handsome, and swift of foot; and I know my patron saint has sent you to
me in my misery. And, oh, my lad, if we are in time,--what can I do for
you? Are you fond of money, Tom?"
"That I be,--when I can get it."
"Then you shall have all I have got in the world, if you get me there in
time to hinder mischief."
"Come on!" shouted Tom, excited in his turn, and took the lead; and not
a word more passed till they came to the foot of a long hill. Then said
Tom,--
"Once we are at top of this, they can't fight without our seeing 'em.
That is Scutchemsee Nob: you can see ten miles all round from there."
At this information Kate uttered an ejaculation, and urged her horse
forward.
The first part of this hill, which stood between her and those whose
tracks she followed, was grass; then came a strip of turnips; then on
the bleak top a broad piece of heather. She soon cantered over the
grass, and left Tom so far behind he could not quite catch her in the
turnips. She entered the heather, but here she was much retarded by the
snow-drifts and the ups and downs of the rough place. But she struggled
on bravely, still leading.
She fixed her eyes earnestly on the ridge, whence she could cry to the
combatants, however distant, and stop the combat.
Now as she struggled on, and Tom came after, panting a little for the
first time, suddenly there rose from the crest of the hill two columns
of smoke, and the next moment two sharp reports ran through the frosty
air.
Kate stopped, and looked round to Tom with a scared, inquiring air.
"Pistols!" yelled Tom behind her.
At that the woman overpowered the heroine, and Kate hid her face and
fell to trembling and wailing. Her wearied horse came down to a walk.
Presently up comes Tom.
"Don't lose your stomach for that," he panted out. "Gentlefolks do pop
at one another all day sometimes, and no harm done."
"Oh, bless you!" cried Kate; "I may yet be in time."
She spurred her horse on. He did his best, but ere he had gone twenty
yards he plunged into a cavity hidden by the snow.
While he was floundering there, crack went a single pistol, and the
smoke rose and drifted over the hill-top.
"Who--op!" muttered Tom, with horrible _sang-froid_. "There's one done
for this time. Couldn't shoot back, ye see."
At this horrible explanation Kate sank forward on her horse's mane as if
she herself had been killed; and the smoke from the pistol came
floating, thinner and thinner, and eddied high over her head.
Tom spoke rude words of encouragement to her. She did not even seem to
hear them. Then he lost all patience at her, and clutched her arm to
make her hear him. But at that it seemed as if some of his nature passed
into her down his arm; for she turned wild directly, and urged her horse
fiercely up the crest. Her progress was slow at first; but the sun had
melted the snow on the Nob or extreme summit. She tore her way through
the last of the snow on to the clear piece,--then, white as ashes,
spurred and lashed her horse over the ridge, and dashed in amongst them
on the other side. For there they were.
What was the sight that met her eyes?
That belongs to the male branch of my story, and shall be told
forthwith, but in its proper sequence.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, M.A._,
Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, 1847-1853. Edited by
STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M. A. Two Volumes. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields.
The Life and Letters of Mr. Robertson will find a most extended and
appreciative welcome among a large company of sympathizing and grateful
readers on both sides of the ocean. The way has been prepared for them,
and their most hearty reception has been assured, by the acquaintance
opened for us with his mind and heart through the extensive circulation
of the several volumes containing his Sermons and Addresses. When the
first of those volumes was reprinted here, it wrought an immediate
effect upon hundreds, who were instinctively drawn to its perusal, and
who have since seized with avidity upon each subsequent opportunity
furnished them for possessing themselves of everything that could be put
into print which would renew and intensify that effect. An exhaustive
review of that one department of our religious literature which embraces
utterances from the pulpit would, we believe, fully establish these two
positions: first, that the ability shown alike in the composition and in
the delivery of sermons is at least equal in each age and generation to
the average of that which is exhibited in the forum and at the bar; and,
second, that preachers of extraordinary power appear at just such
intervals and under just such conditions as will best assure us of a
reserved and as yet unrecognized capability in the pulpit, redeeming it
from the charge of a general dulness and exhaustion. It was at the very
time when the newspaper press of England and America was reiterating and
illustrating this charge, not without many tokens that supported it,
that the sermons of Mr. Robertson were offering at least one signal
exception to its truth, sufficient even to silence it within the range
of his ministry. An eminently able and effective preacher appears often
enough to reassert the loftiest ideal of his profession, and, what is
more, to vindicate it against the distrust and contempt to which it may
seem to be exposed by the "popular preachers." As we write, there is
circulating through the papers a very striking paragraph from an article
by that distinguished divine, Mr. Caird, in which, with a sharp
criticism, he deals, as we should suppose a man of his high tone would
deal, with the theme of popular preaching, especially as to its effects
upon the dispenser of it and upon the crowds who gather to it. Mr.
Robertson shrank from the repute of it, and the inflictions which it
visits, as he did from sin. He knew full well, that, as the popular
taste and standard were not educated to an appreciation and approval of
the very loftiest style of ministration, the more of curious, gaping
notoriety, or even admiration, he might draw towards him, the poorer was
the incense.
Yet there must be a fallacy somewhere involved in the common judgment on
this subject. For Mr. Robertson certainly was a popular preacher; and
yet, as he never made the slightest concession to any of the arts or
trickeries, the displays or exaggerations, which are supposed to be
essential conditions of that repute, his own example and experience may
stand as at least an exceptional proof of the possible dignity and
solidity of the position. When he had been addressing a thronged
congregation, who hung, impressed and awed, upon his utterances, he goes
home to write about the scene and its circumstances in strong disdain,
almost with angry contempt, as if it were a reproach to himself. Did not
the large majority of his hearers receive in their hearts and minds the
electric power of his earnest and ever instructive speech? Suppose it
were true, as he had painful reasons for knowing, that there were always
before him frivolous, empty-headed, and unappreciative hearers, the
hangers-on of a fashionable watering-place, who went to listen to him
because he was the rage; such as these could be only a scattering among
his auditors. Suppose, too, that the captious, the jealous, the bigoted,
and the conceited were represented there, intending to catch matter for
bringing him under public odium in their own circles, because he
trespassed upon the borders of heresy, or shocked the conventional
standards of snobbish society, or spread his range broadly over the
widest fields of moral and political relations; the very presence and
purpose of such listeners were, to one of his grandeur and purity of
spirit, a new inspiration of courage and fidelity. On the whole, so far
as Mr. Robertson really came under the designation which he so dreaded
to bear, he has made it an honorable one. Perhaps it would not be saying
the right, as it certainly is not saying the best thing about his
sermons, now so widely circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, to
speak of them as meeting any popular taste. Would that we could estimate
so highly the craving and the standard, among what are called religious
readers, as to assert for him a favoritism equal to that accorded to a
Cumming, a Spurgeon, or even a Chalmers. Chalmers may have spoken from
what was, in his time, the highest round of elevation at which he would
have been listened to by those who demanded fidelity to an accepted
doctrinal system as the basis for whatever eloquence, logic, rhetoric,
or unction might avail in presenting it. But Mr. Robertson rose to a
higher plane, and took a far wider horoscope. His freest ventures
require that he have readers able and willing to share them.
The biographical materials now furnished will afford a high
gratification to readers on this continent, who, after perusing the
sermons of Mr. Robertson, have felt a keen desire to know something
about the man. We believe that very many of those readers, after
availing themselves of the information concerning him imparted in these
volumes, will turn back again to his discourses to give them a more
deliberate study. He was a man to engage the profoundest interest of
those who live to scrutinize the elements of character and the
developments of a life-history and work in an individual whose mission
is that of a reconciler and a reconstructor of opinions, creeds, and
theories, in one of the great transitional periods of thought and
belief.
The biography before us is a model which cannot be too closely followed
by any one who in time to come shall be privileged to have a subject for
his pen at all resembling, or approximating to, the character and career
of this extraordinary man. The editor was himself rarely privileged for
his work in the quality of his materials, and he has shown an admirable
skill in their use. His chapters begin with the statement of dates,
facts, incidents of a biographical or local character, marking the
life-periods, the external relations and positions of Mr. Robertson, and
are then substantially made up of his correspondence. We can recall now
no collection of letters which can be compared with these for
comprehensiveness of matter, felicity of diction, and elevation of tone
and sentiment, in discussing alike the commonplace and the loftiest
themes of didactic and spiritual religion, under the most vitalized and
intense dealing with it in our modern life. If we should utter all we
have felt, as we have lingered as if entranced over many of these pages,
we should fail of carrying with us those who, not having yet read them,
would, after their perusal, pronounce our encomiums inadequate. Mr.
Robertson's life was a short one, covering only thirty-seven years.
There was nothing conspicuous in the sphere of it. He held only the
lower offices of his clerical profession. Yet we believe we can say,
without exaggeration, that no one member of that profession, from its
bishops down to its curates, with perhaps the single exception of Dean
Stanley, has so wisely divined or so ably presented as he did the
modifications which must be made in the popular dispensation of religion
through the Church, if it is longer to expect a hearing, or even its
present show of tolerance, from those who share the average intelligence
of the age.
This man, who so nobly, and with a rare consistency of character and
life, fulfilled the office of a minister of the Prince of Peace, seems
all along to have had a heart divided by its first love for a military
life and service. Many readers will find a puzzling problem in
reconciling themselves to this fact, as it shows tokens all through his
career that the preference of his youth was also that of his experienced
manhood. His honored father still survives him as a Captain in the Royal
Artillery, retired from service. Three brothers in the military service
also survive the preacher. He was brought up, as he often writes, in
camps and barracks, and loved no sound as he did the boom of artillery.
It was a grievous cross to his cherished inclinations, when he was sent
by parental authority to the University. Being there, he had no
misgiving as to the choice left him for life. He gave himself heart and
soul to the ministry, and that, too, under views of doctrine and duty,
to be followed out in its discharge, amazingly unlike those to which the
free, expanding, and grandly independent growth of his own rare powers
finally led him. Would he have been the same heroic, conscientious, and
devout man as a soldier that he was as a minister? the reader will more
than once be prompted to ask over these pages. He would have been a
splendid example of heroism and chivalry in any cause which his
conscience could have espoused. But if military orders had constrained
his loyalty in behalf of some of the infamous predatory outrages which
English arms have of late years visited upon India and China, could a
man such as he was have retained his commission? His letters give
abundant proof that his ecclesiastical superiors had no prerogative sway
over his conscience. How could he have borne the constraints of
subordination in following a flag which recognizes no scruples of
distinctions between right and wrong when it rallies its champions?
However this might have been, certain it is that all the grand imagery
of the battle-field and the fight, of spear and breastplate, shield and
sword, of soldierly manliness and fidelity, by which St. Paul symbolizes
the warfare of life, and the armor of those who would come off
conquerors, is literally and gloriously realized in Mr. Robertson's
course and in himself. He was a soldier of the sublimest type,--a bold,
earnest, self-denying, effective, and high-souled battler of the worst
foes of man, and the gentle, kindly, loving defender of the weak, the
unfriended, the wronged. He his wishes which left him free to fight the
enemies of truth and righteousness.
During his student-life at Oxford his mind seemed to have been held in a
balance by his affections between those who had committed themselves
respectively to the Tractarian and the Evangelical parties. The solution
which he was to work out for himself of any real perplexities involved
in the issue between them was to lead him clear of both of them. His own
devoutness and sincerity, aided no doubt by the domestic and social
influences of his early religious training, set him forward, in the
first experimentings as a curate, as an earnest disciple of the
"evangelical" fellowship. He made a faithful trial of its principles and
methods. His reading and his self-training, his standard of fidelity,
and the tone and style of his ministerial work, were all dictated by the
teaching of that school. He outgrew it, and cast aside all that belonged
to it: he came utterly to detest and loathe its characteristic
peculiarities. Ever remaining heartily loyal, as he believed, in
essential doctrinal conviction, and in practical conformity, to the
Church of England, he allowed himself a range of liberty within the
terms of its formulas, which left him, as he felt, not only unfettered,
but also quickened by the inspiration of a freedom restrained by no
other bounds than those of humility and reverence. His power of
apprehension, his skill in analysis, his keen sagacity and penetration
in detecting the kernel of truth through all husks and integuments, made
him the most facile of critics, as well as one of the most trustworthy
interpreters of conflicting theories. His magnanimity and catholicity of
spirit gave him an almost preternatural comprehensiveness of sympathy
with minds and consciences struggling in opposite directions for
satisfaction. He engaged himself upon all the freshest problems which
the critical, scientific, and radical restlessness of our age has
opened. We believe that professional experts, and even the foremost
pioneers in the new fields which have thus been opened, will find valued
help, either of cheering encouragement, or of wise, restraining caution,
in his passing comments on their materials or methods. He was wholly
free of that conceit and superciliousness of temper by which most of the
rash and blatant empirics of "advanced thought" manage to disgust the
slow and conservative makeweights of moderation. If we should attempt to
express in a single phrase the charm and loftiness of Mr. Robertson's
personal and representative manifestation, we should say, that he, more
than any other man of the age, was the saint of the new liberalism, even
of the extreme radicalism. More than any other conspicuous man who had
cast aside and spurned the old traditionalisms of credulity, ignorance,
and prejudice, he consecrated free-thinking. For each single negation he
offers a positive belief, or a tenable ground of belief, which
substitutes an efficient and quickening tenet for a faith such as will
satisfy and sanctify. Of course he shocked and startled many, but none
through flippancy or irreverence. He was capable of a holy indignation,
and even occasionally, it would seem, of bitterness of tone, when he
knew, by a divining spirit which no sham or hypocrisy could blind, that
he was challenged not in the interests of truth, but of falsehood. Like
all great and searching souls, he had a dark shadow of melancholy often
cast over him. He is another witness to us of a well-certified truth,
that deep thoughts, while they are in process, not in repose, are sad
thoughts. What sort of friends he had, and by what tenacity of love,
reverence, and gratitude he held them, and how the delicate ties which
bound them to his heart were felt by him as inspirations to fidelity in
such lofty trusts, a score of letters in these volumes will touchingly
illustrate. As we have been enjoying their perusal with a rare delight,
we have anticipated the same experience as multitudes around us will
share in.
_The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke._ Revised
Edition. Vols. I.-III. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
It is interesting to know that Burke was not really accounted among the
attractive orators of his day, and that people had a habit of going out
of Parliament when he rose to his feet. It illustrates the compensations
of time, atoning to the literary man for the immediate superiorities of
the public speaker. Fox said, that, the better a man spoke, the harder
it usually was for him to compose; and that brilliant orator now lingers
only as a name, while his laborious adversary still holds his own in
literature, and resumes his career in this admirable American edition.
It shows the intellectual comprehensiveness of our people, that they are
ready to be taught by this great man, so resolute an opponent of our
most fundamental ideas. Everything that American institutions affirm
Burke denied, except the spirit of truth and faith which alone give any
institutions their value. Grattan said of him, that, so great was his
love for arbitrary power, he could not sleep comfortably on his pillow,
unless he thought the king had a right to take it from under him. He
demonstrated to his own satisfaction that it was far more congenial to
the human mind to yield to the will of one ruler than of a majority, and
stated it as a "ridiculous" theory, that "twenty-four millions should
prevail over two hundred thousand." Regarding it as the very essence of
property that it should be unequal, he could conceive of no safeguard
for it but that it should be "out of all proportion predominant in the
representation."
Yet, so vast were his natural abilities, his acquirements, and his aims,
that he is instructive even as an antagonist, and has, moreover, left
much that can now be quoted on the right side of every great question.
If he can also be quoted on the other side, no matter. For instance,
Buckle claims for him, that "he insisted on an obedience to the popular
wishes which no man before him had paid, and which too many statesmen
since have forgotten." Yet Burke himself boasted, at the time of his
separation from Fox, that he was "the first man who, on the hustings, at
a popular election, rejected the authority of instructions from
constituents, or who in any place has argued so fully against it."
_Songs of Seven._ By JEAN INGELOW. Illustrated. Boston:
Roberts Brothers.
The sweet female singer who has been so warmly welcomed of late in
England and America deserves to be "illustrated." "Songs of Seven" is
one of her best pieces, but not her best. The "High Tide on the Coast of
Lincolnshire" is certainly worthy of the special honor here accorded to
the "Songs of Seven"; and we are somewhat surprised at the selection, by
her American publishers, of these particular verses for illustration.
The wood-cuts in "Songs of Seven" vary materially, and are not in
harmony throughout. Some are of the first order of excellence, while
some are weak and inadequate. Nearly all the _square_ blocks show
artistic thought and skill, and really _illustrate_ the poem. Those by
another hand (the artists' names are not given) betray paucity of mind,
as well as uncertain fingers.
The most attractive merit of this volume is the printer's part of it.
The red borders are as beautiful in their way as any ornamental
inclosures can be; and we have only to compare them with some others in
books published this year in America to note how superior they are in
every respect. The University Press, to which belongs the credit of this
work, has justly won to itself the first praise where printing is
appreciated as a fine art. We have recently seen an edition of the
King's-Chapel Liturgy, with rubrics, from this press, which must rank
among the best-printed books of our time.
_A Chronological History of the Boston Watch and Police, from
1631 to 1865; together with the Recollections of a Boston
Police-Officer, or Boston by Daylight and Gaslight._ From the
Diary of an Officer Fifteen Years in the Service. By EDWARD
H. SAVAGE. Boston: Published and sold by the Author.
This book can hardly be characterized as an important addition to
elegant or learned literature; nor, indeed, does it aspire to any such
distinction. We notice it, in passing, as giving us a glimpse into that
world within the world, over whose surface we walk every day, scarcely
conscious of its existence; and we accept also the opportunity to make
due and honorable mention of the services of that class of men through
whose sagacity, integrity, and steadfastness the rest of us are enabled
to become sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights. It is well
occasionally to recollect how far the safety and order of the city
depend upon a brave, vigilant, and trustworthy police, that a due
recognition of the fact may serve both as acknowledgment for the past
and increased security for the future.