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