CHAPTER I.

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THE UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS

OF

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

WITH

A PREFACE AND ANNOTATIONS

BY

JAMES HOGG.

IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II.

[Illustration]

LONDON:

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.,

PATERNOSTER SQUARE.

1890.

RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,

LONDON & BUNGAY.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE ENGLISH IN CHINA. 7

SHAKSPERE'S TEXT.--SUETONIUS UNRAVELLED. 37

HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH. 55

THE CASUISTRY OF DUELLING. 65

THE LOVE-CHARM. 113

LUDWIG TIECK. 153

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.--THE HOUSE OF WEEPING. 160

THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK. 173

MR. SCHNACKENBERGER; OR, TWO MASTERS FOR ONE DOG. 279

ANGLO-GERMAN DICTIONARIES. 348

THE ENGLISH IN CHINA.

This Paper, originally written for me in 1857, and published in _Titan_

for July of that year, has not appeared in any collective edition of the

author's works, British or American. It was his closing contribution to

a series of three articles concerning Chinese affairs; prepared when our

troubles with that Empire seemed to render war imminent. The first two

were given in _Titan_ for February and April, 1857, and then issued with

additions in the form of a pamphlet which is now very scarce. It

consisted of 152 pages thus arranged:--(1) Preliminary Note, i-iv; (2)

Preface, pp. 3-68; (3) China (the two _Titan_ papers), pp. 69-149; (4)

Postscript, pp. 149-152.

In the posthumous supplementary volume (XVI.) of the collected works the

_third section_ was reprinted, but all the other matter was

discarded--with a rather imperfect appreciation of the labour which the

author had bestowed upon it, and his own estimate of the value of what

he had condensed in this Series--as frequently expressed to me during

its progress.

In the twelfth volume of the 'Riverside' Edition of De Quincey's works,

published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, U.S.A., the whole of the 152

pp. of the expanded _China_ reprint are given, but not the final section

here reproduced from _Titan_.

The Chinese questions stirred DE QUINCEY profoundly, and roused all the

'John Bullism' of his nature. Two passages from the 'Preliminary Note'

will show his object in throwing so much energy into this subject:--

NATIONAL MORALITY.

'Its purpose[1] is to diffuse amongst those of the middle classes, whose

daily occupations leave them small leisure for direct personal

inquiries, some sufficient materials for appreciating the _justice_ of

our British pretensions and attitude in our coming war with China. It is

a question frequently raised amongst public journalists, whether we

British are entitled to that exalted distinction which sometimes we

claim for ourselves, and which sometimes is claimed on our behalf, by

neutral observers on the national practice of morality. There is no call

in this place for so large a discussion; but, most undoubtedly, in one

feature of so grand a distinction, in one reasonable presumption for

inferring a profounder national conscientiousness, as diffused among the

British people, stands upon record, in the pages of history, this

memorable fact, that always at the opening (and at intervals throughout

the progress) of any war, there has been much and angry discussion

amongst us British as to the equity of its origin, and the moral

reasonableness of its objects. Whereas, on the Continent, no man ever

heard of a question being raised, or a faction being embattled, upon any

demur (great or small) as to the moral grounds of a war. To be able to

face the trials of a war--_that_ was its justification; and to win

victories--_that_ was its ratification for the conscience.'

[1] That is--the publication of the pamphlet.--H.

CHINESE POLICY.

'The dispute at Shanghai, in 1848, equally as regards the origin of that

dispute, and as regards the Chinese mode of conducting it, will give the

reader a key to the Chinese character and the Chinese policy. To begin

by making the most arrogant resistance to the simplest demands of

justice, to end by cringing in the lowliest fashion before the guns of a

little war-brig, there we have, in a representative abstract, the

Chinese system of law and gospel. The equities of the present war are

briefly summed up in this one question: What is it that our brutal enemy

wants from us? Is it some concession in a point of international law, or

of commercial rights, or of local privilege, or of traditional usage,

that the Chinese would exact? Nothing of the kind. It is simply a

license, guaranteed by ourselves, to call us in all proclamations by

scurrilous names; and secondly, with our own consent, to inflict upon

us, in the face of universal China, one signal humiliation.... Us--the

freemen of the earth by emphatic precedency--us, the leaders of

civilisation, would this putrescent[2] tribe of hole-and-corner

assassins take upon themselves, not to force into entering by an ignoble

gate [the reference here is to a previous passage concerning the low

door by which Spanish fanaticism ordained that the _Cagots_ (lepers) of

the Pyrenees should enter the churches in a stooping attitude], but to

exclude from it altogether, and for ever. Briefly, then, for this

licensed scurrility, in the first place; and, in the second, for this

foul indignity of a spiteful exclusion from a right four times secured

by treaty, it is that the Chinese are facing the unhappy issues of war.'

[2] _Putrescent._ See the recorded opinions of Lord Amherst's suite upon

the personal cleanliness of the Chinese.

* * * * *

The position and outcome of matters in those critical years may be

recalled by a few lines from the annual summaries of _The Times_ on the

New Years' days of 1858 and 1859. These indicate that DE QUINCEY was

here a pretty fair exponent of the growing wrath of the English people.

[_January 1, 1858._]

'The presence of the China force on the Indian Seas was especially

fortunate. The demand for reinforcements at Calcutta (caused by the

Indian Mutiny) was obviously more urgent than the necessity for

punishing the insolence at Canton. At a more convenient season the

necessary operations in China will be resumed, and in the meantime the

blockading squadron has kept the offending population from despising the

resentment of England. The interval which has elapsed has served to

remove all reasonable doubt of the necessity of enforcing redress.

Public opinion has not during the last twelvemonth become more tolerant

of barbarian outrages. There is no reason to believe that the punishment

of the provincial authorities will involve the cessation of intercourse

with the remainder of the Chinese Empire.'

* * * * *

[_January 1, 1859._]

'The working of our treaties with China and Japan will be watched with

curiosity both in and out of doors, and we can only hope that nothing will

be done to blunt the edge of that masterly decision by which these two

giants of Eastern tale have been felled to the earth, and reduced to the

level and bearing of common humanity.'

* * * * *

The titles which follow are those which were given by DE QUINCEY himself to

the three Sections.--H.

HINTS TOWARDS AN APPRECIATION OF THE COMING WAR IN CHINA.

Said before the opening of July, that same warning remark may happen to

have a prophetic rank, and practically, a prophetic value, which two

months later would tell for mere history, and history paid for by a

painful experience.

The war which is now approaching wears in some respects the strangest

features that have yet been heard of in old romance, or in prosaic

history, for we are at war with the southernmost province of

China--namely, Quantung, and pre-eminently with its chief city of

Canton, but not with the other four commercial ports of China, nor; in

fact, at present with China in general; and, again, we are at war with

Yeh, the poisoning Governor of Canton, but (which is strangest of all)

not with Yeh's master--the Tartar Emperor--locked up in a far-distant

Peking.

Another strange feature in this war is--the footing upon which our

alliances stand. For allies, it seems, we are to have; nominal, as

regards the costs of war, but real and virtual as regards its profits.

The French, the Americans,[3] and I believe the Belgians, have pushed

forward (absolutely in post-haste advance of ourselves) their several

diplomatic representatives, who are instructed duly to lodge their

claims for equal shares of the benefits reaped by our British fighting,

but with no power to contribute a single file towards the bloodshed of

this war, nor a single guinea towards its money costs. Napoleon I., in a

craze of childish spite towards this country, pleased himself with

denying the modern heraldic bearings of Great Britain, and resuscitating

the obsolete shield of our Plantagenets; he insisted that our true

armorial ensigns were the leopards. But really the Third Napoleon is

putting life and significance into his uncle's hint, and using us, as in

Hindostan they use the cheeta or hunting-leopard, for rousing and

running down his oriental game. It is true, that in certain desperate

circumstances, when no opening remains for pacific negotiation, these

French and American agents are empowered to send home for military

succours. A worshipful prospect, when we throw back our eyes upon our

own share in these warlike preparations, with all the advantages of an

unparalleled marine. Six months have slipped away since Lord Clarendon,

our Foreign Secretary, received, in Downing Street, Sir J. Bowring's

and Admiral Seymour's reports of Yeh's atrocities. Six calendar months,

not less, but more, by some days, have run past us since then; and

though some considerable part of our large reinforcements must have

reached their ground in April, and even the commander-in-chief (Sir John

Ashburnham) by the middle of May, yet, I believe, that many of the

gun-boats, on which mainly will rest the pursuit of Yeh's junks, if any

remain unabsconded northwards, have actually not yet left our own

shores. The war should naturally have run its course in one campaign.

Assuredly it will, if confined within the limits of Yeh's command, even

supposing that command to comprehend the two Quangs. Practically, then,

it is a fantastic impossibility that any reversionary service to our

British expedition, which is held out in prophetic vision as

consecrating our French and American friends from all taint of mercenary

selfishness, ever can be realised. I am not going to pursue this

subject. But a brief application of it to a question at this moment

(June 16) urgently appealing to public favour is natural and fair.

Canvassers are now everywhere moving on behalf of a ship canal across

the Isthmus of Suez. This canal proposes to call upon the subscribers

for £9,000,000 sterling; the general belief is, that first and last it

will call for £12,000,000 to £15,000,000. But at that price, or at any

price, it is cheap; and ultimate failure is impossible. Why do I mention

it? Everywhere there is a rumour that 'a narrow jealousy' in London is

the bar which obstructs this canal speculation. There is, indeed, and

already before the canal proposal there _was_, a plan in motion for a

_railway_ across the isthmus, which seems far enough from meeting the

vast and growing necessities of the case. But be _that_ as it may, with

what right does any man in Europe, or America, impute narrowness of

spirit, local jealousy, or selfishness, to England, when he calls to

mind what sacrifices she is at this moment making for those very

oriental interests which give to the ship canal its sole value--the men,

the ships, the money spent, or to _be_ spent, upon the Canton war, and

then in fairness connects that expense (or the similar expense made by

her in 1840-42) with the operative use to which, in those years, she

applied all the diplomatic concessions extorted by her arms. The first

word--a memorable word--which she uttered on proposing her terms in

1842, was, What I demand for myself, _that_ let all Christendom enjoy.

And since that era (_i. e._, for upwards of fourteen years) all

Christendom, that did not fail in the requisite energy for improving the

opportunities then first laid open, _has_ enjoyed the very same

advantages in Chinese ports as Great Britain; secondly, without having

contributed anything whatever to the winning or the securing of these

advantages; thirdly, on the pure volunteer intercession made by Britain

on their behalf. The world has seen enough of violence and cruelties,

the most bloody in the service of commercial jealousies, and nowhere

more than in these oriental regions: witness the abominable acts of the

Dutch at Amboyna, in Japan, and in Java, &c.; witness the bigoted

oppressions, where and when soever they had power, of the colonising

Portuguese and Spaniards. Tyranny and merciless severities for the ruin

of commercial rivals have been no rarities for the last three and a half

centuries in any region of the East. But first of all, from Great

Britain in 1842 was heard the free, spontaneous proclamation--this was a

rarity--unlimited access, with advantages the very same as her own, to a

commerce which it was always imagined that she laboured to hedge round

with repulsions, making it sacred to her own privileged use. A royal

gift was this; but a gift which has not been received by Christendom in

a corresponding spirit of liberal appreciation. One proof of _that_ may

be read in the invidious statement, supported by no facts or names,

which I have just cited. Were this even true, a London merchant is not

therefore a Londoner, or even a Briton. Germans, Swiss, Frenchmen, &c.,

are settled there as merchants, in crowds. No nation, however, is

compromised by any act of her citizens acting as separate and

uncountenanced individuals. So that, even if better established as a

fact, this idle story would still be a calumny; and as a calumny it

would merit little notice. Nevertheless, I have felt it prudent to give

it a prominent station, as fitted peculiarly, by the dark shadows of its

malice, pointed at our whole nation collectively, to call into more

vivid relief the unexampled lustre of that royal munificence in England,

which, by one article of a treaty, dictated at the point of her

bayonets, threw open in an hour, to all nations, that Chinese commerce,

never previously unsealed through countless generations of man.

[3] '_America_:'--For America in particular there is an American

defence offered in a Washington paper (the _Weekly Union_, for May 28,

1857), which, for cool ignoring of facts, exceeds anything that I

remember. It begins thus:--'Since our treaty with China in 1844' (and

_that_, be it remembered, was possible only in consequence of our war

and its close in 1842), 'the most amicable relations have existed

between the United States and China--China is our friend, and we are

hers.' Indeed! as a brief commentary upon that statement, I recommend to

the reader's attention our Blue-books on China of last winter. The

American commander certainly wound up his quarrel with Yeh in a

mysterious way, that drew some sneers from the various nationalities

then moving in that neighbourhood, but no less certainly he had, during

the October of 1856, a smart exchange of cannon-shots with Yeh, which

lasted for some days (three, at least, according to my remembrance), and

ended in the capture of numerous Chinese forts. The American apologist

says in effect, that the United States will not fight, because they have

no quarrel. But that is not the sole question. Does the United States

mean to take none of the benefits that may be won by our arms? He speaks

of the French as more belligerently inclined than the United States.

Would that this were really so. No good will come of schisms between the

nations of Christendom. There is a posthumous work of Commissioner Lin,

in twelve quartos, printed at Peking, urgently pressing the necessity

for China of building upon such schisms the one sole policy that can

save her from ruin.

Next, then, having endeavoured to place these preliminary points in

their true light, I will anticipate the course by which the campaign

would naturally be likely to travel, supposing no alien and mischievous

disturbance at work for deranging it. Simply to want fighting allies

would be no very menacing evil. We managed to do without them in our

pretty extensive plan of warfare fifteen years ago; and there is no

reason why we should find our difficulties now more intractable than

then. I should imagine that the American Congress and the French

Executive would look on uneasily, and with a sense of shame, at the

prospect of sharing largely in commercial benefits which they had not

earned, whilst the burdens of the day were falling exclusively upon the

troops of our nation; but _that_ is a consideration for their own

feelings, and may happen to corrode their hearts and their sense of

honour most profoundly at some future time, when it may have ceased to

be remediable. If that were all, for us there would be no arrears of

mortified sensibilities to apprehend. But what is ominous even in

relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these

sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with

no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility

of _talking_ the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving

the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to the total

enterprise. It is not absolutely impossible that even Yeh, or any

imbecile governor armed with the same obstinacy and brutal arrogance,

might, under the terrors of an armament such as he will have to face,

simulate a submission that was far from his thoughts. We ourselves found

in the year 1846, when in fidelity to our engagements we gave back the

important island of Chusan, which we had retained for four years, in

fact until all the instalments of the ransom money had been paid, that a

more negligent ear was turned to our complaints and remonstrances. The

vile mob of Canton, long kept and indulged as so many trained bull-dogs,

for the purpose of venting that insolence to Europeans which the

mandarins could no longer utter personally without coming into collision

with the treaty, became gradually unmanageable even by their masters. In

1847 Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, was reduced to the

necessity of fulminating this passage against the executive government

of the murdering city--'You' (Lord Palmerston was addressing Sir John

Davis, at that time H. M. Plenipotentiary in China) 'will inform the

Chinese authorities, in plain and distinct terms, that the British

Government will not tolerate that a Chinese mob shall with impunity

maltreat British subjects in China, whenever they get them into their

power; and that if the Chinese authorities will not punish and prevent

such outrages, the British Government will be obliged to take the matter

into their own hands; and it will not be _their_ fault if, in such case,

the innocent are involved in the punishment sought to be inflicted on

the guilty.'

This commanding tone was worthy of Lord Palmerston, and in harmony with

his public acts in all cases where he has understood the ground which

he occupied. Unhappily he did _not_ understand the case of Canton. The

British were admitted by each successive treaty, their right of entry

was solemnly acknowledged by the emperor. Satisfied with this, Lord

Palmerston said, 'Enough: the principle is secured; the mere details,

locally intelligible no doubt, I do not pretend to understand. But all

this will come in time. In time you will be admitted into Canton. And

for the present rest satisfied with having your right admitted, if not

as yet your persons.' Ay, but unfortunately nothing short of plenary

admission to British flesh and blood ever will satisfy the organised

ruffians of Canton, that they have not achieved a triumph over the

British; which triumph, as a point still open to doubt amongst

mischief-makers, they seek to strengthen by savage renewal as often as

they find a British subject unprotected by armed guardians within their

streets. In those streets murder walks undisguised. And the only measure

for grappling with it is summarily to introduce the British resident, to

prostrate all resistance, and to punish it by the gallows[4] where it

proceeds to acts of murder. It is sad consideration for those, either in

England or China, who were nearly or indirectly connected with Canton

(amongst whom must be counted the British Government), that beyond a

doubt the murders of our countrymen, which occurred in that city, would

have been intercepted by such a mastery over the local ruffians as could

not be effected so long as the Treaty of Nanking was not carried into

effect with respect to free entrance and residence of British subjects.

As things stood, all that Sir J. Davis could do, in obedience to the

directions from the Home Government, was to order a combined naval and

military attack upon all the Chinese forts which belt the approaches to

Canton. These were all captured; and the immense number of eight hundred

and twenty-seven heavy guns were in a few hours made unserviceable,

either by knocking off their trunnions, or by spiking them, or in both

ways. The Imperial Commissioner, Keying, previously known so favourably

to the English by his good sense and discretion, had on this occasion

thought it his best policy to ignore Lord Palmerston's letter: a copy

had been communicated to him; but he took not the least notice of it. If

this were intended for insolence, it was signally punished within a few

hours. It happened that on our English list of grievances there remained

a shocking outrage offered to Colonel Chesney, a distinguished officer

of the engineers,[5] and which to a certainty would have terminated in

his murder, but for the coming up at the critical moment of a Chinese in

high authority. The villains concerned in this outrage were known, were

arrested, and (according to an agreement with our plenipotentiary) were

to be punished in our presence. But in contempt of all his engagements,

and out of pure sycophantic concession to the Canton mob, Keying

notified that we the injured party were to be excluded. _In that case no

punishment at all would have been inflicted._ Luckily, our troops and

our shipping had not yet dispersed. Sir J. Davis, therefore, wrote to

Keying, openly taxing him with his breach of honour. 'I _was_ going'

[these were Sir John's words] 'to Hong-Kong to-morrow; but since you

behave with evasion and bad faith, in not punishing the offenders in

the presence of deputed officers, I shall keep the troops at Canton, and

proceed to-morrow in the steamer to Foshan, where, if I meet with

insult, I will burn the town.' Foshan is a town in the neighbourhood of

Canton, and happened to be the scene of Colonel Chesney's ill usage.

Now, upon this vigorous step, what followed? Hear Sir John:--'Towards

midnight a satisfactory reply was received, and at five o'clock next

morning three offenders were brought to the guard-house--a mandarin of

high rank being present on the part of the Chinese, and deputed officers

on the part of the British. The men were bambooed in succession by the

Chinese officers of justice;' and at the close of the scene, the

mandarin (upon a requisition from our side) explained to the mob who

crowded about the barriers _why_ the men were punished, and warned them

that similar chastisement for similar offences awaited themselves. In

one point only the example made was unsatisfactory: the men punished

were not identified as the same who had assaulted Colonel Chesney. They

might be criminals awaiting punishment for some other offence. With so

shuffling a government as the Chinese, always moving through darkness,

and on the principles of a crooked policy, no perfect satisfaction must

ever be looked for. But still, what a bright contrast between this

energy of men acquainted with the Chinese character, and the foolish

imbecility of our own government in Downing Street, who are always

attempting the plan of soothing and propitiating by concession those

ignoble Orientals, in whose eyes all concession, great or small,

through the whole scale of graduation, is interpreted as a distinct

confession of weakness. Thus did all our governments: thus, above all

others, did the East India Company for generations deal with the

Chinese; and the first act of ours that ever won respect from China was

Anson's broadsides, and the second was our refusal of the _ko-tou_. Thus

did our Indian Government, in the early stages of their intercourse,

deal with the Burmese. Thus did our government deal with the

Japanese--an exaggerated copy of the Chinese. What they wanted with

Japan was simply to do her a very kind and courteous service--namely, to

return safe and sound to their native land seven Japanese who had been

driven by hurricanes in continued succession into the Pacific, and had

ultimately been saved from death by British sailors. Our wise government

at home were well aware of the atrocious inhospitality practised

systematically by these cruel islanders; and what course did they take

to propitiate them? Good sense would have prescribed the course of

arming the British vessel in so conspicuous a fashion as to inspire the

wholesome respect of fear. Instead of which, our government actually

drew the teeth of the particular vessel selected, by carefully

withdrawing each individual gun. The Japanese cautiously sailed round

her, ascertained her powerless condition, and instantly proceeded to

force her away by every mode of insult; nor were the unfortunate

Japanese _ever_ restored to their country. Now, contrast with this

endless tissue of imbecilities, practised through many generations by

our blind and obstinate government (for such it really is in its modes

of dealing with Asiatics), the instantaneous success of 'sharp

practice' and resolute appeals to _fear_ on the part of Sir John Davis.

By midnight of the same day on which the British remonstrance had been

lodged an answer is received; and this answer, in a perfect rapture of

panic, concedes everything demanded; and by sunrise the next morning the

whole affair has been finished. Two centuries, on our old East Indian

system of negotiating with China, would not have arrived at the same

point. Later in the very same year occurred another and more atrocious

explosion of Canton ruffianism; and the instantaneous retribution which

followed to the leading criminals, showed at once how great an advance

had been made in winning respect for ourselves, and in extorting our

rights, by this energetic mode of action. On Sunday, the 5th of

December, six British subjects had gone out into the country on a

pleasure excursion, some of whom unhappily carried pocket-pistols. They

were attacked by a mob of the usual Canton character; one Chinese was

killed and one wounded by pistol-shots; but of the six British,

encompassed by a countless crowd, not one escaped: all six were

murdered, and then thrown into the river. Immediately, and before the

British had time to take any steps, the Chinese authorities were all in

motion. The resolute conduct of Sir John Davis had put an end to the

Chinese policy of shuffling, by making it no longer hopeful. It lost

much more than it gained. And accordingly it was agreed, after a few

days' debate, that the emperor's pleasure should not be taken, except

upon the more doubtful cases. Four, about whose guilt no doubts

existed, were immediately beheaded; and the others, after communicating

with Peking, were punished in varying degrees--one or two capitally.

[4] '_By the gallows:_'--Or much rather by decapitation. Accordingly, we

read of a Ming (_i. e._, native Chinese) emperor, who (upon finding

himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his

daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account

would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being

headless, would in Chinese estimation have been imperfect.

[5] '_Colonel Chesney:_'--The same, I believe, whose name was at one

time so honourably known in connection with the Euphrates and its steam

navigation.

CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

Such is the condition of that guilty town, nearest of all Chinese towns

to Hong-Kong, and indissolubly connected with ourselves. From this town

it is that the insults to our flag, and the attempts at poisoning,

wholesale and retail, have collectively emanated; and all under the

original impulse of Yeh. Surely, in speculating on the conduct of the

war, either as probable or as reasonable, the old oracular sentence of

Cato the Elder and of the Roman senate (_Delenda est Carthago_) begins

to murmur in our ears--not in this stern form, but in some modification,

better suited to a merciful religion and to our western civilization. It

is a great neglect on the part of somebody, that we have no account of

the baker's trial at Hong-Kong. He was acquitted, it seems; but upon

what ground? Some journals told us that he represented Yeh as coercing

him into this vile attempt, through his natural affection for his

family, alleged to be in Yeh's power at Canton. Such a fact, if true,

would furnish some doubtful palliation of the baker's crime, and might

have weight allowed in the sentence; but surely it would place a most

dangerous power in the hands of Chinese grandees, if, through the

leverage of families within their grasp, and by official connivance on

our part, they could reach and govern a set of agents in Hong-Kong. No

sympathy with our horror of secret murders by poison, under the shelter

of household opportunities, must be counted on from the emperor, for he

has himself largely encouraged, rewarded, and decorated these claims on

his public bounty. The more necessary that such nests of crime as

Canton, and such suggestors of crime as Yeh, should be thoroughly

disarmed. This could be done, as regards the city, by three

changes:--First, by utterly destroying the walls and gates; secondly, by

admitting the British to the freest access, and placing their residence

in a special quarter, upon the securest footing; thirdly, and as one

chief means in that direction, by establishing a police on an English

plan, and to some extent English in its composition. As to the cost, it

is evident enough that the colonial head-quarters at Hong-Kong must in

future keep up a _permanent_ military establishment; and since any

danger threatening this colony must be kindled and fed chiefly in

Canton, why not make this large city, sole focus as it is of all

mischief to us, and not a hundred miles distant from the little island,

the main barrack of the armed force?

Upon this world's tariff of international connections, what is China in

relation to Great Britain? Free is she, or not--free to dissolve her

connection with us? Secondly, what is Great Britain, when commercially

appraised, in relation to China? Is she of great value or slight value

to China? First, then, concerning China, viewed in its connection with

ourselves, this vast (but perhaps not proportionably populous) country

offers by accident the same unique advantage for meeting a social

_hiatus_ in our British system that is offered by certain southern

regions in the American United States for meeting another _hiatus_

within the same British system. Without tea, without cotton, Great

Britain, no longer great, would collapse into a very anomalous sort of

second-rate power. Without cotton, the main bulwark of our export

commerce would depart. And without tea, our daily life would, generally

speaking, be as effectually-ruined as bees without a Flora. In both of

these cases it happens that the benefit which we receive is _unique_;

that is, not merely ranking foremost upon a scale of similar benefits

reaped from other lands--a largest contribution where others might still

be large--but standing alone, and in a solitude that we have always

reason to regard as alarming. So that, if Georgia, &c., withdrew from

Liverpool and Manchester her myriads of cotton bales, palsied would be

our commercial supremacy; and, if childish China should refuse her tea

(for as to her silk, that is of secondary importance), we must all go

supperless to bed: seriously speaking, the social life of England would

receive a deadly wound. It is certainly a phenomenon without a parallel

in the history of social man--that a great nation, numbering twenty-five

millions, after making an allowance on account of those amongst the very

poorest of the Irish who do not use tea, should within one hundred years

have found themselves able so absolutely to revolutionise their diet, as

to substitute for the gross stimulation of ale and wine the most

refined, elegant, and intellectual mode of stimulation that human

research has succeeded in discovering.[6] But the material basis of this

stimulation unhappily we draw from the soil of one sole nation--and that

nation (are we ever allowed to forget?) capricious and silly beyond all

that human experience could else have suggested as possible. In these

circumstances, it was not to be supposed that we should neglect any

opening that offered for making ourselves independent of a nation which

at all times we had so much reason to distrust as the Chinese. Might not

the tea-plant be made to prosper in some district of our Indian Empire?

Forty years ago we began to put forth organised botanical efforts for

settling that question. Forty years ago, and even earlier, according to

my remembrance, Dr Roxburgh--in those days the paramount authority upon

oriental botany--threw some energy into this experiment for creating our

own nurseries of the tea-plant. But not until our Burmese victories,

some thirty years since, and our consequent treaties had put the

province of Assam into our power, was, I believe, any serious progress

made in this important effort. Mr Fortune has since applied the benefits

of his scientific knowledge, and the results of his own great personal

exertions in the tea districts of China, to the service of this most

important speculation; with what success, I am not able to report.

Meantime, it is natural to fear that the very possibility of doubts

hanging over the results in an experiment so vitally national, carries

with it desponding auguries as to the ultimate issue. Were the prospects

in any degree cheerful, it would be felt as a patriotic duty to report

at short intervals all solid symptoms of progress made in this

enterprise; for it is an enterprise aiming at a triumph far more than

scientific--a triumph over a secret purpose of the Chinese, full of

anti-social malice and insolence against Great Britain. Of late years,

as often as we have accomplished a victory over any insult to our

national honour offered or meditated by the Chinese, they have recurred

to some old historical tradition (perhaps fabulous, perhaps not), of an

emperor, Tartar or Chinese, who, rather than submit to terms of

equitable reciprocity in commercial dealings with a foreign nation, or

to terms implying an original equality of the two peoples, caused the

whole establishments and machinery connected with the particular traffic

to be destroyed, and all its living agents to be banished or beheaded.

It is certain that, in the contemplation of special contingencies likely

to occur between themselves and the British, the high mandarins dallied

at intervals with this ancient precedent, and forbore to act upon it,

partly under the salutary military panic which has for years been

gathering gloomily over their heads, but more imperatively, perhaps,

from absolute inability to dispense with the weekly proceeds from the

customs, so eminently dependent upon the British shipping. Money, mere

weight of dollars, the lovely lunar radiance of silver, this was the

spell that moonstruck their mercenary hearts, and kept them for ever

see-sawing--

'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.'

Now, upon this--a state of things suspected at times, or perhaps known,

but not so established as that it could have been afterwards pleaded in

evidence--a very grave question arose, but a question easily settled:

had the Chinese a right, under the law of nations, to act upon their

malicious caprice? No man, under any way of viewing the case, hesitated

in replying, '_No_.' China, it was argued, had possessed from the first

a clear, undoubted right to dismiss us with our business unaccomplished,

_re infectâ_, if that business were the establishment of a reciprocal

traffic. In the initial stage of the relations between the two powers,

the field was open to any possible movement in either party; but,

according to the course which might be severally pursued on either side,

it was possible that one or both should so act as, in the second stage

of their dealings, wilfully to forfeit this original liberty of action.

Suppose, for instance, that China peremptorily declined all commercial

intercourse with Britain, undeniably, it was said, she had the right to

do so. But, if she once renounced this right, no matter whether

_ex_plicitly in words, or silently and _im_plicitly in acts (as if, for

example, she looked on tranquilly whilst Great Britain erected elaborate

buildings for the safe housing of goods)--in any such case, China

wilfully divested herself of all that original right to withdraw from

commercial intercourse. She might say _Go_, or she might say, _Come_;

but she could not first say, _Come_; and then, revoking this invitation,

capriciously say, _Go_.

[6] Down to George I. there _could_ have been no breakfast in England for a

gentleman or lady--there is none even yet in most parts of the

Continent--without wine of some class or other.

To this doctrine, thus limited, no man could reasonably demur. But to some

people it has seemed that the limitations themselves are the only unsound

part of the argument. It is denied that this original right of refusing a

commercial intercourse has any true foundation in the relations of things or

persons. Vainly, if any such natural right existed, would that broad basis

have been laid providentially for insuring intercourse among nations, which,

in fact, we find everywhere dispersed. Such a narrow and selfish

distribution of natural gifts, all to one man, or all to one place, has in a

first stage of human inter-relations been established, only that men might

be hurried forward into a second stage where this false sequestration might

be unlocked and dispersed. Concentrated masses, impropriations gathered into

a few hands, useless alike to the possessor and to the world, why is it

that, by primary arrangements of nature, they have been frozen into vast,

inert insulation? Only that the agencies of commerce may thus the more

loudly be invoked for thawing and setting them free to the world's use.

Whereas, by a diffusive scattering, all motives to large social intercourse

would have been neutralised.

It seems clear that the practical liberation and distribution throughout the

world of all good gifts meant for the whole household of man, has been

confided to the secret sense of a _right_ existing in man for claiming such

a distribution as part of his natural inheritance. Many articles of almost

inestimable value to man, in relation to his physical well-being (at any

rate bearing such a value when substitutional remedies were as yet unknown)

such as mercury, Jesuit's bark, through a long period the sole remedy for

intermitting fevers, opium, mineral waters, &c., were at one time _locally_

concentred. In such cases, it might often happen, that the medicinal relief

to an hospital, to an encampment, to a nation, might depend entirely upon

the right to _force_ a commercial intercourse.

Now, on the other hand, having thus noticed the question, what

commercial value has China irrevocably for England, next in the reverse

question--namely, what commercial value does England bear to China?--I

would wish to place this in a new light, by bringing it for the first

time into relation to the doctrine of rent. Multitudes in past days,

when political economy was a more favoured study, have spoken and

written upon the modern doctrine of rent, without apparently perceiving

how immediately it bears upon China, and how summarily it shatters an

objection constantly made to the value of our annual dealing with that

country. First, let me sketch, in the very briefest way, an outline of

this modern doctrine. Two men, without communication, and almost

simultaneously, in the year 1815, discovered the law of rent. Suddenly

it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must

necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and

opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural

machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon

machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse

machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making machine for a

worse, but only for one that possesses the old powers at a less cost, or

possesses greater powers, let us suppose, at an equal cost. But, in the

natural progress of the bread-making machines, nature herself compels

him to pursue the opposite course: he travels from the best machines to

the worse. The best land is brought into cultivation first. As

population expands, it becomes necessary to take up a second quality of

land; then a third quality; and so on for ever. Left to the action of

this one law, bread would be constantly growing dearer through a long

succession of centuries. Its tendency lies in this direction even now;

but this tendency is constantly met, thwarted, and retarded, by a

counter-tendency in the general practice of agriculture, which is always

slowly improving its own powers--that is, obtaining the same result at a

cost slowly decreasing. It follows as a consequence, when closely

pursued, that, whilst the products of pure human skill and human

machines are constantly, by tendency, growing cheaper, on the other

hand, by a counter-tendency, the products of natural machines (as the

land, mines, rivers, &c.) are constantly on the ascent. Another

consequence is, that the worst of these natural machines gives the

price for the whole; whereas, in a conflict between human machines, all

the products of the worse would be beaten out of the field by those of

the better. It is in dependency upon this law that all those innumerable

proposals for cultivating waste-lands, as in the Scottish Highlands, in

the Irish bogs, &c., are radically vicious; and, instead of creating

plenty, would by their very success impoverish us. For suppose these

lands, which inevitably must have been the lowest in the scale (or else

why so long neglected?) to be brought into tillage--what follows?

Inevitably this: that their products enter the market as the very lowest

on the graduated tariff--_i. e._, as lower than any already cultured.

And these it is--namely, the very lowest by the supposition--that must

give the price for the whole; so that _every_ number on the scale will

rise at once to the level fixed by these lowest soils, so ruinously

(though benevolently) taken up into active and efficient life. If you

add 20,000 quarters of wheat to the amount already in the market, you

_seem_ to have done a service; but, if these 20,000 have been gained at

an extra cost of half-a-crown on each quarter, and if these it is that,

being from the poorest machines, rule the price, then you have added

half-a-crown to every quarter previously in the market.

Meantime, returning to China, it is important to draw attention upon this

point. A new demand for any product of land may happen to be not very large,

and thus may seem not much to affect the markets, or the interests of those

who produce it. But, since the rent doctrine has been developed, it has

become clear that a new demand may affect the producers in two separate

modes: first, in the ordinary known mode; secondly, by happening to call

into activity a lower quality of soil. A very moderate demand, nay, a very

small one, added to that previously existing, if it happens not to fall

within the powers of those numbers already in culture (as, suppose, 1, 2, 3,

4), must necessarily call out No. 5; and so on.

Now, our case, as regards Chinese land in the tea districts, is far beyond

this. Not only has it been large enough to benefit the landholder

enormously, by calling out lower qualities of land, which process again has

stimulated the counteracting agencies in the more careful and scientific

culture of the plant; but also it has been in a positive sense enormous. It

might have been large relatively to the power of calling out lower qualities

of soil, and yet in itself have been small; but _our_ demand, running up at

present to 100,000,000 pounds weight annually, is in all senses enormous.

The poorer class of Chinese tea-drinkers use the leaves three times

over--_i. e._, as the basis of three separate tea-makings. Consequently,

even upon that single deduction, 60,000,000 of Chinese tea-drinkers count

only as 20,000,000 of ours. But I conclude, by repeating that the greatest

of the impressions made by ourselves in the China tea districts, has been

derived from this--that, whilst the native demand has probably been

stationary, ours, moving by continual starts forward, must have stimulated

the tea interest by continual descents upon inferior soils.

There is no doubt that the Emperor and all his arrogant courtiers have

decupled their incomes from the British stimulation applied to inferior

soils, that but for us never would have been called into culture. Not a

man amongst them is aware of the advantages which he owes to England.

But he soon _would_ be aware of them, if for five years this exotic

demand were withdrawn, and the tea-districts resigned to native

patronage. Upon reviewing what I have said, not the ignorant and

unteachable Chinese only, but some even amongst our own well-informed

and reflecting people, will see that they have prodigiously underrated

the commercial value of England to China; since, when an Englishman

calls for a hundred tons of tea, he does not (as is usually supposed)

benefit the Chinese merchant only by giving him the ordinary profit on a

ton, repeated for a hundred times, but also infallibly either calls into

profitable activity lands lying altogether fallow, or else, under the

action of the rent laws, gives a new and secondary value to land already

under culture.

Other and greater topics connected with this coming Chinese campaign

clamorously call for notice: especially these three:--

First, the pretended literature and meagre civilisation of China--what

they are, and with what real effects such masquerading phantoms operate

upon the generation with which accidents of commerce have brought us

connected.

Secondly, what is the true mode of facing that warfare of kidnapping,

garotting, and poisoning, avowed as legitimate subjects of patronage in

the practice and in the edicts of the Tartar Government? Two things may

be said with painful certainty upon this subject: first, the British

Government has signally neglected its duties in this field through a

period of about ninety years, and apparently is not aware of any

responsibility attaching in such a case to those who wield the functions

of supreme power. Hyder Ali, the tiger, and his more ferocious son

Tippoo, practised, in the face of all India, the atrocities of Virgil's

Mezentius upon their British captives. These men filled the stage of

martial history, through nearly forty years of the eighteenth century,

with the tortures of the most gallant soldiers on earth, and were never

questioned or threatened upon the subject. In this nineteenth century,

again, we have seen a Spanish queen and her uncle sharing between them

the infamy of putting to death (unjudged and unaccused) British soldiers

on the idlest of pretences. Was it then in the power of the British

Government to have made a vigorous and effectual intercession? It was;

and in various ways they have the same power over the Chinese sovereign

(still more over his agents) at present. The other thing which occurs to

say is this: that, if we do _not_ interfere, some morning we shall

probably all be convulsed with unavailing wrath at a repetition of Mr

Stead's tragic end, on a larger scale, and exemplified in persons of

more distinguished position.

Finally, it would have remained to notice the vast approaching

revolution for the total East that will be quickened by this war, and

will be ratified by the broad access to the Orient, soon to be laid open

on one plan or other. Then will Christendom first begin to _act_

commensurately on the East: Asia will begin to rise from her ancient

prostration, and, without exaggeration, the beginnings of a new earth

and new heavens will dawn.

SHAKSPERE'S TEXT.--SUETONIUS UNRAVELLED.

_To the Editor of 'Titan'._

Dear Sir,--A year or two ago,[7] I received as a present from a

distinguished and literary family in Boston (United States), a small

pamphlet (twin sister of that published by Mr Payne Collier) on the text

of Shakspere. Somewhere in the United States, as here in England, some

unknown critic, at some unknown time, had, from some unknown source,

collected and recorded on the margin of one amongst the Folio reprints

of Shakspere by Heminge & Condell, such new readings as either his own

sagacity had summarily prompted, or calm reflection had recommended, or

possibly local tradition in some instances, and histrionic tradition in

others, might have preserved amongst the _habitués_ of a particular

theatre. In Mr P. Collier's case, if I recollect rightly, it was the

_First_ Folio (_i. e._, by much the best); in this American case, I

think it is the _Third_ Folio (about the worst) which had received the

corrections. But, however this may be, there are two literary

_collaborateurs_ concerned in each of these parallel cases--namely,

first, the original collector (possibly author) of the various readings,

who lived and died probably within the seventeenth century; and,

secondly, the modern editor, who stations himself as a repeating

frigate that he may report and pass onwards these marginal variations to

us of the nineteenth century.

[7] Written in 1856. H.

COR. for _Corrector_, is the shorthand designation by which I have

distinguished the _first_; REP. for _Reporter_ designates the other. My

wish and purpose is to extract all such variations of the text as seem

to have any claim to preservation, or even, to a momentary

consideration. But in justice to myself, and in apology for the hurried

way in which the several parts of this little memorandum are brought

into any mimicry of order and succession, I think it right to say that

my documents are all dispersed into alien and distant quarters; so that

I am reduced into dependence upon my own unassisted memory.

[THE TEMPEST. _Act I. Scene 1._

'Not a soul

But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd

Some tricks of desperation.'

COR. here substitutes, 'But felt a fever of the _mind_:' which substitution

strikes me as entirely for the worse; 'a fever of the mad' is such a fever

as customarily attacks the delirious, and all who have lost the control of

their reasoning faculties.

[_Ibid._

'O dear father,

Make not too rash a trial of him; for

He's gentle, and not fearful.'

Upon this the _Reporter's_ remark is, that 'If we take _fearful_ in its

common acceptation of _timorous_, the proposed change renders the passage

clearer;' but that, if we take the word _fearful_ in its rarer

signification of _that which excites terror_, 'no alteration is needed.'

Certainly: none _is_ needed; for the mistake (as _I_ regard it) of REP. lies

simply in supposing the passive sense of _fearful_--namely, that which

_suffers_ fear--to be the ordinary sense; which now, in the nineteenth

century, it is; but was _not_ in the age of Shakspere.

[MACBETH. _Scene 7._

'Thus even-handed justice

_Commends_ the ingredients of our poison'd chalice

To our own lips.'

COR. proposes, _Returns_ the ingredients of, &c.; and, after the word

_returns_ is placed a comma; which, however, I suppose to be a press

oversight, and no element in the correction. Meantime, I see no call for any

change whatever. The ordinary use of the word _commend_, in any advantageous

introduction of a stranger by letters, seems here to maintain

itself--namely, placing him in such a train towards winning favour as may

give a favourable bias to his opportunities. The opportunities are not left

to their own casual or neutral action, but are armed and pointed towards a

special result by the influence of the recommender. So, also, it is here

supposed that amongst several chalices, which might else all have an equal

power to conciliate notice, one specially--namely, that which contains the

poison--is armed by Providence with a power to bias the choice, and commend

itself to the poisoner's favour.

[_Ibid._

'His two chamberlains

Will I with wine and wassail so _convince_.'

COR. is not happy at this point in his suggestion: tinkers are accused

(often calumniously, for tinkers have enemies as well as other people) of

insidiously enlarging holes, making simple into compound fractures, and

sometimes of planting two holes where they find one. But I have it on the

best authority--namely, the authority of three tinkers who were

unanimous--that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind

amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason'

by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look

for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an

unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came

nearest to the seraphic character in one century _was_ a tinker--namely,

John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions _do_

cheat at uncertain times, _are_ traitors in a small proportion, _must be_

perfidious, unless they make an odious hypocritical pretension to the

character of angels. That tinkers are not alone in their practice of

multiplying the blemishes on which their healing art is invoked, seems

broadly illustrated by the practice of verbal critics. Those who have

applied themselves to the ancient classics, are notorious for their corrupt

dealings in this way. And Coleridge founded an argument against the whole

body upon the confessedly dreadful failure of Bentley, prince of all the

order, when applied to a case where most of us could appreciate the

result--namely, to the _Paradise Lost_. If, said Coleridge, this Bentley

could err so extravagantly in a case of mother-English, what must we presume

him often to have done in Greek? Here we may see to this day that practice

carried to a ruinous extent, which, when charged upon tinkers, I have seen

cause to restrict. In the present case from _Macbeth_, I fear that COR. is

slightly indulging in this tinkering practice. As I view the case, there

really is no hole to mend. The old meaning of the word _convince_ is well

brought out in the celebrated couplet--

'He, that's convinc'd against his will,

Is of the same opinion still.

How can _that_ be? I have often heard objectors say. Being convinced by his

opponent--_i. e._, convinced that his opponent's view is the right one--how

can he retain his own original opinion, which by the supposition is in polar

opposition. But this argument rests on a false notion of the sense attached

originally to the word _convinced_. That word was used in the sense of

_refuted; redargued_, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The

case supposed was that of a man who is reduced to an absurdity; he cannot

deny that, from his own view, an absurdity _seems_ to follow; and, until he

has shown that this absurdity is only apparent, he is bound to hold himself

_provisionally_ answered. Yet that does not reconcile him to his adversary's

opinion; he retains his own, and is satisfied that somewhere an answer to it

exists, if only he could discover it.

Here the meaning is, 'I will convince his chamberlains with wine'--_i. e._,

will refute by means of the confusion belonging to the tragedy itself, when

aided by intoxication, all the arguments (otherwise plausible) which they

might urge in self-defence.

['_Thrice_ and once the hedge-pig whined:'--

This our friend COR. alters to _twice_; but for the very reason which

should have checked him--namely, on Theobald's suggestion that '_odd_

numbers are used in enchantments and magical operations;' and here he

fancies himself to obtain an odd number by the arithmetical

summation--_twice_ added to _once_ makes thrice. Meantime the odd number is

already secured by viewing the _whines_ separately, and not as a sum. The

hedge-pig whined thrice--that was an odd number. Again he whined, and this

time only once--this also was an odd number. Otherwise COR. is perfectly

right in his general doctrine, that

'Numero Deus _impare_ gaudet.'

Nobody ever heard of _even_ numbers in any case of divination. A dog, for

instance, howling under a sick person's window, is traditionally ominous of

evil--but not if he howls twice, or four times.

['I _pull_ in resolution.'--_Act V. Scene 5._

COR. had very probably not seen Dr Johnson's edition of _Shakspere_, but in

common with the Doctor, under the simple coercion of good sense, he proposes

'I _pall_;' a restitution which is so self-attested, that it ought

fearlessly to be introduced into the text of all editions whatever, let them

be as superstitiously scrupulous as in all reason they ought to be.

[HAMLET. _Act II. Scene in the Speech of Polonius._

'Good sir, or so, or friend, or gentleman,'

is altered by COR., and in this case with an effect of solemn humour which

justifies itself, into

'Good sir, or sir, or friend, or gentleman;'

meaning good sir, or sir simply without the epithet _good_, which implies

something of familiarity. Polonius, in his superstitious respect for ranks

and degrees, provides four forms of address applying to four separate cases:

such is the ponderous casuistry which the solemn courtier brings to bear

upon the most trivial of cases.

* * * * *

At this point, all at once, we find our sheaf of arrows exhausted: trivial

as are the new resources offered for deciphering the hidden meanings of

Shakspere, their quality is even less a ground of complaint than their

limitation in quantity. In an able paper published by this journal, during

the autumn of 1855, upon the new readings offered by Mr Collier's work, I

find the writer expressing generally a satisfaction with the condition of

Shakspere's text. I feel sorry that I cannot agree with him. To me the text,

though improved, and gradually moving round to a higher and more hopeful

state of promise, is yet far indeed from the settled state which is

desirable. I wish, therefore, as bearing upon all such hopes and prospects,

to mention a singular and interesting case of sudden conquest over a

difficulty that once had seemed insuperable. For a period of three centuries

there had existed an enigma, dark and insoluble as that of the Sphinx, in

the text of Suetonius. Isaac Casaubon had vainly besieged it; then, in a

mood of revolting arrogance, Joseph Scaliger; Ernesti; Gronovius; many

others; and all without a gleam of success.

The passage in Suetonius which so excruciatingly (but so unprofitably) has

tormented the wits of such scholars as have sat in judgment upon it through

a period of three hundred and fifty years, arises in the tenth section of

his Domitian. That prince, it seems, had displayed in his outset

considerable promise of moral excellence: in particular, neither rapacity

nor cruelty was apparently any feature in his character. Both qualities,

however, found a pretty early development in his advancing career, but

cruelty the earliest. By way of illustration, Suetonius rehearses a list of

distinguished men, clothed with senatorian or even consular rank, whom he

had put to death upon allegations the most frivolous: amongst them Aelius

Lamia, a nobleman whose wife he had torn from him by open and insulting

violence. It may be as well to cite the exact words of Suetonius: 'Aelium

Lamiam (interemit) ob suspiciosos quidem, verum et veteres et innoxios

jocos; quòd post abductam uxorem laudanti vocem suam--dixerat, _Heu taceo_;

quòdque Tito hortanti se ad alterum matrimonium, responderat [Greek: mê kai

su gamêsai theleis];'--that is, Aelius Lamia he put to death on account of

certain jests; jests liable to some jealousy, but, on the other hand, of old

standing, and that had in fact proved harmless as regarded practical

consequences--namely, that to one who praised his voice as a singer he had

replied, _Heu taceo_; and that on another occasion, in reply to the Emperor

Titus, when urging him to a second marriage, he had said, 'What now, I

suppose _you_ are looking out for a wife?'

The latter jest is intelligible enough, stinging, and witty. As if the young

men of the Flavian family could fancy no wives but such as they had won by

violence from other men, he affects in a bitter sarcasm to take for granted

that Titus, as the first step towards marrying, counselled his friends to

marry as the natural means for creating a fund of eligible wives. The

primal qualification of any lady as a consort being, in _their_ eyes, that

she had been torn away violently from a friend, it became evident that the

preliminary step towards a Flavian wedding was, to persuade some incautious

friend into marrying, and thus putting himself into a capacity of being

robbed. How many ladies that it was infamous for this family to appropriate

as wives, so many ladies that in their estimate were eligible in that

character. Such, at least in the stinging jest of Lamia, was the Flavian

rule of conduct. And his friend Titus, therefore, simply as the brother of

Domitian, simply as a Flavian, he affected to regard as indirectly providing

a wife, when he urged his friend by marrying to enrol himself as a

_pillagee_ elect.

The latter jest, therefore, when once apprehended, speaks broadly and

bitingly for itself. But the other--what can it possibly mean? For centuries

has that question been reiterated; and hitherto without advancing by one

step nearer to solution. Isaac Casaubon, who about 230 years since was the

leading oracle in this field of literature, writing an elaborate and

continuous commentary upon Suetonius, found himself unable to suggest any

real aids for dispersing the thick darkness overhanging the passage. What he

says is this:--'Parum satisfaciunt mihi interpretes in explicatione hujus

Lamiæ dicti. Nam quod putant _Heu taceo_ suspirium esse ejus--indicem

doloris ob abductam uxorem magni sed latentis, nobis non ita videtur; sed

notatam potius fuisse tyrannidem principis, qui omnia in suo genere pulchra

et excellentia possessoribus eriperet, unde necessitas incumbebat sua bona

dissimulandi celandique.' Not at all satisfactory to me are the

commentators in the explanation of the _dictum_ (which is here equivalent to

_dicterium_) of Lamia. For, whereas they imagine _Heu taceo_ to be a sigh of

his--the record and indication of a sorrow, great though concealed, on

behalf of the wife that had been violently torn away from him--me, I

confess, that the case does not strike in that light; but rather that a

satiric blow was aimed at the despotism of the sovereign prince, who tore

away from their possessors all objects whatsoever marked by beauty or

distinguished merit in their own peculiar class: whence arose a pressure of

necessity for dissembling and hiding their own advantages. '_Sic esse

exponendum_,' that such is the true interpretation (continues Casaubon),

'_docent illa verba_ [LAUDANTI VOCEM SUAM],' (we are instructed by those

words), [to one who praised his singing voice, &c.].

This commentary was obscure enough, and did no honour to the native good

sense of Isaac Casaubon, usually so conspicuous. For, whilst proclaiming a

settlement, in reality it settled nothing. Naturally, it made but a feeble

impression upon the scholars of the day; and not long after the publication

of the book, Casaubon received from Joseph Scaliger a friendly but

gasconading letter, in which that great scholar brought forward a new

reading--namely, [Greek: entaktô], to which he assigned a profound technical

value as a musical term. No person even affected to understand Scaliger.

Casaubon himself, while treating so celebrated a man with kind and

considerate deference, yet frankly owned that, in all his vast reading, he

had never met with this strange Greek word. But, without entering into any

dispute upon that verbal question, and conceding to Scaliger the word and

his own interpretation of the word, no man could understand in what way this

new resource was meant to affect the ultimate question at issue--namely, the

extrication of the passage from that thick darkness which overshadowed it.

'_As you were_' (to speak in the phraseology of military drill), was in

effect the word of command. All things reverted to their original condition.

And two centuries of darkness again enveloped this famous perplexity of

Roman literature. The darkness had for a few moments seemed to be unsettling

itself in preparation for flight: but immediately it rolled back again; and

through seven generations of men this darkness was heavier, because less

hopeful than before.

Now then, I believe, all things are ready for the explosion of the

catastrophe; 'which catastrophe,' I hear some malicious reader whispering,

'is doubtless destined to glorify himself' (meaning the unworthy writer of

this little paper). I cannot deny it. A truth _is_ a truth. And, since no

medal, nor riband, nor cross, of any known order, is disposable for the most

brilliant successes in dealing with desperate (or what may be called

_condemned_) passages in Pagan literature, mere sloughs of despond that yawn

across the pages of many a heathen dog, poet and orator, that I could

mention, the more reasonable it is that a large allowance should be served

out of boasting and self-glorification to all those whose merits upon this

field national governments have neglected to proclaim. The Scaligers, both

father and son, I believe, acted upon this doctrine; and drew largely by

anticipation upon that reversionary bank which they conceived to be

answerable for such drafts. Joseph Scaliger, it strikes me, was drunk when

he wrote his letter on the present occasion, and in that way failed to see

(what Casaubon saw clearly enough) that he had commenced shouting before he

was out of the wood. For my own part, if I go so far as to say that the

result promises, in the Frenchman's phrase, to 'cover me with glory,' I beg

the reader to remember that the idea of 'covering' is of most variable

extent: the glory may envelope one in a voluminous robe--a princely mantle

that may require a long suite of train-bearers, or may pinch and vice one's

arms into that succinct garment (now superannuated) which some eighty years

ago drew its name from the distinguished Whig family in England of Spencer.

Anticipating, therefore, that I _shall_--nay, insisting, and mutinously, if

needful, that I _will_--be covered with glory by the approaching result, I

do not contemplate anything beyond that truncated tunic, once known as a

'spencer,' and which is understood to cover only the shoulders and the

chest.

Now, then, all being ready, and the arena being cleared of competitors

(for I suppose it is fully understood that everybody but myself has

retired from the contest), thrice, in fact, has the trumpet sounded, 'Do

you give it up?' Some preparations there are to be made in all cases of

contest. Meantime, let it be clearly understood what it is that the

contest turns upon. Supposing that one had been called, like OEdipus

of old, to a turn-up with that venerable girl the Sphinx, most

essential it would have been that the clerk of the course (or however

you designate the judge, the umpire, &c.) should have read the riddle

propounded to Greece: how else judge of the solution? At present the

elements of the case to be decided stand thus:--

A Roman noble, a man, in fact, of senatorial rank, has been robbed,

robbed with violence, and with cruel scorn, of a lovely young wife, to

whom he was most tenderly attached. But by whom? the indignant reader

demands. By a younger son[8] of the Roman emperor Vespasian.

[8] But holding what rank, and what precise station, at the time of the

outrage? At this point I acknowledge a difficulty. The criminal was in

this case Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, the tenth Cæsar,

younger Brother of Titus, the eleventh Cæsar, and himself, under the

name of Domitian, the twelfth of the Cæsars, consequently the closing

prince in that series of the initial twelve Cæsars whom Suetonius had

undertaken to record. Now the difficulty lies here, which yet I have

never seen noticed in any book: was this violence perpetrated before or

after Domitian's assumption of the purple? If _after_, how, then, could

the injured husband have received that advice from Titus (as to

repairing his loss by a second marriage), which forms part of an

anecdote and a _bon-mot_ between Titus and Lamia? Yet again, if not

after but before, how was it Lamia had not invoked the protection of

Vespasian, or of Titus--the latter of whom enjoyed a theatrically fine

reputation for equity and moderation?

For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew

himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show

symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his

own head. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. _Patience_ had

been the word; _silence_, and below all the deep, deep word--_wait_; and

if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word _wait_ would

have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that

also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is

hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite

might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the

black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and

fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the

foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance,

violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of

such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the

later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian.

Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up

into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part

of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage

for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony

might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through

which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole,

therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been

resolved that he should die. But previously that he should drink off a

final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady

herself, again--that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so

total a stranger to man and his generations--had she also suffered in

sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a

certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profoundly on

what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning

torments, it may have been that the dreadful Cæsar might have found the

'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellowship in exalting the

furnace of misery. The lady herself--may we not suppose her at the last

to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist

indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no

benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural

interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be

worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There

is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that

the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to

the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in

proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to

live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or

in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so nobly

released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this

followed--that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native

nobility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly

under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay,

inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously

impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of

Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such _public_

manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one

motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry

along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of

heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society

exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the

existence of other and nobler agencies in human affairs? Not at all.

Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not

known, or imperfectly known to _them_, these they ignore. What it was

circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and

swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives--namely,

that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that

his death followed. But what was it that he _did_ say? That is precisely

the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present

we know, and we do _not_ know, what it was that he said. We have

bequeathed to us by history two words--involving eight letters--which in

their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic

literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as

the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are

required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the

following five conditions:--First, it must allude to his wife, as one

that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy

tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the

compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice;

fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not

only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant

enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its

own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless

words--'_Heu taceo._'

Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any

possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish

a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it

in less than nine letters--namely, _Oh lord, sir_. I, for my part,

satisfied that the existing form of _Heu taceo_ was mere indictable and

punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief

element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how

many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a

fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram

that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost

through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I

landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:--Let

me premise, however, what _at any rate_ the existing darkness attests,

that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether

from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at

this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that

the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had

replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is

it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case

would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every

school-boy knows that this means a _wife-revoking voice_. But first let

me remark that there is such a legitimate word as _Orpheutaceam_: and in

that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus--_Suavem dixisti?

Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam_. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to

recognise in this form our old friend _Heu taceo_. But here he is to a

certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the

compositor will show him, up to you as--_vellem et Orp_. [HEU TACEAM].

Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the

seemingly surreptitious AM, though believing the real word to be

_taceo_. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives

_taceam_. Here, then, shines out at once--(1) Eurydice the lovely wife;

(2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced

into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever

known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4)

the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of

recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the

restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous

form.

[9] In _All's Well that Ends Well_.

HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH.[10]

Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity

of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more

than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. Why

particularly at this time? Simply, because the interest in that language

rests upon two separate foundations: there are two separate principles

concerned in its pretensions; and by accident in part, but in part also

through the silent and inevitable march of human progress, there has

been steadily gathering for many years an interest of something like

sceptical and hostile curiosity about each of these principles,

considered as problems open to variable solutions, as problems already

viewed from different national centres, and as problems also that press

forward to some solution or other with more and more of a clamorous

emphasis, in proportion as they tend to consequences no longer merely

speculative and scholastic, but which more and more reveal features

largely practical and political. The two principles upon which the

English language rests the burden of its paramount interest, are

these:--first, its powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its

apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of

opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages

which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their

structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly

for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain

peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of

interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet

on which we live might be said to have assembled and opened her first

parliament for representing the grandeur of the human intellect. That

particular assembly, I mean, for celebrating the Olympic Games about

four centuries and a half before the era of Christ, when Herodotus

opened the gates of morning for the undying career of history, by

reading to the congregated children of Hellas, to the whole

representative family of civilisation, that loveliest of earthly

narratives, which, in nine musical cantos, unfolded the whole luxury of

human romance as at the bar of some austere historic Areopagus, and,

inversely again, which crowded the total abstract of human records,

sealed[11] as with the seal of Delphi in the luxurious pavilions of

human romance.

[10] This fragment appeared in _The Instructor_ for July, 1853. The

subject was not continued in any form.--H.

[11] '_Sealed_,' &c.:--I do not believe that, in the sense of holy

conscientious loyalty to his own innermost convictions, any writer of

history in any period of time can have surpassed Herodotus. And the

reader must remember (or, if unlearned, he must be informed) that this

judgment has _now_ become the unanimous judgment of all the most

competent authorities--that is, of all those who, having first of all

the requisite erudition as to Greek, as to classical archæology, &c.,

then subsequently applied this appropriate learning to the searching

investigation of the several narratives authorised by Herodotus. In the

middle of the last century, nothing could rank lower than the historic

credibility of this writer. And to parody his title to be regarded as

the 'Father of History,' by calling him the 'Father of Lies,' was an

unworthy insult offered to his admirable simplicity and candour by more

critics than one. But two points startle the honourable reader, who is

loathe to believe of any laborious provider for a great intellectual

interest that he _can_ deliberately have meant to deceive: the first

point, and, separately by itself, an all-sufficient demur, is

this--that, not in proportion to the learning and profundity brought to

bear upon Herodotus, did the doubts and scruples upon his fidelity

strengthen or multiply. Precisely in the opposite current was the

movement of human opinion, as it applied itself to this patriarch of

history. Exactly as critics and investigators arose like Larcher--just,

reasonable, thoughtful, patient, and combining--or geographers as

comprehensive and as accurate as Major Rennel, regularly in that ratio

did the reports and the judgments of Herodotus command more and more

respect. The other point is this; and, when it is closely considered, it

furnishes a most reasonable ground of demur to the ordinary criticisms

upon Herodotus. These criticisms build the principle of their objection

generally upon the marvellous or romantic element which intermingles

with the current of the narrative. But when a writer treats (as to

Herodotus it happened that repeatedly he treated) tracts of history far

removed in space and in time from the domestic interests of his native

land, naturally he misses as any available guide the ordinary

utilitarian relations which would else connect persons and events with

great outstanding interests of his own contemporary system. The very

abstraction which has silently been performed by the mere effect of vast

distances, wildernesses that swallow up armies, and mighty rivers that

are unbridged, together with the indefinite chronological remoteness, do

already of themselves translate such sequestered and insulated chambers

of history into the character of moral apologues, where the sole

surviving interest lies in the quality of the particular moral

illustrated, or in the sudden and tragic change of fortune recorded.

Such changes, it is urged, are of rare occurrence; and, recurring too

often, they impress a character of suspicious accuracy upon the

narrative. Doubtless they do so, and reasonably, where the writer is

pursuing the torpid current of circumstantial domestic annals. But, in

the rapid abstract of Herodotus, where a century yields but a page or

two, and considering that two slender octavos, on the particular scale

adopted by Herodotus, embody the total records of the human race down to

his own epoch, really it would furnish no legitimate ground of scruple

or jealousy, though every paragraph should present us with a character

that seems exaggerated, or with an incident approaching to the

marvellous, or a catastrophe that is revolting. A writer is bound--he

has created it into a duty, having once assumed the office of a national

historiographer--to select from the rolls of a nation such events as are

the most striking. And a selection conducted on this principle through

several centuries, or pursuing the fortunes of a dynasty reigning over

vast populations, _must_ end in accumulating a harvest of results such

as would startle the sobriety of ordinary historic faith. If a medical

writer should elect for himself, of his own free choice, to record such

cases only in his hospital experience as terminated fatally, it would be

absurd to object the gloomy tenor of his reports as an argument for

suspecting their accuracy, since he himself, by introducing this as a

condition into the very terms of his original undertaking with the

public, has created against himself the painful necessity of continually

distressing the sensibilities of his reader. To complain of Herodotus,

or any public historian, as drawing too continually upon his reader's

profounder sensibilities, is, in reality, to forget that this belongs as

an original element to the very task which he has undertaken. To

undertake the exhibition of human life under those aspects which

confessedly bring it into unusual conflict with chance and change, is,

by a mere self-created necessity, to prepare beforehand the summons to a

continued series of agitations: it is to seek the tragic and the

wondrous wilfully, and then to complain of it as violating the laws of

probability founded on life within the ordinary conditions of

experience.

That most memorable of Panhellenic festivals it was, which first made

known to each other the two houses of Grecian blood that typified its

ultimate and polar capacities, the most and the least of exorbitations,

the utmost that were possible from its equatorial centre; viz., on the

one side, the Asiatic Ionian, who spoke the sweet musical dialect of

Homer, and, on the other side, the austere Dorian, whom ten centuries

could not teach that human life brought with it any pleasure, or any

business, or any holiness of duty, other or loftier than that of war. If

it were possible that, under the amenities of a Grecian sky, too fierce

a memento could whisper itself of torrid zones, under the stern

discipline of the Doric Spartan it was that you looked for it; or, on

the other hand, if the lute might, at intervals, be heard or fancied

warbling too effeminately for the martial European key of the Grecian

muses, amidst the sweet blandishments it was of Ionian groves that you

arrested the initial elements of such a relaxing modulation. Twenty-five

centuries ago, when Europe and Asia met for brotherly participation in

the noblest, perhaps,[12] of all recorded solemnities, viz., the

inauguration of History in its very earliest and prelusive page, the

coronation (as with propriety we may call it) of the earliest (perhaps

even yet the greatest?) historic artist, what was the language employed

as the instrument of so great a federal act? It was that divine Grecian

language to which, on the model of the old differential compromise in

favour of Themistocles, all rival languages would cordially have

conceded the second honour. If now, which is not impossible, any

occasion should arise for a modern congress of the leading nations that

represent civilisation, not probably in the Isthmus of Corinth, but on

that of Darien, it would be a matter of mere necessity, and so far

hardly implying any expression of homage, that the English language

should take the station formerly accorded to the Grecian. But I come

back to the thesis which I announced, viz., to the twofold _onus_ which

the English language is called upon to sustain:--first, to the

responsibility attached to its _powers_; secondly, to the responsibility

and weight of expectation attached to its destiny. To the questions

growing out of the first, I will presently return. But for the moment, I

will address myself to the nature of that DESTINY, which is often

assigned to the English language: what is it? and how far is it in a

fair way of fulfilling this destiny?

[12] Perhaps, seriously, the most of a _cosmopolitical_ act that has

ever been attempted. Next to it, in point of dignity, I should feel

disposed to class the inauguration of the Crusades.

As early as the middle of the last century, and by people with as little

enthusiasm as David Hume, it had become the subject of plain prudential

speculations, in forecasting the choice of a subject, or of the language

in which it should reasonably be treated, that the area of expectation

for an English writer was prodigiously expanding under the development

of our national grandeur, by whatever names of 'colonial' or 'national'

it might be varied or disguised. The issue of the American War, and the

sudden expansion of the American Union into a mighty nation on a scale

corresponding to that of the four great European potentates--Russia,

Austria, England, and France--was not in those days suspected. But the

tendencies could not be mistaken. And the same issue was fully

anticipated, though undoubtedly through the steps of a very much slower

process. Whilst disputing about the items on the tess apettiele, the

disputed facts were overtaking us, and flying past us, on the most

gigantic scale. All things were changing: and the very terms of the

problem were themselves changing, and putting on new aspects, in the

process and at the moment of enunciation. For instance, it had been

sufficiently seen that another Christendom, far more colossal than the

old Christendom of Europe, _might_, and undoubtedly _would_, form itself

rapidly in America. Against the tens of millions in Europe would rise

up, like the earth-born children of Deucalion and Pyrrha (or of the

Theban Cadmus and Hermione) American millions counted by hundreds. But

from what _radix_? Originally, it would have been regarded as madness to

take Ireland, in her Celtic element, as counting for anything. But of

late--whether rationally, however, I will inquire for a brief moment or

so--the counters have all changed in these estimates. The late Mr

O'Connell was the parent of these hyperbolical anticipations. To count

his ridiculous 'monster-meetings' by hundreds of thousands, and then at

last by millions, cost nobody so much as a blush; and considering the

open laughter and merriment with which all O'Connell estimates were

accepted and looked at, I must think that the _London Standard_ was more

deeply to blame than any other political party, in giving currency and

acceptation to the nursery exaggerations of Mr O'Connell. Meantime

those follies came to an end. Mr O'Connell died; all was finished: and a

new form of mendacity was transferred to America. There has always

existed in the United States one remarkable phenomenon of Irish politics

applied to the deception of both English, Americans, and Irish. All

people who have given any attention to partisanship and American

politics, are aware of a rancorous malice burning sullenly amongst a

small knot of Irishmen, and applying itself chiefly to the feeding of an

interminable feud against England and all things English. This, as it

chiefly expresses itself in American journals, naturally passes for the

product of American violence; which in reality it is not. And hence it

happens, and for many years it _has_ happened, that both Englishmen and

Americans are perplexed at intervals by a malice and an _acharnement_ of

hatred to England, which reads very much like that atrocious and

viperous malignity imputed to the father of Hannibal against the Romans.

It is noticeable, both as keeping open a peculiar exasperation of Irish

patriotism absurdly directed against England; as doing a very serious

injustice to Americans, who are thus misrepresented as the organs of

this violence, so exclusively Irish; and, finally, as the origin of the

monstrous delusion which I now go on to mention. The pretence of late

put forward is, that the preponderant element in the American population

is indeed derived from the British Islands, but by a vast overbalance

from Ireland, and from the Celtic part of the Irish population. This

monstrous delusion has recently received an extravagant sanction from

the London _Quarterly Review_. Half a dozen other concurrent papers, in

journals political and literary, hold the same language. And the upshot

of the whole is--that, whilst the whole English element (including the

earliest colonisation of the New England states at the beginning of the

seventeenth century, and including the whole stream of British

emigration since the French Revolution) is accredited for no more than

three and a half millions out of pretty nearly twenty millions of

_white_ American citizens, on the other hand, against this English

element, is set up an Irish (meaning a purely Hiberno-_Celtic_) element,

amounting--oh, genius of blushing, whither hast thou fled?--to a total

of eight millions. Anglo-Saxon blood, it seems, is in a miserable

minority in the United States; whilst the German blood composes, we are

told, a respectable nation of five millions; and the Irish-Celtic young

noblemen, though somewhat at a loss for shoes, already count as high as

eight millions!

Now, if there were any semblance of truth in all this, we should have

very good reason indeed to tremble for the future prospects of the

English language throughout the Union. Eight millions struggling with

three and a half should already have produced some effect on the very

composition of Congress. Meantime, against these audacious falsehoods I

observe a reasonable paper in the _Times_ (August 23, 1852), rating the

Celtic contribution from Ireland--that is, exclusively of all the

_Ulster_ contribution--at about two millions; which, however, I view as

already an exaggeration, considering the number that have always by

preference resorted to the Canadas. Two millions, whom poverty, levity,

and utter want of all social or political consideration, have reduced to

ciphers the most absolute--two millions, in the very lowest and most

abject point of political depression, cannot do much to disturb the

weight of the English language: which, accordingly, on another

occasion, I will proceed to consider, with and without the aid of the

learned Dr Gordon Latham, and sometimes (if he will excuse me) in

defiance of that gentleman, though far enough from defiance in any

hostile or unfriendly sense.

THE CASUISTRY OF DUELLING.[13]

This mention of Allan Cunningham recalls to my recollection an affair

which retains one part of its interest to this day, arising out of the

very important casuistical question which it involves. We Protestant

nations are in the habit of treating casuistry as a field of

speculation, false and baseless _per se_; nay, we regard it not so much

in the light of a visionary and idle speculation, as one positively

erroneous in its principles, and mischievous for its practical results.

This is due in part to the disproportionate importance which the Church

of Rome has always attached to casuistry; making, in fact, this

supplementary section of ethics take precedency of its elementary

doctrines in their catholic simplicity: as though the plain and broad

highway of morality were scarcely ever the safe road, but that every

case of human conduct were to be treated as an exception, and never as

lying within the universal rule: and thus forcing the simple,

honest-minded Christian to travel upon a tortuous by-road, in which he

could not advance a step in security without a spiritual guide at his

elbow: and, in fact, whenever the hair-splitting casuistry is brought,

with all its elaborate machinery, to bear upon the simplicities of

household life, and upon the daily intercourse of the world, there it

has the effect (and is expressly cherished by the Romish Church with a

view to the effect) of raising the spiritual pastor into a sort of

importance which corresponds to that of an attorney. The consulting

casuist is, in fact, to all intents and purposes, a moral attorney. For,

as the plainest man, with the most direct purposes, is yet reasonably

afraid to trust himself to his own guidance in any affair connected with

questions of law; so also, when taught to believe that an upright

intention and good sense are equally insufficient in morals, as they are

in law, to keep him from stumbling or from missing his road, he comes to

regard a conscience-keeper as being no less indispensable for his daily

life and conversation, than his legal agent, or his professional 'man of

business,' for the safe management of his property, and for his guidance

amongst the innumerable niceties which beset the real and inevitable

intricacies of rights and duties, as they grow out of human enactments

and a complex condition of society. Fortunately for the happiness of

human nature and its dignity, those holier rights and duties which grow

out of laws heavenly and divine, written by the finger of God upon the

heart of every rational creature, are beset by no such intricacies, and

require, therefore, no such vicarious agency for their practical

assertion. The primal duties of life, like the primal charities, are

placed high above us--legible to every eye, and shining like the stars,

with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into

every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is

otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a

place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur.

So far, however, the question between us and Rome is a question of

degrees. They push casuistry into a general and unlimited application;

we, if at all, into a very narrow one. But another difference there is

between us even more important; for it regards no mere excess in the

_quantity_ of range allowed to casuistry, but in the _quality_ of its

speculations: and which it is (more than any other cause) that has

degraded the office of casuistical learning amongst us. Questions are

raised, problems are entertained, by the Romish casuistry, which too

often offend against all purity and manliness of thinking. And that

objection occurs forcibly here, which Southey (either in _The Quarterly

Review_ or in his _Life of Wesley_) has urged and expanded with regard

to the Romish and also the Methodist practice of _auricular

confession_--viz., that, as it _is_ practically managed, not leaving the

person engaged in this act to confess according to the light of his own

conscience, but at every moment interfering, on the part of the

confessor, to suggest _leading questions_ (as lawyers call them), and to

throw the light of confession upon parts of the experience which native

modesty would leave in darkness,--so managed, the practice of confession

is undoubtedly the most demoralising practice known to any Christian

society. Innocent young persons, whose thoughts would never have

wandered out upon any impure images or suggestions, have their ingenuity

and their curiosity sent roving upon unlawful quests: they are

instructed to watch what else would pass undetained in the mind, and

would pass unblameably, on the Miltonic principle: ('Evil into the mind

of God or man may come unblamed,' &c.) Nay, which is worst of all,

unconscious or semi-conscious thoughts and feelings or natural impulses,

rising, like a breath of wind under some motion of nature, and again

dying away, because not made the subject of artificial review and

interpretation, are now brought powerfully under the focal light of the

consciousness: and whatsoever is once made the subject of consciousness,

can never again have the privilege of gay, careless thoughtlessness--the

privilege by which the mind, like the lamps of a mail-coach, moving

rapidly through the midnight woods, illuminate, for one instant, the

foliage or sleeping umbrage of the thickets; and, in the next instant,

have quitted them, to carry their radiance forward upon endless

successions of objects. This happy privilege is forfeited for ever, when

the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct

knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty

familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality.

[13] This appeared in _Tait's Magazine_ for February, 1841. Although

practically an independent paper, it was included in the series entitled

'Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English

Opium-Eater.' The reference to Allan Cunningham occurs in the previous

chapter of these 'Sketches.'--H.

Here, then, are objections sound and deep, to casuistry, as managed in

the Romish church. Every possible objection ever made to auricular

confession applies with equal strength to casuistry; and some

objections, besides these, are peculiar to itself. And yet, after all,

these are but objections to casuistry as treated by a particular church.

Casuistry in itself--casuistry as a possible, as a most useful, and a

most interesting speculation--remains unaffected by any one of these

objections; for none applies to the essence of the case, but only to its

accidents, or separable adjuncts. Neither is this any curious or subtle

observation of little practical value. The fact is as far otherwise as

can be imagined--the defect to which I am here pointing, is one of the

most clamorous importance. Of what value, let me ask, is Paley's Moral

Philosophy? What is its imagined use? Is it that in substance it reveals

any new duties, or banishes as false any old ones? No; but because the

known and admitted duties--duties recognised in _every_ system of

ethics--are here placed (successfully or not) upon new foundations, or

brought into relation with new principles not previously perceived to be

in any relation whatever. This, in fact, is the very meaning of a

theory[14] or contemplation, [[Greek: Theôria],] when A, B, C, old and

undisputed facts have their relations to each other developed. It is

not, therefore, for any practical benefit in action, so much as for the

satisfaction of the understanding, when reflecting on a man's own

actions, the wish to see what his conscience or his heart prompts

reconciled to general laws of thinking--this is the particular service

performed by Paley's Moral Philosophy. It does not so much profess to

tell _what_ you are to do, as the _why_ and the _wherefore_; and, in

particular, to show how one rule of action may be reconciled to some

other rule of equal authority, but which, apparently, is in hostility to

the first. Such, then, is the utmost and highest aim of the Paleyian or

the Ciceronian ethics, as they exist. Meantime, the grievous defect to

which I have adverted above--a defect equally found in all systems of

morality, from the Nichomachéan ethics of Aristotle downwards--is the

want of a casuistry, by way of supplement to the main system, and

governed by the spirit of the very same laws, which the writer has

previously employed in the main body of his work. And the immense

superiority of this supplementary section, to the main body of the

systems, would appear in this, that the latter I have just been saying,

aspires only to guide the reflecting judgment in harmonising the

different parts of his own conduct, so as to bring them under the same

law; whereas the casuistical section, in the supplement, would seriously

undertake to guide the conduct, in many doubtful cases, of action--cases

which are so regarded by all thinking persons. Take, for example, the

case which so often arises between master and servant, and in so many

varieties of form--a case which requires you to decide between some

violation of your conscience, on the one hand, as to veracity, by saying

something that is not strictly true, as well as by evading (and that is

often done) all answer to inquiries which you are unable to meet

satisfactorily--a violation of your conscience to this extent, and in

this way; or, on the other hand, a still more painful violation of your

conscience in consigning deliberately some young woman--faulty, no

doubt, and erring, but yet likely to derive a lesson from her own

errors, and the risk to which they have exposed her--consigning her, I

say, to ruin, by refusing her a character, and thus shutting the door

upon all the paths by which she might retrace her steps. This I state as

one amongst the many cases of conscience daily occurring in the common

business of the world. It would surprise any reader to find how many

they are; in fact, a very large volume might be easily collected of such

cases as are of ordinary occurrence. _Casuistry_, the very word

_casuistry_ expresses the science which deals with such _cases_: for as

a case, in the declension of a noun, means a falling away, or a

deflection from the upright nominative (_rectus_), so a case in ethics

implies some falling off, or deflection from the high road of catholic

morality. Now, of all such cases, one, perhaps the most difficult to

manage, the most intractable, whether for consistency of thinking as to

the theory of morals, or for consistency of action as to the practice of

morals, is the case of DUELLING.

[14] No terms of art are used so arbitrarily, and with such perfect

levity, as the terms _hypothesis_, _theory_, _system_. Most writers use

one or other with the same indifference that they use in constructing

the title of a novel, or, suppose, of a pamphlet, where the phrase

_thoughts_, or _strictures_, or _considerations_, upon so and so, are

used _ad libitum_. Meantime, the distinctions are essential. That is

properly an _hypothesis_ where the question is about a cause: certain

phenomena are known and given: the object is to place below these

phenomena a basis [[Greek: a hypothosis]] capable of supporting them,

and accounting for them. Thus, if you were to assign a cause sufficient

to account for the _aurora borealis_, that would be an hypothesis. But a

theory, on the other hand, takes a multitude of facts all disjointed,

or, at most, suspected, of some inter-dependency: these it takes and

places under strict laws of relation to each other. But here there is no

question of a cause. Finally, a system is the synthesis of a theory and

an hypothesis: it states the relations as amongst an undigested mass,

_rudis indigestaque moles_, of known phenomena; and it assigns a basis

for the whole, as in an hypothesis. These distinctions would become

vivid and convincing by the help of proper illustrations.

As an introduction, I will state my story--the case for the casuist; and

then say one word on the reason of the case.

First, let me report the case of a friend--a distinguished lawyer at the

English bar. I had the circumstances from himself, which lie in a very

small compass; and, as my friend is known, to a proverb almost, for his

literal accuracy in all statements of fact, there need be no fear of any

mistake as to the main points of the case. He was one day engaged in

pleading before the Commissioners of Bankruptcy; a court then, newly

appointed, and differently constituted, I believe, in some respects,

from its present form. That particular commissioner, as it happened, who

presided at the moment when the case occurred, had been recently

appointed, and did not know the faces of those who chiefly practised in

the court. All things, indeed, concurred to favour his mistake: for the

case itself came on in a shape or in a stage which was liable to

misinterpretation, from the partial view which it allowed of the facts,

under the hurry of the procedure; and my friend, also, unluckily, had

neglected to assume his barrister's costume, so that he passed, in the

commissioner's appreciation, as an attorney. 'What if he _had_ been an

attorney?' it may be said: 'was he, therefore, less entitled to courtesy

or justice?' Certainly not; nor is it my business to apologise for the

commissioner. But it may easily be imagined, and (making allowances for

the confusion of hurry and imperfect knowledge of the case) it _does_

offer something in palliation of the judge's rashness, that, amongst a

large heap of 'Old Bailey' attorneys, who notoriously attended this

court for the express purpose of whitewashing their clients, and who

were in bad odour as tricksters, he could hardly have been expected to

make a special exception in favour of one particular man, who had not

protected himself by the insignia of his order. His main error, however,

lay in misapprehending the case: misapprehension lent strength to the

assumption that my friend was an 'Old Bailey' (_i. e._, a sharking)

attorney; whilst, on the other hand, that assumption lent strength to

his misapprehension of the case. Angry interruptions began: these, being

retorted or resented with just indignation, produced an irritation and

ill temper, which, of themselves, were quite sufficient to raise a cloud

of perplexity over any law process, and to obscure it for any

understanding. The commissioner grew warmer and warmer; and, at length,

he had the presumption to say:--'Sir, you are a disgrace to your

profession.' When such sugar-plums, as Captain M'Turk the peacemaker

observes, were flying between them, there could be no room for further

parley. That same night the commissioner was waited on by a friend of

the barrister's, who cleared up his own misconceptions to the

disconcerted judge; placed him, even to his own judgment, thoroughly in

the wrong; and then most courteously troubled him for a reference to

some gentleman, who would arrange the terms of a meeting for the next

day. The commissioner was too just and grave a man to be satisfied with

himself, on a cool review of his own conduct. Here was a quarrel ripened

into a mortal feud, likely enough to terminate in wounds, or, possibly,

in death to one of the parties, which, on his side, carried with it no

palliations from any provocation received, or from wrong and insult, in

any form, sustained: these, in an aggravated shape, could be pleaded by

my friend, but with no opening for retaliatory pleas on the part of the

magistrate. That name, again, of magistrate, increased his offence and

pointed its moral: he, a conservator of the laws--he, a dispenser of

equity, sitting even at the very moment on the judgment seat--_he_ to

have commenced a brawl, nay to have fastened a quarrel upon a man even

then of some consideration and of high promise; a quarrel which finally

tended to this result--shoot or be shot. That commissioner's situation

and state of mind, for the succeeding night, were certainly not

enviable: like Southey's erring painter, who had yielded to the

temptation of the subtle fiend,

With repentance his only companion he lay;

And a dismal companion is she.

Meantime, my friend--what was _his_ condition; and how did _he_ pass the

interval? I have heard him feelingly describe the misery, the blank

anguish of this memorable night. Sometimes it happens that a man's

conscience is wounded; but this very wound is the means, perhaps, by

which his feelings are spared for the present: sometimes his feelings

are lacerated; but this very laceration makes the ransom for his

conscience. Here, on the contrary, his feelings and his happiness were

dimmed by the very same cause which offered pain and outrage to his

conscience. He was, upon principle, a hater of duelling. Under any

circumstances, he would have condemned the man who could, for a light

cause, or almost for the weightiest, have so much as _accepted_ a

challenge. Yet, here he was positively _offering_ a challenge; and to

whom? To a man whom he scarcely knew by sight; whom he had never spoken

to until this unfortunate afternoon; and towards whom (now that the

momentary excitement of anger had passed away) he felt no atom of

passion or resentment whatsoever. As a free 'unhoused' young man,

therefore, had he been such, without ties or obligations in life, he

would have felt the profoundest compunction at the anticipation of any

serious injury inflicted upon another man's hopes or happiness, or upon

his own. But what was his real situation? He was a married man, married

to the woman of his choice within a very few years: he was also a

father, having one most promising son, somewhere about three years old.

His young wife and his son composed his family; and both were dependent,

in the most absolute sense, for all they possessed or they expected--for

all they had or ever could have--upon his own exertions. Abandoned by

him, losing him, they forfeited, in one hour, every chance of comfort,

respectability, or security from scorn and humiliation. The mother, a

woman of strong understanding and most excellent judgment--good and

upright herself--liable, therefore, to no habit of suspicion, and

constitutionally cheerful, went to bed with her young son, thinking no

evil. Midnight came, one, two o'clock; mother and child had long been

asleep; nor did either of them dream of that danger which even now was

yawning under their feet. The barrister had spent the hours from ten to

two in drawing up his will, and in writing such letters as might have

the best chance, in case of fatal issue to himself, for obtaining some

aid to the desolate condition of those two beings whom he would leave

behind, unprotected and without provision. Oftentimes he stole into the

bedroom, and gazed with anguish upon the innocent objects of his love;

and, as his conscience now told him, of his bitterest perfidy. 'Will you

then leave us? Are you really going to betray us? Will you deliberately

consign us to life-long poverty, and scorn, and grief?' These affecting

apostrophes he seemed, in the silence of the night, to hear almost with

bodily ears. Silent reproaches seemed written upon their sleeping

features; and once, when his wife suddenly awakened under the glare of

the lamp which he carried, he felt the strongest impulse to fly from the

room; but he faltered, and stood rooted to the spot. She looked at him

smilingly, and asked why he was so long in coming to bed. He pleaded an

excuse, which she easily admitted, of some law case to study against the

morning, or some law paper to draw. She was satisfied; and fell asleep

again. He, however, fearing, above all things, that he might miss the

time for his appointment, resolutely abided by his plan of not going to

bed; for the meeting was to take place at Chalk Farm, and by half-past

five in the morning: that is, about one hour after sunrise. One hour and

a half before this time, in the gray dawn, just when the silence of

Nature and of mighty London was most absolute, he crept stealthily, and

like a guilty thing, to the bedside of his sleeping wife and child;

took, what he believed might be his final look of them: kissed them

softly; and, according to his own quotation from Coleridge's _Remorse_,

In agony that could not be remembered;

and a conflict with himself that defied all rehearsal, he quitted his

peaceful cottage at Chelsea in order to seek for the friend who had

undertaken to act as his second. He had good reason, from what he had

heard on the night before, to believe his antagonist an excellent shot;

and, having no sort of expectation that any interruption could offer to

the regular progress of the duel, he, as the challenger, would have to

stand the first fire; at any rate, conceiving this to be the fair

privilege of the party challenged, he did not mean to avail himself of

any proposal for drawing lots upon the occasion, even if such a proposal

should happen to be made. Thus far the affair had travelled through the

regular stages of expectation and suspense; but the interest of the case

as a story was marred and brought to an abrupt conclusion by the conduct

of the commissioner. He was a man of known courage, but he also, was a

man of conscientious scruples; and, amongst other instances of courage,

had the courage to own himself in the wrong. He felt that his conduct

hitherto had not been wise or temperate, and that he would be sadly

aggravating his original error by persisting in aiming at a man's life,

upon which life hung also the happiness of others, merely because he had

offered to that man a most unwarranted insult. Feeling this, he thought

fit, at first coming upon the ground, to declare that, having learned,

since the scene in court, the real character of his antagonist, and the

extent of his own mistake, he was resolved to brave all appearances and

ill-natured judgments, by making an ample apology; which, accordingly,

he did; and so the affair terminated. I have thought it right, however,

to report the circumstances, both because they were really true in every

particular, but, much more, because they place in strong relief one

feature, which is often found in these cases, and which is allowed far

too little weight in distributing the blame between the parties: to this

I wish to solicit the reader's attention. During the hours of this

never-to-be-forgotten night of wretchedness and anxiety, my friend's

reflection was naturally forced upon the causes which had produced it.

In the world's judgment, he was aware that he himself, as the one

charged with the most weighty responsibility, (those who depended upon

him being the most entirely helpless,) would have to sustain by much the

heaviest censure: and yet what was the real proportion of blame between

the parties? He, when provoked and publicly insulted, had retorted

angrily: that was almost irresistible under the constitution of human

feelings; the meekest of men could scarcely do less. But surely the true

_onus_ of wrong and moral responsibility for all which might follow,

rested upon that party who, giving way to mixed impulses of rash

judgment and of morose temper, had allowed himself to make a most

unprovoked assault upon the character of one whom he did not know; well

aware that such words, uttered publicly by a person in authority, must,

by some course or other, be washed out and cancelled; or, if not, that

the party submitting to such defamatory insults, would at once exile

himself from the society and countenance of his professional brethren.

Now, then, in all justice, it should be so ordered that the weight of

public indignation might descend upon him, whoever he might be, (and, of

course, the more heavily, according to the authority of his station and

his power of inflicting wrong,) who should thus wantonly abuse his means

of influence, to the dishonour or injury of an unoffending party. We

clothe a public officer with power, we arm him with influential

authority over public opinion; not that he may apply these authentic

sanctions to the backing of his own malice, and giving weight to his

private caprices: and, wherever such abuse takes place, then it should

be so contrived that some reaction in behalf of the injured person

might receive a sanction equally public. And, upon this point, I shall

say a word or two more, after first stating my own case; a case where

the outrage was far more insufferable, more deliberate, and more

malicious; but, on the other hand, in this respect less effectual for

injury, that it carried with it no sanction from any official station or

repute in the unknown parties who offered the wrong. The circumstances

were these:--In 1824, I had come up to London upon an errand in itself

sufficiently vexatious--of fighting against pecuniary embarrassments, by

literary labours; but, as had always happened hitherto, with very

imperfect success, from the miserable thwartings I incurred through the

deranged state of the liver. My zeal was great, and my application was

unintermitting; but spirits radically vitiated, chiefly through the

direct mechanical depression caused by one important organ deranged;

and, secondly, by a reflex effect of depression through my own thoughts,

in estimating my prospects; together with the aggravation of my case, by

the inevitable exile from my own mountain home,--all this reduced the

value of my exertions in a deplorable way. It was rare indeed that I

could satisfy my own judgment, even tolerably, with the quality of any

literary article I produced; and my power to make sustained exertions,

drooped, in a way I could not control, every other hour of the day:

insomuch, that what with parts to be cancelled, and what with whole days

of torpor and pure defect of power to produce anything at all, very

often it turned out that all my labours were barely sufficient (some

times not sufficient) to meet the current expenses of my residence in

London. Three months' literary toil terminated, at times, in a result =

0; the whole _plus_ being just equal to the _minus_, created by two

separate establishments, and one of them in the most expensive city of

the world. Gloomy, indeed, was my state of mind at that period: for,

though I made prodigious efforts to recover my health, (sensible that

all other efforts depended for their result upon this elementary effort,

which was the _conditio sine qua non_ for the rest), yet all availed me

not; and a curse seemed to settle upon whatever I then undertook. Such

was my frame of mind on reaching London: in fact it never varied. One

canopy of murky clouds (a copy of that dun atmosphere which settles so

often upon London) brooded for ever upon my spirits, which were in one

uniformly low key of cheerless despondency; and, on this particular

morning, my depression had been deeper than usual, from the effects of a

long, continuous journey of 300 miles, and of exhaustion from want of

sleep. I had reached London, about six o'clock in the morning, by one of

the northern mails; and, resigning myself as usual in such cases, to the

chance destination of the coach, after delivering our bags in Lombard

Street, I was driven down to a great city hotel. Here there were hot

baths; and, somewhat restored by this luxurious refreshment, about eight

o'clock I was seated at a breakfast table; upon which, in a few minutes,

as an appendage not less essential than the tea-service, one of the

waiters laid that morning's _Times_, just reeking from the press. The

_Times_, by the way, is notoriously the leading journal of Europe

anywhere; but, in London, and more peculiarly in the city quarter of

London, it enjoys a pre-eminence scarcely understood elsewhere. Here it

is not _a_ morning paper, but _the_ morning paper: no other is known, no

other is cited as authority in matters of fact. Strolling with my eye

indolently over the vast Babylonian confusion of the enormous columns,

naturally as one of the _corps littéraire_, I found my attention drawn

to those regions of the paper which announced forthcoming publications.

Amongst them was a notice of a satirical journal, very low priced, and

already advanced to its third or fourth number. My heart palpitated a

little on seeing myself announced as the principal theme for the malice

of the current number. The reader must not suppose that I was left in

any doubt as to the quality of the notice with which I had been

honoured; and that, by possibility, I was solacing my vanity with some

anticipation of honeyed compliments. That, I can assure him, was made

altogether impossible, by the kind of language which flourished in the

very foreground of the _programme_, and even of the running title. The

exposure and _depluming_ (to borrow a good word from the fine old

rhetorician, Fuller,) of the leading 'humbugs' of the age--_that_ was

announced as the regular business of the journal: and the only question

which remained to be settled was, the more or less of the degree; and

also one other question, even more interesting still, viz.--whether

personal abuse were intermingled with literary. Happiness, as I have

experienced in other periods of my life, deep domestic happiness, makes

a man comparatively careless of ridicule, of sarcasm, or of abuse. But

calamity--the degradation, in the world's eye, of every man who is

fighting with pecuniary difficulties--exasperates beyond all that can be

imagined, a man's sensibility to insult. He is even apprehensive of

insult--tremulously fantastically apprehensive, where none is intended;

and like Wordsworth's shepherd, with his very understanding consciously

abused and depraved by his misfortunes is ready to say, at all hours--

And every man I met or faced,

Methought he knew some ill of me.

Some notice, perhaps, the newspaper had taken of this new satirical

journal, or some extracts might have been made from it; at all events, I

had ascertained its character so well that, in this respect, I had

nothing to learn. It now remained to get the number which professed to

be seasoned with my particular case; and it may be supposed that I did

not loiter over my breakfast after this discovery. Something which I saw

or suspected amongst the significant hints of a paragraph or

advertisement, made me fear that there might possibly be insinuations or

downright assertion in the libel requiring instant public notice; and,

therefore, on a motive of prudence, had I even otherwise felt that

indifference for slander which now I _do_ feel, but which, in those

years, morbid irritability of temperament forbade me to affect, I should

still have thought it right to look after the work; which now I did:

and, by nine o'clock in the morning--an hour at which few people had

seen me for years--I was on my road to Smithfield. Smithfield? Yes; even

so. All known and respectable publishers having declined any connexion

with the work, the writers had facetiously resorted to this _aceldama_,

or slaughtering quarter of London--to these vast shambles, as typical, I

suppose, of their own slaughtering spirit. On my road to Smithfield, I

could not but pause for one moment to reflect on the pure defecated

malice which must have prompted an attack upon myself. Retaliation or

retort it could not pretend to be. To most literary men, scattering

their written reviews, or their opinions, by word of mouth, to the right

and the left with all possible carelessness, it never can be matter of

surprise, or altogether of complaint, (unless as a question of degrees,)

that angry notices, or malicious notices, should be taken of themselves.

Few, indeed, of literary men can pretend to any absolute innocence from

offence, and from such even as may have seemed deliberate. But I, for my

part, could. Knowing the rapidity with which all remarks _of_ literary

men _upon_ literary men are apt to circulate, I had studiously and

resolutely forborne to say anything, whether of a writer or a book,

unless where it happened that I could say something that would be felt

as complimentary. And as to written reviews, so much did I dislike the

assumption of judicial functions and authority over the works of my own

brother authors and contemporaries, that I have, in my whole life,

written only two; at that time only one; and that one, though a review

of an English novel, was substantially a review of a German book, taking

little notice, or none, of the English translator; for, although he, a

good German scholar now, was a very imperfect one at that time, and was,

therefore, every way open to criticism, I had evaded this invidious

office applied to a novice in literature, and (after pointing out one or

two slight blemishes of trivial importance) all that I said of a general

nature was a compliment to him upon the felicity of his verses. Upon the

German author I was, indeed, severe, but hardly as much as he deserved.

The other review was a tissue of merriment and fun; and though, it is

true, I _did_ hear that the fair authoress was offended at one jest, I

may safely leave it for any reader to judge between us. She, or her

brother, amongst other Latin epigrams had one addressed to a young lady

_upon the loss of her keys_. This, the substance of the lines showed to

have been the intention; but (by a very venial error in one who was

writing Latin from early remembrance of it, and not in the character of

a professing scholar) the title was written _De clavis_ instead of _De

clavibus amissis_; upon which I observed that the writer had selected a

singular topic for condolence with a young lady,--viz., '_on the loss of

her cudgels_;' (_clavis_, as an ablative, coming clearly from _clava_).

This (but I can hardly believe it) was said to have offended Miss H.;

and, at all events, this was the extent of my personalities. Many kind

things I had said; much honour; much admiration, I had professed at that

period of my life in occasional papers or private letters, towards many

of my contemporaries, but never anything censorious or harsh; and simply

on a principle of courteous forbearance which I have felt to be due

towards those who are brothers of the same liberal profession with one's

self. I could not feel, when reviewing my whole life, that in any one

instance, by act, by word, or by intention, I had offered any

unkindness, far less any wrong or insult, towards a brother author. I

was at a loss, therefore, to decipher the impulse under which the

malignant libeller could have written, in making (as I suspected

already) my private history the subject of his calumnies. Jealousy, I

have since understood, jealousy, was the foundation of the whole. A

little book of mine had made its way into drawing-rooms where some book

of his had not been heard of. On reaching Smithfield, I found the

publisher to be a medical bookseller, and, to my surprise, having every

appearance of being a grave, respectable man; notwithstanding this

undeniable fact, that the libellous journal, to which he thought proper

to affix his sanction, trespassed on decency, not only by its slander,

but, in some instances, by downright obscenity; and, worse than that,

by prurient solicitations to the libidinous imagination, through blanks,

seasonably interspersed. I said nothing to him in the way of inquiry;

for I easily guessed that the knot of writers who were here clubbing

their _virus_, had not so ill combined their plans as to leave them open

to detection by a question from any chance stranger. Having, therefore,

purchased a set of the journal, then amounting to three or four numbers,

I went out; and in the elegant promenades of Smithfield, I read the

lucubrations of my libeller. Fit academy for such amenities of

literature! Fourteen years have gone by since then; and, possibly, the

unknown hound who yelled, on that occasion, among this kennel of curs,

may, long since, have buried himself and his malice in the grave.

Suffice it here to say, that, calm as I am now, and careless on

recalling the remembrance of this brutal libel, at that time I was

convulsed with wrath. As respected myself, there was a depth of

malignity in the article which struck me as perfectly mysterious. How

could any man have made an enemy so profound, and not even have

suspected it? _That_ puzzled me. For, with respect to the other objects

of attack, such as Sir Humphrey Davy, &c., it was clear that the malice

was assumed; that, at most, it was the gay impertinence of some man upon

town, armed with triple Irish brass from original defect of feeling, and

willing to raise an income by running amuck at any person just then

occupying enough of public interest to make the abuse saleable. But, in

my case, the man flew like a bull-dog at the throat, with a pertinacity

and _acharnement_ of malice that would have caused me to laugh

immoderately, had it not been for one intolerable wound to my feelings.

These mercenary libellers, whose stiletto is in the market, and at any

man's service for a fixed price, callous and insensible as they are,

yet retain enough of the principles common to human nature, under every

modification, to know where to plant their wounds. Like savage hackney

coachmen, they know where there is a _raw_. And the instincts of human

nature teach them that every man is vulnerable through his female

connexions. There lies his honour; there his strength; there his

weakness. In their keeping is the heaven of his happiness; in them and

through them the earthy of its fragility. Many there are who do not feel

the _maternal_ relation to be one in which any excessive freight of

honour or sensibility is embarked. Neither is the name of _sister_,

though tender in early years, and impressive to the fireside

sensibilities, universally and through life the same magical sound. A

sister is a creature whose very property and tendency (_qua_ sister) is

to alienate herself, not to gather round your centre. But the names of

_wife_ and _daughter_ these are the supreme and starry charities of

life: and he who, under a mask, fighting in darkness, attacks you there,

that coward has you at disadvantage. I stood in those hideous shambles

of Smithfield: upwards I looked to the clouds, downwards to the earth,

for vengeance. I trembled with excessive wrath--such was my infirmity of

feeling at that time, and in that condition of health; and had I

possessed forty thousand lives, all, and every one individually, I would

have sacrificed in vindication of her that was thus cruelly libelled.

Shall I give currency to his malice, shall I aid and promote it by

repeating it? No. And yet why not? Why should I scruple, as if afraid to

challenge his falsehoods?--why should I scruple to cite them? He, this

libeller, asserted--But faugh!

This slander seemed to have been built upon some special knowledge of

me; for I had often spoken with horror of those who could marry persons

in a condition which obliged them to obedience--a case which had

happened repeatedly within my own knowledge; and I had spoken on this

ground, that the authority of a master might be _supposed_ to have been

interposed, whether it really were so or not in favour of his designs;

and thus a presumption, however false it might be, always remained that

his wooing had been, perhaps, not the wooing of perfect freedom, so

essential to the dignity of woman, and, therefore, essential to his own

dignity; but that perhaps, it had been favoured by circumstances, and by

opportunities created, if it had not even been favoured, by express

exertions of authority. The libeller, therefore, _did_ seem to have some

knowledge of my peculiar opinions: yet, in other points, either from

sincere ignorance or from affectation, and by way of turning aside

suspicion, he certainly manifested a non-acquaintance with facts

relating to me that must have been familiar enough to all within my

circle.

Let me pursue the case to its last stage. The reader will say, perhaps,

why complain of a paltry journal that assuredly never made any noise;

for I, the reader, never heard of it till now. No, that is very

possible; for the truth is, and odd enough it seems, this malicious

journal prospered so little, that, positively, at the seventh No. it

stopped. Laugh I did, and laugh I could not help but do, at this picture

of baffled malice: writers willing and ready to fire with poisoned

bullets, and yet perfectly unable to get an effective aim, from sheer

want of co-operation on the part of the public.

However, the case as it respected me, went farther than it did with

respect to the public. Would it be believed that human malice, with

respect to a man not even known by sight to his assailants, as was clear

from one part of their personalities, finally--that is to say, months

afterwards--adopted the following course:--The journal had sunk under

public scorn and neglect; neglect at first, but, perhaps, scorn at the

last; for, when the writers found that mere malice availed not to draw

public attention, they adopted the plan of baiting their hooks with

obscenity; and they published a paper, professing to be written by Lord

Byron, called, '_My Wedding Night_;' and very possible, from internal

evidence, to have been really written by him; and yet the combined

forces of Byron and obscenity failed to save them,--which is rather

remarkable. Having sunk, one might suppose the journal was at an end,

for good and evil; and, especially, that all, who had been molested by

it, or held up to ridicule, might now calculate on rest. By no means:

First of all they made inquiries about the localities of my residence,

and the town nearest to my own family. Nothing was effected unless they

carried the insult, addressed to my family, into the knowledge of that

family and its circle. My cottage in Grasmere was just 280 miles from

London, and eighteen miles from any town whatsoever. The nearest was

Kendal; a place of perhaps 16,000 inhabitants; and the nearest

therefore, at which there were any newspapers printed. There were two:

one denominated _The Gazette_; the other _The Chronicle_. The first was

Tory and Conservative; had been so from its foundation; and was,

besides, generous in its treatment of private character. My own

contributions to it I will mention hereafter. _The Chronicle_, on the

other hand, was a violent reforming journal, and conducted in a

partisan spirit. To this newspaper the article was addressed; by this

newspaper it was published; and by this it was carried into my own

'_next-door_' neighbourhood. Next-door neighbourhood? But that surely

must be the very best direction these libellers could give to their

malice; for there, at least, the falsehood of their malice must be

notorious. Why, yes: and in that which _was_ my neighbourhood, according

to the most literal interpretation of the term, a greater favour could

not have been done me, nor a more laughable humiliation for my

unprovoked enemies. Commentary or refutation there needed none; the

utter falsehood of the main allegations were so obvious to every man,

woman, and child, that, of necessity, it discredited even those parts

which might, for any thing known to my neighbours, have been true. Nay,

it was the means of procuring for me a generous expression of sympathy,

that would else have been wanting; for some gentlemen of the

neighbourhood, who were but slightly known to me, put the malignant

journal into the fire at a public reading-room. So far was well; but, on

the other hand, in Kendal, a town nearly twenty miles distant, of

necessity I was but imperfectly known; and though there was a pretty

general expression of disgust at the character of the publication, and

the wanton malignity which it bore upon its front, since, true or not

true, no shadow of a reason was pleaded for thus bringing forward

statements expressly to injure me, or to make me unhappy; yet there must

have been many, in so large a place, who had too little interest in the

question, or too limited means of inquiry, for ever ascertaining the

truth. Consequently, in _their_ minds, to this hour, my name, as one

previously known to them, and repeatedly before the town in connexion

with political or literary articles in their Conservative journal, must

have suffered.

But the main purpose, for which I have reported the circumstances of

these two cases, relates to the casuistry of duelling. Casuistry, as I

have already said, is the moral philosophy of _cases_--that is, of

anomalous combinations of circumstances--that, for any reason

whatsoever, do not fall, or do not seem to fall, under the general rules

of morality. As a general rule, it must, doubtless, be unlawful to

attempt another man's life, or to hazard your own. Very special

circumstances must concur to make out any case of exception; and even

then it is evident, that one of the parties must always be deeply in the

wrong. But it _does_ strike me, that the present casuistry of society

upon the question of duelling, is profoundly wrong, and wrong by

manifest injustice. Very little distinction is ever made, in practice,

by those who apply their judgments to such cases, between the man who,

upon principle, practises the most cautious self-restraint and

moderation in his daily demeanour, never under any circumstance offering

an insult, or any just occasion of quarrel, and resorting to duel only

under the most insufferable provocation, between this man, on the one

side, and the most wanton ruffian, on the other, who makes a common

practice of playing upon other men's feelings, whether in reliance upon

superior bodily strength, or upon the pacific disposition of

conscientious men, and fathers of families. Yet, surely, the difference

between them goes the whole extent of the interval between wrong and

right. Even the question, 'Who gave the challenge?' which _is_ sometimes

put, often merges virtually in the transcendant question, 'Who gave the

provocation?' For it is important to observe, in both the cases which I

have reported, that the _onus_ of offering the challenge was thrown upon

the unoffending party; and thus, in a legal sense, that party is made to

give the provocation who, in a moral sense, received it. But surely, if

even the law makes allowances for human infirmity, when provoked beyond

what it can endure,--we, in our brotherly judgments upon each other,

ought, _a fortiori_, to take into the equity of our considerations the

amount and quality of the offence. It will be objected that the law, so

far from allowing for, expressly refuses to allow for, sudden sallies of

anger or explosions of vindictive fury, unless in so far as they are

extempore, and before the reflecting judgment has had time to recover

itself. Any indication that the party had leisure for calm review, or

for a cool selection of means and contrivances in executing his

vindictive purposes, will be fatal to a claim of that nature. This is

true; but the nature of a printed libel is, continually to renew itself

as an insult. The subject of it reads this libel, perhaps, in solitude;

and, by a great exertion of self-command, resolves to bear it with

fortitude and in silence. Some days after, in a public room, he sees

strangers reading it also: he hears them scoffing and laughing loudly:

in the midst of all this, he sees himself pointed out to their notice by

some one of the party who happens to be acquainted with his person; and,

possibly, if the libel take that particular shape which excessive malice

is most likely to select, he will hear the name of some female relative,

dearer, it may be to him, and more sacred in his ears, than all this

world beside, bandied about with scorn and mockery by those who have not

the poor excuse of the original libellers, but are, in fact, adopting

the second-hand malignity of others. Such cases, with respect to libels

that are quickened into popularity by interesting circumstances, or by a

personal interest attached to any of the parties, or by wit, or by

extraordinary malice, or by scenical circumstances, or by circumstances

unusually ludicrous, are but too likely to occur; and, with every fresh

repetition, the keenness of the original provocation is renewed, and in

an accelerated ratio. Again, with reference to my own case, or to any

case resembling that, let it be granted that I was immoderately and

unreasonably transported by anger at the moment;--I thought so myself,

after a time, when the journal which published the libel sank under the

public neglect; but this was an after consideration; and, at the moment,

how heavy an aggravation was given to the stings of the malice, by the

deep dejection, from embarrassed circumstances and from disordered

health, which then possessed me; aggravations, perhaps, known to the

libellers as encouragements for proceeding at the time, and often enough

likely to exist in other men's cases. Now, in the case as it actually

occurred, it so happened that the malicious writers had, by the libel,

dishonoured themselves too deeply in the public opinion, to venture upon

coming forward, in their own persons, to avow their own work; but

suppose them to have done so (as, in fact, even in this case, they might

have done, had they not published their intention of driving a regular

trade in libel and in slander); suppose them insolently to beard you in

public haunts; to cross your path continually when in company with the

very female relative upon whom they had done their best to point the

finger of public scorn; and suppose them further, by the whole artillery

of contemptuous looks, words, gestures, and unrepressed laughter, to

republish, as it were, ratify, and publicly to apply, personally, their

own original libel, as often as chance or as opportunity (eagerly

improved) should throw you together in places of general resort; and

suppose, finally, that the central figure--nay, in their account, the

very butt throughout this entire drama of malice--should chance to be an

innocent, gentle-hearted, dejected, suffering woman, utterly unknown to

her persecutors, and selected as their martyr merely for her

relationship to yourself--suppose her, in short, to be your wife--a

lovely young woman sustained by womanly dignity, or else ready to sink

into the earth with shame, under the cruel and unmanly insults heaped

upon her, and having no protector upon earth but yourself: lay all this

together, and then say whether, in such a case, the most philosophic or

the most Christian patience might not excusably give way; whether flesh

and blood could do otherwise than give way, and seek redress for the

past, but, at all events, security for the future, in what, perhaps,

might be the sole course open to you--an appeal to arms. Let it not be

said that the case here proposed, by way of hypothesis, is an extreme

one: for the very argument has contemplated extreme cases: since, whilst

conceding that duelling is an unlawful and useless remedy for cases of

ordinary wrong, where there is no malice to resist a more conciliatory

mode of settlement, and where it is difficult to imagine any deliberate

insult except such as is palliated by intoxication--conceding this, I

have yet supposed it possible that cases may arise, with circumstances

of contumely and outrage, growing out of deep inexorable malice, which

cannot be redressed, _as things now are_, without an appeal to the _voye

de fait_. 'But this is so barbarous an expedient in days of high

civilisation.' Why, yes, it labours with the semi-barbarism of

chivalry: yet, on the other hand, this mention of chivalry reminds me

to say, that if this practice of duelling share the blame of chivalry,

one memorable praise there is, which also it may claim as common to them

both. It is a praise which I have often insisted on; and the very

sublime of prejudice I would challenge to deny it. Burke, in his

well-known apology for chivalry, thus expresses his sense of the

immeasurable benefits which it conferred upon society, as a

supplementary code of law, reaching those cases which the weakness of

municipal law was then unavailing to meet, and at a price so trivial in

bloodshed or violence--he calls it 'the cheap defence of nations.' Yes,

undoubtedly; and surely the same praise belongs incontestably to the law

of duelling. For one duel _in esse_, there are ten thousand, every day

of our lives, amid populous cities, _in posse_: one challenge is given,

a myriad are feared: one life (and usually the most worthless, by any

actual good rendered to society) is sacrificed, suppose triennially,

from a nation; _every_ life is endangered by certain modes of behaviour.

Hence, then, and at a cost inconceivably trifling, the peace of society

is maintained in cases which no law, no severity of police, ever could

effectually reach. Brutal strength would reign paramount in the walks of

public life; brutal intoxication would follow out its lawless impulses,

were it not for the fear which now is always in the rear--the fear of

being summoned to a strict summary account, liable to the most perilous

consequences. This is not open to denial: the actual basis upon which

reposes the security of us all, the peace of our wives and our

daughters, and our own immunity from the vilest degradations under their

eyes, is the necessity, known to every gentleman, of answering for his

outrages in a way which strips him of all unfair advantages, except one

(which is not often possessed), which places the weak upon a level with

the strong, and the quiet citizen upon a level with the military

adventurer, or the ruffian of the gambling-house. The fact, I say,

cannot be denied; neither can the low price be denied at which this vast

result is obtained. And it is evident that, on the principle of

expediency, adopted as the basis of morality by Paley, the justification

of duelling is complete: for the greatest sum of immediate happiness is

produced at the least possible sacrifice.[15] But there are many men of

high moral principle, and yet not professing to rest upon Christianity,

who reject this prudential basis of ethics as the death of all morality.

And these men hold, that the social recognition of any one out of the

three following dangerous and immoral principles, viz.--_1st_, That a

man may lawfully sport with his own life; _2dly_, That he may lawfully

sport with the life of another; _3dly_, That he may lawfully seek his

redress for a social wrong, by any other channel than the law tribunals

of the land: that the recognition of these, or any of them, by the

jurisprudence of a nation, is a mortal wound to the very key-stone upon

which the whole vast arch of morality reposes. Well, in candour, I must

admit that, by justifying, in courts of judicature, through the verdicts

of juries, that mode of personal redress and self-vindication, to heal

and prevent which was one of the original motives for gathering into

social communities, and setting up an empire of public law as paramount

to all private exercise of power, a fatal wound is given to the sanctity

of moral right, of the public conscience, and of law in its elementary

field. So much I admit; but I say also, that the case arises out of a

great dilemma, with difficulties on both sides; and that, in all

_practical_ applications of philosophy, amongst materials so imperfect

as men, just as in all attempts to realize the rigour of mathematical

laws amongst earthly mechanics, inevitably there will arise such

dilemmas and cases of opprobrium to the reflecting intellect. However,

in conclusion, I shall say four things, which I request my opponent,

whoever he may be, to consider; for they are things which certainly

ought to have weight; and some important errors have arisen by

neglecting them.

[15] Neither would it be open to Paley to plead that the final or

remotest consequences must be taken into the calculation; and that one

of these would be the weakening of all moral sanctions, and thus,

indirectly, an injury to morality, which might more than compensate the

immediate benefit to social peace and security; for this mode of arguing

the case would bring us back to the very principle which his own

implicitly, or by involution, rejects: since it would tell us to obey

the principle itself without reference to the apparent consequences. By

the bye, Paley has an express section of his work against the law of

honour as a valid rule of action; but, as Cicero says of Epicurus, it

matters little what he says; the question for us is _quam sibi

convenienter_, how far consistently with himself. Now, as Sir James

Mackintosh justly remarks, all that Paley says in refutation of the

principle of worldly honour is hollow and unmeaning. In fact, it is

merely one of the commonplaces adopted by satire, and no philosophy at

all. Honour, for instance, allows you, upon paying gambling debts, to

neglect or evade all others: honour, again, allows you to seduce a

married woman: and he would secretly insinuate that honour _enjoins_ all

this; but it is evident that honour simply forbears to forbid all this:

in other words, it is a very limited rule of action, not applying to one

case of conduct in fifty. It might as well be said, that Ecclesiastical

Courts sanction murder, because that crime lies out of their

jurisdiction.

_First_, then, let him remember that it is the principle at stake--viz.,

the recognition by a legal tribunal, as lawful or innocent of any

attempt to violate the laws, or to take the law into our own hands: this

it is and the mortal taint which is thus introduced into the public

morality of a Christian land, thus authentically introduced; thus sealed

and countersigned by judicial authority; the majesty of law actually

interfering to justify, with the solemnities of trial, a flagrant

violation of law; this it is, this only, and not the amount of injury

sustained by society, which gives value to the question. For, as to the

injury, I have already remarked, that a very trivial annual loss--one

life, perhaps, upon ten millions, and that life often as little

practically valuable as any amongst us--that pays our fine or ransom in

that account. And, in reality, there is one popular error made upon this

subject, when the question is raised about the institution of some

_Court of Honour_, or _Court of Appeal in cases of injury to the

feelings_, under the sanction of parliament, which satisfactorily

demonstrates the trivial amount of injury sustained: it is said on such

occasions that _de minimis non curat lex_--that the mischief, in fact,

is too narrow and limited for the regard of the legislature. And we may

be assured that, if the evil were ever to become an extensive one, the

notice of Parliament soon _would_ be attracted to the subject; and hence

we may derive a hint for an amended view of the policy adopted in past

ages. Princes not distinguished for their religious scruples, made it,

in different ages and places, a capital offence to engage in a duel:

whence it is inferred, falsely, that, in former times, a more public

homage was paid to Christian principle. But the fact is, that not the

anti-Christian character of the offence so much as its greater

frequency, and the consequent extension of a civil mischief was the

ruling consideration with the lawgiver. Among other causes for this

greater prevalence of duels, was the composition of armies, more often

brought together upon mercenary principles from a large variety of

different nations, whose peculiar usages, points of traditional honour,

and even the oddness of their several languages to the ear, formed a

perpetual occasion of insult and quarrel. Fluellen's affair with Pistol,

we may be sure, was no rare but a representative case.

_Secondly_, In confirmation of what I have said about duelling, as the

great conductor for carrying off the excess of angry irritation in

society, I will repeat what was said to me by a man of great ability and

distinguished powers, as well as opportunities for observation, in

reference to a provincial English town, and the cabals which prevailed

there. These cabals--some political, arising out of past electioneering

contests; some municipal, arising out of the corporation disputes; some

personal, arising out of family rivalships, or old traditionary

disputes--had led to various feuds that vexed the peace of the town in a

degree very considerably beyond the common experience of towns reaching

the same magnitude. How was this accounted for? The word _tradesman_ is,

more than even the term _middle class_, liable to great ambiguity of

meaning; for it includes a range so large as to take in some who tread

on the heels even of the highest aristocracy, and some at the other end,

who rank not at all higher than day-labourers or handicraftsmen. Now,

those who ranked with gentlemen, took the ordinary course of gentlemen

in righting themselves under personal insults; and the result was, that,

amongst _them_ or _their_ families, no feuds were subsisting of ancient

standing. No ill blood was nursed; no calumnies or conspicuous want of

charity prevailed. Not that they often fought duels: on the contrary, a

duel was a very rare event amongst the indigenous gentry of the place;

but it was sufficient to secure all the effects of duelling, that it was

known, with respect to this class, that, in the last resort, they were

ready to fight. Now, on the other hand, the lowest order of tradesmen

had _their_ method of terminating quarrels--the old English method of

their fathers--viz., by pugilistic contests. And _they_ also cherished

no malice against each other or amongst their families. 'But,' said my

informant, 'some of those who occupied the intermediate stations in this

hierarchy of trade, found themselves most awkwardly situated. So far

they shared in the refinements of modern society, that they disdained

the coarse mode of settling quarrels by their fists. On the other hand,

there was a special and peculiar reason pressing upon this class, which

restrained them from aspiring to the more aristocratic modes of

fighting. They were sensible of a ridicule, which everywhere attaches to

many of the less elevated or liberal modes of exercising trade in going

out to fight with sword and pistol. This ridicule was sharpened and made

more effectual, in _their_ case, from the circumstance of the Royal

Family and the court making this particular town a frequent place of

residence. Besides that apart from the ridicule, many of them depended

for a livelihood upon the patronage of royalty or of the nobility,

attached to their suite; and most of these patrons would have resented

their intrusion upon the privileged ground of the aristocracy in

conducting disputes of honour. What was the consequence? These persons,

having no natural outlet for their wounded sensibilities, being

absolutely debarred from _any_ mode of settling their disputes,

cherished inextinguishable feuds: their quarrels in fact had no natural

terminations; and the result was, a spirit of malice and most

unchristian want of charity, which could not hope for any final repose,

except in death.' Such was the report of my observing friend: the

particular town may be easily guessed at; and I have little doubt that

its condition continues as of old.

_Thirdly_, It is a very common allegation against duelling, that the

ancient Romans and Grecians never practised this mode of settling

disputes; and the inference is, of course, unfavourable, not to

Christianity, but to us as inconsistent disciples of our own religion;

and a second inference is, that the principle of personal honour, well

understood, cannot require this satisfaction for its wounds. For the

present I shall say nothing on the former head, but not for want of

something to say. With respect to the latter, it is a profound mistake,

founded on inacquaintance with the manners and the spirit of manners

prevalent amongst these imperfectly civilised nations. Honour was a

sense not developed in many of its modifications amongst either Greeks

or Romans. Cudgelling was at one time used as the remedy in cases of

outrageous libel and pasquinade. But it is a point very little to the

praise of either people, that no vindictive notice was taken of any

possible personalities, simply because the most hideous license had been

established for centuries in tongue license and unmanly Billingsgate.

This had been promoted by the example hourly ringing in their ears of

vernile scurrility. _Verna_--that is, the slave born in the family--had

each from the other one universal and proverbial character of

foul-mouthed eloquence, which heard from infancy, could not but furnish

a model almost unconsciously to those who had occasion publicly to

practise vituperative rhetoric. What they remembered of this vernile

licentiousness, constituted the staple of their talk in such situations.

And the horrible illustrations left even by the most accomplished and

literary of the Roman orators, of their shameless and womanly fluency in

this dialect of unlicensed abuse, are evidences, not to be resisted, of

such obtuseness, such coarseness of feeling, so utter a defect of all

the gentlemanly sensibilities, that no man, alive to the real state of

things amongst them, would ever think of pleading their example in any

other view than as an object of unmitigated disgust. At all events, the

long-established custom of deluging each other in the Forum, or even in

the Senate, with the foulest abuse, the precedent traditionally

delivered through centuries before the time of Cæsar and Cicero, had so

robbed it of its sting, that, as a subject for patient endurance, or an

occasion for self conquest in mastering the feelings, it had no merit at

all. Anger, prompting an appeal to the cudgel, there might be, but sense

of wounded honour, requiring a reparation by appeal to arms, or a

washing away by blood, no such feeling could have been subdued or

overcome by a Roman, for none such existed. The feelings of wounded

honour on such occasions, it will be allowed, are mere reflections

(through sympathetic agencies) of feelings and opinions already

existing, and generally dispersed through society. Now, in Roman

society, the case was a mere subject for laughter; for there were no

feelings or opinions pointing to honour, personal honour as a principle

of action, nor, consequently, to wounded honour as a subject of

complaint. The Romans were not above duelling, but simply not up to that

level of civilisation.

_Finally_, with respect to the suggestion of a _Court of Honour_, much

might be said that my limits will not allow; but two suggestions I will

make. _First_, Recurring to a thing I have already said, I must repeat

that no justice would be shown unless (in a spirit very different from

that which usually prevails in society) the weight of public indignation

and the displeasure of the court were made to settle conspicuously upon

the AGGRESSOR; not upon the challenger, who is often the party suffering

under insufferable provocation (provocation which even the sternness of

penal law and the holiness of Christian faith allow for), but upon the

author of the original offence. _Secondly_, A much more searching

investigation must be made into the conduct of the SECONDS than is usual

in the unprofessional and careless inquisitions of the public into such

affairs. Often enough, the seconds hold the fate of their principals

entirely in their hands; and instances are not a few, within even my

limited knowledge, of cases where murder has been really committed, not

by the party who fired the fatal bullet, but by him who (having it in

his power to interfere without loss of honour to any party) has cruelly

thought fit--[and, in some instances, apparently for no purpose but

that of decorating himself with the name of an energetic man, and of

producing a public '_sensation_,' as it is called--a sanguinary

affair]--to goad on the tremulous sensibility of a mind distracted

between the sense of honour on the one hand, and the agonising claims of

a family on the other, into fatal extremities that might, by a slight

concession, have been avoided. I could mention several instances; but,

in some of these, I know the circumstances only by report. In one,

however, I had my information from parties who were personally connected

with the unhappy subject of the affair. The case was this:--A man of

distinguished merit, whom I shall not describe more particularly,

because it is no part of my purpose to recall old buried feuds, or to

insinuate any _personal_ blame whatsoever (my business being not with

this or that man, but with a system and its principles); this man, by a

step well-meant but injudicious, and liable to a very obvious

misinterpretation, as though taken in a view of self-interest, had

entangled himself in a quarrel. That quarrel would have been settled

amicably, or, if not amicably, at least without bloodshed, had it not

been for an unlucky accident combined with a very unwise advice. One

morning, after the main dispute had been pretty well adjusted, he was

standing at the fireside after breakfast, talking over the affair so far

as it had already travelled, when it suddenly and most unhappily came

into his head to put this general question--'Pray, does it strike you

that people will be apt, on a review of this whole dispute, to think

that there has been too much talking and too little doing?' His evil

genius so ordered it, that the man to whom he put this question, was one

who, having no military character to rest on, could not (or thought he

could not) recommend those pacific counsels which a truly brave man is

ever ready to suggest--I put the most friendly construction upon his

conduct--and his answer was this--'Why, if you insist upon my giving a

faithful reply, if you _will_ require me to be sincere (though I really

wish you would not), in that case my duty is to tell you, that the world

_has_ been too free in its remarks--that it has, with its usual

injustice, been sneering at literary men and _paper pellets_, as the

ammunition in which they trade; in short, my dear friend, the world has

presumed to say that not you only, but that both parties, have shown a

little of'----'Yes; I know what you are going to say,' interrupted the

other, 'of the _white feather_. Is it not so?'--'Exactly; you have hit

the mark--that is what they say. But how unjust it is; for, says I, but

yesterday, to Mr. L. M., who was going on making himself merry with the

affair in a way that was perfectly scandalous--"Sir," says I,'----but

this _says I_ never reached the ears of the unhappy man: he had heard

enough; and, as a secondary dispute was still going on that had grown

out of the first, he seized the very first opening which offered itself

for provoking the issue of a quarrel. The other party was not backward

or slack in answering the appeal; and thus, in one morning, the prospect

was overcast--peace was no longer possible; and a hostile meeting was

arranged. Even at this meeting much still remained in the power of the

seconds: there was an absolute certainty that all fatal consequences

might have been evaded, with perfect consideration for the honour of

both parties. The principals must unquestionably have felt _that_; but

if the seconds would not move in that direction, of course _their_ lips

were sealed. A more cruel situation could not be imagined: two persons,

who never, perhaps, felt more than that fiction of enmity which

belonged to the situation, that is to say, assumed the enmity which

society presumes rationally incident to a certain position--assumed it

as a point of honour, but did not heartily feel it; and even for the

slight shade of animosity which, for half an hour, they might have

really felt, had thoroughly quelled it before the meeting, these two

persons--under no impulses whatever, good or bad, from within, but

purely in a hateful necessity of servile obedience to a command from

without--prepared to perpetrate what must, in that frame of

dispassionate temper have appeared to each, a purpose of murder, as

regarded his antagonist--a purpose of suicide, as regarded himself.

Simply a word, barely a syllable, was needed from the 'Friends' (such

Friends!) of the parties, to have delivered them, with honour, from this

dreadful necessity: that word was not spoken; and because a breath, a

motion of the lips, was wanting--because, in fact, the seconds were

thoughtless and without feeling, one of the parties has long slept in a

premature grave--his early blossoms scattered to the wind--his golden

promise of fruit blasted; and the other has since lived that kind of

life, that, in my mind, _he_ was happier who died. Something of the same

kind happened in the duel between Lord Camelford and his friend, Mr.

Best; something of the same kind in that between Colonel Montgomery and

Captain Macnamara. In the former case, the quarrel was, at least, for a

noble subject; it concerned a woman. But in the latter, a dog, and a

thoughtless lash applied to his troublesome gambols, was the sole

subject of dispute. The colonel, as is well known, a very elegant and

generous young man, fell; and Captain Macnamara had thenceforwards a

worm at his heart whose gnawings never died. He was a post-captain; and

my brother afterwards sailed with him in quality of midshipman. From

him I have often heard affecting instances of the degree in which the

pangs of remorse had availed, to make one of the bravest men in the

service a mere panic-haunted, and, in a moral sense, almost a paralytic

wreck. He that, whilst his hand was unstained with blood, would have

faced an army of fiends in discharge of his duty, now fancied danger in

every common rocking of a boat: he made himself at times, the subject of

laughter at the messes of the junior and more thoughtless officers: and

his hand, whenever he had occasion to handle a spy-glass, shook, (to use

the common image,) or, rather, shivered, like an aspen tree. Now, if a

regular tribunal, authenticated, by Parliament, as the fountain of law,

and, by the Sovereign, as the fountain of honour, were, under the very

narrowest constitution, to apply itself merely to a review of the whole

conduct pursued by the seconds, even under this restriction such a

tribunal would operate with great advantage. It is needless to direct

any severity to the conduct of the principals, unless when that conduct

has been outrageous or wanton in provocation: supposing anything

tolerably reasonable and natural in the growth of the quarrel, after the

quarrel is once 'constituted,' (to borrow a term of Scotch law,) the

principals, as they are called with relation to the subject of dispute,

are neither principals nor even secondaries for the subsequent

management of the dispute: they are delivered up, bound hand and foot,

into the hands of their technical 'friends'; passive to the law of

social usage as regards the general necessity of pursuing the dispute;

passive to the directions of their seconds as regards the particular

mode of pursuing it. It is, therefore, the seconds who are the proper

objects of notice for courts of honour; and the error has been, in

framing the project of such a court, to imagine the inquiry too much

directed upon the behaviour of those who cease to be free agents from

the very moment that they become liable to any legal investigation

whatever: simply as quarrellers, the parties are no objects of question;

they are not within the field of any police review; and the very first

act which brings them within that field, translates the responsibility

(because the free agency) from themselves to their seconds. The whole

_questio vexata_, therefore, reduces itself to these logical moments,

(to speak the language of mathematics:) the two parties mainly concerned

in the case of duelling, are Society and the Seconds. The first, by

authorising such a mode of redress; the latter, by conducting it. Now, I

presume, it will be thought hopeless to arraign Society at the bar of

any earthly court, or apply any censure or any investigation to its mode

of thinking.[16] To the _principals_, for the reasons given, it would be

unjust to apply them; and the inference is, that the _seconds_ are the

parties to whom their main agency should be directed--as the parties in

whose hands lies the practical control of the whole affair, and the

whole machinery of opportunities, (so easily improved by a wise

humanity)--for sparing bloodshed, for promoting reconciliation, for

making those overtures of accommodation and generous apology which the

brave are so ready to agree to, in atonement for hasty words, or rash

movements of passion, but which it is impossible for _them_ to

originate. In short, for impressing the utmost possible spirit of

humanising charity and forbearance upon a practice which, after all,

must for ever remain somewhat of an opprobrium to a Christian people;

but which, tried by the law of worldly wisdom, is the finest bequest of

chivalry; the most economic safety-valve for man's malice that man's wit

could devise; the most absolute safe-guard of the weak against the

brutal; and, finally, (once more to borrow the words of Burke,) in a

sense the fullest and most practical, 'the cheap defence of nations;'

not indeed against the hostility which besieges from _without_, but

against the far more operative nuisance of bad passions that vex and

molest the social intercourse of men by ineradicable impulses from

within.

[16] If it be asked by what title I represent Society as authorising

(nay, as necessitating) duels, I answer, that I do not allude to any

floating opinions of influential circles in society; for these are in

continual conflict, and it may be difficult even to guess in which

direction the preponderance would lie. I build upon two undeniable

results, to be anticipated in any regular case of duel, and supported by

one uniform course of precedent:--_First_, That, in a civil adjudication

of any such case, assuming only that it has been fairly conducted, and

agreeably to the old received usages of England, no other verdict is

ever given by a jury than one of acquittal. _Secondly_, That, before

military tribunals, the result is still stronger; for the party liable

to a challenge is not merely acquitted, as a matter of course, if he

accepts it with any issue whatsoever, but is positively dishonoured and

degraded (nay, even dismissed the service, virtually under colour of a

request that he will sell out) if he does not. These precedents form the

current law for English society, as existing amongst gentlemen. Duels,

pushed _à l'outrance_, and on the savage principles adopted by a few

gambling ruffians on the Continent, (of which a good description is

given in the novel of _The most unfortunate Man in the World_,) or by

old buccaneering soldiers of Napoleon, at war with all the world, and in

the desperation of cowardice, demanding to fight in a saw-pit or across

a table,--this sort of duels is as little recognised by the indulgence

of English law, as, in the other extreme, the mock duels of German

Burschen are recognised by the gallantry of English society. Duels of

the latter sort would be deemed beneath the dignity of judicial inquiry:

duels of the other sort, beyond its indulgence. But all other duels,

fairly managed in the circumstances, are undeniably privileged amongst

non-military persons, and commanded to those who are military.

I may illustrate the value of one amongst the suggestions I have made,

by looking back and applying it to part of my last anecdote: the case of

that promising person who was cut off so prematurely for himself, and so

ruinously for the happiness of the surviving antagonist. I may mention,

(as a fact known to me on the very best authority,) that the Duke of

Wellington was consulted by a person of distinction, who had been

interested in the original dispute, with a view to his opinion upon the

total merits of the affair, on its validity, as a 'fighting' quarrel,

and on the behaviour of the parties to it. Upon the last question, the

opinion of his Grace was satisfactory. His bias, undoubtedly, if he has

any, is likely to lie towards the wisdom of the peacemaker; and

possibly, like many an old soldier, he may be apt to regard the right of

pursuing quarrels by arms as a privilege not hastily to be extended

beyond the military body. But, on the other question, as to the nature

of the quarrel, the duke denied that it required a duel; or that a duel

was its natural solution. And had the duke been the mediator, it is

highly probable that the unfortunate gentleman would now have been

living. Certainly, the second quarrel involved far less of irritating

materials than the first. It grew out of a hasty word, and nothing more;

such as drops from parliamentary debaters every night of any interesting

discussion--drops hastily, is as hastily recalled, or excused, perhaps,

as a venial sally of passion, either by the good sense or the

magnanimity of the party interested in the wrong. Indeed, by the

unanimous consent of all who took notice of the affair, the seconds, or

one of them at least, in this case, must be regarded as deeply

responsible for the tragical issue; nor did I hear of one person who

held them blameless, except that one who, of all others, might the most

excusably have held them wrong in any result. But now, from such a case

brought under the review of a court, such as I have supposed, and

improved in the way I have suggested, a lesson so memorable might have

been given to the seconds, by a two-years' imprisonment--punishment

light enough for the wreck of happiness which they caused--that soon,

from this single case, raised into a memorable precedent, there would

have radiated an effect upon future duels for half a century to come.

And no man can easily persuade me that he is in earnest about the

extinction of duelling, who does not lend his countenance to a

suggestion which would, at least, mitigate the worst evils of the

practice, and would, by placing the main agents in responsibility to the

court, bring the duel itself immediately under the direct control of

that court; would make a legal tribunal not reviewers subsequently, but,

in a manner, spectators of the scene; and would carry judicial

moderation and skill into the very centre of angry passions; not, as now

they act, inefficiently to review, and, by implication, sometimes to

approve their most angry ebullitions, but practically to control and

repress them.

THE LOVE-CHARM.

A TALE FROM THE GERMAN OF TIECK.[17]

Emilius was sitting in deep thought at his table, awaiting his friend

Roderick. The light was burning before him; the winter evening was cold;

and to-day he wished for the presence of his fellow-traveller, though at

other times wont rather to avoid his society: for on this evening he was

about to disclose a secret to him, and beg for his advice. The timid,

shy Emilius found in every business and accident of life so many

difficulties, such insurmountable hindrances, that it might seem to have

been an ironical whim of his destiny which brought him and Roderick

together, Roderick being in everything the reverse of his friend.

Inconstant, flighty, always determined by the first impression, and

kindling in an instant, he engaged in everything, had a plan for every

occasion; no undertaking was too arduous for him, no obstacle could

deter him. But in the midst of the pursuit he slackened and wearied just

as suddenly as at first he had caught fire and sprung forward. Whatever

then opposed him, was for him not a spur to urge him onward, but only

led him to abandon what he had so hotly rushed into; so that Roderick

was every day thoughtlessly beginning something new, and with no better

cause relinquishing and idly forgetting what he had begun the day

before. Hence, never a day passed but the friends got into a quarrel,

which seemed to threaten the death of their friendship; and yet what to

all appearance thus severed them, was perhaps the very thing that most

closely bound them together; each loved the other heartily; but each

found passing satisfaction in being able to discharge the most justly

deserved reproaches upon his friend.

[17] See the remarks in Prefatory Note, vol. i.

Emilius, a rich young man, of a susceptible and melancholy temperament,

on the death of his parents had become master of his fortune. He had set

out on a journey in order thereby to complete his education, but had now

already spent several months in a large town, for the sake of enjoying

the pleasures of the carnival, about which he never gave himself the

least trouble, and of making certain arrangements of importance about

his fortune with some relations, to whom as yet he had scarcely paid a

visit. On the road he had fallen in with the restless, ever-shifting and

veering Roderick, who was living at variance with his guardians, and

who, to free himself wholly from them and their burdensome admonitions,

eagerly grasped at the opportunity held out to him by his new friend of

becoming his companion on his travels. During their journey they had

often been on the point of separating; but each after every dispute had

only felt the more clearly that he could not live without the other.

Scarce had they left their carriage in any town, when Roderick had

already seen everything remarkable in it, to forget it all again on the

morrow; while Emilius took a week to acquire a thorough knowledge of the

place from his books, lest he should omit seeing anything that was to be

seen; and after all, from indolence and indifference thought there was

hardly anything worth his while to go and look at. Roderick had

immediately made a thousand acquaintances, and visited every public

place of entertainment; often too he brought his new-made friends to the

lonely chamber of Emilius, and would then leave him alone with them, as

soon as they began to tire him. At other times he would confound the

modest Emilius by extravagantly praising his merits and his acquirements

before intelligent and learned men, and by giving them to understand how

much they might learn from his friend about languages, or antiquities,

or the fine arts, although he himself could never find time for

listening to him on such subjects, when the conversation happened to

turn on them. But if Emilius ever chanced to be in a more active mood,

he might almost make sure of his truant friend having caught cold the

night before at a ball or a sledge-party, and being forced to keep his

bed; so that, with the liveliest, most restless, and most communicative

of men for his companion, Emilius lived in the greatest solitude.

To-day he confidently expected him; for Roderick had been forced to give

him a solemn promise of spending the evening with him, in order to learn

what it was that for weeks had been depressing and agitating his

thoughtful friend. Meanwhile Emilius wrote down the following lines:

'Tis sweet when spring its choir assembles,

And every nightingale is steeping

The trees in his melodious weeping,

Till leaf and bloom with rapture trembles.

Fair is the net which moonlight weaves;

Fair are the breezes' gambolings,

As with lime-odours on their wings

They chase each other through the leaves.

Bright is the glory of the rose,

When Love's rich magic decks the earth,

From countless roses Love looks forth,

Those stars wherewith Love's heaven glows.

But sweeter, fairer, brighter far

To me that little lamp's pale gleaming,

When through the narrow casement streaming,

It bids me hail my evening star;

As from their braids her locks she flings,

Then twines them in a flowery band,

While at each motion of her hand

The white robe to her fair form clings;

Or when she breaks her lute's deep slumbers,

And as at morning's touch up-darting,

The notes, beneath her fingers starting,

Dance o'er the strings in playful numbers.

To stop their flight her voice she pours

Full after them; they laugh and fly,

And to my heart for refuge hie;

Her voice pursues them through its doors.

Leave me, ye fierce ones! hence remove!

They bar themselves within, and say,

'Till this be broken, here we stay,

That thou mayst know what 'tis to love.'

Emilius arose fretfully. It grew darker, and Roderick came not, and he was

wishing to tell him of his love for an unknown fair one, who dwelt in the

opposite house, and who kept him all day long at home, and waking through

many a night. At length footsteps sounded up the stairs; the door opened

without anybody knocking at it, and in walked two gay masks with ugly

visages, one a Turk, dressed in red and blue silk, the other a Spaniard in

pale yellow and pink with many waving feathers on his hat. As Emilius was

becoming impatient, Roderick took off his mask, showed his well-known

laughing countenance, and said: 'Heyday, my good friend, what a drowned

puppy of a face! Is this the way to look in carnival time? I and our dear

young officer are come to fetch you away. There is a grand ball to-night at

the masquerade rooms; and as I know you have forsworn ever going out in any

other suit than that which you always wear, of the devil's own colour, come

with us as black as you are, for it is already somewhat late.'

Emilius felt angry, and said: 'You have, it seems, according to custom,

altogether forgotten our agreement. I am extremely sorry,' he continued,

turning to the stranger, 'that I cannot possibly accompany you; my friend

has been over-hasty in promising for me; indeed I cannot go out at all,

having something of importance to talk to him about.'

The stranger, who was well-bred, and saw what Emilius meant, withdrew; but

Roderick, with the utmost indifference, put on his mask again, placed

himself before the glass, and said: 'Verily I am a hideous figure, am I not?

To say the truth, it is a tasteless, worthless, disgusting device.'

'That there can be no question about,' answered Emilius, in high

indignation. 'Making a caricature of yourself, and making a fool of

yourself, are among the pleasures you are always driving after at full

gallop.'

'Because you do not like dancing yourself,' said the other, 'and look upon

dancing as a mischievous invention, not a soul in the world must wear a

merry face. How tiresome it is, when a person is made up of nothing but

whims!'

'Doubtless!' replied his angry friend, 'and you give me ample opportunity

for finding that it is so. I thought after our agreement you would have

given me this evening; but----'

'But it is the carnival, you know,' pursued the other, 'and all my

acquaintances and certain fair ladies are expecting me at the grand ball

to-night. Assure yourself, my good friend, it is mere disease in you that

makes you so unreasonable against all such matters.'

'Which of us has the fairest claim to disease,' said Emilius, 'I will not

examine. At least your inconceivable frivolousness, your hunger and thirst

after stop-gaps for every hour you are awake, your wild-goose chase after

pleasures that leave the heart empty, seem not to me altogether the

healthiest state of the soul. In certain things, at all events, you might

make a little allowance for my weakness, if it must once for all pass for

such: and there is nothing in the world that so jars through and through me

as a ball with its frightful music. Somebody once said, that to a deaf

person who cannot hear the music, a set of dancers must look like so many

patients for a mad-house; but, in my opinion, this dreadful music itself,

this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each

treading on its own heels, in those accursed tunes which ram themselves

into our memories, yea, I might say, mix themselves up with our very blood,

so that one cannot get rid of their taint for many a miserable day

after--this to me is the very trance of madness; and if I could ever bring

myself to think dancing endurable, it must be dancing to the tune of

silence.'

'Well done, signor Paradox-monger!' exclaimed the mask. 'Why, you are so far

gone, that you think the most natural, most innocent, and merriest thing in

the world unnatural, ay, and shocking.'

'I cannot change my feelings,' said his grave friend. 'From my very

childhood these tunes have made me wretched, and have often well-nigh driven

me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and furies in

the world of sound, and come thus and buzz round my head, and grin at me

with horrid laughter.'

'All nervous irritability!' returned the other; 'just like your extravagant

abhorrence of spiders and many other harmless insects.'

'Harmless you call them,' cried Emilius, now quite untuned, 'because you

have no repugnance toward them. To one, however, who feels the same disgust

and loathing, the same nameless horror, that I feel, rise up in his soul and

shoot through his whole being at the sight of them, these miscreate

deformities, such as toads, spiders, or that most loathsome of nature's

excrements, the bat, are not indifferent or insignificant: their very

existence is directly at enmity and wages war with his. In truth, one might

smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and

fearful spectres, and those births of night which we see in sickness, to

take root therein, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions, when the

commonest every-day life brings before our eyes such frightful distorted

master-pieces among the works of horror. Yet, can we really and faithfully

love the beautiful, without being stricken with pain at the sight of such

monstrosities?'

'Wherefore stricken with pain?' asked Roderick. 'Why should the great realm

of the waters and the seas present us with nothing but those terrors which

you have accustomed yourself to find there? Why not rather look on such

creatures as strange, entertaining, and ludicrous mummers, and on the whole

region in the light of a great masked ball-room? But your whims go still

further; for as you love roses with a kind of idolatry, there are many

flowers for which you have a no less vehement hatred: yet what harm has the

dear good tulip ever done you, or all the other dutiful children of summer

that you persecute? So again you have an aversion to many colours, to many

scents, and to many thoughts; and you take no pains to harden yourself

against these weaknesses, but yield to them and sink down into them as into

a luxurious feather-bed; and I often fear I shall lose you altogether some

day, and find nothing but a patchwork of whims and prejudices sitting at

that table instead of my Emilius.'

Emilius was wrath to the bottom of his heart, and answered not a word.

He had long given up all design of making his intended confession; nor

did the thoughtless Roderick show the least wish to hear the secret

which his melancholy friend had announced to him with such an air of

solemnity. He sat carelessly in the arm-chair, playing with his mask,

when he suddenly cried: 'Be so kind, Emilius, as to lend me your large

cloak.'

'What for?' asked the other.

'I hear music in the church on the opposite side of the street,'

answered Roderick, 'and this hour has hitherto escaped me every evening

since we have been here. To-day it comes just as if called for. I can

hide my dress under your cloak, which will also cover my mask and

turban, and when it is over I can go straight to the ball.'

Emilius muttered between his teeth as he looked in the wardrobe for his

cloak, then constraining himself to an ironical smile, gave it to

Roderick, who was already on his legs. 'There is my Turkish dagger which

I bought yesterday,' said the mask, as he wrapped himself up; 'put it by

for me; it is a bad habit carrying about toys of cold steel: one can

never tell what ill use may be made of them, should a quarrel arise, or

any other knot which it is easier to cut than to untie. We meet again

to-morrow; farewell; a pleasant evening to you.' He waited for no reply,

but hastened down-stairs.

When Emilius was alone, he tried to forget his anger, and to fix his

attention on the laughable side of his friend's behaviour. After a while

his eyes rested upon the shining, finely-wrought dagger, and he said:

'What must be the feelings of a man who could thrust this sharp iron

into the breast of an enemy! but oh, what must be those of one who could

hurt a beloved object with it! He locked it up, then gently folded back

the shutters of his window, and looked across the narrow street. But no

light was there; all was dark in the opposite house; the dear form that

dwelt in it, and that used about this time to show herself at her

household occupations, seemed to be absent. 'Perhaps she is at the

ball,' thought Emilius, little as it suited her retired way of life.

Suddenly, however, a light entered; the little girl whom his beloved

unknown had about her, and with whom, during the day and evening, she

busied herself in various ways, carried a candle through the room, and

closed the window-shutters. An opening remained light, large enough for

over-looking a part of the little chamber from the spot where Emilius

stood; and there the happy youth would often bide till after midnight,

fixed as though he had been charmed there. He was full of gladness when

he saw her teaching the child to read, or instructing her in sewing and

knitting. Upon inquiry he had learnt that the little girl was a poor

orphan whom his fair maiden had charitably taken into the house to

educate her. Emilius's friends could not conceive why he lived in this

narrow street, in this comfortless lodging, why he was so little to be

seen in society, or how he employed himself. Without employment, in

solitude he was happy: only he felt angry with himself and his own

timidity and shyness, which kept him from venturing to seek a nearer

acquaintance with this fair being, notwithstanding the friendliness with

which on many occasions she had greeted and thanked him. He knew not

that she would often bend over him eyes no less love-sick than his own;

nor boded what wishes were forming in her heart, of what an effort, of

what a sacrifice she felt herself capable, so she might but attain to

the possession of his love.

After walking a few times up and down the room, when the light had

departed with the child, he suddenly resolved upon going to the ball,

though it was so against his inclination and his nature; for it struck

him that his Unknown might have made an exception to her quiet mode of

life, in order for once to enjoy the world, and its gaieties. The

streets were brilliantly lighted up, the snow crackled under his feet,

carriages rolled by, and masks in every variety of dress whistled and

chirped as they passed him. From many a house there sounded the

dancing-music he so abhorred, and he could not bring himself to go the

nearest way towards the ball-room, whither people from every direction

were streaming and thronging. He walked round the old church, gazed at

its lofty tower rising solemnly into the dark sky, and felt gladdened by

the stillness and loneliness of the remote square. Within the recess of

a large door-way, the varied sculptures of which he had always

contemplated with pleasure, recollecting, while so engaged, the olden

times and the arts which adorned them, he now again paused, to give

himself up for a few moments to his thoughts. He had not stood long,

before a figure drew his attention, which kept restlessly walking to and

fro, and seemed to be waiting for somebody. By the light of a lamp that

was burning before an image of the Virgin, he clearly distinguished its

features as well as its strange garb. It was an old woman of the

uttermost hideousness, which struck the eye the more from being brought

out by its extravagant contrast with a scarlet bodice embroidered with

gold; the gown she wore was dark, and the cap on her head shone likewise

with gold. Emilius fancied at first it must be some tasteless mask that

had strayed there by mistake; but he was soon convinced by the clear

light that the old, brown, wrinkled face was one of Nature's ploughing,

and no mimic exaggeration. Many minutes had not passed when there

appeared two men, wrapped up in cloaks, who seemed to approach the spot

with cautions footsteps, often looking about them, as if to observe

whether anybody was following. The old woman walked up to them. 'Have

you got the candles?' asked she hastily, and with a gruff voice. 'Here

they are,' said one of the men; 'you know the price; let the matter be

settled forthwith.' The old woman seemed to be giving him money, which

he counted over beneath his cloak. 'I rely upon you,' she again began,

'that they are made exactly according to the prescription, at the right

time and place, so that the work cannot fail.' 'Feel safe as to that,'

returned the man, and walked rapidly away. The other, who remained

behind, was a youth: he took the old woman by the hand, and said: 'Can

it then be, Alexia, that such rites and forms of words, as those old

stories, in which I never could put faith, tell us, can fetter the free

will of man, and make love and hatred grow in the heart?' 'So it is,'

answered the scarlet woman; 'but one and one must make two, and many a

one must be added thereto, before such things come to pass. It is not

these candles alone, moulded beneath the midnight darkness of the new

moon, and drenched with human blood, it is not the muttering magical

words and invocations alone, that can give you the mastery over the soul

of another; much more than this belongs to such works; but it is all

known to the initiated.' 'I rely on you then,' said the stranger.

'To-morrow after midnight I am at your service,' returned the old woman.

'You shall not be the first person that ever was dissatisfied with the

tidings I brought him. To-night, as you have heard, I have some one else

in hand, one whose senses and understanding our art shall twist about

whichever way we choose, as easily as I twist this hair out of my head.'

These last words she uttered with a half grin: they now separated, and

withdrew in different directions.

Emilius came from the dark niche shuddering, and raised his looks upon

the image of the Virgin with the Child. 'Before thine eyes, thou mild

and blessed one,' said he, half aloud, 'are these miscreants daring to

hold their market, and trafficking in their hellish drugs. But as thou

embracest thy Child with thy love, even so doth the unseen Love hold us

all in its protecting arms, and we feel their touch, and our poor hearts

beat in joy and in trembling toward a greater heart that will never

forsake us.'

Clouds were wandering along over the pinnacles of the tower and the

steep roof of the church; the everlasting stars looked down from amongst

them, sparkling with mild serenity; and Emilius turned his thoughts

resolutely away from these nightly horrors, and thought upon the beauty

of his Unknown. He again entered the living streets, and bent his steps

toward the brightly illuminated ball-room, whence voices, and the

rattling of carriages, and now and then, between the pauses, the

clamorous music came sounding to his ears.

In the hall he was instantly lost amid the streaming throng; dancers

sprang round him, masks shot by him to and fro, kettle-drums and

trumpets deafened his ears, and it was unto him as though human life

were nothing but a dream. He walked along the lines; his eye alone was

watchful, seeking for those beloved eyes and that fair head with its

brown locks, for the sight of which he yearned to-day even more

intensely than at other times; and yet he inwardly reproached the adored

being for enduring to plunge into and lose itself in such a stormy sea

of confusion and folly. 'No,' said he to himself, 'no heart that loves

can lay itself open to this waste hubbub of noise, in which every

longing and every tear of love is scoffed and mocked at by the pealing

laughter of wild trumpets. The whispering of trees, the murmuring of

fountains, harp-tones, and gentle song gushing forth from an overflowing

bosom, are the sounds in which love abides. But this is the very

thundering and shouting of hell in the trance of its despair.'

He found not what he was seeking; for the belief that her beloved face

might perchance be lying hid behind some odious mask was what he could

not possibly bring himself to. Thrice already had he ranged up and down

the hall, and had vainly passed in array every sitting and unmasked

female, when the Spaniard joined him and said: 'I am glad that after all

you are come. You seem to be looking for your friend.'

Emilius had quite forgotten him: he said, however, in some confusion:

'Indeed I wonder at not having met him here; his mask is easily known.'

'Can you guess what the strange fellow is about?' answered the young

officer. 'He did not dance, or even remain half an hour in the

ball-room; for he soon met with his friend Anderson, who is just come

from the country. Their conversation fell upon literature. As Anderson

had not yet seen the new poem, Roderick would not rest till they had

opened one of the back rooms for him; and there he now is, sitting with

his companion beside a solitary taper, and declaiming the whole poem to

him, beginning with the invocation to the Muse.'

'It is just like him,' said Emilius; 'he is always the child of the

moment. I have done all in my power, not even shunning some amicable

quarrels, to break him of this habit of always living extempore, and

playing away his whole being in impromptus, card after card, as it

happens to turn up, without once looking through his hand. But these

follies have taken such deep root in his heart, he would sooner part

with his best friend than with them. That very same poem, of which he is

so fond that he always carries a copy of it in his pocket, he was

desirous of reading to me, and I had even urgently entreated him to do

so; but we were scarcely over the first description of the moon, when,

just as I was resigning myself to an enjoyment of its beauties, he

suddenly jumped up, ran off, came back with the cook's apron round his

waist, tore down the bell-rope in ringing to have the fire lighted, and

insisted on dressing me some beef-steaks, for which I had not the least

appetite, and of which he fancies himself the best cook in Europe,

though, if he is lucky, he spoils them only nine times out of ten.'

The Spaniard laughed, and asked: 'Has he never been in love?'

'In his way,' replied Emilius very gravely; 'as if he were making game

both of love and of himself, with a dozen women at a time, and, if you

would believe his words, raving after every one of them; but ere a week

passes over his head they are all sponged out of it together, and not

even a blot of them remains.'

They parted in the crowd, and Emilius walked toward the remote

apartment, whence already from afar he heard his friend's loud

recitative. 'Ah, so you are here too,' cried Roderick, as he entered;

'that is just what it should be. I have got to the very passage at which

we broke down the other day; seat yourself, and you may listen to the

rest.'

'I am not in a humour for it now,' said Emilius; 'besides, the room and

the hour do not seem to me altogether fitted for such an employment.'

'And why not?' answered Roderick. 'Time and place are made for us, and

not we for time and place. Is not good poetry as good at one place as at

another? Or would you prefer dancing? there is scarcity of men; and with

the help of nothing more than a few hours' jumping and a pair of tired

legs, you may lay strong siege to the hearts of as many grateful

beauties as you please.'

'Good-bye!' cried the other, already in the door-way; 'I am going home.'

Roderick called after him: 'Only one word! I set off with this gentleman

at daybreak to-morrow, to spend a few days in the country, but will

look in upon you to take leave before we start. Should you be asleep, as

is most likely, do not take the trouble of waking; for in a couple of

days I shall be with you again.--The strangest being on earth!' he

continued, turning to his new friend, 'so moping and fretful and gloomy,

that he turns all his pleasures sour; or rather there is no such thing

as pleasure for him. Instead of walking about with his fellow-creatures

in broad daylight and enjoying himself, he gets down to the bottom of

the well of his thoughts, for the sake of now and then having a glimpse

of a star. Everything must be in the superlative for him; everything

must be pure and noble and celestial; his heart must be always heaving

and throbbing, even when he is standing before a puppet-show. He never

laughs or cries, but can only smile and weep; and there is mighty little

difference between his weeping and his smiling. When anything, be it

what you will, falls short of his anticipations and preconceptions,

which are always flying up out of reach and sight, he puts on a tragical

face, and complains that it is a base and soulless world. At this

moment, I doubt not, he is exacting, that under the masks of a Pantaloon

and a Pulcinello there should be a heart glowing with unearthly desires

and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should out moralise Hamlet

upon the nothingness of sublunary things; and should it not be so, the

dew will rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole

scene with desponding contempt.'

'He must be melancholic then?' asked his hearer.

'Not that exactly,' answered Roderick. 'He has only been spoilt by his

over-fond parents, and by himself. He has accustomed himself to let his

heart ebb and flow as regularly as the sea, and if this motion ever

chances to intermit, he cries out _miracle!_ and would offer a prize to

the genius that can satisfactorily explain so marvellous a phenomenon.

He is the best fellow under the sun; but all my painstaking to break him

of this perverseness is utterly vain and thrown away; and if I would not

earn sorry thanks for my good intentions, I must even let him follow his

own course.'

'He seems to need a physician,' remarked Anderson.

'It is one of his whims,' said Roderick, 'to entertain a supreme

contempt for the whole medical art. He will have it that every disease

is something different and distinct in every patient, that it can be

brought under no class, and that it is absurd to think of healing it,

either by attention to ancient practice or by what is called theory.

Indeed he would much rather apply to an old woman, and make use of

sympathetic cures. On the same principle, he despises all foresight, on

whatever occasion, as well as everything like regularity, moderation,

and common sense. The last above all he holds in especial abhorrence, as

the antipodes and arch-enemy of all enthusiasm. From his very childhood

he framed for himself an ideal of a noble character; and his highest aim

is to render himself what he considers such, that is, a being who shows

his superiority to all things earthy by his contempt for gold. Merely in

order that he may not be suspected of being parsimonious, or giving

unwillingly, or ever talking about money, he tosses it about him right

and left by handfuls; with all his large income is for ever poor and

distressed, and becomes the fool of everybody not endowed with precisely

the same kind of magnanimity, which for himself he is determined that he

will have. To be his friend is the undertaking of all undertakings; for

he is so irritable, one need only cough or eat with one's knife, or even

pick one's teeth, to offend him mortally.'

'Was he never in love?' asked his country friend.

'Whom should he love? whom could he love?' answered Roderick. 'He scorns

all the daughters of earth; and were he ever to suspect that his beloved

had not an angelical contempt for dress, or liked dancing as well as

star-gazing, it would break his heart; still more appalling would it be,

if she were ever so unfortunate as to sneeze.'

Meanwhile Emilius was again standing amid the throng; but suddenly there

came over him that uneasiness, that shivering, which had already so

often seized his heart when among a crowd in a state of similar

excitement; it chased him out of the ball-room and house, down along the

deserted streets; nor, till he reached his lonely chamber, did he

recover himself and the quiet possession of his senses. The night-light

was already kindled; he sent his servant to bed; everything in the

opposite house was silent and dark; and he sat down to pour forth in

verse the feelings which had been aroused by the ball.

Within the heart 'tis still;

Sleep each wild thought encages;

Now stirs a wicked will,

Would see how madness rages.

And cries, Wild Spirit, awake!

Loud cymbals catch the cry

And back its echoes shake;

And shouting peals of laughter,

The trumpet rushes after,

And cries, Wild Spirit, awake!

Amidst them flute tones fly,

Like arrows keen and numberless;

And with bloodhound yell

Pipes the onset swell;

And violins and violoncellos,

Creeking, clattering,

Shrieking and shattering;

And horns whence thunder bellows;

To leave the victim slumberless,

And drag forth prisoned madness,

And cruelly murder all quiet and innocent gladness.

What will be the end of this commotion?

Where the shore to this turmoiling ocean?

What seeks the tossing throng,

As it wheels and whirls along?

On! on! the lustres

Like hell-stars bicker:

Let us twine in closer clusters.

On! on! ever thicker and quicker!

How the silly things throb, throb amain!

Hence, all quiet!

Hither, riot!

Peal more proudly,

Squeal more loudly,

Ye cymbals, ye trumpets! Be-dull all pain,

Till it laugh again.

Thou becomest to me, beauty's daughter;

Smiles ripple over thy lips,

And o'er thine eyes blue water;

O let me breathe on thee,

Ere parted hence we flee.

Ere aught that light eclipse.

I know that beauty's flowers soon wither;

Those lips within whose rosy cells

Thy spirit warbles its sweet spells,

Death's clammy kiss ere long will press together.

I know, that face so fair and full

Is but a masquerading skull;

But hail to thee, skull so fair and so fresh!

Why should I weep and whine and wail,

That what blooms now must soon grow pale,

That worms must feed on that sweet flesh?

Let me laugh but to-day and to-morrow,

And I care not for sorrow,

While thus on the waves of the dance by each other we sail!

Now thou art mine

And I am thine:

And what though pain and sorrow wait

To seize thee at the gate,

And sob and tear and groan and sigh

Stand ranged in state

On thee to fly;

Blithely let us look and cheerily

On death, that grins so drearily.

What would grief with us, or anguish?

They are foes that we know how to vanquish.

I press thine answering fingers,

Thy look upon me lingers,

Or the fringe of thy garment will waft me a kiss:

Thou rollest on in light;

I fall back into night;

Even despair is bliss.

From this delight,

From this wild laughter's surge,

Perchance there may emerge

Foul jealousy and scorn and spite.

But this our glory! and pride!

When thee I despise,

I turn but mine eyes,

And the fair one beside thee will welcome my gaze;

And she is my bride;

Oh, happy, happy days!

Or shall it be her neighbour,

Whose eyes like a sabre

Flash and pierce,

Their glance is so fierce?

Thus capering and prancing,

All together go dancing

Adown life's giddy cave;

Nor living nor loving,

But dizzily roving

Through dreams to a grave.

There below 'tis yet worse;

Its flowers and its clay

Roof a gloomier day,

Hide a still deeper curse.

Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream!

Ye horns, shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream!

And jump, caper, leap, prance, dance yourselves out of breath!

For your life is all art;

Love has given you no heart:

Therefore shout till ye plunge into bottomless death.

He had ended and was standing at the window. Then came she into the

opposite chamber, lovely, as he had never yet seen her; her brown hair

floated freely and played in wanton ringlets about the whitest of necks;

she was but lightly clad, and it seemed as though she was about to

finish some household task at this late hour of the night before going

to bed; for she placed two lights in two corners of the room, set to

rights the green baize on the table, and again retired. Emilius was

still sunk in his sweet dreams, and gazing on the image which his

beloved had left on his mind, when to his horror the fearful, the

scarlet old woman walked through the chamber; the gold on her head and

breast glared ghastlily as it threw back the light. She had vanished

again. Was he to believe his eyes? Was it not some blinding deception of

the night, some spectre that his own feverish imagination had conjured

up before him? But no! she returned still more hideous than before, with

a long gray-and-black mane flying wildly and ruggedly about her breast

and back. The fair maiden followed her, pale, frozen up; her lovely

bosom was without a covering; but the whole form was like a marble

statue. Betwixt them they led the little sweet child, weeping and

clinging entreatingly to the fair maiden, who looked not down upon it.

The child clasped and lifted up its little beseeching hands, and stroked

the pale neck and cheeks of the marble beauty. But she held it fast by

the hair, and in the other hand a silver basin. Then the old woman gave

a growl, and pulled out a long knife, and drew it across the white neck

of the child. Here something wound forth from behind them, which they

seemed not to perceive; or it must have produced in them the same deep

horror as in Emilius. The ghastly neck of a serpent curled forth, scale

after scale, lengthening and ever lengthening out of the darkness, and

stooped down between them over the child, whose lifeless limbs hung from

the old woman's arms; its black tongue licked up the spirting red blood,

and a green sparkling eye shot over into Emilius's eye, and brain, and

heart, so that he fell at the same instant to the ground.

He was senseless when found by Roderick some hours after.

* * * * *

A party of friends was sitting, on the brightest summer morning, in a

green arbour, assembled round an excellent breakfast. Laughter and jests

passed round, and many a time did the glasses kiss with a merry health

to the youthful couple, and a wish that they might be the happiest of

the happy. The bride and bridegroom were not present; the fair one being

still busied about her dress, while the young husband was sauntering

alone in a distant avenue, musing upon his happiness.

'What a pity,' said Anderson, 'that we are to have no music. All our

ladies are beclouded at the thought, and never in their whole lives

longed for a dance so much as to-day, when to have one is quite out of

the question. It is far too painful to his feelings.'

'I can tell you a secret though,' said a young officer; 'which is, that

we are to have a dance after all, and a rare madcap and riotous one it

will he. Everything is already arranged; the musicians are come

secretly, and quartered out of sight. Roderick has managed it all; for

he says, one ought not to let him have his own way, or to humour his

strange prejudices over-much, especially on such a day as this. Besides,

he is already grown far more like a human being, and is much more

sociable than he used to be; so that I think even he will not dislike

this alteration. Indeed, the whole wedding has been brought about all of

a sudden, in a way that nobody could have expected.'

'His whole life,' said Anderson, 'is no less singular than his

character. You must all remember how, being engaged on his travels, he

arrived last autumn in our city, fixed himself there for the winter,

lived like a melancholy man, scarcely ever leaving his room, and never

gave himself the least trouble about our theatre or any other amusement.

He almost quarrelled with Roderick, his most intimate friend, for trying

to divert him, and not pampering him in all his moping humours. In fact,

this exaggerated irritability and moodiness must have been a disease

that was gathering in his body; for, as you know, he was seized four

months since with a most violent nervous fever, so that we were all

forced to give him up for lost. After his fancies had raved themselves

out, on returning to his senses, he had almost entirely lost his

memory; his childhood, indeed, and his early youth were still present to

his mind, but he could not recollect anything that had occurred during

his travels, or immediately before his illness. He was forced to begin

anew his acquaintance with all his friends, even with Roderick; and only

by little and little has it grown lighter with him; but slowly has the

past with all that had befallen him come again, though still in dim

colours, over his memory. He had been removed into his uncle's house,

that the better care might be taken of him, and he was like a child,

letting them do with him whatever they chose. The first time he went out

to enjoy the warmth of spring in the park, he saw a girl sitting

thoughtfully by the road-side. She looked up; her eye met his; and, as

it were seized with an unaccountable yearning, he bade the carriage

stop, got out, sat down by her, took hold of her hands, and poured

himself forth in a full stream of tears. His friends were again alarmed

for his understanding; but he grew tranquil, lively and conversable, got

introduced to the girl's parents, and at the very first besought her

hand; which, as her parents did not refuse their consent, she granted

him. Thenceforward he was happy, and a new life sprang up within him;

every day he became healthier and more cheerful. A week ago he visited

me at this country-seat of mine, and was above measure delighted with

it; indeed so much so that he would not rest till he had made me sell it

to him. I might easily have turned his passionate wish to my own good

account, and to his injury; for, whenever he sets his heart on a thing,

he will have it, and that forthwith. He immediately made his

arrangements, and had furniture brought hither that he may spend the

summer months here; and in this way it has come to pass that we are all

now assembled together to celebrate our friend's marriage at this

villa, which a few days since belonged to me.'

The house was large, and situated in a very lovely country. One side

looked down upon a river, and beyond it upon pleasant hills, clad and

girt round with shrubs and trees of various kinds; immediately before it

lay a beautiful flower-garden. Here the orange and lemon trees were

ranged in a large open hall, from which small doors led to the

store-rooms and cellars, and pantries. On the other side spread the

green plain of a meadow, which was immediately bordered by a large park;

here the two long wings of the house formed a spacious court; and three

broad, open galleries, supported by rows of pillars standing above each

other, connected all the apartments in the building, which gave it on

this side an interesting and singular character; for figures were

continually moving along these arcades in the discharge of their various

household tasks; new forms kept stepping forth between the pillars and

out of every room, which reappeared soon after above or below, to be

lost behind some other doors; the company too would often assemble there

for tea or for play; and thus, when seen from below, the whole had the

look of a theatre, before which everybody would gladly pause awhile,

expecting, as his fancies wandered, that something strange or pleasing

would soon be taking place above.

The party of young people were just rising, when the full-dressed bride

came through the garden and walked up to them. She was clad in

violet-coloured velvet; a sparkling necklace lay cradled on her white

neck; the costly lace just allowed her swelling bosom to glimmer

through; her brown hair was tinged yet more beautifully by its wreath of

myrtles and white roses. She addressed each in turn with a kind

greeting, and the young men were astonished at her surpassing beauty.

She had been gathering flowers in the garden, and was now returning into

the house, to see after the preparations for the dinner. The tables had

been placed in the lower open gallery, and shone dazzlingly with their

white coverings and their load of sparkling crystal; rich clusters of

many-coloured flowers rose from the graceful necks of alabaster vases;

green garlands, starred with white blossoms, twined round the columns;

and it was a lovely sight to behold the bride gliding along with gentle

motion between the tables and the pillars, amid the light of the

flowers, overlooking the whole with a searching glance, then vanishing,

and re-appearing a moment afterwards higher up to pass into her chamber.

'She is the loveliest and most enchanting creature I ever saw,' cried

Anderson; 'our friend is indeed the happiest of men.'

'Even her paleness,' said the officer, taking up the word, 'heightens

her beauty. Her brown eyes sparkle only more intensely above those white

cheeks, and beneath those dark locks; and the singular, almost burning,

redness of her lips gives a truly magical appearance to her face.'

'The air of silent melancholy that surrounds her,' said Anderson, 'sheds

a lofty majesty over her whole form.'

The bridegroom joined them, and inquired after Roderick. They had all

missed him some time since, and could not conceive where he could be

tarrying; and they all set out in search of him. 'He is below in the

hall,' said at length a young man whom they happened to ask, 'in the

midst of the coachmen, footmen, and grooms, showing off tricks at cards,

which they cannot grow tired of staring at.' They went in, and

interrupted the noisy admiration of the servants, without, however,

disturbing Roderick, who quietly pursued his conjuring exhibition. When

he had finished, he walked with the others into the garden, and said, 'I

do it only to strengthen the fellows in their faith: for these puzzles

give a hard blow to their groomships' free-thinking inclinations, and

help to make them true believers.'

'I see,' said the bridegroom, 'my all-sufficing friend, among his other

talents, does not think that of a mountebank beneath his cultivation.'

'We live in a strange time,' replied the other. 'Who knows whether

mountebanks may not come to rule the roost in their turn. One ought to

despise nothing nowadays: the veriest straw of talent may be that which

is to break the camel's back.'

When the two friends found themselves alone, Emilius again turned down

the dark avenue, and said, 'Why am I in such a gloomy mood on this the

happiest day of my life? But I assure you, Roderick, little as you will

believe it, I am not made for this moving about among such a mob of

human beings; for this keeping my attention on the _qui vive_ for every

letter of the alphabet, so that neither A nor Z may go without all

fitting respect; for this making a bow to her tenth, and shaking hands

with my twentieth; for this rendering of formal homage to her parents;

for this handing a flower from my nosegay of compliments to every lady

that crosses my eye; for this waiting to receive the tide of newcomers

as wave after wave rushes over me, and then turning to give orders that

their servants and horses may have each a full trough and pail set

before them.'

'That is a watch that goes of its own accord,' answered Roderick. 'Only

look at your house, it was just built for such an occasion; and your

head-butler, with his right hand taking up at the same time that his

left is setting down, and one leg running north while the other seems to

be making for south, was begotten and born for no other end than to put

confusion in order. He would even set my brains to rights if he could

get at them; were the whole city here he would find room for all; and he

will make your hospitality the proverb of fifty miles round. Leave all

such things to him and to your lovely bride; and where will you find so

sweet a lightener of this world's cares?'

'This morning before sunrise,' said Emilius, 'I was walking through the

wood; my thoughts were solemnly tuned, and I felt to the bottom of my

soul that my life was now receiving its determinate character, that it

was become a serious thing, and that this passion had created for me a

home and a calling. I passed along by that arbour there, and heard

sounds: it was my beloved in close conversation. "Has it not turned out

now as I told you?" said a strange voice; "just as I knew it must turn

out. You have got your wish, so cheer up and be merry." I would not go

near them; afterwards I walked toward the arbour, but they had both

already left it. Since then I keep thinking and thinking, what can these

words mean?'

Roderick answered: 'Perhaps she may have been in love with you for some

time without your knowing it; you are only so much the happier.'

A late nightingale here upraised her song, and seemed to be wishing the

lover health and bliss. Emilius became more thoughtful. 'Come down with

me, to cheer up your spirits,' said Roderick, 'down to the village,

where you will find another couple; for you must not fancy that yours is

the only wedding on which to-day's sun is to shine. A young clown,

finding his time wear heavily in the house with an ugly old maid, for

want of something better to do, did what makes the booby now think

himself bound in honour to transform her into his wife. By this time

they must both be already dressed, so let us not miss the sight; for

doubtless, it will be a most interesting wedding.'

The melancholy man let himself be dragged along by his lively chattering

friend, and they soon came to the cottage. The procession was just

sallying forth, to go to the church. The young countryman was in his

usual linen frock; all his finery consisted in a pair of leather

breeches, which he had polished till they shone like a field of

dandelions; he was of simple mien, and appeared somewhat confused. The

bride was sun-burnt, with but a few farewell leaves of youth still

hanging about her; she was coarsely and poorly, but cleanly dressed;

some red and blue silk ribbons, already a good deal faded; but what

chiefly disfigured her was, that her hair, stiffened with lard, flour,

and pins, had been swept back from her forehead, and piled up at the top

of her head in a mound, on the summit of which lay the bridal chaplet.

She smiled and seemed glad at heart, but was shamefaced and downcast.

Next came the aged parents; the father too was only a servant about the

farm, and the hovel, the furniture, and the clothing, all bore witness

that their poverty was extreme. A dirty, squinting musician followed the

train, who kept grinning and screaming, and scratching his fiddle, which

was patched together of wood and pasteboard, and instead of strings had

three bits of pack-thread. The procession halted when his honour, their

new master, came up to them. Some mischief-loving servants, young lads

and girls, tittered and laughed, and jeered the bridal couple,

especially the ladies' maids, who thought themselves far handsomer, and

saw themselves infinitely better clad, and wondered how people could be

so vulgar. A shuddering came over Emilius; he looked round for Roderick,

but the latter had already run away from him again. An impertinent

coxcomb, with a head pilloried in his high starched neck-cloth, a

servant to one of the visitors, eager to show his wit, pressed up to

Emilius, giggling, and cried: 'Now, your honour, what says your honour

to this grand couple? They can neither of them guess where they are to

find bread for to-morrow, and yet they mean to give a ball this

afternoon, and that famous performer there is already engaged.' 'No

bread!' said Emilius; 'can such things be?' 'Their wretchedness,'

continued the chatterbox, 'is known to the whole neighbourhood; but the

fellow says he bears the creature the same good-will, although she is

such a sorry bit of clay. Ay, verily, as the song says, love can make

black white! The couple of baggages have not even a bed, and must pass

their wedding night on the straw. They have just been round to every

house begging a pint of small beer, with which they mean to get drunk; a

royal treat for a wedding day, your honour!' Everybody round about

laughed loudly, and the unhappy, despised pair cast down their eyes.

Emilius indignantly pushed the chatterer away. 'Here, take this!' he

cried, and threw a hundred ducats, which he had received that morning,

into the hands of the amazed bridegroom. The betrothed couple and their

parents wept aloud, threw themselves clumsily on their knees, and kissed

his hands and the skirts of his coat. He tried to make his escape. 'Let

that keep hunger out of your doors as long as it lasts!' he exclaimed,

quite stunned by his feelings. 'Oh!' they all screamed, 'oh, your

honour! we shall be rich and happy till the day of our deaths, and

longer too, if we live longer.'

He knew not how he got away from them; but he found himself alone, and

hastened with unsteady steps into the wood. Here he sought out the

thickest, loneliest spot, and threw himself down on a grassy knoll, no

longer keeping back the bursting stream of his tears. 'I am sick of

life,' he sobbed; 'I cannot be glad and happy, I will not. Make haste

and receive me, thou dear kind earth, and hide me in thy cool,

refreshing arms from the wild beasts that tread over thee and call

themselves men. Oh, God in heaven! how have I deserved that I should

rest upon down and wear silk, that the grape should pour forth her most

precious blood for me, and that all should throng around me and offer

me their homage and love? This poor wretch is better and worthier than

I, and misery is his nurse, and mockery and venomous scorn are the only

sounds that hail his wedding. Every delicacy that is placed before me,

every draught out of my costly goblets, my lying on soft beds, my

wearing gold and rich garments, will be unto me like so many sins, now

that I have beheld how the world hunts down many thousand thousand

wretches, who are hungering after the dry bread that I throw away, and

who never know what a good meal is. Oh, now I can fully understand your

feelings, ye holy pious, whom the world despises and scorns and scoffs

at, who scatter abroad your all, even unto the raiment of your poverty,

and did gird sack-cloth about your loins, and did resolve as beggars to

endure the gibes and the kicks wherewith brutal insolence and swilling

voluptuousness drive away misery from their tables, that by so doing ye

might thoroughly purge yourselves from the foul sin of wealth.'

The world, with all its forms of being, hung in a mist before his eyes;

he determined to look upon the destitute as his brethren, and to depart

far away from the communion of the happy. They had already been waiting

for him a long time in the hall, to perform the ceremony; the bride had

become uneasy; her parents had gone in search of him through the garden

and park; at length he returned, lighter for having wept away his cares,

and the solemn knot was tied.

The company then walked from the lower hall toward the open gallery, to

seat themselves at table. The bride and bridegroom led the way, and the

rest followed in their train. Roderick offered his arm to a young girl

who was gay and talkative. 'Why does a bride always cry, and look so sad

and serious during the ceremony,' said she, as they mounted the steps.

'Because it is the first moment in which she feels intensely all the

weight and meaning and mystery of life,' answered Roderick.

'But our bride,' continued the girl, 'far surpasses in gravity all I

have ever yet seen. Indeed, she almost always looks melancholy, and one

can never catch her in a downright hearty laugh.'

'This does more honour to her heart,' answered Roderick, himself,

contrary to custom, feeling somewhat seriously disposed. 'You know not,

perhaps, that the bride a few years ago took a lovely little orphan girl

into the house, to educate her. All her time was devoted to the child,

and the love of this gentle being was her sweetest reward. The girl was

become seven years old, when she was lost during a walk through the

town, and in spite of all the means that have been employed, nobody

could ever find out what became of her. Our noble-minded hostess has

taken this misfortune so much to heart that she has been preyed upon

ever since by a silent melancholy, nor can anything win her away from

her longing after her little play-fellow.'

'A most interesting adventure, indeed,' said the lady. 'One might see a

whole romance in three volumes grow out of this seed. It will be a

strange sight, and it will not be for nothing, when this lost star

reappears. What a pretty poem it would make! Don't you think so, sir?'

The party arranged themselves at table. The bride and bridegroom sat in

the centre, and looked out upon the gay landscape. They talked and drank

healths, and the most cheerful humour reigned; the bride's parents were

quite happy; the bridegroom alone was reserved and thoughtful, eat but

little, and took no part in the conversation. He started when some

musical sounds rolled down from above, but grew calm again on finding it

was nothing but the soft notes of a bugle, which wandered along with a

pleasant murmur over the shrubs and through the park, till they died

away on the distant hills. Roderick had stationed the musicians in the

gallery overhead, and Emilius was satisfied with this arrangement.

Toward the end of the dinner he called his butler, and turning to his

bride, said, 'My love, let poverty also have a share of our

superfluities.' He then ordered him to send several bottles of wine,

some pastry, and other dishes in abundant portions, to the poor couple,

so that with them also this day might be a day of rejoicing, unto which

in after-times they might look back with delight. 'See, my friend,'

cried Roderick, 'how beautifully all things in this world hang together.

My idle trick of busying myself about other people's concerns, and my

chattering, though you are for ever finding fault with them, have after

all been the occasion of this good deed.' Several persons began making

pretty speeches to their host on his compassion and kind heart, and the

young lady next to Roderick lisped about romantic feelings and

sentimental magnanimity. 'O, hold your tongues,' cried Emilius

indignantly. 'This is no good action; it is no action at all; it is

nothing. When swallows and linnets feed themselves with the crumbs that

are thrown away from the waste of this meal, and carry them to their

young ones in their nests, shall not I remember a poor brother who needs

my help? If I durst follow my heart, ye would laugh and jeer at me, just

as ye have laughed and jeered at many others who have gone forth into

the wilderness, that they might hear no more of this world and its

generosity.'

Everybody was silent, and Roderick, perceiving the most vehement

displeasure in his friend's glowing eyes, feared he might forget himself

still more in his present ungracious mood, and tried to give the

conversation a sudden turn upon other subjects. But Emilius was becoming

restless and absent; his eyes were continually wandering toward the

upper gallery, where the servants who lived in the top story had many

things to do.

'Who is that ugly old woman,' he at length asked, 'that is so busy

there, going backwards and forwards, in her gray cloak?' 'She is one of

my attendants,' said his bride; 'she is to overlook and manage my

waiting-maids and the other girls.' 'How can you bear to have anything

so hideous always at your elbow?' replied Emilius. 'Let her alone,'

answered the young lady; 'God meant the ugly to live as well as the

handsome: and she is such a good, honest creature, she may be of great

use to us.'

On rising from table, everybody pressed round the new husband, again

wished him joy, and urgently begged that he would consent to their

having a ball. The bride too said, breathing a gentle kiss on his

forehead: 'You will not deny your wife's first request, my beloved; we

have all been looking forward with delight to this moment. It is so

long since I danced last, and you have never yet seen me dance. Have you

no curiosity how I shall acquit myself in this new character? My mother

tells me I look better than at any other time.'

'I never saw you thus cheerful,' said Emilius; 'I will be no disturber

of your joys: do just what you please; only let me bargain for nobody

asking me to make myself ridiculous by any clumsy capers.'

'Oh, if you are a bad dancer,' she answered, laughing, 'you may feel

quite safe; everybody will readily consent to your sitting still.' The

bride then retired to put on her ball-dress.

'She does not know,' said Emilius to Roderick, with whom he withdrew,

'that I can pass from the next room into hers through a secret door; I

will surprise her while she is dressing.'

When Emilius had left them, and many of the ladies were also gone to

make such changes in their attire as were necessary for the ball,

Roderick took the young men aside, and led the way to his own room. 'It

is wearing toward evening,' said he, 'and will soon be dark; so make

haste, every one of you, and mask yourselves, that we may render this

night glorious in the annals of merriment and madness. Give your fancies

free range in choosing your characters: the wilder and uglier the

better. Try every combination of shaggy mane, and squinting eye, and

mouth like a gaping volcano; build mountains upon your shoulders, or

fatten yourselves into Falstaffs; and as a whet to your inventions, I

hereby promise a kiss from the bride to the figure that would be the

likeliest to make her miscarry. A wedding is such a strange event in

one's life; the bride and bridegroom are so suddenly plunged, as it were

by magic, head over heels into a new, unaccustomed element, that it is

impossible to infuse too much of madness and folly into this feast, in

order to keep pace with the whirlpool that is bearing a brace of human

beings from the state in which they were two, into the state in which

they become one, and to let all things round about them be fit

accompaniments for the dizzy dream on the wings of which they are

floating toward a new life. So let us rave away the night, making all

sail before the breeze; and a fig for such as look twice on the grave

sour faces that would have you behave rationally.'

'Don't be afraid,' said the young officer; 'we have brought from town

with us a large chest full of masks and mad carnival dresses, such as

would make even you stare.'

'But see here,' returned Roderick, 'what a gem I have got from my

tailor, who was just going to cut up this peerless robe into strips. He

bought it of an old crone, who must doubtless have worn it on gala days

when she went to Lucifer's drawing-room on the Blocksberg. Look at this

scarlet bodice, with its gold tassels and fringe, at this cap besmeared

with the last fee the hag got from Beelzebub or his imps: it will give

me a right worshipful air. To match such jewels, there is this green

velvet petticoat with its saffron-coloured trimming, and this mask

would melt even Medusa to a grin. Thus accoutred I mean to lead the

chorus of Graces, myself their mother-queen, toward the bed-chamber.

Make all the haste you can; and we will then go in procession to fetch

the bride.'

The bugles were still playing; the company were walking about the

garden, or sitting before the house. The sun had gone down behind thick,

murky clouds, and the country was lying in the gray dusk, when a parting

gleam suddenly burst forth athwart the cloudy veil, and flooded every

spot around, but especially the building, and its galleries, and

pillars, and wreaths of flowers, as it were with red blood. At this

moment the parents of the bride and the other spectators beheld a train

of the wildest appearances move toward the upper corridor. Roderick led

the way as the scarlet old woman, and was followed by hump-backs,

mountain-paunches, massy wigs, clowns, punches, skeleton-like

pantaloons, female figures embanked by enormous hoops and over-canopied

with three feet of horsehair, powder and pomatum, and by every

disgusting shape that can be conceived, as though a nightmare were

unrolling her stores. They jumped, and twirled, and tottered, and

stumbled, and straddled, and strutted, and swaggered along the gallery,

and then vanished behind one of the doors. But few of the beholders had

been able to laugh: so utterly were they amazed by the strange sight.

Suddenly a piercing shriek burst from one of the rooms, and there rushed

forth into the blood-red glow of the sunset the pale bride, in a short

white frock, round which wreaths of flowers were waving, with her lovely

bosom all uncovered, and her rich locks streaming through the air. As

though mad, with rolling eyes and distorted face, she darted along the

gallery, and, blinded by terror, could find neither door nor staircase;

and immediately after rushed Emilius in chase of her, with the sparkling

Turkish dagger in his high, upraised hand. Now she was at the end of the

passage; she could go no further; he reached her. His masked friends and

the gray old woman were running after him. But he had already furiously

pierced her bosom, and cut through her white neck; her blood spouted

forth into the radiance of the setting sun. The old woman had clasped

round him to tear him back; he struggled with her, and hurled himself

together with her over the railing, and they both fell, almost lifeless,

down at the feet of the relations who had been staring in dumb horror at

the bloody scene. Above and below, or hastening down the stairs and

along the galleries, were seen the hideous masks, standing or running

about in various clusters, like fiends of hell.

Roderick took his dying friend in his arms. He had found him in his

wife's room playing with the dagger. She was almost dressed when he

entered. At the sight of the hated red bodice his memory had rekindled;

the horrible vision of the night had risen upon his mind; and gnashing

his teeth he had sprung after his trembling flying bride, to avenge that

murder and all those devilish doings. The old woman, ere she expired,

confessed the crime that had been wrought; and the gladness and mirth of

the whole house were suddenly changed into sorrow and lamentation and

dismay.

LUDWIG TIECK.

The author of the foregoing tale, Ludwig Tieck, has lately been

introduced to the English reader by an admirable translation of his two

exquisite little novels, _The Pictures_ and _The Betrothing_. He is one

among the great German writers who made their appearance during the last

ten years of the eighteenth century; a period--whether from any

extraordinary productiveness in the power that regulates the seed-time

and the harvests of the human race, or from the mighty excitements and

stimulants wherewith the world was then teeming--among the richest in

the blossoming of genius. For not to mention the great military talents

first developed in those days, among the holders of which were he who

conquered all the continent of Europe, and he before whom that conqueror

fell; turning away from the many rank but luxuriant weeds that sprang up

in France, after all its plains had been manured with blood; and fixing

the eye solely upon literary excellence, we find in our own country,

that the chief part of those men by whom we may hope that the memory of

our days will be transmitted to posterity as a thing precious and to be

held in honour, that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey, and Lamb,

and Landor, and Scott, put forth during those ten years the first-fruits

of their minds; while in Germany, the same period was rendered

illustrious by Fichte and John Paul Richter at its commencement, and

subsequently by Schelling, and Hegel, and Steffens, Schleiermacher, and

the Schlegels, and Novalis, and Tieck. Of this noble brotherhood, who

all, I believe, studied at the same university, that of Jena, and who

were all bound together by friendship, by affinity of genius, and by

unity of aim, the two latter, Novalis and Tieck, were the poets: for

though there are several things of great poetical beauty in the works of

the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis.

The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its

spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood,

to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been

brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the

character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and

Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring

burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in

the whole history of literature, any poet who can count up so many and

so great exploits achieved on his first descent into the arena: in

number and variety even Goethe must yield the precedence, though his

youthful triumphs were _Goetz of Berlichingen_ and _Werther_. There was

in Tieck's early works the promise, and far more than the promise, of

the greatest dramatic poet whom Europe had seen since the days of

Calderon; there was a rich, elastic, buoyant, comic spirit, not like the

analytical reflection, keen biting wit of Molière and Congreve, and

other comic writers of the satirical school, but like the living

merriment, the uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, the humour arising

from _good_ humour, not, as it often does, from _ill_ humour, the

incarnation, so to say, of the principle of mirth, in Shakespeare, and

Cervantes, and Aristophanes; and as a wreath of flowers to crown the

whole, there was the heavenly purity and starlike loveliness of his

_Genoveva_. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace with the fertility of

the six years from 1798 to 1804, he must have been beyond all rivalry

the second of German poets; and as Eschylus in the _Frogs_ shares his

supremacy with Sophocles, so would Goethe have invited Tieck to sit

beside him on his throne. Unfortunately for those who would have feasted

upon his fruits, the poet, during the last twenty years, has been so

weighed down by almost unintermitting ill health, that he has published

but little. There was a short interval indeed that seemed to bid fairer,

about the year 1812, when he began to collect his tales and lesser

dramas, on a plan something like that of the _Decameron_, in the

_Phantasm_, but it has not yet been carried beyond the second reign, out

of seven through which it was designed to extend. Of that collection the

chief part had been known to the world ten or twelve years before: some

things, however, appeared then for the first time, and among them, I

believe, was the tale of _The Love-Charm_. Latterly, Tieck's genius has

taken a new spring, in a somewhat different direction from that of his

youth. He has written half a dozen novels, in the manner of the couple

recently translated; nor are the others of less excellence than those

two; a beautiful tale of magic has also been just published; and the

speedy appearance of several other things that have employed him during

the long period of seeming inactivity, is promised; wherein he has been

engaged more or less for above a quarter of a century, and to gather

materials for which he some years since visited England. Of this work

the highest expectations may justly be formed: not many people, even, in

this country, possess a more extensive and accurate acquaintance with

our ancient drama than Tieck; no one has entered more fully into the

spirit of its great poets, than Tieck has shown himself to have done in

the prefaces to his _Old English Theatre_ and his _Shakespeare's

Vorschule_; few have ever bestowed such attention on the history of the

stage in all countries, or have so studied the principles of dramatic

composition and the nature of dramatic effect; hardly any one, I may say

no one, ever learnt so much from Shakespeare: no one, therefore, can

have more to teach us about him; and to judge from the remarks on some

of the plays which have already been printed in the _Abendzeitung_, no

one was ever so able to trace out the most secret workings of the great

master's mind, or to retain his full, calm self-possession when

following him on his highest flights; no one ever united in such

perfection the great critic with the great poet. One may look forward,

therefore, with confidence to the greatest work in æsthetical criticism

that even Germany will ever have produced.

Of the foregoing tale itself little need be said. If the translator has

failed so grievously that an English reader cannot see its merits, he

would hardly help himself out of the scrape by talking about the effect

he ought to have produced. And grievously he must have failed, if any

reader with a feeling for poetry does not perceive and enjoy the beauty

of the descriptions, especially of the two eventful scenes, the power

and passion of the wild dithyramb, the admirable delineation of the

characters in proportion to their relative importance, and the poetical

harmony and perfect _keeping_ of the whole. Nothing can be more delicate

than the way of softening the horror that might be felt for the bride:

she has not even a name, that there may be no distinct object for our

disgust to fasten on; she is only spoken of under titles of a

pleasurable meaning; her beauty, like Helen's on the walls of Troy, is

manifested by its effect: the young men are astonished at it; her air of

deep melancholy impresses even the gayest and most thoughtless, and is

thus more powerful than if pages had been employed in giving utterance

to her remorse; besides which, had the latter course been adopted, the

main object would have been the wicked heart, not the wicked deed, the

sin, not the crime; and sin is always loathsome, whereas a crime may

often be looked upon with pity. The poet has therefore wisely kept all

his power of characteristic delineation for the two chief persons in the

tale; and rarely have any characters been brought out so distinctly

within a work of such dimensions; the contrast between them runs through

every feature, yet each is the necessary complement to the other; the

abuse which they vent in the ball-room each against his dearest friend,

and in the ears of almost a stranger, is in the true style of our frail

affections, veering before the slightest puff of self-will; nor is there

a circumstance mentioned about either, which tends not to complete the

picture, and is not all but indispensable. On some occasions a whole

life and character are revealed by a single touch; as for instance when

Emilius exclaims, _No bread! Can such things be?_ No other man could

have been so ignorant of what goes on in the world, as to marvel at such

a common occurrence; yet Emilius, it is quite certain, would be

surprised, when awaked from his dreams, to behold the face of real life;

so that this exclamation is, as it were, a great toe from which to

construct one who is anything rather than a Hercules. Indeed the whole

scene of the peasant's marriage, which at first sight may appear like a

somewhat idle digression, brought in for no better reason than

amusement, is absolutely necessary to the tale as a work of art: it not

only shows the character of Emilius in a fresh and important point of

view, not only supplies him with fuel, so that he is ready to burn at

the approach of the first spark, as for the former scene he had been

prepared by the arousal of his feelings in the ball-room; which,

besides, cast a mysterious haze over the scene, and leave it half

doubtful how much of the crime was actually perpetrated: the peasant's

wedding is necessary as a contrast, as a complement, and as a relief to

the other marriage; nor can that calm and masterly irony, which is among

the first elements in the mind of a great poet, be more clearly

manifested, than it is here, where the pomp and rejoicing of the great

and wealthy are suddenly turned 'into sorrow and lamentation and

dismay;' while the poor and the abashed and the despised are enabled to

pass their days in what to them is comfort, and to obtain the enjoyment

of a day 'unto which in after-times they may look back with delight.'

Everything about the one marriage seems happy; everything about the

other seems wretched; but neither is what it seems: they who seem happy

are a prey to extravagant and sinful desires; those who seem wretched

have moderate wishes, and, though they have offended, have not done it

wantonly or in malice; they are making what seems to them the only

atonement in their power, and 'the fellow bears the creature the same

good-will, though she is such a sorry bit of clay'; therefore the end of

each marriage is according, not unto the outward show and promise, but

unto that which lies within the heart. It is thus that poetical justice

endeavours, so far as it may, to anticipate the sentence of Omniscient

justice.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.--THE HOUSE OF WEEPING.

_From Jean Paul Frederick Richter._

Since the day when the town of Haslau first became the seat of a Court,

no man could remember that any one event in its annals (always excepting

the birth of the hereditary prince) had been looked for with so anxious

a curiosity as the opening of the last will and testament left by Van

der Kabel. This Van der Kabel may be styled the Haslau Croesus; and

his whole life might be termed, according to the pleasure of the wits,

one long festival of god-sends, or a daily washing of golden sands

nightly impregnated by golden showers of Danæ. Seven distant surviving

relatives of seven distant relatives deceased of the said Van der Kabel,

entertained some little hopes of a place amongst his legatees, grounded

upon an assurance which he had made, 'that upon his oath he would not

fail to _remember them_ in his will.' These hopes, however, were but

faint and weakly; for they could not repose any extraordinary confidence

in his good faith--not only because in all cases he conducted his

affairs in a disinterested spirit, and with a perverse obstinacy of

moral principle, whereas his seven relatives were mere novices, and

young beginners in the trade of morality,--but also because, in all

these moral extravagances of his (so distressing to the feelings of the

sincere rascal), he thought proper to be very satirical, and had his

heart so full of odd caprices, tricks, and snares for unsuspicious

scoundrels, that (as they all said) no man who was but raw in the art of

virtue could deal with him, or place any reliance upon his intentions.

Indeed the covert laughter which played about his temples, and the

falsetto tones of his sneering voice, somewhat weakened the advantageous

impression which was made by the noble composition of his face, and by a

pair of large hands, from which were daily dropping favours little and

great--benefit nights, Christmas-boxes and New-Year's gifts; for this

reason it was that, by the whole flock of birds who sought shelter in

his boughs, and who fed and built their nests on him, as on any wild

service-tree, he was, notwithstanding, reputed a secret magazine of

springes; and they were scarce able to find eyes for the visible berries

which fed them, in their scrutiny after the supposed gossamer snares.

In the interval between two apoplectic fits he had drawn up his will,

and had deposited it with the magistrate. When he was just at the point

of death he transferred to the seven presumptive heirs the certificate

of this deposit; and even then said, in his old tone--how far it was

from his expectation, that by any such anticipation of his approaching

decease, he could at all depress the spirits of men so steady and

sedate, whom, for his own part, he would much rather regard in the light

of laughing than of weeping heirs; to which remark one only of the whole

number, namely, Mr. Harprecht, inspector of police, replied as a cool

ironist to a bitter one--'that the total amount of concern and of

_interest_, which might severally belong to them in such a loss, was

not (they were sincerely sorry it was not) in their power to determine.'

At length the time is come when the seven heirs have made their

appearance at the town-hall, with their certificate--of deposit;

_videlicet_, the ecclesiastical councillor Glantz; Harprecht, the

inspector of police; Neupeter, the court-agent; the court-fiscal, Knoll;

Pasvogel, the bookseller; the reader of the morning lecture, Flacks; and

Monsieur Flitte, from Alsace. Solemnly, and in due form, they demanded

of the magistrate the schedule of effects consigned to him by the late

Kabel, and the opening of his will. The principal executor of this will

was Mr Mayor himself; the sub-executors were the rest of the

town-council. Thereupon, without delay, the schedule and the will were

fetched from the register office of the council to the council chamber:

both were exhibited in rotation to the members of the council and the

heirs, in order that they might see the privy seal of the town impressed

upon them: the registry of consignment, indorsed upon the schedule, was

read aloud to the seven heirs by the town-clerk: and by that registry it

was notified to them, that the deceased had actually consigned the

schedule to the magistrate, and entrusted it to the corporation-chest;

and that on the day of consignment he was still of sound mind: finally,

the seven seals, which he had himself affixed to the instrument, were

found unbroken. These preliminaries gone through, it was now (but not

until a brief registry of all these forms had been drawn up by the

town-clerk) lawful, in God's name, that the will should be opened and

read aloud by Mr Mayor, word for word as follows:--

'I, Van der Kabel, on this 7th day of May, 179-, being in my house at

Haslau, situate in Dog-street, deliver and make known this for my last

will; and without many millions of words, notwithstanding I have been

both a German notary and a Dutch schoolmaster. Howsoever I may disgrace

my old professions by this parsimony of words, I believe myself to be so

far at home in the art and calling of a notary, that I am competent to

act for myself as a testator in due form, and as a regular devisor of

property.

'It is a custom of testators to premise the moving causes of their

wills. These, in my case, as in most others, are regard for my happy

departure, and for the disposal of the succession to my property--which,

by the way, is the object of a tender passion in various quarters. To

say anything about my funeral, and all that, would be absurd and stupid.

This, and what shape my remains shall take, let the eternal sun settle

above, not in any gloomy winter, but in some of his most verdant

springs.

'As to those charitable foundations and memorial institutions of

benevolence, about which notaries are so much occupied, in my case I

appoint as follows: to three thousand of my poor townsmen of every

class, I assign just the same number of florins, which sum I will that,

on the anniversary of my death, they shall spend in feasting upon the

town common, where they are previously to pitch their camp, unless the

military camp of his Serene Highness shall be already pitched there, in

preparation for the reviews; and when the gala is ended, I would have

them cut up the tents into clothes. Item, to all the school-masters in

our locality I bequeath one golden augustus. Item, to the Jews of this

place I bequeath my pew in the high church.--As I would wish that my

will should be divided into clauses, this is considered to be the first.

* * * * *

CLAUSE II.

'Amongst the important offices of a will, it is universally agreed to be

one, that from amongst the presumptive and presumptuous expectants, it

should name those who are, and those who are not, to succeed to the

inheritance; that it should create heirs and destroy them. In conformity to

this notion, I give and bequeath to Mr Glantz, the councillor for

ecclesiastical affairs, as also to Mr Knoll, the exchequer officer; likewise

to Mr Peter Neupeter, the court-agent; item to Mr Harprecht, director of

police; furthermore to Mr Flacks, the morning lecturer; in like manner to

the court-bookseller, Mr Pasvogel; and finally to Monsieur Flitte,--nothing;

not so much because they have no just claims upon me--standing, as they do,

in the remotest possible degree of consanguinity; nor again, because they

are for the most part themselves rich enough to leave handsome inheritances;

as because I am assured, indeed I have it from their own lips, that they

entertain a far stronger regard for my insignificant person than for my

splendid property; my body, therefore, or as large a portion of it as they

can get, I bequeath to them.'

At this point seven faces, like those of the Seven Sleepers, gradually

elongated into preternatural extent. The ecclesiastical councillor, a young

man, but already famous throughout Germany for his sermons printed or

preached, was especially aggrieved by such offensive personality; Monsieur

Flitte rapped out a curse that rattled even in the ears of magistracy; the

chin of Flacks the morning lecturer gravitated downwards into the dimensions

of a patriarchal beard; and the town-council could distinguish an assortment

of audible reproaches to the memory of Mr Kabel, such as prig, rascal,

profane wretch, &c. But the Mayor motioned with his hand, and immediately

the fiscal and the bookseller recomposed their features and set their faces

like so many traps with springs, and triggers, at full cock, that they might

catch every syllable; and then with a gravity that cost him some efforts:--

* * * * *

CLAUSE III.

'Excepting always, and be it excepted, my present house in Dog-street: which

house by virtue of this third clause is to descend and to pass in full

property just as it now stands, to that one of my seven relatives

above-mentioned, who shall, within the space of one half-hour (to be

computed from the reciting of this clause), shed, to the memory of me his

departed kinsman, sooner than the other six competitors, one, or, if

possible, a couple of tears, in the presence of a respectable magistrate,

who is to make a protocol thereof. Should, however, _all remain dry_, in

that case, the house must lapse to the heir-general--whom I shall proceed to

name.'

Here Mr Mayor closed the will: doubtless, he observed, the condition annexed

to the bequest was an unusual one, but yet, in no respect contrary to law:

to him that wept the first the court was bound to adjudge the house: and

then placing his watch on the session table, the pointers of which indicated

that it was now just half-past eleven, he calmly sat down--that he might

duly witness in his official character of executor, assisted by the whole

court of aldermen, who should be the first to produce the requisite tear or

tears on behalf of the testator.

That since the terraqueous globe has moved or existed, there can ever

have met a more lugubrious congress, or one more out of temper and

enraged than this of Seven United Provinces, as it were, all dry and all

confederated for the purpose of weeping,--I suppose no impartial judge

will believe. At first some invaluable minutes were lost in pure

confusion of mind, in astonishment, in peals of laughter: the congress

found itself too suddenly translated into the condition of the dog to

which, in the very moment of his keenest assault upon some object of his

appetite, the fiend cried out--Halt! Whereupon, standing up as he was,

on his hind legs, his teeth grinning, and snarling with the fury of

desire, he halted and remained petrified:--from the graspings of hope,

however distant, to the necessity of weeping for a wager, the congress

found the transition too abrupt and harsh.

One thing was evident to all--that for a shower that was to come down at

such a full gallop, for a baptism of the eyes to be performed at such a

hunting pace, it was vain to think of any pure water of grief: no

hydraulics could effect this: yet in twenty-six minutes (four

unfortunately were already gone), in one way or other, perhaps, some

business might be done.

'Was there ever such a cursed act,' said the merchant Neupeter, 'such a

price of buffoonery enjoined by any man of sense and discretion? For my

part, I can't understand what the d----l it means.' However, he

understood this much, that a house was by possibility floating in his

purse upon a tear: and _that_ was enough to cause a violent irritation

in his lachrymal glands.

Knoll, the fiscal, was screwing up, twisting, and distorting his

features pretty much in the style of a poor artisan on Saturday night,

whom some fellow-workman is bar_ber_ously razoring and scraping by the

light of a cobbler's candle: furious was his wrath at this abuse and

profanation of the title _Last Will and Testament_: and at one time,

poor soul! he was near enough to tears--of vexation.

The wily bookseller, Pasvogel, without loss of time, sate down quietly

to business: he ran through a cursory retrospect of all the works any

ways moving or affecting that he had himself either published or sold on

commission;--took a flying survey of the pathetic in general: and in

this way of going to work, he had fair expectations that in the end he

should brew something or other: as yet, however, he looked very much

like a dog who is slowly licking off an emetic which the Parisian

surgeon Demet has administered by smearing it on his nose:

time--gentlemen, time was required for the operation.

Monsieur Flitte, from Alsace, fairly danced up and down the sessions

chamber; with bursts of laughter he surveyed the rueful faces around

him: he confessed that he was not the richest among them, but for the

whole city of Strasburg, and Alsace to boot, he was not the man that

could or would weep on such a merry occasion. He went on with his

unseasonable laughter and indecent mirth, until Harprecht, the police

inspector, looked at him very significantly, and said--that perhaps

Monsieur flattered himself that he might by means of laughter squeeze or

express the tears required from the well-known meibomian glands, the

caruncula, &c., and might thus piratically provide himself with

surreptitious rain;[18] but in that case, he must remind him that he

would no more win the day with any such secretions than he could carry

to account a course of sneezes or wilfully blowing his nose; a channel

into which it was well known that very many tears, far more than were

now wanted, flowed out of the eyes through the nasal duct; more indeed

by a good deal than were ever known to flow downwards to the bottom of

most pews at a funeral sermon. Monsieur Flitte of Alsace, however,

protested that he was laughing out of pure fun, for his own amusement;

and, upon his honour, with no _ulterior views_.

[18] In the original, the word is Fenster schweiss, window-sweat, _i.

e._ (as the translator understands the passage) Monsieur Flitte was

suspected of a design to swindle the company by exhibiting his two

windows streaming with spurious moisture, such as hoar frost produces on

the windows when melted by the heat of the room, rather than with the

genuine and unadulterated rain which Mr Kabel demanded.

The inspector on his side, being pretty well acquainted with the

hopeless condition of his own dephlegmatised heart, endeavoured to force

into his eyes something that might meet the occasion by staring with

them wide open and in a state of rigid expansion.

The morning-lecturer, Flacks, looked like a Jew beggar mounted on a

stallion which is running away with him: meantime, what by domestic

tribulations, what by those he witnessed at his own lecture, his heart

was furnished with such a promising bank of heavy-laden clouds, that he

could easily have delivered upon the spot the main quantity of water

required had it not been for the house which floated on the top of the

storm; and which, just as all was ready, came driving in with the tide,

too gay and gladsome a spectacle not to banish his gloom, and thus

fairly dammed up the waters.

The ecclesiastical councillor--who had become acquainted with his own

nature by long experience in preaching funeral sermons, and sermons on

the New Year, and knew full well that he was himself always the first

person and frequently the last, to be affected by the pathos of his own

eloquence--now rose with dignified solemnity, on seeing himself and the

others hanging so long by the dry rope, and addressed the chamber:--No

man, he said, who had read his printed works, could fail to know that he

carried a heart about him as well as other people; and a heart, he would

add, that had occasion to repress such holy testimonies of its

tenderness as tears, lest he should thereby draw too heavily on the

sympathies and the purses of his fellow-men, rather than elaborately to

provoke them by stimulants for any secondary views, or to serve an

indirect purpose of his own: 'This heart,' said he, 'has already shed

tears (but they were already shed secretly), for Kabel was my friend;'

and, so saying, he paused for a moment and looked about him.

With pleasure he observed that all were sitting as dry as corks: indeed,

at this particular moment, when he himself, by interrupting their

several water-works, had made them furiously angry, it might as well

have been expected that crocodiles, fallow-deer, elephants, witches, or

ravens should weep for Van der Kabel, as his presumptive heirs. Among

them all, Flacks was the only one who continued to make way: he kept

steadily before his mind the following little extempore assortment of

objects:--Van der Kabel's good and beneficent acts; the old petticoats

so worn and tattered, and the gray hair of his female congregation at

morning service; Lazarus with his dogs; his own long coffin; innumerable

decapitations; the Sorrows of Werther; a miniature field of battle; and

finally, himself and his own melancholy condition at this moment, itself

enough to melt any heart, condemned as he was in the bloom of youth by

the second clause of Van der Kabel's will to tribulation, and tears, and

struggles:--Well done, Flacks! Three strokes more with the pump-handle,

and the water is pumped up and the house along with it.

Meantime Glantz, the ecclesiastical councillor, proceeded in his

pathetic harangue--'Oh, Kabel, my Kabel!' he ejaculated, and almost wept

with joy at the near approach of his tears, 'the time shall come that by

the side of thy loving breast, covered with earth, mine also shall lie

mouldering and in cor----' _ruption_ he would have said; but Flacks,

starting up in trouble, and with eyes overflowing, threw a hasty glance

around him, and said, 'With submission, gentlemen, to the best of my

belief I am weeping.' Then sitting down, with great satisfaction he

allowed the tears to stream down his face; that done, he soon recovered

his cheerfulness and his _aridity_. Glantz the councillor thus saw the

prize fished away before his eyes--those very eyes which he had already

brought into an _Accessit_,[19] or inchoate state of humidity; this

vexed him: and his mortification was the greater on thinking of his own

pathetic exertions, and the abortive appetite for the prize which he had

thus uttered in words as ineffectual as his own sermons; and at this

moment he was ready to weep for spite--and 'to weep the more because he

wept in vain.' As to Flacks, a protocol was immediately drawn up of his

watery compliance with the will of Van der Kabel: and the messuage in

Dog-street was knocked down to him for ever. The Mayor adjudged it to

the poor devil with all his heart: indeed, this was the first occasion

ever known in Haslau, on which the tears of a schoolmaster and a curate

had converted themselves--not into mere amber that incloses only a

worthless insect, like the tears of Heliodes, but like those of the

goddess Freia, into heavy gold. Glantz congratulated Flacks very

warmly; and observed with a smiling air, that possibly he had himself

lent him a helping hand by his pathetic address. As to the others, the

separation between them and Flacks was too palpable, in the mortifying

distinction of _wet_ and _dry_, to allow of any cordiality between them;

and they stood aloof therefore: but they stayed to hear the rest of the

will, which they now awaited in a state of anxious agitation.

[19] To the English reader it may be necessary to explain, that in the

continental universities, etc., when a succession of prizes is offered,

graduated according to the degrees of merit, the illiptical formula of

'_Accessit_' denotes the second prize; and hence, where only a single

prize is offered, the second degree of merit may properly be expressed

by the term here used.

THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.

'_To be weak_,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, '_is

to be miserable_.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter

for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and

by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable in

all, that capital weakness of man which regards the _tenure_ of his

enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of

flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!--which sometimes

settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be an

end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious

heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the

everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by

his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the

hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye

which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy

_present_--the hollowness--the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which

all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but

unwearying theme, this impassioned commonplace of humanity, is the

subject in every age of variation without end, from the Poet, the

Rhetorician, the Fabulist, the Moralist, the Divine, and the

Philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans,

labour to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint,

which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and

groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or

something beyond all beginning--then next a dim lotos of human

consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a

shore--then a few sunny smiles and many tears--a little love and

infinite strife--whisperings from paradise and fierce mockeries from the

anarchy of chaos--dust and ashes--and once more darkness circling round,

as if from the beginning, and in this way rounding or making an island

of our fantastic existence,--_that_ is human life; _that_ the inevitable

amount of man's laughter and his tears--of what he suffers and he

does--of his motions this way and that way--to the right or to the

left--backwards or forwards--of all his seeming realities and all his

absolute negations--his shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows--of

whatsoever he thinks, finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves,

hates, or in dread hope anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it

will be, for ever and ever.

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast

halls of man's frailty there are separate and more gloomy chambers of a

frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that

threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence,

and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his power have

fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty, by

comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have

a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a single

week--a day--an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of a

memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying

showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician scatters

sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the self-same

tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at noon beheld

all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour looks out upon a

total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive

memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked, or a wreck to

be obliterated.

These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily

occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the

infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be

reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a whole

nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their

heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course turned

out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and nightly

conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some nations,

wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the

pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation.

Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent

scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the

sickness of the brain--lunacy--which, visiting nearly one thousand in

every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each

particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad

a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder

even than _that_,--the sight of a family-ruin wrought by crime is even

more appalling. Forgery, breaches of trust, embezzlement, of private or

public funds--(a crime sadly on the increase since the example of

Fauntleroy, and the suggestion of its great feasibility first made by

him)--these enormities, followed too often, and countersigned for their

final result to the future happiness of families, by the appalling

catastrophe of suicide, must naturally, in every wealthy nation, or

wherever property and the modes of property are much developed,

constitute the vast majority of all that come under the review of public

justice. Any of these is sufficient to make shipwreck of all peace and

comfort for a family; and often, indeed, it happens that the desolation

is accomplished within the course of one revolving sun; often the whole

dire catastrophe, together with its total consequences, is both

accomplished and made known to those whom it chiefly concerns within one

and the same hour. The mighty Juggernaut of social life, moving onwards

with its everlasting thunders, pauses not for a moment to spare--to

pity--to look aside, but rushes forward for ever, impassive as the

marble in the quarry--caring not for whom it destroys, for the how many,

or for the results, direct and indirect, whether many or few. The

increasing grandeur and magnitude of the social system, the more it

multiplies and extends its victims, the more it conceals them; and for

the very same reason: just as in the Roman amphitheatres, when they grew

to the magnitude of mighty cities (in some instances accommodating

400,000 spectators, in many a fifth part of that amount), births and

deaths became ordinary events, which, in a small modern theatre, are

rare and memorable; and exactly as these prodigious accidents

multiplied, _pari passu_, they were disregarded and easily concealed:

for curiosity was no longer excited; the sensation attached to them was

little or none.

From these terrific tragedies, which, like monsoons or tornadoes,

accomplish the work of years in an hour, not merely an impressive lesson

is derived, sometimes, perhaps, a warning, but also (and this is of

universal application) some consolation. Whatever may have been the

misfortunes or the sorrows of a man's life, he is still privileged to

regard himself and his friends as amongst the fortunate by comparison,

in so far as he has escaped these wholesale storms, either as an actor

in producing them, or a contributor to their violence--or even more

innocently (though oftentimes not less miserably)--as a participator in

the instant ruin, or in the long arrears of suffering which they

entail.

* * * * *

The following story falls within the class of hasty tragedies, and sudden

desolations here described. The reader is assured that every incident is

strictly true: nothing, in that respect, has been altered; nor, indeed,

anywhere except in the conversations, of which, though the results and

general outline are known, the separate details have necessarily been lost

under the agitating circumstances which produced them. It has been judged

right and delicate to conceal the name of the great city, and therefore of

the nation in which these events occurred, chiefly out of consideration for

the descendants of one person concerned in the narrative: otherwise, it

might not have been requisite: for it is proper to mention, that every

person directly a party to the case has been long laid in the grave: all of

them, with one solitary exception, upwards of fifty years.

* * * * *

It was early spring in the year 17--; the day was the 6th of April; and the

weather, which had been of a wintry fierceness for the preceding six or

seven weeks--cold indeed beyond anything known for many years, gloomy for

ever, and broken by continual storms--was now by a Swedish transformation

all at once bright--genial--heavenly. So sudden and so early a prelusion of

summer, it was generally feared, could not last. But that only made

everybody the more eager to lose no hour of an enjoyment that might prove so

fleeting. It seemed as if the whole population of the place, a population

among the most numerous in Christendom, had been composed of hybernating

animals suddenly awakened by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's

torpor. Through every hour of the golden morning the streets were resonant

with female parties of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay even of

the most delicate valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their

wintry clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural

environs of our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows began

daily to re-echo the glad voices of the young and jovial awaking once again,

like the birds and the flowers, and universal nature, to the luxurious

happiness of this most delightful season.

Happiness do I say? Yes, happiness; happiness to me above all others. For I

also in those days was among the young and the gay; I was healthy; I was

strong; I was prosperous in a worldly sense! I owed no man a shilling;

feared no man's face; shunned no man's presence. I held a respectable

station in society; I was myself, let me venture to say it, respected

generally for my personal qualities, apart from any advantages I might draw

from fortune or inheritance; I had reason to think myself popular amongst

the very slender circle of my acquaintance; and finally, which perhaps was

the crowning grace to all these elements of happiness, I suffered not from

the presence of _ennui_; nor ever feared to suffer: for my temperament was

constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the

one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz. by powerful daily

exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or (if I should not be

suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say)--in one eternal

solstice, of unclouded hope.

These, you will say, were blessings; these were golden elements of felicity.

They were so; and yet, with the single exception of my healthy frame and

firm animal organisation, I feel that I have mentioned hitherto nothing but

what by comparison might be thought of a vulgar quality. All the other

advantages that I have enumerated, had they been yet wanting, might have

been acquired; had they been forfeited, might have been reconquered; had

they been even irretrievably lost, might, by a philosophic effort, have

been dispensed with; compensations might have been found for any of them,

many equivalents, or if not, consolations at least, for their absence. But

now it remains to speak of other blessings too mighty to be valued, not

merely as transcending in rank and dignity all other constituents of

happiness, but for a reason far sadder than that--because, once lost, they

were incapable of restoration, and because not to be dispensed with;

blessings in which 'either we must live or have no life:' lights to the

darkness of our paths and to the infirmity of our steps--which, once

extinguished, never more on this side the gates of Paradise can any man hope

to see re-illumined for himself. Amongst these I may mention an intellect,

whether powerful or not in itself, at any rate most elaborately cultivated;

and, to say the truth, I had little other business before me in this life

than to pursue this lofty and delightful task. I may add, as a blessing, not

in the same _positive_ sense as that which I have just mentioned, because

not of a nature to contribute so hourly to the employment of the thoughts,

but yet in this sense equal, that the absence of either would have been an

equal affliction,--namely, a conscience void of all offence. It was little

indeed that I, drawn by no necessities of situation into temptations of that

nature, had done no injury to any man. That was fortunate; but I could not

much value myself upon what was so much an accident of my situation.

Something, however, I might pretend to beyond this _negative_ merit; for I

had originally a benign nature; and, as I advanced in years and

thoughtfulness, the gratitude which possessed me for my own exceeding

happiness led me to do that by principle and system which I had already

done upon blind impulse; and thus upon a double argument I was incapable of

turning away from the prayer of the afflicted, whatever had been the

sacrifice to myself. Hardly, perhaps, could it have been said in a

sufficient sense at that time that I was a religious man: yet undoubtedly I

had all the foundations within me upon which religion might hereafter have

grown. My heart overflowed with thankfulness to Providence: I had a natural

tone of unaffected piety; and thus far at least I might have been called a

religious man, that in the simplicity of truth I could have exclaimed,

'O, Abner, I fear God, and I fear none beside.'

But wherefore seek to delay ascending by a natural climax to that final

consummation and perfect crown of my felicity--that almighty blessing which

ratified their value to all the rest? Wherefore, oh! wherefore do I shrink

in miserable weakness from----what? Is it from reviving, from calling up

again into fierce and insufferable light the images and features of a

long-buried happiness? That would be a natural shrinking and a reasonable

weakness. But how escape from reviving, whether I give it utterance or not,

that which is for ever vividly before me? What need to call into artificial

light that which, whether sleeping or waking--by night or by day--for

eight-and-thirty years has seemed by its miserable splendour to scorch my

brain? Wherefore shrink from giving language, simple vocal utterance, to

that burden of anguish which by so long an endurance has lost no atom of its

weight, nor can gain any most surely by the loudest publication? Need there

can be none, after this, to say that the priceless blessing, which I have

left to the final place in this ascending review, was the companion of my

life--my darling and youthful wife. Oh! dovelike woman! fated in an hour the

most defenceless to meet with the ravening vulture,--lamb fallen amongst

wolves,--trembling--fluttering fawn, whose path was inevitably to be crossed

by the bloody tiger;--angel, whose most innocent heart fitted thee for too

early a flight from this impure planet; if indeed it were a necessity that

thou shouldst find no rest for thy footing except amidst thy native heavens,

if indeed to leave what was not worthy of thee were a destiny not to be

evaded--a summons not to be put by,--yet why, why, again and again I

demand--why was it also necessary that this thy departure, so full of wo to

me, should also to thyself be heralded by the pangs of martyrdom? Sainted

love, if, like the ancient children of the Hebrews, like Meshech and

Abednego, thou wert called by divine command, whilst yet almost a child, to

walk, and to walk alone, through the fiery furnace,--wherefore then couldst

not thou, like that Meshech and that Abednego, walk unsinged by the dreadful

torment, and come forth unharmed? Why, if the sacrifice were to be total,

was it necessary to reach it by so dire a struggle? and if the cup, the

bitter cup, of final separation from those that were the light of thy eyes

and the pulse of thy heart might not be put aside,--yet wherefore was it

that thou mightst not drink it up in the natural peace which belongs to a

sinless heart?

But these are murmurings, you will say, rebellious murmurings against

the proclamations of God. Not so: I have long since submitted myself,

resigned myself, nay even reconciled myself, perhaps, to the great wreck

of my life, in so far as it was the will of God, and according to the

weakness of my imperfect nature. But my wrath still rises, like a

towering flame, against all the earthly instruments of this ruin; I am

still at times as unresigned as ever to this tragedy, in so far as it

was the work of human malice. Vengeance, as a mission for _me_, as a

task for _my_ hands in particular, is no longer possible; the

thunder-bolts of retribution have been long since launched by other

hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do--I must--I shall

perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very

impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of

heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my

heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or

two upon what she was--and how far worthy of a love more honourable to

her (that was possible) and deeper (but that was not possible) than

mine. When first I saw her, she--my Agnes--was merely a child, not much

(if anything) above sixteen. But, as in perfect womanhood she retained a

most childlike expression of countenance, so even then in absolute

childhood she put forward the blossoms and the dignity of a woman.

Never yet did my eye light upon creature that was born of woman, nor

could it enter my heart to conceive one, possessing a figure more

matchless in its proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and

advisedly to be characterised by no adequate word but the word

_magnificent_ (a word too often and lightly abused). In reality,

speaking of women, I have seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one

except Agnes that could without hyperbole be styled truly and memorably

magnificent. Though in the first order of tall women, yet, being full in

person, and with a symmetry that was absolutely faultless, she seemed to

the random sight as little above the ordinary height. Possibly from the

dignity of her person, assisted by the dignity of her movements, a

stranger would have been disposed to call her at a distance a woman of

_commanding_ presence; but never after he had approached near enough to

behold her face. Every thought of artifice--of practised effect--or of

haughty pretension, fled before the childlike innocence--the sweet

feminine timidity--and the more than cherub loveliness of that

countenance, which yet in its lineaments was noble, whilst its

expression was purely gentle and confiding. A shade of pensiveness there

was about her; but _that_ was in her manners, scarcely ever in her

features; and the exquisite fairness of her complexion, enriched by the

very sweetest and most delicate bloom that ever I have beheld, should

rather have allied it to a tone of cheerfulness. Looking at this noble

creature, as I first looked at her, when yet upon the early threshold of

womanhood--

'With household motions light and free,

And steps of virgin liberty'--

you might have supposed her some Hebe or young Aurora of the dawn. When

you saw only her superb figure, and its promise of womanly development,

with the measured dignity of her step, you might for a moment have

fancied her some imperial Medea of the Athenian stage--some Volumnia

from Rome,

'Or ruling bandit's wife amidst the Grecian isles.'

But catch one glance from her angelic countenance--and then combining

the face and the person, you would have dismissed all such fancies, and

have pronounced her a Pandora or an Eve, expressly accomplished and held

forth by nature as an exemplary model or ideal pattern for the future

female sex:

'A perfect woman, nobly plann'd,

To warn, to comfort, to command:

And yet a spirit too, and bright

With something of an angel light.'

To this superb young woman, such as I have here sketched her, I

surrendered my heart for ever, almost from my first opportunity of

seeing her: for so natural and without disguise was her character, and

so winning the simplicity of her manners, due in part to her own native

dignity of mind, and in part to the deep solitude in which she had been

reared, that little penetration was required to put me in possession of

all her thoughts; and to win her love, not very much more than to let

her see, as see she could not avoid, in connection with that chivalrous

homage which at any rate was due to her sex and her sexual perfections,

a love for herself on my part, which was in its nature as exalted a

passion and as profoundly rooted as any merely human affection can ever

yet have been.

On the seventeenth birthday of Agnes we were married. Oh! calendar of

everlasting months--months that, like the mighty rivers, shall flow on

for ever, immortal as thou, Nile, or Danube, Euphrates, or St. Lawrence!

and ye, summer and winter, day and night, wherefore do you bring round

continually your signs, and seasons, and revolving hours, that still

point and barb the anguish of local recollections, telling me of this

and that celestial morning that never shall return, and of too blessed

expectations, travelling like yourselves through a heavenly zodiac of

changes, till at once and for ever they sank into the grave! Often do I

think of seeking for some quiet cell either in the Tropics or in Arctic

latitudes, where the changes of the year, and the external signs

corresponding to them, express themselves by no features like those in

which the same seasons are invested under our temperate climes: so that,

if knowing, we cannot at least feel the identity of their revolutions.

We were married, I have said, on the birthday--the seventeenth

birthday--of Agnes; and pretty nearly on her eighteenth it was that she

placed me at the summit of my happiness, whilst for herself she thus

completed the circle of her relations to this life's duties, by

presenting me with a son. Of this child, knowing how wearisome to

strangers is the fond exultation of parents, I shall simply say, that he

inherited his mother's beauty; the same touching loveliness and

innocence of expression, the same chiselled nose--mouth--and chin, the

same exquisite auburn hair. In many other features, not of person

merely, but also of mind and manners, as they gradually began to open

before me, this child deepened my love to him by recalling the image of

his mother; and what other image was there that I so much wished to keep

before me, whether waking or asleep? At the time to which I am now

coming but too rapidly, this child, still our only one, and unusually

premature, was within four months of completing his third year;

consequently Agnes was at that time in her twenty-first year; and I may

here add, with respect to myself, that I was in my twenty-sixth.

But before I come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the

temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may be

thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when the

stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no

menace of a breeze--the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing cloud,

that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess and

plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and it

is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and

molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly

undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a

slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known

myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by

steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and

reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely

from too easy a life, and because all nobler agitations that might have

ruffled the sensations occasionally, and all distresses even on the

narrowest scale that might have reawakened the solicitudes of love, by

opening necessities for sympathy--for counsel--or for mutual aid, had

been shut out by foresight too elaborate, or by prosperity too cloying.

But all this, had it otherwise been possible with my particular mind,

and at my early age, was utterly precluded by one remarkable peculiarity

in my temper. Whether it were that I derived from nature some jealousy

and suspicion of all happiness which seems too perfect and unalloyed--[a

spirit of restless distrust which in ancient times often led men to

throw valuable gems into the sea, in the hope of thus propitiating the

dire deity of misfortune, by voluntarily breaking the fearful chain of

prosperity, and led some of them to weep and groan when the gems thus

sacrificed were afterwards brought back to their hands by simple

fishermen, who had recovered them in the intestines of fishes--a

portentous omen, which was interpreted into a sorrowful indication that

the Deity thus answered the propitiatory appeal, and made solemn

proclamation that he had rejected it]--whether, I say, it were this

spirit of jealousy awaked in me by too steady and too profound a

felicity--or whether it were that great overthrows and calamities have

some mysterious power to send forward a dim misgiving of their advancing

footsteps, and really and indeed

'That in to-day already walks to-morrow;'--

or whether it were partly, as I have already put the case in my first

supposition, a natural instinct of distrust, but irritated and enlivened

by a particular shock of superstitious alarm; which, or whether any of

these causes it were that kept me apprehensive, and on the watch for

disastrous change, I will not here undertake to determine. Too certain

it is that I was so. I never ridded myself of an over-mastering and

brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling (that sometimes

was and sometimes was not exalted into a conscious presentiment) of some

great calamity travelling towards me; not perhaps immediately

impending--perhaps even at a great distance; but already--dating from

some secret hour--already in motion upon some remote line of approach.

This feeling I could not assuage by sharing it with Agnes. No motive

could be strong enough for persuading me to communicate so gloomy a

thought with one who, considering her extreme healthiness, was but too

remarkably prone to pensive, if not to sorrowful contemplations. And

thus the obligation which I felt to silence and reserve, strengthened

the morbid impression I had received; whilst the remarkable incident I

have adverted to served powerfully to rivet the superstitious chain

which was continually gathering round me. The incident was this--and

before I repeat it, let me pledge my word of honour, that I report to

you the bare facts of the case, without exaggeration, and in the

simplicity of truth:--There was at that time resident in the great city

which is the scene of my narrative a woman, from some part of Hungary,

who pretended to the gift of looking into futurity. She had made herself

known advantageously in several of the greatest cities of Europe under

the designation of the Hungarian Prophetess; and very extraordinary

instances were cited amongst the highest circles of her success in the

art which she professed. So ample were the pecuniary tributes which she

levied upon the hopes and the fears, or the simple curiosity of the

aristocracy, that she was thus able to display not unfrequently a

disinterestedness and a generosity, which seemed native to her

disposition, amongst the humbler classes of her applicants; for she

rejected no addresses that were made to her, provided only they were not

expressed in levity or scorn, but with sincerity, and in a spirit of

confiding respect. It happened, on one occasion, when a nursery-servant

of ours was waiting in her anteroom for the purpose of taking her turn

in consulting the prophetess professionally, that she had witnessed a

scene of consternation and unaffected maternal grief in this Hungarian

lady upon the sudden seizure of her son, a child of four or five years

old, by a spasmodic inflammation of the throat (since called croup),

peculiar to children, and in those days not very well understood by

medical men. The poor Hungarian, who had lived chiefly in warm, or at

least not damp climates, and had never so much as heard of this

complaint, was almost wild with alarm at the rapid increase of the

symptoms which attend the paroxysms, and especially of that loud and

distressing sound which marks the impeded respiration. Great, therefore,

was her joy and gratitude on finding from our servant that she had

herself been in attendance more than once upon cases of the same nature,

but very much more violent,--and that, consequently, she was well

qualified to suggest and to superintend all the measures of instant

necessity, such as the hot-bath, the peculiar medicines, &c., which are

almost sure of success when applied in an early stage. Staying to give

her assistance until a considerable improvement had taken place in the

child, our servant then hurried home to her mistress. Agnes, it may be

imagined, despatched her back with such further and more precise

directions as in a very short time availed to re-establish the child in

convalescence. These practical services, and the messages of maternal

sympathy repeatedly conveyed from Agnes, had completely won the heart of

the grateful Hungarian, and she announced her intention of calling with

her little boy, to make her personal acknowledgments for the kindness

which had been shown to her. She did so, and we were as much impressed

by the sultana-like style of her Oriental beauty, as she, on her part,

was touched and captivated by the youthful loveliness of my angelic

wife. After sitting for above an hour, during which time she talked with

a simplicity and good feeling that struck us as remarkable in a person

professing an art usually connected with so much of conscious fraud, she

rose to take her leave. I must mention that she had previously had our

little boy sitting on her knee, and had at intervals thrown a hasty

glance upon the palms of his hands. On parting, Agnes, with her usual

frankness, held out her hand. The Hungarian took it with an air of sad

solemnity, pressed it fervently, and said,--'Lady, it is my part in this

life to look behind the curtain of fate; and oftentimes I see such

sights in futurity--some near, some far off--as willingly I would _not_

see. For you, young and charming lady, looking like that angel which you

are, no destiny can be equal to your deserts. Yet sometimes, true it is,

God sees not as man sees; and He ordains, after His unfathomable

counsels, to the heavenly-minded a portion in heaven, and to the

children whom He loves a rest and a haven not built with hands.

Something that I have seen dimly warns me to look no farther. Yet, if

you desire it, I will do my office, and I will read for you with truth

the lines of fate as they are written upon your hands.' Agnes was a

little startled, or even shocked, by this solemn address; but, in a

minute or so, a mixed feeling--one half of which was curiosity, and the

other half a light-hearted mockery of her own mysterious awe in the

presence of what she had been taught to view as either fraud or

insanity--prompted her playfully to insist upon the fullest application

of the Hungarian's art to her own case; nay, she would have the hands of

our little Francis read and interpreted as well as her own, and she

desired to hear the full professional judgment delivered without

suppression or softening of its harshest awards. She laughed whilst she

said all this; but she also trembled a little. The Hungarian first took

the hand of our young child, and perused it with a long and steady

scrutiny. She said nothing, but sighed heavily as she resigned it. She

then took the hand of Agnes--looked bewildered and aghast--then gazed

piteously from Agnes to her child--and at last, bursting into tears,

began to move steadily out of the room. I followed her hastily, and

remonstrated upon this conduct, by pointing her attention to the obvious

truth--that these mysterious suppressions and insinuations, which left

all shadowy and indistinct, were far more alarming than the most

definite denunciations. Her answer yet rings in my ear:--'Why should I

make myself odious to you and to your innocent wife? Messenger of evil I

am, and have been to many; but evil I will not prophesy to her. Watch

and pray! Much may be done by effectual prayer. Human means, fleshly

arms, are vain. There is an enemy in the house of life' [here she

quitted her palmistry for the language of astrology]; 'there is a

frightful danger at hand, both for your wife and your child. Already on

that dark ocean, over which we are all sailing, I can see dimly the

point at which the enemy's course shall cross your wife's. There is but

little interval remaining--not many hours. All is finished; all is

accomplished; and already he is almost up with the darlings of your

heart. Be vigilant, be vigilant, and yet look not to yourself, but to

heaven, for deliverance.'

This woman was not an impostor: she spoke and uttered her oracles under

a wild sense of possession by some superior being, and of mystic

compulsion to say what she would have willingly left unsaid; and never

yet, before or since, have I seen the light of sadness settle with so

solemn an expression into human eyes as when she dropped my wife's hand,

and refused to deliver that burden of prophetic wo with which she

believed herself to be inspired.

The prophetess departed; and what mood of mind did she leave behind her

in Agnes and myself? Naturally there was a little drooping of spirits at

first; the solemnity and the heart-felt sincerity of fear and grief

which marked her demeanour, made it impossible, at the moment when we

were just fresh from their natural influences, that we should recoil

into our ordinary spirits. But with the inevitable elasticity of youth

and youthful gaiety we soon did so; we could not attempt to persuade

ourselves that there had been any conscious fraud or any attempt at

scenical effect in the Hungarian's conduct. She had no motive for

deceiving us; she had refused all offerings of money, and her whole

visit had evidently been made under an overflow of the most grateful

feelings for the attentions shown to her child. We acquitted her,

therefore, of sinister intentions; and with our feelings of jealousy,

feelings in which we had been educated, towards everything that tended

to superstition, we soon agreed to think her some gentle maniac or sad

enthusiast, suffering under some form of morbid melancholy. Forty-eight

hours, with two nights' sleep, sufficed to restore the wonted

equilibrium of our spirits; and that interval brought us onwards to the

6th of April--the day on which, as I have already said, my story

properly commences.

On that day, on that lovely 6th of April, such as I have described it,

that 6th of April, about nine o'clock in the morning, we were seated at

breakfast near the open window--we, that is Agnes, myself, and little

Francis; the freshness of morning spirits rested upon us; the golden

light of the morning sun illuminated the room; incense was floating

through the air from the gorgeous flowers within and without the house;

there in youthful happiness we sat gathered together, a family of love,

and there we never sat again. Never again were we three gathered

together, nor ever shall be, so long as the sun and its golden

light--the morning and the evening--the earth and its flowers endure.

Often have I occupied myself in recalling every circumstance the most

trivial of this the final morning of what merits to be called my life.

Eleven o'clock, I remember, was striking when Agnes came into my study,

and said that she would go into the city (for we lived in a quite rural

suburb), that she would execute some trifling commissions which she had

received from a friend in the country, and would be at home again

between one and two for a stroll which we had agreed to take in the

neighbouring meadows. About twenty minutes after this she again came

into my study dressed for going abroad; for such was my admiration of

her, that I had a fancy--fancy it must have been, and yet still I felt

it to be real--that under every change she looked best; if she put on a

shawl, then a shawl became the most feminine of ornaments; if she laid

aside her shawl and her bonnet, then how nymph-like she seemed in her

undisguised and unadorned beauty! Full-dress seemed for the time to be

best, as bringing forward into relief the splendour of her person, and

allowing the exposure of her arms; a simple morning-dress, again, seemed

better still, as fitted to call out the childlike innocence of her face,

by confining the attention to that. But all these are feelings of fond

and blind affection, hanging with rapture over the object of something

too like idolatry. God knows, if that be a sin, I was but too profound a

sinner; yet sin it never was, sin it could not be, to adore a beauty

such as thine, my Agnes. Neither was it her beauty by itself, and that

only, which I sought at such times to admire; there was a peculiar sort

of double relation in which she stood at moments of pleasurable

expectation and excitement, since our little Francis had become of an

age to join our party, which made some aspects of her character trebly

interesting. She was a wife--and wife to one whom she looked up to as

her superior in understanding and in knowledge of the world, whom,

therefore, she leaned to for protection. On the other hand, she was also

a mother. Whilst, therefore, to her child she supported the matronly

part of guide, and the air of an experienced person; to me she wore,

ingenuously and without disguise, the part of a child herself, with all

the giddy hopes and unchastised imaginings of that buoyant age. This

double character, one aspect of which looks towards her husband and one

to her children, sits most gracefully upon many a young wife whose heart

is pure and innocent; and the collision between the two separate parts

imposed by duty on the one hand, by extreme youth on the other, the one

telling her that she is a responsible head of a family and the

depository of her husband's honour in its tenderest and most vital

interests, the other telling her, through the liveliest language of

animal sensibility, and through the very pulses of her blood, that she

is herself a child; this collision gives an inexpressible charm to the

whole demeanour of many a young married woman, making her other

fascinations more touching to her husband, and deepening the admiration

she excites; and the more so, as it is a collision which cannot exist

except among the very innocent. Years, at any rate, will irresistibly

remove this peculiar charm, and gradually replace it by the graces of

the matronly character. But in Agnes this change had not yet been

effected, partly from nature, and partly from the extreme seclusion of

her life. Hitherto she still retained the unaffected expression of her

childlike nature; and so lovely in my eyes was this perfect exhibition

of natural feminine character, that she rarely or never went out alone

upon any little errand to town which might require her to rely upon her

own good sense and courage, that she did not previously come to exhibit

herself before me. Partly this was desired by me in that lover-like

feeling of admiration already explained, which leads one to court the

sight of a beloved object under every change of dress, and under all

effects of novelty. Partly it was the interest I took in that exhibition

of sweet timidity, and almost childish apprehensiveness, half disguised

or imperfectly acknowledged by herself, which (in the way I have just

explained) so touchingly contrasted with (and for that very reason so

touchingly drew forth) her matronly character. But I hear some objector

say at this point, ought not this very timidity, founded (as in part at

least it was) upon inexperience and conscious inability to face the

dangers of the world, to have suggested reasons for not leaving her to

her own protection? And does it not argue on my part, an arrogant or too

blind a confidence in the durability of my happiness, as though charmed

against assaults, and liable to no shocks of sudden revolution? I reply

that, from the very constitution of society, and the tone of manners in

the city which we inhabited, there seemed to be a moral impossibility

that any dangers of consequence should meet her in the course of those

brief absences from my protection, which only were possible; that even

to herself any dangers, of a nature to be anticipated under the known

circumstances of the case, seemed almost imaginary; that even _she_

acknowledged a propriety in being trained, by slight and brief

separations from my guardianship, to face more boldly those cases of

longer separation and of more absolute consignment to her own resources

which circumstances might arise to create necessarily, and perhaps

abruptly. And it is evident that, had she been the wife of any man

engaged in the duties of a profession, she might have been summoned from

the very first, and without the possibility of any such gradual

training, to the necessity of relying almost singly upon her own courage

and discretion. For the other question, whether I did not depend too

blindly and presumptuously upon my good luck in not at least affording

her my protection so long as nothing occurred to make it impossible? I

may reply most truly that all my feelings ran naturally in the very

opposite channel. So far from confiding too much in my luck, in the

present instance I was engaged in the task of writing upon some points

of business which could not admit of further delay; but now, and at all

times, I had a secret aversion to seeing so gentle a creature thrown

even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which

scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and

often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an

irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind

upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have

acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a

fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it

was in this very point of anxiety as to all that regarded my wife's

security. Her good sense, her prudence, her courage (for courage she had

in the midst of her timidity), her dignity of manner, the more

impressive from the childlike character of her countenance, all should

have combined to reassure me, and yet they did not. I was still anxious

for her safety to an irrational extent; and to sum up the whole in a

most weighty line of Shakspeare, I lived under the constant presence of

a feeling which only that great observer of human nature (so far as I am

aware) has ever noticed, viz., that merely the excess of my happiness

made me jealous of its ability to last, and in that extent less capable

of enjoying it; that in fact the prelibation of my tears, as a homage to

its fragility, was drawn forth by my very sense that my felicity was too

exquisite; or, in the words of the great master--

'I wept to have' [absolutely, by anticipation, shed tears in

possessing] 'what I so feared to lose.'

Thus end my explanations, and I now pursue my narrative: Agnes, as I have

said, came into my room again before leaving the house--we conversed for

five minutes--we parted--she went out--her last words being that she would

return at half-past one o'clock; and not long after that time, if ever mimic

bells--bells of rejoicing, or bells of mourning, are heard in desert spaces

of the air, and (as some have said), in unreal worlds, that mock our own,

and repeat, for ridicule, the vain and unprofitable motions of man, then too

surely, about this hour, began to toll the funeral knell of my earthly

happiness--its final hour had sounded.

* * * * *

One o'clock had arrived; fifteen minutes after, I strolled into the

garden, and began to look over the little garden-gate in expectation of

every moment descrying Agnes in the distance. Half an hour passed, and

for ten minutes more I was tolerably quiet. From this time till

half-past two I became constantly more agitated--_agitated_, perhaps, is

too strong a word--but I was restless and anxious beyond what I should

have chosen to acknowledge. Still I kept arguing, What is half an

hour?--what is an hour? A thousand things might have occurred to cause

that delay, without needing to suppose any accident; or, if an accident,

why not a very trifling one? She may have slightly hurt her foot--she

may have slightly sprained her ankle. 'Oh, doubtless,' I exclaimed to

myself, 'it will be a mere trifle, or perhaps nothing at all.' But I

remember that, even whilst I was saying this, I took my hat and walked

with nervous haste into the little quiet lane upon which our garden-gate

opened. The lane led by a few turnings, and after a course of about five

hundred yards, into a broad high-road, which even at that day had begun

to assume the character of a street, and allowed an unobstructed range

of view in the direction of the city for at least a mile. Here I

stationed myself, for the air was so clear that I could distinguish

dress and figure to a much greater distance than usual. Even on such a

day, however, the remote distance was hazy and indistinct, and at any

other season I should have been diverted with the various mistakes I

made. From occasional combinations of colour, modified by light and

shade, and of course powerfully assisted by the creative state of the

eye under this nervous apprehensiveness, I continued to shape into

images of Agnes forms without end, that upon nearer approach presented

the most grotesque contrasts to her impressive appearance. But I had

ceased even to comprehend the ludicrous; my agitation was now so

overruling and engrossing that I lost even my intellectual sense of it;

and now first I understood practically and feelingly the anguish of hope

alternating with disappointment, as it may be supposed to act upon the

poor shipwrecked seaman, alone and upon a desolate coast, straining his

sight for ever to the fickle element which has betrayed him, but which

only can deliver him, and with his eyes still tracing in the far

distance

'Ships, dim-discover'd, dropping from the clouds,'--

which a brief interval of suspense still for ever disperses into hollow

pageants of air or vapour. One deception melted away only to be

succeeded by another; still I fancied that at last to a certainty I

could descry the tall figure of Agnes, her gipsy hat, and even the

peculiar elegance of her walk. Often I went so far as to laugh at

myself, and even to tax my recent fears with unmanliness and effeminacy,

on recollecting the audible throbbings of my heart, and the nervous

palpitations which had besieged me; but these symptoms, whether

effeminate or not, began to come back tumultuously under the gloomy

doubts that succeeded almost before I had uttered this self-reproach.

Still I found myself mocked and deluded with false hopes; yet still I

renewed my quick walk, and the intensity of my watch for that radiant

form that was fated never more to be seen returning from the cruel city.

It was nearly half-past three, and therefore close upon two hours beyond

the time fixed by Agnes for her return, when I became absolutely

incapable of supporting the further torture of suspense, and I suddenly

took the resolution of returning home and concerting with my female

servants some energetic measures, though _what_ I could hardly say, on

behalf of their mistress. On entering the garden-gate I met our little

child Francis, who unconsciously inflicted a pang upon me which he

neither could have meditated nor have understood. I passed him at his

play, perhaps even unaware of his presence, but he recalled me to that

perception by crying aloud that he had just seen his mamma.

'When--where?' I asked convulsively.

'Up-stairs in her bedroom,' was his instantaneous answer.

His manner was such as forbade me to suppose that he could be joking;

and, as it was barely possible (though, for reasons well-known to me, in

the highest degree improbable), that Agnes might have returned by a

by-path, which, leading through a dangerous and disreputable suburb,

would not have coincided at any one point with the public road where I

had been keeping my station. I sprang forward into the house, up-stairs,

and in rapid succession into every room where it was likely that she

might be found; but everywhere there was a dead silence, disturbed only

by myself, for, in my growing confusion of thought, I believe that I

rang the bell violently in every room I entered. No such summons,

however, was needed, for the servants, two of whom at the least were

most faithful creatures, and devotedly attached to their young mistress,

stood ready of themselves to come and make inquiries of me as soon as

they became aware of the alarming fact that I had returned without her.

Until this moment, though having some private reasons for surprise that

she should have failed to come into the house for a minute or two at the

hour prefixed, in order to make some promised domestic arrangements for

the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at

some distance from home--and that either the extreme beauty of the day

had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a

conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience and

solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the

moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. Now, however,

in a single instant vanished _every_ mode of accounting for their

mistress's absence; and the consternation of our looks communicated

contagiously, by the most unerring of all languages, from each to the

other what thoughts were uppermost in our panic-stricken hearts. If to

any person it should seem that our alarm was disproportioned to the

occasion, and not justified at least by anything as yet made known to

us, let that person consider the weight due to the two following

facts--first, that from the recency of our settlement in this

neighbourhood, and from the extreme seclusion of my wife's previous life

at a vast distance from the metropolis, she had positively no friends on

her list of visitors who resided in this great capital; secondly, and

far above all beside, let him remember the awful denunciations, so

unexpectedly tallying with this alarming and mysterious absence, of the

Hungarian prophetess; these had been slighted--almost dismissed from our

thoughts; but now in sudden reaction they came back upon us with a

frightful power to lacerate and to sting--the shadowy outline of a

spiritual agency, such as that which could at all predict the events,

combining in one mysterious effect, with the shadowy outline of those

very predictions. The power, that could have predicted, was as dim and

as hard to grasp as was the precise nature of the evil that had been

predicted.

An icy terror froze my blood at this moment when I looked at the

significant glances, too easily understood by me, that were exchanged

between the servants. My mouth had been for the last two hours growing

more and more parched, so that at present, from mere want of moisture, I

could not separate my lips to speak. One of the women saw the vain

efforts I was making, and hastily brought me a glass of water. With the

first recovery of speech, I asked them what little Francis had meant by

saying that he had seen his mother in her bedroom. Their reply was--that

they were as much at a loss to discover his meaning as I was; that he

had made the same assertion to them, and with so much earnestness, that

they had, all in succession, gone up-stairs to look for her, and with

the fullest expectation of finding her. This was a mystery which

remained such to the very last; there was no doubt whatsoever that the

child believed himself to have seen his mother; that he could not have

seen her in her human bodily presence, there is as little doubt as there

is, alas! that in this world he never _did_ see her again. The poor

child constantly adhered to his story, and with a circumstantiality far

beyond all power of invention that could be presumed in an artless

infant. Every attempt at puzzling him or entangling him in

contradictions by means of cross-examination was but labour thrown away;

though, indeed, it is true enough that for those attempts, as will soon

be seen, there was but a brief interval allowed.

Not dwelling upon this subject at present, I turned to Hannah--a woman

who held the nominal office of cook in our little establishment, but

whose real duties had been much more about her mistress's person--and

with a searching look of appeal I asked her whether, in this moment of

trial, when (as she might see) I was not so perfectly master of myself

as perhaps always to depend upon seeing what was best to be done, she

would consent to accompany me into the city, and take upon herself those

obvious considerations of policy or prudence which might but too easily

escape my mind, darkened, and likely to be darkened, as to its power of

discernment by the hurricane of affliction now too probably at hand. She

answered my appeal with the fervour I expected from what I had already

known of her character. She was a woman of a strong, fiery, perhaps I

might say of heroic mind, supported by a courage that was absolutely

indomitable, and by a strength of bodily frame very unusual in a woman,

and beyond the promise even of her person. She had suffered as deep a

wrench in her own affections as a human being can suffer; she had lost

her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty and

interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst of

all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large

commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of

every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very

much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him,

as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations

from childish years, from total inexperience, or any other alleviating

circumstances that could be urged, having everything to plead--and of

all his accomplices the only one who had anything to plead. Interest,

however, he had little or none; and whilst some hoary villains of the

party, who happened to be more powerfully befriended, were finally

allowed to escape with a punishment little more than nominal, he and two

others were selected as sacrifices to the offended laws. They suffered

capitally. All three behaved well; but the poor boy in particular, with

a courage, a resignation, and a meekness, so distinguished and beyond

his years as to attract the admiration and the liveliest sympathy of the

public universally. If strangers could feel in that way, if the mere

hardened executioner could be melted at the final scene,--it may be

judged to what a fierce and terrific height would ascend the affliction

of a doating mother, constitutionally too fervid in her affections. I

have heard an official person declare, that the spectacle of her

desolation and frantic anguish was the most frightful thing he had ever

witnessed, and so harrowing to the feelings, that all who could by

their rank venture upon such an irregularity, absented themselves during

the critical period from the office which corresponded with the

government; for, as I have said, the affair took place in a large

provincial city, at a great distance from the capital. All who knew this

woman, or who were witnesses to the alteration which one fortnight had

wrought in her person as well as her demeanour, fancied it impossible

that she could continue to live; or that, if she did, it must be through

the giving way of her reason. They proved, however, to be mistaken; or,

at least, if (as some thought) her reason did suffer in some degree,

this result showed itself in the inequality of her temper, in moody fits

of abstraction, and the morbid energy of her manner at times under the

absence of all adequate external excitement, rather than in any positive

and apparent hallucinations of thought. The charm which had mainly

carried off the instant danger to her faculties, was doubtless the

intense sympathy which she met with. And in these offices of consolation

my wife stood foremost. For, and that was fortunate, she had found

herself able, without violence to her own sincerest opinions in the

case, to offer precisely that form of sympathy which was most soothing

to the angry irritation of the poor mother; not only had she shown a

_direct_ interest in the boy, and not a mere interest of _reflection_

from that which she took in the mother, and had expressed it by visits

to his dungeon, and by every sort of attention to his comforts which his

case called for, or the prison regulations allowed; not only had she

wept with the distracted woman as if for a brother of her own; but,

which went farther than all the rest in softening the mother's heart,

she had loudly and indignantly proclaimed her belief in the boy's

innocence, and in the same tone her sense of the crying injustice

committed as to the selection of the victims, and the proportion of the

punishment awarded. Others, in the language of a great poet,

'Had pitied _her_ and not her grief;'

they had either not been able to see, or, from carelessness, had neglected

to see, any peculiar wrong done to her in the matter which occasioned her

grief,--but had simply felt compassion for her as for one summoned, in a

regular course of providential and human dispensation, to face an

affliction, heavy in itself, but not heavy from any special defect of

equity. Consequently their very sympathy, being so much built upon the

assumption that an only child had offended to the extent implied in his

sentence, oftentimes clothed itself in expressions which she felt to be not

consolations but insults, and, in fact, so many justifications of those whom

it relieved her overcharged heart to regard as the very worst of enemies.

Agnes, on the other hand, took the very same view of the case as herself;

and, though otherwise the gentlest of all gentle creatures, yet here, from

the generous fervour of her reverence for justice, and her abhorrence of

oppression, she gave herself no trouble to moderate the energy of her

language: nor did I, on my part, feeling that substantially she was in the

right, think it of importance to dispute about the exact degrees of the

wrong done or the indignation due to it. In this way it happened naturally

enough that at one and the same time, though little contemplating either of

these results, Agnes had done a prodigious service to the poor desolate

mother by breaking the force of her misery, as well as by arming the active

agencies of indignation against the depressing ones of solitary grief, and

for herself had won a most grateful and devoted friend, who would have gone

through fire and water to serve her, and was thenceforwards most anxious for

some opportunity to testify how deep had been her sense of the goodness

shown to her by her benign young mistress, and how incapable of suffering

abatement by time. It remains to add, which I have slightly noticed before,

that this woman was of unusual personal strength: her bodily frame matched

with her intellectual: and I notice this _now_ with the more emphasis,

because I am coming rapidly upon ground where it will be seen that this one

qualification was of more summary importance to us--did us more 'yeoman's

service' at a crisis the most awful--than other qualities of greater name

and pretension. _Hannah_ was this woman's Christian name; and her name and

her memory are to me amongst the most hallowed of my earthly recollections.

One of her two fellow-servants, known technically amongst us as the

'parlour-maid,' was also, but not equally, attached to her mistress; and

merely because her nature, less powerfully formed and endowed, did not allow

her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of passion or

of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate, and worthy to

be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery-maid, and therefore more

naturally and more immediately standing within the confidence of her

mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But of that hereafter.

Meantime, Hannah--she upon whom I leaned as upon a staff in all which

respected her mistress, ran up-stairs, after I had spoken and received her

answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare herself for going out along

with me to the city. I did not ask her to be quick in her movements: I knew

there was no need: and, whilst she was absent, I took up, in one of my

fretful movements of nervousness, a book which was lying upon a side table:

the book fell open of itself at a particular page; and in that, perhaps,

there was nothing extraordinary; for it was a little portable edition of

_Paradise Lost_; and the page was one which I must naturally have turned to

many a time: for to Agnes I had read all the great masters of literature,

especially those of modern times; so that few people knew the high classics

more familiarly: and as to the passage in question, from its divine beauty I

had read it aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty separate occasions. All this I

mention to take away any appearance of a vulgar attempt to create omens; but

still, in the very act of confessing the simple truth, and thus weakening

the marvellous character of the anecdote, I must notice it as a strange

instance of the '_Sortes Miltonianæ_'--that precisely at such a moment as

this I should find thrown in my way, should feel tempted to take up, and

should open, a volume containing such a passage as the following: and

observe, moreover, that although the volume, _once being taken up_, would

naturally open where it had been most frequently read, there were, however,

many passages which had been read _as_ frequently--or more so. The

particular passage upon which I opened at this moment was that most

beautiful one in which the fatal morning separation is described between

Adam and his bride--that separation so pregnant with wo, which eventually

proved the occasion of the mortal transgression--the last scene between our

first parents at which both were innocent and both were happy--although the

superior intellect already felt, and, in the slight altercation preceding

this separation, had already expressed a dim misgiving of some coming

change: these are the words, and in depth of pathos they have rarely been

approached:--

'Oft he to her his charge of quick return

Repeated; she to him as oft engag'd

To be returned by noon amid the bow'r,

And all things in best order to invite

Noon-tide repast, or afternoon's repose.

Oh much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve!

Of thy presumed return, event perverse!

Thou never from that hour in Paradise

Found'st either sweet repast, or sound repose.'

'_My_ Eve!' I exclaimed, 'partner in _my_ paradise, where art thou? _Much

failing_ thou wilt not be found, nor _much deceived_; innocent in any case

thou art; but, alas! too surely by this time _hapless_, and the victim of

some diabolic wickedness.' Thus I murmured to myself; thus I ejaculated;

thus I apostrophised my Agnes; then again came a stormier mood. I could not

sit still; I could not stand in quiet; I threw the book from me with

violence against the wall; I began to hurry backwards and forwards in a

short uneasy walk, when suddenly a sound, a step; it was the sound of the

garden-gate opening, followed by a hasty tread. Whose tread! Not for a

moment could it be fancied the oread step which belonged to that daughter of

the hills--my wife, my Agnes; no, it was the dull massy tread of a man: and

immediately there came a loud blow upon the door, and in the next moment,

the bell having been found, a furious peal of ringing. Oh coward heart! not

for a lease of immortality could I have gone forwards myself. My breath

failed me; an interval came in which respiration seemed to be stifled--the

blood to halt in its current; and then and there I recognised in myself the

force and living truth of that Scriptural description of a heart consciously

beset by evil without escape: 'Susannah _sighed_.' Yes, a long long sigh--a

deep deep sigh--that is the natural language by which the overcharged heart

utters forth the wo that else would break it. I sighed--oh how profoundly!

But that did not give me power to move. Who will go to the door? I whispered

audibly. Who is at the door? was the inaudible whisper of my heart. Then

might be seen the characteristic differences of the three women. That one,

whom I suspected, I heard raising an upper window to look out and

reconnoitre. The affectionate Rachael, on the other hand, ran eagerly

down-stairs; but Hannah, half dressed, even her bosom exposed, passed her

like a storm; and before I heard any sound of opening a door, I saw from the

spot where I stood the door already wide open, and a man in the costume of a

policeman. All that he said I could not hear; but this I heard--that I was

wanted at the police office, and had better come off without delay. He

seemed then to get a glimpse of me, and to make an effort towards coming

nearer; but I slunk away, and left to Hannah the task of drawing from him

any circumstances which he might know. But apparently there was not much to

tell, or rather, said I, there is too much, the _much_ absorbs the _many_;

some one mighty evil transcends and quells all particulars. At length the

door was closed, and the man was gone. Hannah crept slowly along the

passage, and looked in hesitatingly. Her very movements and stealthy pace

testified that she had heard nothing which, even by comparison, she could

think good news. 'Tell me not now, Hannah,' I said; 'wait till we are in

the open air.' She went up-stairs again. How short seemed the time till she

descended!--how I longed for further respite! 'Hannah!' I said at length

when we were fairly moving upon the road, 'Hannah! I am too sure you have

nothing good to tell. But now tell me the worst, and let that be in the

fewest words possible.'

'Sir,' she said, 'we had better wait until we reach the office; for really I

could not understand the man. He says that my mistress is detained upon some

charge; but _what_, I could not at all make out. He was a man that knew

something of you, sir, I believe, and he wished to be civil, and kept

saying, "Oh! I dare say it will turn out nothing at all, many such charges

are made idly and carelessly, and some maliciously." "But what charges?" I

cried, and then he wanted to speak privately to you. But I told him that of

all persons he must not speak to you, if he had anything painful to tell;

for that you were too much disturbed already, and had been for some hours,

out of anxiety and terror about my mistress, to bear much more. So, when he

heard that, he was less willing to speak freely than before. He might prove

wrong, he said; he might give offence; things might turn out far otherwise

than according to first appearances; for his part, he could not believe

anything amiss of so sweet a lady. And alter all it would be better to wait

till we reached the office.'

Thus much then was clear--Agnes was under some accusation. This was already

worse than the worst I had anticipated. 'And then,' said I, thinking aloud

to Hannah, 'one of two things is apparent to me; either the accusation is

one of pure hellish malice, without a colour of probability or the shadow of

a foundation, and that way, alas! I am driven in my fears by that Hungarian

woman's prophecy; or, which but for my desponding heart I should be more

inclined to think, the charge has grown out of my poor wife's rustic

ignorance as to the usages then recently established by law with regard to

the kind of money that could be legally tendered. This, however, was a

suggestion that did not tend to alleviate my anxiety; and my nervousness had

mounted to a painful, almost to a disabling degree, by the time we reached

the office. Already on our road thither some parties had passed us who were

conversing with eagerness upon the case: so much we collected from the many

and ardent expressions about 'the lady's beauty,' though the rest of such

words as we could catch were ill calculated to relieve my suspense. This,

then, at least, was certain--that my poor timid Agnes had already been

exhibited before a tumultuous crowd; that her name and reputation had gone

forth as a subject of discussion for the public; and that the domestic

seclusion and privacy within which it was her matronly privilege to move had

already undergone a rude violation.

The office, and all the purlieus of the office, were occupied by a dense

crowd. That, perhaps, was always the case, more or less, at this time of

day; but at present the crowd was manifestly possessed by a more than

ordinary interest; and there was a unity in this possessing interest; all

were talking on the same subject, the case in which Agnes had so recently

appeared in some character or other; and by this time it became but too

certain in the character of an accused person. Pity was the prevailing

sentiment amongst the mob; but the opinions varied much as to the probable

criminality of the prisoner. I made my way into the office. The presiding

magistrates had all retired for the afternoon, and would not reassemble

until eight o'clock in the evening. Some clerks only or officers of the

court remained, who were too much harassed by applications for various forms

and papers connected with the routine of public business, and by other

official duties which required signatures or attestations, to find much

leisure for answering individual questions. Some, however, listened with a

marked air of attention to my earnest request for the circumstantial details

of the case, but finally referred me to a vast folio volume, in which were

entered all the charges, of whatever nature, involving any serious

tendency--in fact, all that exceeded a misdemeanour--in the regular

chronological succession according to which they came before the magistrate.

Here, in this vast calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the _aliases_ or

cant designations of ruffians--prostitutes--felons, stood the description,

at full length, Christian and surnames all properly registered, of my

Agnes--of her whose very name had always sounded to my ears like the very

echo of mountain innocence, purity, and pastoral simplicity. Here in another

column stood the name and residence of her accuser. I shall call him

_Barratt_, for that was amongst his names, and a name by which he had at one

period of his infamous life been known to the public, though not his

principal name, or the one which he had thought fit to assume at this era.

James Barratt, then, as I shall here call him, was a haberdasher--keeping a

large and conspicuous shop in a very crowded and what was then considered a

fashionable part of the city. The charge was plain and short. Did I live to

read it? It accused Agnes M---- of having on that morning secreted in her

muff, and feloniously carried away, a valuable piece of Mechlin lace, the

property of James Barratt. And the result of the first examination was thus

communicated in a separate column, written in red ink--'Remanded to the

second day after to-morrow for final examination.' Everything in this

sin-polluted register was in manuscript; but at night the records of each

day were regularly transferred to a printed journal, enlarged by comments

and explanatory descriptions from some one of the clerks, whose province it

was to furnish this intelligence to the public journals. On that same night,

therefore, would go forth to the world such an account of the case, and such

a description of my wife's person, as would inevitably summon to the next

exhibition of her misery, as by special invitation and advertisement, the

whole world of this vast metropolis--the idle, the curious, the brutal, the

hardened amateur in spectacles of wo, and the benign philanthropist who

frequents such scenes with the purpose of carrying alleviation to their

afflictions. All alike, whatever might be their motives or the spirit of

their actions, would rush (as to some grand festival of curiosity and

sentimental luxury) to this public martyrdom of my innocent wife.

Meantime, what was the first thing to be done? Manifestly, to see Agnes:

her account of the affair might suggest the steps to be taken. Prudence,

therefore, at any rate, prescribed this course; and my heart would not have

tolerated any other. I applied, therefore, at once, for information as to

the proper mode of effecting this purpose without delay. What was my horror

at learning that, by a recent regulation of all the police offices, under

the direction of the public minister who presided over that department of

the national administration, no person could be admitted to an interview

with any accused party during the progress of the official examinations--or,

in fact, until the final committal of the prisoner for trial. This rule was

supposed to be attended by great public advantages, and had rarely been

relaxed--never, indeed, without a special interposition of the police

minister authorising its suspension. But was the exclusion absolute and

universal? Might not, at least, a female servant, simply as the bearer of

such articles as were indispensable to female delicacy and comfort, have

access to her mistress? No; the exclusion was total and unconditional. To

argue the point was manifestly idle; the subordinate officers had no

discretion in the matter; nor, in fact, had any other official person,

whatever were his rank, except the supreme one; and to him I neither had any

obvious means of introduction, nor (in case of obtaining such an

introduction) any chance of success; for the spirit of the rule, I foresaw

it would be answered, applied with especial force to cases like the present.

Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation,

superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that

was now opening its artillery upon me--for misery has a privilege, and

everywhere is felt to be a holy thing--had combined to procure for me some

attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given with

precision, explanations made at length, and anxiety shown to satisfy my

inquiries. But this could not last; the inexorable necessities of public

business coming back in a torrent upon the official people after this

momentary interruption, forbade them to indulge any further consideration

for an individual case, and I saw that I must not stay any longer. I was

rapidly coming to be regarded as a hindrance to the movement of public

affairs; and the recollection that I might again have occasion for some

appeal to these men in their official characters, admonished me not to abuse

my privilege of the moment. After returning thanks, therefore, for the

disposition shown to oblige me, I retired.

Slowly did I and Hannah retrace our steps. Hannah sustained, in the tone of

her spirits, by the extremity of her anger, a mood of feeling which I did

not share. Indignation was to her in the stead of consolation and hope. I,

for my part, could not seek even a momentary shelter from my tempestuous

affliction in that temper of mind. The man who could accuse my Agnes, and

accuse her of such a crime, I felt to be a monster; and in my thoughts he

was already doomed to a bloody atonement (atonement! alas! what atonement!)

whenever the time arrived that _her_ cause would not be prejudiced, or the

current of public feeling made to turn in his favour by investing him with

the semblance of an injured or suffering person. So much was settled in my

thoughts with the stern serenity of a decree issuing from a judgment-seat.

But that gave no relief, no shadow of relief, to the misery which was now

consuming me. Here was an end, in one hour, to the happiness of a life. In

one hour it had given way, root and branch--had melted like so much

frost-work, or a pageant of vapoury exhalations. In a moment, in the

twinkling of an eye, and yet for ever and ever, I comprehended the total

ruin of my situation. The case, as others might think, was yet in suspense;

and there was room enough for very rational hopes, especially where there

was an absolute certainty of innocence. Total freedom from all doubt on that

point seemed to justify almost more than hopes. This might be said, and most

people would have been more or less consoled by it. I was not. I felt as

certain, as irredeemably, as hopelessly certain of the final results as

though I had seen the record in the books of heaven. 'Hope nothing,' I said

to myself; 'think not of hope in this world, but think only how best to walk

steadily, and not to reel like a creature wanting discourse of reason, or

incapable of religious hopes under the burden which it has pleased God to

impose, and which in this life cannot be shaken off. The countenance of man

is made to look upward and to the skies. Thither also point henceforwards

your heart and your thoughts. Never again let your thoughts travel

earthwards. Settle them on the heavens, to which your Agnes is already

summoned. The call is clear, and not to be mistaken. Little in _her_ fate

now depends upon you, or upon anything that man can do. Look, therefore, to

yourself; see that you make not shipwreck of your heavenly freight because

your earthly freight is lost; and miss not, by any acts of wild and

presumptuous despair, that final reunion with your Agnes, which can only be

descried through vistas that open through the heavens.'

Such were the thoughts, thoughts often made audible, which came

spontaneously like oracles from afar, as I strode homewards with Hannah

by my side. Her, meantime, I seemed to hear; for at times I seemed and I

intended to answer her. But answer her I did not; for not ten words of

all that she said did I really and consciously hear. How I went through

that night is more entirely a blank in my memory, more entirely a

chapter of chaos and the confusion of chaos, than any other passage the

most impressive in my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at

intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or

pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a

momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this

enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation as

rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the

momentary trance--this fugitive beguilement of my wo--had been conceded

by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing the pang, by

thus forcing it into a stronger relief through the insidious peace

preceding it. It is a well-known and most familiar experience to all the

sons and daughters of affliction, that under no circumstances is the

piercing, lancinating torment of a recent calamity felt so keenly as in

the first moments of awaking in the morning from the night's slumbers.

Just at the very instant when the clouds of sleep, and the whole

fantastic illusions of dreaminess are dispersing, just as the realities

of life are re-assuming their steadfast forms--re-shaping

themselves--and settling anew into those fixed relations which they are

to preserve throughout the waking hours; in that particular crisis of

transition from the unreal to the real, the wo which besieges the brain

and the life-springs at the heart rushes in afresh amongst the other

crowd of realities, and has at the moment of restoration literally the

force and liveliness of a new birth--the very same pang, and no whit

feebler, as that which belonged to it when it was first made known.

From the total hush of oblivion which had buried it and sealed it up, as

it were, during the sleeping hours, it starts into sudden life on our

first awaking, and is to all intents and purposes a new and not an old

affliction--one which brings with it the old original shock which

attended its first annunciation.

That night--that first night of separation from my wife--_how_ it

passed, I know not; I know only _that_ it passed, I being in our common

bedchamber, that holiest of all temples that are consecrated to human

attachments whenever the heart is pure of man and woman and the love is

strong--I being in that bedchamber, once the temple now the sepulchre of

our happiness,--I there, and my wife--my innocent wife--in a dungeon. As

the morning light began to break, somebody knocked at the door; it was

Hannah; she took my hand--misery levels all feeble distinctions of

station, sex, age--she noticed my excessive feverishness, and gravely

remonstrated with me upon the necessity there was that I should maintain

as much health as possible for the sake of 'others,' if not for myself.

She then brought me some tea, which refreshed me greatly; for I had

tasted nothing at all beyond a little water since the preceding

morning's breakfast. This refreshment seemed to relax and thaw the stiff

frozen state of cheerless, rayless despair in which I had passed the

night; I became susceptible of consolation--that consolation which lies

involved in kindness and gentleness of manner--if not susceptible more

than before of any positive hope. I sat down; and, having no witnesses

to my weakness but this kind and faithful woman, I wept, and I found a

relief in tears; and she, with the ready sympathy of woman, wept along

with me. All at once she ventured upon the circumstances (so far as she

had been able to collect them from the reports of those who had been

present at the examination) of our calamity. There was little indeed

either to excite or to gratify any interest or curiosity separate from

the _personal_ interest inevitably connected with a case to which there

were two such parties as a brutal, sensual, degraded ruffian, on one

side in character of accuser, and on the other as defendant, a meek

angel of a woman, timid and fainting from the horrors of her situation,

and under the licentious gaze of the crowd--yet, at the same time, bold

in conscious innocence, and in the very teeth of the suspicions which

beset her, winning the good opinion, as well as the good wishes of all

who saw her. There had been at this first examination little for her to

say beyond the assigning her name, age, and place of abode; and here it

was fortunate that her own excellent good sense concurred with her

perfect integrity and intuitive hatred of all indirect or crooked

courses in prompting her to an undisguised statement of the simple

truth, without a momentary hesitation or attempt either at evasion or

suppression. With equally good intentions in similar situations many a

woman has seriously injured her cause by slight evasions of the entire

truth, where nevertheless her only purpose has been the natural and

ingenuous one of seeking to save the reputation untainted of a name

which she felt to have been confided to her keeping. The purpose was an

honourable one, but erroneously pursued. Agnes fell into no such error.

She answered calmly, simply, and truly, to every question put by the

magistrates; and beyond _that_ there was little opportunity for her to

speak; the whole business of this preliminary examination being confined

to the deposition of the accuser as to the circumstances under which he

alleged the act of felonious appropriation to have taken place. These

circumstances were perfectly uninteresting, considered in themselves;

but amongst them was one which to us had the most shocking interest,

from the absolute proof thus furnished of a deep-laid plot against

Agnes. But for this one circumstance there would have been a possibility

that the whole had originated in error--error growing out of and acting

upon a nature originally suspicious, and confirmed perhaps by an

unfortunate experience. And in proportion as that was possible, the

chances increased that the accuser might, as the examinations advanced,

and the winning character of the accused party began to develop itself,

begin to see his error, and to retract his own over-hasty suspicions.

But now we saw at a glance that for this hope there was no countenance

whatever, since one solitary circumstance sufficed to establish a

conspiracy. The deposition bore--that the lace had been secreted and

afterwards detected in a muff; now it was a fact as well-known to both

of us as the fact of Agnes having gone out at all--that she had laid

aside her winter's dress for the first time on this genial sunny day.

Muff she had not at the time, nor could have had appropriately from the

style of her costume in other respects. What was the effect upon us of

this remarkable discovery! Of course there died at once the hope of any

abandonment by the prosecutor of his purpose; because here was proof of

a predetermined plot. This hope died at once; but then, as it was one

which never had presented itself to my mind, I lost nothing by which I

had ever been solaced. On the other hand, it will be obvious that a new

hope at the same time arose to take its place, viz., the reasonable one

that by this single detection, if once established, we might raise a

strong presumption of conspiracy, and moreover that, as a leading fact

or clue, it might serve to guide us in detecting others. Hannah was

sanguine in this expectation; and for a moment her hopes were

contagiously exciting to mine. But the hideous despondency which in my

mind had settled upon the whole affair from the very first, the

superstitious presentiment I had of a total blight brooding over the

entire harvest of my life and its promises (tracing itself originally, I

am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of the Hungarian

woman)--denied me steady light, anything--all in short but a wandering

ray of hope. It was right, of course, nay, indispensable, that the

circumstance of the muff should be strongly insisted upon at the next

examination, pressed against the prosecutor, and sifted to the

uttermost. An able lawyer would turn this to a triumphant account; and

it would be admirable as a means of pre-engaging the good opinion as

well as the sympathies of the public in behalf of the prisoner. But, for

its final effect--my conviction remained, not to be shaken, that all

would be useless; that our doom had gone forth, and was irrevocable.

Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as

usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems

wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses in

the midst of such mighty overthrows and such interruption to the courses

of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations. Why

should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural world

be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular and

anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the

mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet

ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will

be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonising punishment, has

derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the day

would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was _but_ a

day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness must and

would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual, and shine

with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what _had_ indeed

suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but would then have

ceased to suffer. 'La Journée,' said Damien,

'La journée sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my day also,

my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will have an end;

that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so long as I thought at

all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching when thinking in any shape

would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,

to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts

ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the

administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its

inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and

liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting

themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a

century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the

French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied to

those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to

approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself had

direct personal cognizance of various cases in which bribery had been

applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that perhaps

Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular passport

through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation been of

somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should have been

found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness of new-born

vigour, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular irritation it

excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one particular minister

new to the possession of power, anxious to distinguish himself, proud of

his creative functions within the range of his office, and very

sensitively jealous on the point of opposition to his mandates. Vain,

therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and,

in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some

of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not

think it prudent to proclaim my character beforehand as one who tampered

with such means, and thus to arm against myself those jealousies in

official people which it was so peculiarly important that I should keep

asleep.

All that day, however, I lingered about the avenues and vast courts in

the precincts of the prison, and near one particular wing of the

building, which had been pointed out to me by a jailer as the section

allotted to those who were in the situation of Agnes; that is, waiting

their final commitment for trial. The building generally he could

indicate with certainty, but he professed himself unable to indicate the

particular part of it which 'the young woman brought in on the day

previous' would be likely to occupy; consequently he could not point out

the window from which her cell (her '_cell!_' what a word!) would be

lighted. 'But, master,' he went on to say, 'I would advise nobody to try

that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at the same time

used a gesture so indicative of private understanding, that I at once

apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had altogether

misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at any mode of

communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted all _that_

was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes it was perfectly

hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither here nor there.

You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say; and where a gentleman

acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as such, I'm not the man to

go and split upon him for a word. To be sure it's quite nat'ral that a

gentleman--put case that a young woman is his fancy woman--it's nothing

but nat'ral that he should want to get her out of such an old rat-hole

as this, where many's the fine-timbered creature, both he and she, that

has lain to rot, and has never got out of the old trap at all, first or

last'----'How so?' I interrupted him; 'surely they don't detain the

corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you--put case that he or that she

should die in this rat-trap before sentence is past, why then the prison

counts them as its own children, and buries them in its own chapel--that

old stack of pigeon-holes that you see up yonder to the right hand.' So,

then, after all, thought I, if my poor Agnes should, in her desolation

and solitary confinement to these wretched walls, find her frail

strength give way--should the moral horrors of her situation work their

natural effect upon her health, and she should chance to die within this

dungeon, here within this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection,

and in that case her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever.

The man, who perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though

tainted by the mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to his

situation, seemed to guess at the character of my ruminations by the

change in my countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so

much trouble'; and it seemed to increase his respect for me that this

trouble should be directed to the case of a woman, for he appeared to

have a manly sense of the peculiar appeal made to the honour and

gallantry of man, by the mere general fact of the feebleness and the

dependence of woman. I looked at him more attentively in consequence of

the feeling tone in which he now spoke, and was surprised that I had not

more particularly noticed him before; he was a fine-looking, youngish

man, with a bold Robin-hood style of figure and appearance; and, morally

speaking, he was absolutely transfigured to my eyes by the effect worked

upon him for the moment, through the simple calling up of his better

nature. However, he recurred to his cautions about the peril in a legal

sense of tampering with the windows, bolts, and bars of the old decaying

prison; which, in fact, precisely according to the degree in which its

absolute power over its prisoners was annually growing less and less,

grew more and more jealous of its own reputation, and punished the

attempts to break loose with the more severity, in exact proportion as

they were the more tempting by the chances of success. I persisted in

disowning any schemes of the sort, and especially upon the ground of

their hopelessness. But this, on the other hand, was a ground that in

his inner thoughts he treated with scorn; and I could easily see that,

with a little skilful management of opportunity, I might, upon occasion,

draw from him all the secrets he knew as to the special points of

infirmity in this old ruinous building. For the present, and until it

should certainly appear that there was some use to be derived from this

species of knowledge, I forbore to raise superfluous suspicions by

availing myself further of his communicative disposition. Taking,

however, the precaution of securing his name, together with his

particular office and designation in the prison, I parted from him as if

to go home, but in fact to resume my sad roamings up and down the

precincts of the jail.

What made these precincts much larger than otherwise they would have

been, was the circumstance that, by a usage derived from older days,

both criminal prisoners and those who were prisoners for debt, equally

fell under the custody of this huge caravanserai for the indifferent

reception of crime, of misdemeanour, and of misfortune. And those who

came under the two first titles were lodged here through all stages of

their connection with public justice; alike when mere objects of vague

suspicion to the police, when under examination upon a specific charge,

when fully committed for trial, when convicted and under sentence,

awaiting the execution of that sentence, and, in a large proportion of

cases, even through their final stage of punishment, when it happened to

be of any nature compatible with indoor confinement. Hence it arose that

the number of those who haunted the prison gates with or without a title

to admission was enormous; all the relatives, or more properly the

acquaintances and connections of the criminal population within the

prison, being swelled by all the families of needy debtors who came

daily either to offer the consolation of their society, or to diminish

their common expenditure by uniting their slender establishments. One of

the rules applied to the management of this vast multitude that were

every day candidates for admission was, that to save the endless trouble

as well as risk, perhaps, of opening and shutting the main gates to

every successive arrival, periodic intervals were fixed for the

admission by wholesale: and as these periods came round every two hours,

it would happen at many parts of the day that vast crowds accumulated

waiting for the next opening of the gate. These crowds were assembled in

two or three large outer courts, in which also were many stalls and

booths, kept there upon some local privilege of ancient inheritance, or

upon some other plea made good by gifts or bribes--some by Jews and

others by Christians, perhaps equally Jewish. Superadded to these

stationary elements of this miscellaneous population, were others, drawn

thither by pure motives of curiosity, so that altogether an almost

permanent mob was gathered together in these courts; and amid this mob

it was,--from I know not what definite motive, partly because I thought

it probable that amongst these people I should hear the case of Agnes

peculiarly the subject of conversation; and so, in fact, it did really

happen,--but partly, and even more, I believe, because I now awfully

began to shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and distraction of

thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two days. Feverish I

had been from the first,--and from bad to worse, in such a case, was, at

any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also amongst this crowd of

the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the desponding, and the

dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger body of contagion

lurking than accorded to their mere numerical expectations. There was at

that season a very extensive depopulation going on in some quarters of

this great metropolis, and in other cities of the same empire, by means

of a very malignant typhus. This fever is supposed to be the peculiar

product of jails; and though it had not as yet been felt as a scourge

and devastator of this particular jail, or at least the consequent

mortality had been hitherto kept down to a moderate amount, yet it was

highly probable that a certain quantity of contagion, much beyond the

proportion of other popular assemblages less uniformly wretched in their

composition, was here to be found all day long; and doubtless my excited

state, and irritable habit of body, had offered a peculiar

predisposition that favoured the rapid development of this contagion.

However this might be, the result was, that on the evening of the second

day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison (consequently

the night preceding the second public examination of Agnes), I was

attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury, that before morning I

had lost all command of my intellectual faculties. For some weeks I

became a pitiable maniac, and in every sense the wreck of my former

self; and seven entire weeks, together with the better half of an eighth

week, had passed over my head whilst I lay unconscious of time and its

dreadful freight of events, excepting in so far as my disordered brain,

by its fantastic coinages, created endless mimicries and mockeries of

these events--less substantial, but oftentimes less afflicting, or less

agitating. It would have been well for me had my destiny decided that I

was not to be recalled to this world of wo. But I had no such happiness

in store. I recovered, and through twenty and eight years my groans

have recorded the sorrow I feel that I did.

* * * * *

I shall not rehearse circumstantially, and point by point, the sad

unfolding, as it proceeded through successive revelations to me, of all

which had happened during my state of physical incapacity. When I first

became aware that my wandering senses had returned to me, and knew, by the

cessation of all throbbings, and the unutterable pains that had so long

possessed my brain, that I was now returning from the gates of death, a sad

confusion assailed me as to some indefinite cloud of evil that had been

hovering over me at the time when I first fell into a state of

insensibility. For a time I struggled vainly to recover the lost connection

of my thoughts, and I endeavoured ineffectually to address myself to sleep.

I opened my eyes, but found the glare of light painful beyond measure.

Strength, however, it seemed to me that I had, and more than enough, to

raise myself out of bed. I made the attempt, but fell back, almost giddy

with the effort. At the sound of the disturbance which I had thus made, a

woman whom I did not know came from behind a curtain, and spoke to me.

Shrinking from any communication with a stranger, especially one whose

discretion I could not estimate in making discoveries to me with the

requisite caution, I asked her simply what o'clock it was.

'Eleven in the forenoon,' she replied.

'And what day of the month?'

'The second,' was her brief answer.

I felt almost a sense of shame in adding--'The second! but of what month?'

'Of June,' was the startling rejoinder.

On the 8th of April I had fallen ill, and it was now actually the 2nd of

June. Oh! sickening calculation! revolting register of hours! for in that

same moment which brought back this one recollection, perhaps by steadying

my brain, rushed back in a torrent all the other dreadful remembrances of

the period, and now the more so, because, though the event was still

uncertain as regarded my knowledge, it must have become dreadfully certain

as regarded the facts of the case, and the happiness of all who were

concerned. Alas! one little circumstance too painfully assured me that this

event had not been a happy one. Had Agnes been restored to her liberty and

her home, where would she have been found but watching at my bedside? That

too certainly I knew, and the inference was too bitter to support.

* * * * *

On this same day, some hours afterwards, upon Hannah's return from the city,

I received from her, and heard with perfect calmness, the whole sum of evil

which awaited me. Little Francis--she took up her tale at that point--'was

with God:' so she expressed herself. He had died of the same fever which had

attacked me--had died and been buried nearly five weeks before. Too probably

he had caught the infection from me. Almost--such are the caprices of human

feeling--almost I could have rejoiced that this young memorial of my

vanished happiness had vanished also. It gave me a pang, nevertheless, that

the grave should thus have closed upon him before I had seen his fair little

face again. But I steeled my heart to hear worse things than this. Next she

went on to inform me that already, on the first or second day of our

calamity, she had taken upon herself, without waiting for authority, on

observing the rapid approaches of illness in me, and arguing the state of

helplessness which would follow, to write off at once a summons in the most

urgent terms to the brother of my wife. This gentleman, whom I shall call

Pierpoint, was a high-spirited, generous young man as I have ever known.

When I say that he was a sportsman, that at one season of the year he did

little else than pursue his darling amusement of fox-hunting, for which

indeed he had almost a maniacal passion--saying this, I shall already have

prejudged him in the opinions of many, who fancy all such persons the slaves

of corporal enjoyments. But, with submission, the truth lies the other way.

According to my experience, people of these habits have their bodies more

than usually under their command, as being subdued by severe exercise; and

their minds, neither better nor worse on an average than those of their

neighbours, are more available from being so much more rarely clogged by

morbid habits in that uneasy yoke-fellow of the intellectual part--the body.

He at all events was a man to justify in his own person this way of

thinking; for he was a man not only of sound, but even of bold and energetic

intellect, and in all moral respects one whom any man might feel proud to

call his friend. This young man, Pierpoint, without delay obeyed the

summons; and on being made acquainted with what had already passed, the

first step he took was to call upon Barratt, and without further question

than what might ascertain his identity, he proceeded to inflict upon him a

severe horsewhipping. A worse step on his sister's account he could not have

taken. Previously to this the popular feeling had run strongly against

Barratt, but now its unity was broken. A new element was introduced into the

question: Democratic feelings were armed against this outrage; gentlemen and

nobles, it was said, thought themselves not amenable to justice; and again,

the majesty of the law was offended at this intrusion upon an affair already

under solemn course of adjudication. Everything, however, passes away under

the healing hand of time, and this also faded from the public mind. People

remembered also that he was a brother, and in that character, at any rate,

had a right to some allowances for his intemperance; and what quickened the

oblivion of the affair was, which in itself was sufficiently strange, that

Barratt did not revive the case in the public mind by seeking legal

reparation for his injuries. It was, however, still matter of regret that

Pierpoint should have indulged himself in this movement of passion, since

undoubtedly it broke and disturbed the else uniform stream of public

indignation by investing the original aggressor with something like the

character of an injured person; and therefore with some set-off to plead

against his own wantonness of malice: his malice might now assume the nobler

aspect of revenge.

Thus far, in reporting the circumstances, Hannah had dallied--thus far I

had rejoiced that she dallied, with the main burden of the wo; but now

there remained nothing to dally with any longer--and she rushed along in

her narrative, hurrying to tell--I hurrying to hear. A second, a third

examination had ensued, then a final committal--all this within a week.

By that time all the world was agitated with the case; literally not the

city only, vast as that city was, but the nation was convulsed and

divided into parties upon the question, Whether the prosecution were one

of mere malice or not? The very government of the land was reported to

be equally interested, and almost equally divided in opinion. In this

state of public feeling came the trial. Image to yourself, oh reader,

whosoever you are, the intensity of the excitement which by that time

had arisen in all people to be spectators of the scene--then image to

yourself the effect of all this, a perfect consciousness that in herself

as a centre was settled the whole mighty interest of the

exhibition--that interest again of so dubious and mixed a

character--sympathy in some with mere misfortune--sympathy in others

with female frailty and guilt, not perhaps founded upon an absolute

unwavering belief in her innocence even amongst those who were most loud

and positive as partisans in affirming it,--and then remember that all

this hideous scenical display and notoriety settled upon one whose very

nature, constitutionally timid, recoiled with the triple agony of

womanly shame--of matronly dignity--of insulted innocence, from every

mode and shape of public display. Combine all these circumstances and

elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of my

poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by recurring

to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early ages of

Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or Verona to

'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery--she to fight!

the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young martyr _had_ a

fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that cruel mockery)

fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have faced

perhaps--the combat with the instincts of her own shrinking, trembling,

fainting nature. Such a fight had my Agnes to maintain; and at that time

there was a large party of gentlemen in whom the gentlemanly instinct

was predominant, and who felt so powerfully the cruel indignities of her

situation, that they made a public appeal in her behalf. One thing, and

a strong one, which they said, was this:--'We all talk and move in this

case as if, because the question appears doubtful to some people, and

the accused party to some people wears a doubtful character, it would

follow that she therefore had in reality a mixed character composed in

joint proportions of the best and the worst that is imputed to her. But

let us not forget that this mixed character belongs not to her, but to

the infirmity of our human judgments--_they_ are mixed--_they_ are

dubious--but she is not--she is, or she is not, guilty--there is no

middle case--and let us consider for a single moment, that if this young

lady (as many among us heartily believe) _is_ innocent, then and upon

that supposition let us consider how cruel we should all think the

public exposure which aggravates the other injuries (as in that case

they must be thought) to which her situation exposes her.' They went on

to make some suggestions for the officers of the court in preparing the

arrangements for the trial, and some also for the guidance of the

audience, which showed the same generous anxiety for sparing the

feelings of the prisoner. If these did not wholly succeed in repressing

the open avowal of coarse and brutal curiosity amongst the intensely

vulgar, at least they availed to diffuse amongst the neutral and

indifferent part of the public a sentiment of respect and forbearance

which, emanating from high quarters, had a very extensive influence upon

most of what met the eye or the ear of my poor wife. She, on the day of

trial, was supported by her brother; and by that time she needed support

indeed. I was reported to be dying; her little son was dead; neither had

she been allowed to see him. Perhaps these things, by weaning her from

all further care about life, might have found their natural effect in

making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue.

And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering

sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the

hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the

deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry

light--sweet and woful to remember. Then----but why linger? I hurry to

the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a jury or a bench of

judges, I do not say--having determined, from the beginning, to give no

hint of the land in which all these events happened; neither is that of

the slightest consequence. Guilty she was pronounced: but sentence at

that time was deferred. Ask me not, I beseech you, about the muff or

other circumstances inconsistent with the hostile evidence. These

circumstances had the testimony, you will observe, of my own servants

only; nay, as it turned out, of one servant exclusively: _that_

naturally diminished their value. And, on the other side, evidence was

arrayed, perjury was suborned, that would have wrecked a wilderness of

simple truth trusting to its own unaided forces. What followed? Did

this judgment of the court settle the opinion of the public? Opinion of

the public! Did it settle the winds? Did it settle the motion of the

Atlantic? Wilder, fiercer, and louder grew the cry against the wretched

accuser: mighty had been the power over the vast audience of the

dignity, the affliction, the perfect simplicity, and the Madonna beauty

of the prisoner. That beauty so childlike, and at the same time so

saintly, made, besides, so touching in its pathos by means of the

abandonment--the careless abandonment and the infinite desolation of her

air and manner--would of itself, and without further aid, have made many

converts. Much more was done by the simplicity of her statements, and

the indifference with which she neglected to improve any strong points

in her own favour--the indifference, as every heart perceived, of

despairing grief. Then came the manners on the hostile side--the haggard

consciousness of guilt, the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut

which sought to dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses,

assembled on that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of

conscious uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising that the storm

of popular opinion made itself heard with a louder and a louder sound.

The government itself began to be disturbed; the ministers of the

sovereign were agitated; and, had no menaces been thrown out, it was

generally understood that they would have given way to the popular

voice, now continually more distinct and clamorous. In the midst of all

this tumult obscure murmurs began to arise that Barratt had practised

the same or similar villainies in former instances. One case in

particular was beginning to be whispered about, which at once threw a

light upon the whole affair: it was the case of a young and very

beautiful married woman, who had been on the very brink of a catastrophe

such as had befallen my own wife, when some seasonable interference, of

what nature was not known, had critically delivered her. This case arose

'like a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand,' then spread and

threatened to burst in tempest upon the public mind, when all at once,

more suddenly even than it had arisen, it was hushed up, or in some way

disappeared. But a trifling circumstance made it possible to trace this

case:--in after times, when means offered, but unfortunately no

particular purpose of good, nor any purpose, in fact, beyond that of

curiosity, it _was_ traced: and enough was soon ascertained to have

blown to fragments any possible conspiracy emanating from this Barratt,

had that been of any further importance. However, in spite of all that

money or art could effect, a sullen growl continued to be heard amongst

the populace of villainies many and profound that had been effected or

attempted by this Barratt; and accordingly, much in the same way as was

many years afterwards practised in London, when a hosier had caused

several young people to be prosecuted to death for passing forged

bank-notes, the wrath of the people showed itself in marking the shop

for vengeance upon any favourable occasion offering through fire or

riots, and in the meantime in deserting it. These things had been going

on for some time when I awoke from my long delirium; but the effect they

had produced upon a weak and obstinate and haughty government, or at

least upon the weak and obstinate and haughty member of the government

who presided in the police administration, was, to confirm and rivet the

line of conduct which had been made the object of popular denunciation.

More energetically, more scornfully, to express that determination of

flying in the face of public opinion and censure, four days before my

awakening, Agnes had been brought up to receive her sentence. On that

same day (nay, it was said in that same hour), petitions, very

numerously signed, and various petitions from different ranks, different

ages, different sexes, were carried up to the throne, praying, upon

manifold grounds, but all noticing the extreme doubtfulness of the case,

for an unconditional pardon. By whose advice or influence, it was

guessed easily, though never exactly ascertained, these petitions were

unanimously, almost contemptuously, rejected. And to express the

contempt of public opinion as powerfully as possible, Agnes was

sentenced by the court, reassembled in full pomp, order, and ceremonial

costume, to a punishment the severest that the laws allowed--viz. hard

labour for ten years. The people raged more than ever; threats public

and private were conveyed to the ears of the minister chiefly concerned

in the responsibility, and who had indeed, by empty and ostentatious

talking, assumed that responsibility to himself in a way that was

perfectly needless.

Thus stood matters when I awoke to consciousness: and this was the fatal

journal of the interval--interval so long as measured by my fierce

calendar of delirium--so brief measured by the huge circuit of events

which it embraced, and their mightiness for evil. Wrath, wrath

immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like a

cancer. The worst had come. And the thing which kills a man for

action--the living in two climates at once--a torrid and a frigid

zone--of hope and fear--that was past. Weak--suppose I were for the

moment: I felt that a day or two might bring back my strength. No

miserable tremors of hope _now_ shook my nerves: if they shook from that

inevitable rocking of the waters that follows a storm, so much might be

pardoned to the infirmity of a nature that could not lay aside its

fleshly necessities, nor altogether forego its homage to 'these frail

elements,' but which by inspiration already lived within a region where

no voices were heard but the spiritual voices of transcendant

passions--of

'Wrongs unrevenged, and insults unredress'd.'

Six days from that time I was well--well and strong. I rose from bed; I

bathed; I dressed: dressed as if I were a bridegroom. And that _was_ in

fact a great day in my life. I was to see Agnes. Oh! yes: permission had

been obtained from the lordly minister that I should see my wife. Is it

possible? Can such condescensions exist? Yes: solicitations from ladies,

eloquent notes wet with ducal tears, these had won from the thrice

radiant secretary, redolent of roseate attar, a countersign to some

order or other, by which I--yes I--under license of a fop, and

supervision of a jailer--was to see and for a time to converse with my

own wife.

The hour appointed for the first day's interview was eight o'clock in

the evening. On the outside of the jail all was summer light and

animation. The sports of children in the streets of mighty cities are

but sad, and too painfully recall the circumstances of freedom and

breezy nature that are not there. But still the pomp of glorious summer,

and the presence, 'not to be put by,' of the everlasting light, that is

either always present, or always dawning--these potent elements

impregnate the very city life, and the dim reflex of nature which is

found at the bottom of well-like streets, with more solemn powers to

move and to soothe in summer. I struck upon the prison gates, the first

among multitudes waiting to strike. Not because we struck, but because

the hour had sounded, suddenly the gate opened; and in we streamed. I,

as a visitor for the first time, was immediately distinguished by the

jailers, whose glance of eye is fatally unerring. 'Who was it that I

wanted?' At the name a stir of emotion was manifest, even there: the dry

bones stirred and moved: the passions outside had long ago passed to the

interior of this gloomy prison: and not a man but had his hypothesis on

the case; not a man but had almost fought with some comrade (many had

literally fought) about the merits of their several opinions.

If any man had expected a scene at this reunion, he would have been

disappointed. Exhaustion, and the ravages of sorrow, had left to dear

Agnes so little power of animation or of action, that her emotions were

rather to be guessed at, both for kind and for degree, than directly to

have been perceived. She was in fact a sick patient, far gone in an

illness that should properly have confined her to bed; and was as much

past the power of replying to my frenzied exclamations, as a dying

victim of fever of entering upon a strife of argument. In bed, however,

she was not. When the door opened she was discovered sitting at a table

placed against the opposite wall, her head pillowed upon her arms, and

these resting upon the table. Her beautiful long auburn hair had escaped

from its confinement, and was floating over the table and her own

person. She took no notice of the disturbance made by our entrance, did

not turn, did not raise her head, nor make an effort to do so, nor by

any sign whatever intimate that she was conscious of our presence, until

the turnkey in a respectful tone announced me. Upon that a low groan, or

rather a feeble moan, showed that she had become aware of my presence,

and relieved me from all apprehension of causing too sudden a shock by

taking her in my arms. The turnkey had now retired; we were alone. I

knelt by her side, threw my arms about her, and pressed her to my heart.

She drooped her head upon my shoulder, and lay for some time like one

who slumbered; but, alas! not as she had used to slumber. Her breathing,

which had been like that of sinless infancy, was now frightfully short

and quick; she seemed not properly to breathe, but to gasp. This,

thought I, may be sudden agitation, and in that case she will gradually

recover; half an hour will restore her. Wo is me! she did _not_ recover;

and internally I said--she never _will_ recover. The arrows have gone

too deep for a frame so exquisite in its sensibility, and already her

hours are numbered.

At this first visit I said nothing to her about the past; _that_, and

the whole extent to which our communications should go, I left rather to

her own choice. At the second visit, however, upon some word or other

arising which furnished an occasion for touching on this hateful topic,

I pressed her, contrary to my own previous intention, for as full an

account of the fatal event as she could without a distressing effort

communicate. To my surprise she was silent--gloomily--almost it might

have seemed obstinately silent. A horrid thought came into my mind;

could it, might it have been possible that my noble-minded wife, such

she had ever seemed to me, was open to temptations of this nature? Could

it have been that in some moment of infirmity, when her better angel was

away from her side, she had yielded to a sudden impulse of frailty, such

as a second moment for consideration would have resisted, but which

unhappily had been followed by no such opportunity of retrieval? I had

heard of such things. Cases there were in our own times (and not

confined to one nation), when irregular impulses of this sort were known

to have haunted and besieged natures not otherwise ignoble or base. I

ran over some of the names amongst those which were taxed with this

propensity. More than one were the names of people in a technical sense

held noble. That, nor any other consideration, abated my horror. Better,

I said, better (because more compatible with elevation of mind) better

to have committed some bloody act--some murderous act. Dreadful was the

panic I underwent. God pardon the wrong I did; and even now I pray to

him--as though the past thing were a future thing and capable of

change--that he would forbid her for ever to know what was the

derogatory thought I had admitted. I sometimes think, by recollecting a

momentary blush that suffused her marble countenance,--I think--I fear

that she might have read what was fighting in my mind. Yet that would

admit of another explanation. If she did read the very worst, meek

saint! she suffered no complaint or sense of that injury to escape her.

It might, however, be that perception, or it might be that fear which

roused her to an effort that otherwise had seemed too revolting to

undertake. She now rehearsed the whole steps of the affair from first to

last; but the only material addition, which her narrative made to that

which the trial itself had involved, was the following:--On two

separate occasions previous to the last and fatal one, when she had

happened to walk unaccompanied by me in the city, the monster Barratt

had met her in the street. He had probably,--and this was, indeed,

subsequently ascertained,--at first, and for some time afterwards,

mistaken her rank, and had addressed some proposals to her, which, from

the suppressed tone of his speaking, or from her own terror and

surprise, she had not clearly understood; but enough had reached her

alarmed ear to satisfy her that they were of a nature in the last degree

licentious and insulting. Terrified and shocked rather than indignant,

for she too easily presumed the man to be a maniac, she hurried

homewards; and was rejoiced, on first venturing to look round when close

to her own gate, to perceive that the man was not following. There,

however, she was mistaken; for either on this occasion, or on some

other, he had traced her homewards. The last of these rencontres had

occurred just three months before the fatal 6th of April; and if, in any

one instance, Agnes had departed from the strict line of her duty as a

wife, or had shown a defect of judgment, it was at this point--in not

having frankly and fully reported the circumstances to me. On the last

of these occasions I had met her at the garden-gate, and had

particularly remarked that she seemed agitated; and now, at recalling

these incidents, Agnes reminded me that I had noticed that circumstance

to herself, and that she had answered me faithfully as to the main fact.

It was true she had done so; for she had said that she had just met a

lunatic who had alarmed her by fixing his attention upon herself, and

speaking to her in a ruffian manner; and it was also true that she did

sincerely regard him in that light. This led me at the time to construe

the whole affair into a casual collision with some poor maniac escaping

from his keepers, and of no future moment, having passed by without

present consequences. But had she, instead of thus reporting her own

erroneous impression, reported the entire circumstances of the case, I

should have given them a very different interpretation. Affection for

me, and fear to throw me needlessly into a quarrel with a man of

apparently brutal and violent nature--these considerations, as too often

they do with the most upright wives, had operated to check Agnes in the

perfect sincerity of her communications. She had told nothing _but_ the

truth--only, and fatally it turned out for us both, she had not told the

_whole_ truth. The very suppression, to which she had reconciled herself

under the belief that thus she was providing for my safety and her own

consequent happiness, had been the indirect occasion of ruin to both. It

was impossible to show displeasure under such circumstances, or under

any circumstances, to one whose self-reproaches were at any rate too

bitter; but certainly, as a general rule, every conscientious woman

should resolve to consider her husband's honour in the first case, and

far before all other regards whatsoever; to make this the first, the

second, the third law of her conduct, and his personal safety but the

fourth or fifth. Yet women, and especially when the interests of

children are at stake upon their husband's safety, rarely indeed are

able to take this Roman view of their duties.

To return to the narrative.--Agnes had not, nor could have, the most

remote suspicion of this Barratt's connection with the shop which she

had not accidentally entered; and the sudden appearance of this wretch

it was, at the very moment of finding herself charged with so vile and

degrading an offence, that contributed most of all to rob her of her

natural firmness, by suddenly revealing to her terrified heart the depth

of the conspiracy which thus yawned like a gulf below her. And not only

had this sudden horror, upon discovering a guilty design in what before

had seemed accident, and links uniting remote incidents which else

seemed casual and disconnected, greatly disturbed and confused her

manner, which confusion again had become more intense upon her own

consciousness that she _was_ confused, and that her manner was greatly

to her disadvantage; but--which was the worst effect of all, because the

rest could not operate against her, except upon those who were present

to witness it, whereas this was noted down and recorded--so utterly did

her confusion strip her of all presence of mind, that she did not

consciously notice (and consequently could not protest against at the

moment when it was most important to do so, and most natural) the

important circumstance of the muff. This capital objection, therefore,

though dwelt upon and improved to the utmost at the trial, was looked

upon by the judges as an after-thought; and merely because it had not

been seized upon by herself, and urged in the first moments of her

almost incapacitating terror on finding this amongst the circumstances

of the charge against her--as if an ingenuous nature, in the very act of

recoiling with horror from a criminal charge the most degrading, and in

the very instant of discovering, with a perfect rapture of alarm, the

too plausible appearance of probability amongst the circumstances, would

be likely to pause, and with attorney-like dexterity, to pick out the

particular circumstance that might admit of being _proved_ to be false,

when the conscience proclaimed, though in despondence for the result,

that all the circumstances were, as to the use made of them, one tissue

of falsehoods. Agnes, who had made a powerful effort in speaking of the

case at all, found her calmness increase as she advanced; and she now

told me, that in reality there were two discoveries which she made in

the same instant, and not one only, which had disarmed her firmness and

ordinary presence of mind. One I have mentioned--the fact of Barratt,

the proprietor of the shop, being the same person who had in former

instances persecuted her in the street; but the other was even more

alarming--it has been said already that it was _not_ a pure matter of

accident that she had visited this particular shop. In reality, that

nursery-maid, of whom some mention has been made above, and in terms

expressing the suspicion with which even then I regarded her, had

persuaded her into going thither by some representations which Agnes had

already ascertained to be altogether unwarranted. Other presumptions

against this girl's fidelity crowded dimly upon my wife's mind at the

very moment of finding her eyes thus suddenly opened. And it was not

five minutes after her first examination, and in fact five minutes after

it had ceased to be of use to her, that she remembered another

circumstance which now, when combined with the sequel, told its own

tale;--the muff had been missed some little time before the 6th of

April. Search had been made for it; but, the particular occasion which

required it having passed off, this search was laid aside for the

present, in the expectation that it would soon reappear in some corner

of the house before it was wanted: then came the sunny day, which made

it no longer useful, and would perhaps have dismissed it entirely from

the recollection of all parties, until it was now brought back in this

memorable way. The name of my wife was embroidered within, upon the

lining, and it thus became a serviceable link to the hellish cabal

against her. Upon reviewing the circumstances from first to last, upon

recalling the manner of the girl at the time when the muff was missed,

and upon combining the whole with her recent deception, by which she had

misled her poor mistress into visiting this shop, Agnes began to see the

entire truth as to this servant's wicked collusion with Barratt, though,

perhaps, it might be too much to suppose her aware of the unhappy result

to which her collusion tended. All this she saw at a glance when it was

too late, for her first examination was over. This girl, I must add, had

left our house during my illness, and she had afterwards a melancholy

end.

One thing surprised me in all this, Barratt's purpose must manifestly

have been to create merely a terror in my poor wife's mind, and to stop

short of any legal consequences, in order to profit of that panic and

confusion for extorting compliances with his hideous pretensions. It

perplexed me, therefore, that he did not appear to have pursued this

manifestly his primary purpose, the other being merely a mask to conceal

his true ends, and also (as he fancied) a means for effecting them. In

this, however, I had soon occasion to find that I was deceived. He had,

but without the knowledge of Agnes, taken such steps as were then open

to him, for making overtures to her with regard to the terms upon which

he would agree to defeat the charge against her by failing to appear.

But the law had travelled too fast for him and too determinately; so

that, by the time he supposed terror to have operated sufficiently in

favour of his views, it had already become unsafe to venture upon such

explicit proposals as he would otherwise have tried. His own safety was

now at stake, and would have been compromised by any open or written

avowal of the motives on which he had been all along acting. In fact, at

this time he was foiled by the agent in whom he confided; but much more

he had been confounded upon another point--the prodigious interest

manifested by the public. Thus it seems--that, whilst he meditated only

a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one for himself; and finally,

to evade the suspicions which began to arise powerfully as to his true

motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin, had found himself in a

manner obliged to go forward and consummate the ruin of another.

* * * * *

The state of Agnes, as to health and bodily strength, was now becoming

such that I was forcibly warned--whatsoever I meditated doing, to do

quickly. There was this urgent reason for alarm: once conveyed into that

region of the prison in which sentences like hers were executed, it

became hopeless that I could communicate with her again. All intercourse

whatsoever, and with whomsoever, was then placed under the most rigorous

interdict; and the alarming circumstance was, that this transfer was

governed by no settled rules, but might take place at any hour, and

would certainly be precipitated by the slightest violence on my part,

the slightest indiscretion, or the slightest argument for suspicion.

Hard indeed was the part I had to play, for it was indispensable that I

should appear calm and tranquil, in order to disarm suspicions around

me, whilst continually contemplating the possibility that I myself might

be summoned to extremities which I could not so much as trust myself to

name or distinctly to conceive. But thus stood the case; the

Government, it was understood, angered by the public opposition,

resolute for the triumph of what they called 'principle,' had settled

finally that the sentence should be carried into execution. Now that

she, that my Agnes, being the frail wreck that she had become, could

have stood one week of this sentence practically and literally

enforced--was a mere chimera. A few hours probably of the experiment

would have settled that question by dismissing her to the death she

longed for; but because the suffering would be short, was I to stand by

and to witness the degradation--the pollution--attempted to be fastened

upon her. What! to know that her beautiful tresses would be shorn

ignominiously--a felon's dress forced upon her--a vile taskmaster with

authority to----; blistered be the tongue that could go on to utter, in

connection with her innocent name, the vile dishonours which were to

settle upon her person! I, however, and her brother had taken such

resolutions that this result was one barely possible; and yet I sickened

(yes, literally I many times experienced the effect of physical

sickness) at contemplating our own utter childish helplessness, and

recollecting that every night during our seclusion from the prison the

last irreversible step might be taken--and in the morning we might find

a solitary cell, and the angel form that had illuminated it gone where

we could not follow, and leaving behind her the certainty that we should

see her no more. Every night, at the hour of locking up, _she_, at

least, manifestly had a fear that she saw us for the last time; she put

her arms feebly about my neck, sobbed convulsively, and, I believe,

guessed--but, if really so, did not much reprove or quarrel with the

desperate purposes which I struggled with in regard t o her own life.

One thing was quite evident--that to the peace of her latter days, now

hurrying to their close, it was indispensable that she should pass them

undivided from me; and possibly, as was afterwards alleged, when it

became easy to allege anything, some relenting did take place in high

quarters at this time; for upon some medical reports made just now, a

most seasonable indulgence was granted, viz. that Hannah was permitted

to attend her mistress constantly; and it was also felt as a great

alleviation of the horrors belonging to this prison, that candles were

now allowed throughout the nights. But I was warned privately that these

indulgences were with no consent from the police minister; and that

circumstances might soon withdraw the momentary intercession by which we

profited. With this knowledge we could not linger in our preparations;

we had resolved upon accomplishing an escape for Agnes, at whatever risk

or price; the main difficulty was her own extreme feebleness, which

might forbid her to co-operate with us in any degree at the critical

moment; and the main danger was--delay. We pushed forward, therefore, in

our attempts with prodigious energy, and I for my part with an energy

like that of insanity.

* * * * *

The first attempt we made was upon the fidelity to his trust of the

chief jailer. He was a coarse vulgar man, brutal in his manners, but

with vestiges of generosity in his character--though damaged a good deal

by his daily associates. Him we invited to a meeting at a tavern in the

neighbourhood of the prison, disguising our names as too certain to

betray our objects, and baiting our invitation with some hints which we

had ascertained were likely to prove temptations under his immediate

circumstances. He had a graceless young son whom he was most anxious to

wean from his dissolute connections, and to steady, by placing him in

some office of no great responsibility. Upon this knowledge we framed

the terms of our invitation.

These proved to be effectual, as regarded our immediate object of

obtaining an interview of persuasion. The night was wet; and at seven

o'clock, the hour fixed for the interview, we were seated in readiness,

much perplexed to know whether he would take any notice of our

invitation. We had waited three quarters of an hour, when we heard a

heavy lumbering step ascending the stair. The door was thrown open to

its widest extent, and in the centre of the door-way stood a short,

stout-built man, and the very broadest I ever beheld--staring at us with

bold enquiring eyes. His salutation was something to this effect.

'What the hell do you gay fellows want with me? What the blazes is this

humbugging letter about? My son, and be hanged! what do you know of my

son?'

Upon this overture we ventured to request that he would come in and

suffer us to shut the door, which we also locked. Next we produced the

official paper nominating his son to a small place in the customs,--not

yielding much, it was true, in the way of salary, but fortunately, and

in accordance with the known wishes of the father, unburdened with any

dangerous trust.

'Well, I suppose I must say thank ye: but what comes next? What am I to

do to pay the damages?' We informed him that for this particular little

service we asked no return.

'No, no,' said he, 'that'll not go down: that cat'll not jump. I'm not

green enough for that. So, say away--what's the damage?' We then

explained that we had certainly a favour and a great one to ask: ['Ay,

I'll be bound you have,' was his parenthesis:] but that for this we were

prepared to offer a separate remuneration; repeating that with respect

to the little place procured for his son, it had not cost us anything,

and therefore we did really and sincerely decline to receive anything in

return; satisfied that, by this little offering, we had procured the

opportunity of this present interview. At this point we withdrew a

covering from a table upon which we had previously arranged a heap of

gold coins, amounting in value to twelve hundred English guineas: this

being the entire sum which circumstances allowed us to raise on so

sudden a warning: for some landed property that we both had was so

settled and limited, that we could not convert it into money either by

way of sale, loan, or mortgage. This sum, stating to him its exact

amount, we offered to his acceptance, upon the single condition that he

would look aside, or wink hard, or (in whatever way he chose to express

it) would make, or suffer to be made, such facilities for our liberating

a female prisoner as we would point out. He mused: full five minutes he

sat deliberating without opening his lips; At length he shocked us by

saying, in a firm decisive tone that left us little hope of altering his

resolution,--'No: gentlemen, it's a very fair offer, and a good deal of

money for a single prisoner. I think I can guess at the person. It's a

fair offer--fair enough. But, bless your heart! if I were to do the

thing you want----why perhaps another case might be overlooked: but this

prisoner, no: there's too much depending. No, they would turn me out of

my place. Now the place is worth more to me in the long run than what

you offer; though you bid fair enough, if it were only for my time in

it. But look here: in case I can get my son to come into harness, I'm

expecting to get the office for him after I've retired. So I can't do

it. But I'll tell you what: you've been kind to my son: and therefore

I'll not say a word about it. You're safe for me. And so good-night to

you.' Saying which, and standing no further question, he walked

resolutely out of the room and down-stairs.

Two days we mourned over this failure, and scarcely knew which way to

turn for another ray of hope;--on the third morning we received

intelligence that this very jailer had been attacked by the fever,

which, after long desolating the city, had at length made its way into

the prison. In a very few days the jailer was lying without hope of

recovery: and of necessity another person was appointed to fill his

station for the present. This person I had seen, and I liked him less by

much than the one he succeeded: he had an Italian appearance, and he

wore an air of Italian subtlety and dissimulation. I was surprised to

find, on proposing the same service to him, and on the same terms, that

he made no objection whatever, but closed instantly with my offers. In

prudence, however, I had made this change in the articles: a sum equal

to two hundred English guineas, or one-sixth part of the whole money, he

was to receive beforehand as a retaining fee; but the remainder was to

be paid only to himself, or to anybody of his appointing, at the very

moment of our finding the prison gates thrown open to us. He spoke

fairly enough, and seemed to meditate no treachery; nor was there any

obvious or known interest to serve by treachery; and yet I doubted him

grievously.

The night came: it was chosen as a gala night, one of two nights

throughout the year in which the prisoners were allowed to celebrate a

great national event: and in those days of relaxed prison management the

utmost license was allowed to the rejoicing. This indulgence was

extended to prisoners of all classes, though, of course, under more

restrictions with regard to the criminal class. Ten o'clock came--the

hour at which we had been instructed to hold ourselves in readiness. We

had been long prepared. Agnes had been dressed by Hannah in such a

costume externally (a man's hat and cloak, &c.) that, from her height,

she might easily have passed amongst a mob of masquerading figures in

the debtors' halls and galleries for a young stripling. Pierpoint and

myself were also to a certain degree disguised; so far at least, that we

should not have been recognised at any hurried glance by those of the

prison officers who had become acquainted with our persons. We were all

more or less disguised about the face; and in that age when masks were

commonly used at all hours by people of a certain rank, there would have

been nothing suspicious in any possible costume of the kind in a night

like this, if we could succeed in passing for friends of debtors.

I am impatient of these details, and I hasten over the ground. One

entire hour passed away, and no jailer appeared. We began to despond

heavily; and Agnes, poor thing! was now the most agitated of us all. At

length eleven struck in the harsh tones of the prison-clock. A few

minutes after, we heard the sound of bolts drawing, and bars

unfastening. The jailer entered--drunk, and much disposed to be

insolent. I thought it advisable to give him another bribe, and he

resumed the fawning insinuation of his manner. He now directed us, by

passages which he pointed out, to gain the other side of the prison.

There we were to mix with the debtors and their mob of friends, and to

await his joining us, which in that crowd he could do without much

suspicion. He wished us to traverse the passages separately; but this

was impossible, for it was necessary that one of us should support Agnes

on each side. I previously persuaded her to take a small quantity of

brandy, which we rejoiced to see had given her, at this moment of

starting, a most seasonable strength and animation. The gloomy passages

were more than usually empty, for all the turnkeys were employed in a

vigilant custody of the gates, and examination of the parties going out.

So the jailer had told us, and the news alarmed us. We came at length to

a turning which brought us in sight of a strong iron gate, that divided

the two main quarters of the prison. For this we had not been prepared.

The man, however, opened the gate without a word spoken, only putting

out his hand for a fee; and in my joy, perhaps, I gave him one

imprudently large. After passing this gate, the distant uproar of the

debtors guided us to the scene of their merriment; and when there, such

was the tumult and the vast multitude assembled, that we now hoped in

good earnest to accomplish our purpose without accident. Just at this

moment the jailer appeared in the distance; he seemed looking towards

us, and at length one of our party could distinguish that he was

beckoning to us. We went forward, and found him in some agitation, real

or counterfeit. He muttered a word or two quite unintelligible about the

man at the wicket, told us we must wait a while, and he would then see

what could be done for us. We were beginning to demur, and to express

the suspicions which now too seriously arose, when he, seeing, or

affecting to see some object of alarm, pushed us with a hurried movement

into a cell opening upon the part of the gallery at which we were now

standing. Not knowing whether we really might not be retreating from

some danger, we could do no otherwise than comply with his signals; but

we were troubled at finding ourselves immediately locked in from the

outside, and thus apparently all our motions had only sufficed to

exchange one prison for another.

We were now completely in the dark, and found, by a hard breathing from

one corner of the little dormitory, that it was not unoccupied. Having

taken care to provide ourselves separately with means for striking a

light, we soon had more than one torch burning. The brilliant light

falling upon the eyes of a man who lay stretched on the iron bedstead,

woke him. It proved to be my friend the under-jailer, Ratcliffe, but no

longer holding any office in the prison. He sprang up, and a rapid

explanation took place. He had become a prisoner for debt; and on this

evening, after having caroused through the day with some friends from

the country, had retired at an early hour to sleep away his

intoxication. I on my part thought it prudent to entrust him

unreservedly with our situation and purposes, not omitting our gloomy

suspicions. Ratcliffe looked, with a pity that won my love, upon the

poor wasted Agnes. He had seen her on her first entrance into the

prison, had spoken to her, and therefore knew _from_ what she had

fallen, _to_ what. Even then he had felt for her; how much more at this

time, when he beheld, by the fierce light of the torches, her wo-worn

features!

'Who was it,' he asked eagerly, 'you made the bargain with? Manasseh?'

'The same.'

'Then I can tell you this--not a greater villain walks the earth. He is

a Jew from Portugal; he has betrayed many a man, and will many another,

unless he gets his own neck stretched, which might happen, if I told all

I know.'

'But what was it probable that this man meditated? Or how could it

profit him to betray us?'

'That's more than I can tell. He wants to get your money, and that he

doesn't know how to bring about without doing his part. But that's what

he never _will_ do, take my word for it. That would cut him out of all

chance for the head-jailer's place.' He mused a little, and then told us

that he could himself put us outside the prison-walls, and _would_ do it

without fee or reward. 'But we must be quiet, or that devil will bethink

him of me. I'll wager something he thought that I was out merry-making

like the rest; and if he should chance to light upon the truth, he'll be

back in no time.' Ratcliffe then removed an old fire-grate, at the back

of which was an iron plate, that swung round into a similar fireplace

in the contiguous cell. From that, by a removal of a few slight

obstacles, we passed, by a long avenue, into the chapel. Then he left

us, whilst he went out alone to reconnoitre his ground. Agnes was now in

so pitiable a condition of weakness, as we stood on the very brink of

our final effort, that we placed her in a pew, where she could rest as

upon a sofa. Previously we had stood upon graves, and with monuments

more or less conspicuous all around us: some raised by friends to the

memory of friends--some by subscriptions in the prison--some by

children, who had risen into prosperity, to the memory of a father,

brother, or other relative, who had died in captivity. I was grieved

that these sad memorials should meet the eye of my wife at this moment

of awe and terrific anxiety. Pierpoint and I were well armed, and all of

us determined not to suffer a recapture, now that we were free of the

crowds that made resistance hopeless. This Agnes easily perceived; and

_that_, by suggesting a bloody arbitration, did not lessen her

agitation. I hoped therefore that, by placing her in the pew, I might at

least liberate her for the moment from the besetting memorials of sorrow

and calamity. But, as if in the very teeth of my purpose, one of the

large columns which supported the roof of the chapel had its basis and

lower part of the shaft in this very pew. On the side of it, and just

facing her as she lay reclining on the cushions, appeared a mural

tablet, with a bas-relief in white marble, to the memory of two

children, twins, who had lived and died at the same time, and in this

prison--children who had never breathed another air than that of

captivity, their parents having passed many years within these walls,

under confinement for debt. The sculptures were not remarkable, being a

trite, but not the less affecting, representation of angels descending

to receive the infants; but the hallowed words of the inscription,

distinct and legible--'Suffer little children to come unto me, and

forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God'--met her eye, and,

by the thoughts they awakened, made me fear that she would become

unequal to the exertions which yet awaited her. At this moment Ratcliffe

returned, and informed us that all was right; and that, from the ruinous

state of all the buildings which surrounded the chapel, no difficulty

remained for us, who were, in fact, beyond the strong part of the

prison, excepting at a single door, which we should be obliged to break

down. But had we any means arranged for pursuing our flight, and turning

this escape to account when out of confinement? All that, I assured him,

was provided for long ago. We proceeded, and soon reached the door. We

had one crow-bar amongst us, but beyond that had no better weapons than

the loose stones found about some new-made graves in the chapel.

Ratcliffe and Pierpoint, both powerful men, applied themselves by turns

to the door, whilst Hannah and I supported Agnes. The door did not

yield, being of enormous strength; but the wall did, and a large mass of

stone-work fell outwards, twisting the door aside; so that, by

afterwards working with our hands, we removed stones many enough to

admit of our egress. Unfortunately this aperture was high above the

ground, and it was necessary to climb over a huge heap of loose rubbish

in order to profit by it. My brother-in-law passed first in order to

receive my wife, quite helpless at surmounting the obstacle by her own

efforts, out of my arms. He had gone through the opening, and, turning,

round so as to face me, he naturally could see something that I did

_not_ see. 'Look behind!' he called out rapidly. I did so, and saw the

murderous villain Manasseh with his arm uplifted and in the act of

cutting at my wife, nearly insensible as she was, with a cutlass. The

blow was not for me, but for her, as the fugitive prisoner; and the law

would have borne him out in the act. I saw, I comprehended the whole. I

groped, as far as I could without letting my wife drop, for my pistols;

but all that I could do would have been unavailing, and too late--she

would have been murdered in my arms. But--and that was what none of us

saw--neither I, nor Pierpoint, nor the hound Manasseh--one person stood

back in the shade; one person had seen, but had not uttered a word on

seeing Manasseh advancing through the shades; one person only had

forecast the exact succession of all that was coming; me she saw

embarrassed and my hands preoccupied--Pierpoint and Ratcliffe useless by

position--and the gleam of the dog's eye directed her to his aim. The

crow-bar was leaning against the shattered wall. This she had silently

seized. One blow knocked up the sword; a second laid the villain

prostrate. At this moment appeared another of the turnkeys advancing

from the rear, for the noise of our assault upon the door had drawn

attention in the interior of the prison, from which, however, no great

number of assistants could on this dangerous night venture to absent

themselves. What followed for the next few minutes hurried onwards,

incident crowding upon incident, like the motions of a dream:--Manasseh,

lying on the ground, yelled out 'The bell! the bell!' to him who

followed. The man understood, and made for the belfry-door attached to

the chapel; upon which Pierpoint drew a pistol, and sent the bullet

whizzing past his ear so truly, that fear made the man obedient to the

counter-orders of Pierpoint for the moment. He paused and awaited the

issue.--In a moment had all cleared the wall, traversed the waste

ground beyond it, lifted Agnes over the low railing, shaken hands with

our benefactor Ratcliffe and pushed onwards as rapidly as we were able

to the little dark lane, a quarter of a mile distant, where had stood

waiting for the last two hours a chaise-and-four.

[Ratcliffe, before my story closes, I will pursue to the last of my

acquaintance with him, according to the just claims of his services. He

had privately whispered to me, as we went along, that he could speak to

the innocence of that lady, pointing to my wife, better than anybody. He

was the person whom (as then holding an office in the prison) Barratt

had attempted to employ as agent in conveying any messages that he found

it safe to send--obscurely hinting the terms on which he would desist

from prosecution. Ratcliffe had at first undertaken the negotiation from

mere levity of character. But when the story and the public interest

spread, and after himself becoming deeply struck by the prisoner's

affliction, beauty, and reputed innocence, he had pursued it only as a

means of entrapping Barratt into such written communications and such

private confessions of the truth as might have served Agnes effectually.

He wanted the art, however, to disguise his purposes: Barratt came to

suspect him violently, and feared his evidence so far, even for those

imperfect and merely oral overtures which he had really sent through

Ratcliffe--that on the very day of the trial he, as was believed, though

by another nominally, contrived that Ratcliffe should be arrested for

debt; and, after harassing him with intricate forms of business, had

finally caused him to be conveyed to prison. Ratcliffe was thus

involved in his own troubles at the time; and afterwards supposed that,

without written documents to support his evidence, he could not be of

much service to the re-establishment of my wife's reputation. Six months

after his services in the night-escape from the prison, I saw him, and

pressed him to take the money so justly forfeited to him by Manasseh's

perfidy. He would, however, be persuaded to take no more than paid his

debts. A second and a third time his debts were paid by myself and

Pierpoint. But the same habits of intemperance and dissolute pleasure

which led him into these debts, finally ruined his constitution; and he

died, though otherwise of a fine generous manly nature, a martyr to

dissipation at the early age of twenty-nine. With respect to his prison

confinement, it was so frequently recurring in his life, and was

alleviated by so many indulgences, that he scarcely viewed it as a

hardship: having once been an officer of the prison, and having thus

formed connections with the whole official establishment, and done

services to many of them, and being of so convivial a turn, he was, even

as a prisoner, treated with distinction, and considered as a privileged

son of the house.]

It was just striking twelve o'clock as we entered the lane where the

carriage was drawn up. Rain, about the profoundest I had ever witnessed,

was falling. Though near to midsummer, the night had been unusually dark

to begin with, and from the increasing rain had become much more so. We

could see nothing; and at first we feared that some mistake had occurred

as to the station of the carriage--in which case we might have sought

for it vainly through the intricate labyrinth of the streets in that

quarter. I first descried it by the light of a torch, reflected

powerfully from the large eyes of the leaders. All was ready.

Horse-keepers were at the horses' heads. The postilions were mounted;

each door had the steps let down: Agnes was lifted in: Hannah and I

followed: Pierpoint mounted his horse; and at the word--Oh! how strange

a word!--'_All's right_,' the horses sprang off like leopards, a manner

ill suited to the slippery pavement of a narrow street. At that moment,

but we valued it little indeed, we heard the prison-bell ringing out

loud and clear. Thrice within the first three minutes we had to pull up

suddenly, on the brink of formidable accidents, from the dangerous speed

we maintained, and which, nevertheless, the driver had orders to

maintain, as essential to our plan. All the stoppages and hinderances of

every kind along the road had been anticipated previously, and met by

contrivance, of one kind or other; and Pierpoint was constantly a little

ahead of us to attend to anything that had been neglected. The

consequence of these arrangements was--- that no person along the road

could possibly have assisted to trace us by anything in our appearance:

for we passed all objects at too flying a pace, and through darkness too

profound, to allow of any one feature in our equipage being distinctly

noticed. Ten miles out of town, a space which we traversed in forty-four

minutes, a second relay of horses was ready; but we carried on the same

postilions throughout. Six miles a-head of this distance we had a second

relay; and with this set of horses, after pushing two miles further

along the road, we crossed by a miserable lane five miles long, scarcely

even a bridge road, into another of the great roads from the capital;

and by thus crossing the country, we came back upon the city at a point

far distant from that at which we left it. We had performed a distance

of forty-two miles in three hours, and lost a fourth hour upon the

wretched five miles of cross-road. It was therefore four o'clock, and

broad daylight, when we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most

happy accident now favoured us; a fog the most intense now prevailed;

nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an

uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our

traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had

been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we

drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the poor only and the

wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase, and, befriended by

the fog, still growing thicker and thicker, and by the early hour of the

morning, reached a house previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye

and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was

a home--a sanctuary--an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from

persecution. Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more

Agnes, Hannah, and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were

thus gathered together in a house of our own.

Yes: once again, daughter of the hills, thou sleptst as heretofore in my

encircling arms; but not again in that peace which crowned thy innocence

in those days, and should have crowned it now. Through the whole of our

flying journey, in some circumstances at its outset strikingly recalling

to me that blessed one which followed our marriage, Agnes slept away

unconscious of our movements. She slept through all that day and the

following night; and I watched over her with as much jealousy of all

that might disturb her, as a mother watches over her new-born baby; for

I hoped, I fancied, that a long--long rest, a rest, a halcyon calm, a

deep, deep Sabbath of security, might prove healing and medicinal. I

thought wrong; her breathing became more disturbed, and sleep was now

haunted by dreams; all of us, indeed, were agitated by dreams; the past

pursued me, and the present, for high rewards had been advertised by

Government to those who traced us; and though for the moment we were

secure, because we never went abroad, and could not have been naturally

sought in such a neighbourhood, still that very circumstance would

eventually operate against us. At length, every night I dreamed of our

insecurity under a thousand forms; but more often by far my dreams

turned upon our wrongs; wrath moved me rather than fear. Every night,

for the greater part, I lay painfully and elaborately involved, by deep

sense of wrong,

'----in long orations, which I pleaded

Before unjust tribunals.'[20]

And for poor Agnes, her also did the remembrance of mighty wrongs occupy

through vast worlds of sleep in the same way--though coloured by that

tenderness which belonged to her gentler nature. One dream in

particular--a dream of sublime circumstances--she repeated to me so

movingly, with a pathos so thrilling, that by some profound sympathy it

transplanted itself to my own sleep, settled itself there, and is to

this hour a part of the fixed dream-scenery which revolves at intervals

through my sleeping life. This it was:--She would hear a trumpet

sound--though perhaps as having been the prelude to the solemn entry of

the judges at a town which she had once visited in her childhood; other

preparations would follow, and at last all the solemnities of a great

trial would shape themselves and fall into settled images. The audience

was assembled, the judges were arrayed, the court was set. The prisoner

was cited. Inquest was made, witnesses were called; and false witnesses

came tumultuously to the bar. Then again a trumpet was heard, but the

trumpet of a mighty archangel; and then would roll away thick clouds and

vapours. Again the audience, but another audience, was assembled; again

the tribunal was established; again the court was set; but a tribunal

and a court--how different to her! _That_ had been composed of men

seeking indeed for truth, but themselves erring and fallible creatures;

the witnesses had been full of lies, the judges of darkness. But here

was a court composed of heavenly witnesses--here was a righteous

tribunal--and then at last a judge that could not be deceived. The judge

smote with his eye a person who sought to hide himself in the crowd; the

guilty man stepped forward; the poor prisoner was called up to the

presence of the mighty judge; suddenly the voice of a little child was

heard ascending before her. Then the trumpet sounded once again; and

then there were new heavens and a new earth; and her tears and her

agitation (for she had seen her little Francis) awoke the poor

palpitating dreamer.

[20] From a MS. poem of a great living Poet. [Written in January 1838.

The lines occur in Wordsworth's _Prelude_, Book Tenth, line 410. The

passage stands thus:--

----------'the unbroken dream entangled me

In long orations, which I strove to plead

Before unjust tribunals,--with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,

Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge--my own soul.'--H.]

* * * * *

Two months passed on: nothing could possibly be done materially to raise

the standard of those wretched accommodations which the house offered.

The dilapidated walls, the mouldering plaster, the blackened

mantel-pieces, the stained and polluted wainscots--what could be

attempted to hide or to repair all this by those who durst not venture

abroad? Yet whatever could be done, Hannah did, and, in the meantime,

very soon indeed my Agnes ceased to see or to be offended by these

objects. First of all her sight went from her; and nothing which

appealed to that sense could ever more offend her. It is to me the one

only consolation I have, that my presence and that of Hannah, with such

innocent frauds as we concerted together, made her latter days pass in a

heavenly calm, by persuading her that our security was absolute, and

that all search after us had ceased, under a belief on the part of

Government that we had gained the shelter of a foreign land. All this

was a delusion; but it was a delusion--blessed be Heaven!--which lasted

exactly as long as her life, and was just commensurate with its

necessity. I hurry over the final circumstances.

There was fortunately now, even for me, no fear that the hand of any

policeman or emissary of justice could effectually disturb the latter

days of my wife; for, besides pistols always lying loaded in an inner

room, there happened to be a long narrow passage on entering the house,

which, by means of a blunderbuss, I could have swept effectually, and

cleared many times over; and I know what to do in a last extremity. Just

two months it was, to a day, since we had entered the house; and it

happened that the medical attendant upon Agnes, who awakened no

suspicion by his visits, had prescribed some opiate or anodyne which had

not come; being dark early, for it was now September, I had ventured out

to fetch it. In this I conceived there could be no danger. On my return

I saw a man examining the fastenings of the door. He made no opposition

to my entrance, nor seemed much to observe it--but I was disturbed. Two

hours after, both Hannah and I heard a noise about the door, and voices

in low conversation. It is remarkable that Agnes heard this also--so

quick had grown her hearing. She was agitated, but was easily calmed;

and at ten o'clock we were all in bed. The hand of Agnes was in mine; so

only she felt herself in security. She had been restless for an hour,

and talking at intervals in sleep. Once she certainly wakened, for she

pressed her lips to mine. Two minutes after, I heard something in her

breathing which did not please me. I rose hastily--brought a

light--raised her head--two long, long gentle sighs, that scarcely moved

the lips, were all that could be perceived. At that moment, at that very

moment, Hannah called out to me that the door was surrounded. 'Open it!'

I said; six men entered; Agnes it was they sought; I pointed to the bed;

they advanced, gazed, and walked away in silence.

After this I wandered about, caring little for life or its affairs, and

roused only at times to think of vengeance upon all who had contributed

to lay waste my happiness. In this pursuit, however, I was confounded as

much by my own thoughts as by the difficulties of accomplishing my

purpose. To assault and murder either of the two principal agents in

this tragedy, what would it be, what other effect could it have, than to

invest them with the character of injured and suffering people, and thus

to attract a pity or a forgiveness at least to their persons which never

otherwise could have illustrated their deaths? I remembered, indeed, the

words of a sea-captain who had taken such vengeance as had offered at

the moment upon his bitter enemy and persecutor (a young passenger on

board his ship), who had informed against him at the Custom-house on his

arrival in port, and had thus effected the confiscation of his ship, and

the ruin of the captain's family. The vengeance, and it was all that

circumstances allowed, consisted in coming behind the young man

clandestinely and pushing him into the deep waters of the dock, when,

being unable to swim, he perished by drowning. 'And the like,' said the

captain, when musing on his trivial vengeance, 'and the like happens to

many an honest sailor.' Yes, thought I, the captain was right. The

momentary shock of a pistol-bullet--what is it? Perhaps it may save the

wretch after all from the pangs of some lingering disease; and then

again I shall have the character of a murderer, if known to have shot

him; he will with many people have no such character, but at worst the

character of a man too harsh (they will say), and possibly mistaken in

protecting his property. And then, if not known as the man who shot him,

where is the shadow even of vengeance? Strange, it seemed to me, and

passing strange, that I should be the person to urge arguments in behalf

of letting this man escape. For at one time I had as certainly, as

inexorably, doomed him as ever I took any resolution in my life. But the

fact is, and I began to see it upon closer view, it is not easy by any

means to take an adequate vengeance for any injury beyond a very trivial

standard; and that with common magnanimity one does not care to avenge.

Whilst I was in this mood of mind, still debating with myself whether I

should or should not contaminate my hands with the blood of this

monster, and still unable to shut my eyes upon one fact, viz. that my

buried Agnes could above all things have urged me to abstain from such

acts of violence, too evidently useless, listlessly and scarcely knowing

what I was in quest of, I strayed by accident into a church where a

venerable old man was preaching at the very moment I entered; he was

either delivering as a text, or repeating in the course of his sermon,

these words--'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' By some

accident also he fixed his eyes upon me at the moment; and this

concurrence with the subject then occupying my thoughts so much

impressed me, that I determined very seriously to review my half-formed

purposes of revenge; and well it was that I did so: for in that same

week an explosion of popular fury brought the life of this wretched

Barratt to a shocking termination, pretty much resembling the fate of

the De Witts in Holland. And the consequences to me were such, and so

full of all the consolation and indemnification which this world could

give me, that I have often shuddered since then at the narrow escape I

had had from myself intercepting this remarkable retribution. The

villain had again been attempting to play off the same hellish scheme

with a beautiful young rustic which had succeeded in the case of my

ill-fated Agnes. But the young woman in this instance had a high, and,

in fact, termagant spirit. Rustic as she was, she had been warned of the

character of the man; everybody, in fact, was familiar with the recent

tragedy. Either her lover or her brother happened to be waiting for her

outside the window. He saw in part the very tricks in the act of

perpetration by which some article or other, meant to be claimed as

stolen property, was conveyed into a parcel she had incautiously laid

down. He heard the charge against her made by Barratt, and seconded by

his creatures--heard her appeal--sprang to her aid--dragged the ruffian

into the street, when in less time than the tale could be told, and

before the police (though tolerably alert) could effectually interpose

for his rescue, the mob had so used or so abused the opportunity they

had long wished for, that he remained the mere disfigured wreck of what

had once been a man, rather than a creature with any resemblance to

humanity. I myself heard the uproar at a distance, and the shouts and

yells of savage exultation; they were sounds I shall never forget,

though I did not at that time know them for what they were, or

understood their meaning. The result, however, to me was something

beyond this, and worthy to have been purchased with my heart's blood.

Barratt still breathed; spite of his mutilations he could speak; he was

rational. One only thing he demanded--it was that his dying confession

might be taken. Two magistrates and a clergyman attended. He gave a list

of those whom he had trepanned, and had failed to trepan, by his

artifices and threats, into the sacrifice of their honour. He expired

before the record was closed, but not before he had placed my wife's

name in the latter list as the one whose injuries in his dying moments

most appalled him. This confession on the following day went into the

hands of the hostile minister, and my revenge was perfect.

MR. SCHNACKENBERGER;

OR,

TWO MASTERS FOR ONE DOG.

FROM THE GERMAN.

CHAPTER I.

IN WHAT MANNER MR. SCHNACKENBERGER MADE HIS ENTRY INTO B----.

The sun had just set, and all the invalids at the baths of B---- had

retired to their lodgings, when the harsh tones of welcome from the

steeple announced the arrival of a new guest. Forthwith all the windows

were garrisoned with young faces and old faces, pretty faces and ugly

faces; and scarce one but was overspread with instantaneous merriment--a

_feu-de-joie_ of laughter, that travelled up the street in company with

the very extraordinary object that now advanced from the city gates.

Upon a little, meagre, scare-crow of a horse, sate a tall,

broad-shouldered young fellow, in a great-coat of bright pea-green,

whose variegated lights and shades, from soaking rains and partial

dryings, bore sullen testimony to the changeable state of the weather

for the last week. Out of this great-coat shot up, to a monstrous

height, a head surmounted by a huge cocked hat, one end of which hung

over the stem, the other over the stern of the horse: the legs belonging

to this head were sheathed in a pair of monstrous boots, technically

called 'field-pieces,' which, descending rather too low, were well

plaistered with flesh-coloured mud. More, perhaps, in compliance with

the established rule, than for any visible use, a switch was in the

rider's hand; for to attribute to such a horse, under such a load, any

power to have quitted a pace that must have satisfied the most rigorous

police in Poland, was obviously too romantic. Depending from his side,

and almost touching the ground, rattled an enormous back-sword, which

suggested to the thinking mind a salutary hint to allow free passage,

without let or unseasonable jesting, to Mr. Jeremiah Schnackenberger,

student at the University of X----. He, that might be disposed to

overlook this hint, would certainly pay attention to a second, which

crept close behind the other in the shape of a monstrous dog, somewhat

bigger than the horse, and presenting on every side a double tier of

most respectable teeth. Observing the general muster of the natives,

which his appearance had called to the windows, the rider had unslung

and mounted a pipe, under whose moving canopy of clouds and vapours he

might advance in greater tranquillity: and during this operation, his

very thoughtful and serious horse had struck up a by-street--and made a

dead stop, before his rider was aware, at the sign of the Golden Sow.

Although the gold had long since vanished from the stone beast, and, to

say the truth, every part of the house seemed to sympathise admirably

with the unclean habits of its patron image, nevertheless, Mr. Jeremiah

thought proper to comply with the instincts of his horse; and, as nobody

in the street, or in the yard, came forward to answer his call, he gave

himself no further trouble, but rode on through the open door right

forwards into the bar.