Chapter X: Part 10

It is of Tiberius, absolute master of the vastest, richest empire ever seen under the sun, that an eminent French preacher is treating when he says that an adulatory senator kept repeating to him in every tone and accent that his authority was without bounds. Tiberius would fain have believed the assurance, if the illusion had been possible,—if he had not felt himself at every instant _heurté contre une barrière infranchissable_. The emperor’s flatterers had forgotten, for one thing, to secure a peremptory decree against the inconvenient limitation called time. His days were numbered. And in vain Tiberius essayed to trick and elude death, and dissembled with himself as to the stubborn fact of its resistless advance.

Kings, great nobles, and the like, as a popular essayist observes, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at wind and rain, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, for insubordination and disrespect of persons. A popular novelist, again, having to describe a fashionable wedding in the country on a portentously wet and stormy day, makes the Lisford beadle, “who was a sound Tory of the old school,” almost wonder that the heavens themselves should be audacious enough to wet the uncovered head of the lord of Jocelyn’s Rock. “But it went on raining nevertheless.” It was in no such spirit that John Bunyan once was all but resolved on putting to the test the reality of his faith, by commanding some water puddles to be dry.

Mr. Carlyle made a picturesque application of the royal Dane’s injunction to the waves, in his survey of the advancing tide of the French Revolution—grim host marching on, the black-browed Marseillese in the van, with hum and murmur, far-heard; like the ocean-tide, “drawn up, as if by Luna and Influences, from the great deep of waters, they roll gleaming on; no king, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back.” To quite another effect is Judge Haliburton’s application of the incident, in his panegyric on the capabilities of the Southampton docks. It was here, he says, that Cnut sat in his arm-chair, to show his courtiers (after he gave up drinking and murder) that though he was a mighty prince, he could not control the sea. “Well, what Canute could not do, your dock company has accomplished. It has actually said to the sea, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther:’ and the waves have obeyed the mandate.”

By poetical licence a Cornish poet of the present day ascribes to his rock-bound coast a _ne plus ultra_ control over an ever-aggressive sea: he pictures the embattled advance of the waves, and their discomfiture and retreat:

“They come—they mount—they charge in vain.
Thus far, incalculable main;
No more! Thine hosts have not o’erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone.
Have the rocks faith that thus they stand,
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?”

One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. “O Lord God of hosts, who is like unto Thee?... Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise.”

With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that

... “they can silence when they will
The storm of passion, and say, ‘Peace, be still:’
But ‘Thus far and no farther,’ when addressed
To the wild wave, or wilder human breast,
Implies authority that never can,
That never ought to be the lot of man.”

_IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES._

1 SAMUEL xxvi. 8-25.

Soundly the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches—his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. “Now, therefore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time.” But David was inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch forth a hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul slept on, and the shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul’s bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived—for no man saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched; and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.

Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day. Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to Unwin,—that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. “When in some of the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were undoubtedly designed,” as Cowper is devoutly convinced, “to convey to him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the least suspicion.” It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that a danger which approaches, but wheels away—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. “The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for all who hear the story.” In another of his books, and the most celebrated of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the suggestive opening of that beautiful collect, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!” in which the great shadows of night are made symbolically significant—those great powers, night and darkness, that belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that, unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. “With deepest sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness,—perils that I seemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing.” As Marcello has it, in Beddoes’ tragedy,

“Each minute of man’s safety he does walk
A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath,
O’er a precipitous and craggy danger
Yawning to death!”

With admirable subtlety and suggestiveness, Mr. Hawthorne illustrates this subject in that _fantasiestück_ of his, called “David Swan.” A young man of that name falls asleep on the roadside, of a summer’s day, and _we_ see, what he sees not, nor dreams of happening to him, a series of incidents that go near to alter the current of his being, and very near, in one instance, to stop altogether its earthly course. When he awakes from that sound sleep, and hies him cheerily homeward, he knows not, nor ever will know, in this world at least, that while he slumbered, all in one brief hour, wealth was all but made over to him by one heirless passer-by, and death all but dealt him by two reckless ruffians. They were interrupted, and left him, and he never was to know of the narrow escape. The moral of the fantasy is, that sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. And the moralist’s query ensues, Does it not argue a superintending Providence, that while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually athwart our path, there should still be regularity enough in mortal life to render foresight even partially available?

The moral of “David Swan” is implicitly conveyed in that passage in “Waverley” which relates Colonel Gardiner’s unconscious escape from the raised and pointed weapon of the Highlander, Callum Beg. An incident that appeals to his superstition makes the intending slayer drop his piece; and “Colonel Gardiner,” we read, “unconscious of the danger he had escaped, turned his horse round, and rode slowly back to the front of his regiment.”

So with Mrs. Hilyard, in “Salem Chapel,” on the evening of the secret interview upon the chapel steps. A hidden witness there is of that interview, who, however, sees not the gesture of her companion which bodes, and almost involves, a fatal, a murderous issue. “But even Mrs. Hilyard herself never knew how near, how very near, she was at that moment to the unseen world.”

Or glance, again, at the Azteca, in Southey’s “Madoc,” gliding like a snake to where Caradoc lay sleeping—all unconscious of peril, as happy, and happily unconscious, David Swan:—

“Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams
Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved.
The Azteca stood over him; he knew
His victim, and the power of vengeance gave
Malignant joy. Once hast thou ’scaped my arm;
But what shall save thee now? the Tiger thought,
Exulting, and he raised his spear to strike.
That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp
The gale of morning passed, and swept its strings
Into so sweet a harmony, that sure
It seemed no earthly tune. The savage man
Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round;
No human hand is near:—and hark! again
The aërial music swells and dies away.
Then first the heart of Tialala felt fear:
He thought that some protecting spirit watched
Beside the stranger, and, abashed, withdrew.”

To Cremona went together, in seeming amity, the Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII., and there an incident had nearly taken place, which, as the historian of Latin Christianity says, might, by preventing the Council of Constance, have changed the fortunes of the world. Gabrino Fondoli, who from podestâ had become tyrant of Cremona, “entertained his distinguished guests with sumptuous hospitality. He led them up the lofty tower to survey the rich and spacious plains of Lombardy. On his deathbed Fondoli confessed the sin, of which he deeply repented, that he resisted the temptation, and had not hurled pope and emperor down, and so secured himself an immortal name.” Pope and emperor on the tower-top were as little inclined to suspect how closely the shadow of death was then and there overshadowing them, as they would have been able to comprehend the ultimate repentance of the intending murderer, not for having intended murder, but for having not carried his intention out.

It is one of Young’s night thoughts that “the farthest from the fear, are often nearest to the stroke of fate.” Often the stroke menaces them unawares, but after all is not dealt; and to the last they are unaware that on such a day, and at such a minute, there was but a step between them and death.

_Quid quisque vitet_, says Horace, _nunquam homini satis cautum est, in horas_. The ignorance of what is impending is bliss, in a certain sense. Just as

“The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold,
Unmoved may the blade of the butcher behold;
They dream not—ah, happier they!—that the knife,
Though uplifted, can menace their innocent life.
It falls;—the frail thread of their being is riven;
They dread not, suspect not, the blow till ’tis given.”

_Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas_, is the wish of some in regard even of escaped peril.

Scott vividly illustrates in “Rokeby” the position of unconscious and therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond’s breast, “just ere the spring his finger pressed;” and the interruption of Guy Denzil’s approach makes the ruffian retire, _rê infectâ_:

“They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath,
Doomed to captivity or death,
Their thoughts to one sad subject lent,
Saw not nor heard the ambushment.
Heedless and unconcerned they sate,
While on the very verge of fate;
Heedless and unconcerned remained,
When Heaven the murderer’s arm restrained;
As ships drift darkling down the tide,
Nor see the shelves o’er which they glide.”

_NO LEISURE._

ST. MARK vi. 31.

That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties, and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had _no leisure_ so much as to eat.”

Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything; results produced at once; something to show, and something that may _tell_. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’ statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told, once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can. It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than wave succeeds wave.” A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage.

La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day, that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and converse and reading. Rather is this a species of work—at any rate a means for working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise passiveness.

Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained—not indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat; or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes on their feet, and their staff in their hand—eaten in haste, as was the Jewish passover.

The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be “not charmed” with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. “To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages.” He echoes Wordsworth’s lament that

“Plain living and high thinking are no more;”

and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes, and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life. It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his preference for “coaching it,” and could have been well content to live upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible to the pleasure of driving fast—stirring the blood as it does, and giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a little too hasty and business-like, “as though we were to be eternally getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money—the means instead of the end.” A distinction is duly recognised between haste and hurry—hurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on “what a horrible thing” it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson made a name (“letters four do make that name”) by his “Recreations.” And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of “Leisure Hours.” In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows his utter contempt for the idler—the loafer, as Yankees term him—who never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded, is the intermission of labour—the blink of idleness in the life of a hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. “But to him it is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical and mental, will not stand it.” Only in leisure, it is further contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever.

It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness and of wide application,

“Vouchsafe us such a half-hour’s hush alone,
In compensation for our stormy years!”

Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours, with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent half-hour.

Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the “dignity of repose.” “We seem,” he said, “to live in the midst of a battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main.” The following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the style of the same author—the author of the “Psalm of Life”—that few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not known to be from one of the “Palm Leaves” of Lord Houghton, who, a quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:

“There the calm of life comparing
With his Europe’s busy fate,
Let him gladly homeward faring,
Learn to labour and to wait.”

It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period is—sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted, on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new ones—of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. “Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.” Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.

To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which they make in “plain living”—how they practically shorten the days of a man?

The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure—the cultivation of which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us—says of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time for a calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it is “apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery, and can be justified only by necessity.” The very repose of leisure is accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment—it being one of the most communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is produced by a good night’s rest. And this writer contends that to afford such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures, indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon

“The hour of rest is gone,
And urgent voices round them cry,
‘Ho, lingerer, hasten on!’

“And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,
A moment’s rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?”

Nay something better and more abiding than that.

But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on “Short Cuts,” that if a thing is to be done at all, “then ’twere well it were done quickly,” admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor’s dramatic poem declares in the storm and stress of his career,

“We have not time to mourn,”

“The worse for us!” is his good counsellor’s rejoinder:

“_He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend._
_Eternity mourns that._ ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turn’d out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
Yet such the barrenness of busy life!
From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up
To reach the naked’st pinnacle of all,
While Magnanimity, absolved from toil,
Reposes self-included at the base.”

_A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT._

PROVERBS xxiii. 2.

King Solomon’s discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him; and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man’s dainties, for they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and might beneficially be a standing order for all times.

Adam Smith, in his “Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” calls it “indecent” to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them; and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions not only natural, but unavoidable, yet “always indecent; and to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.” There is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth, himself a gourmand, and, which is different, an enormous eater, liked to see a dinner guest disposing wholesale of the royal cates, if only by way of keeping himself in countenance, while achieving the like result. Royalty has, indeed, again and again been addicted to surfeiting, and sometimes of a memorably fatal sort. Alexander Jannæus died of gluttony, during the siege of Ragaba. Soliman, the seventh khalif of the race of the Ommiyades, died of a surfeit at Chalcis, in Syria, while preparing to lead an army to Constantinople.[29] Of the emperor Jovian, we read in Gibbon, that one night, at the obscure town Dadastana, after indulging himself with a redundant supper, he retired to rest, and was next morning found dead in his bed—an event ascribed by some, though not by all, to the quality of the mushrooms, _plus_ the quantity of wine, which he had swallowed in the evening. The same historian rather more than suspects that the mortal disease of Athanaric the Goth “was contracted amidst the pleasures of the imperial banquets,” by Theodosius provided. Pope Benedict XI. is said to have died of a surfeit of fruit—some beautiful fresh figs, of which he was very fond, being offered to him in a silver basin by a veiled novice, as if from the abbess of the convent of St. Petronilla, in Perugia: “The pope, not suspecting a gift from such a hand, ate them eagerly, and without having them previously tasted.” That he died of poison, few in that age, as Milman says, would venture to doubt, but the poisoning power of arrears of undigested food has never been quite rated at its full value. The same hesitation between fruit surfeit and poison, obtains in the case of King John, whose death, by one account due to the fatal drug administered by a Cistercian monk, by another is attributed to an intemperate indulgence at supper in fruit and new cider. The Emperor Frederick III. contracted his last illness, some say, by a surfeit of melons. And is there not, in the case of our Henry I., what has been called that tale of royal excess so concisely and pathetically told in nursery history? “He never smiled again, and died of a surfeit of lampreys.” The _regicide_ lampreys, Moore calls them in one place; and in another, after citing Hume’s remark on them, as “a food which always agreed better with his [Henry’s] palate than his constitution,” a dish so indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same squib-writer has a cruel simile, “just as honest King Stephen his beaver might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off.” To a surfeit of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist. The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil.

When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching, he removed to Baiæ, where, “in spite of the prescriptions [or proscriptions?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according to his pleasure.” The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are exceptionally notorious. Of that “little, spare, aguish, peevish, supper-eating” sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death, “this warrior full of courage and sage speculation,” could not resist the customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably result in a nightmare, “turning his bed into a nest of monsters.” So with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: “All medical skill was in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus of the hottest spices.” Mr. Tennyson’s dying Northern Farmer is only too true a type of his kind:—

“What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the yaäle?
Doctor’s a’tottler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle;
I weänt breäk rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an’ gin I mun doy I mun doy.”

Swift is giving Pope a significant and not uncalled-for hint, when he writes to express his uneasiness at ever hearing of the poet’s being out to dinner: “For the least transgression of yours, if it be only two bits and one sup more than your stint, is a great debauch; for which you certainly pay more than those sots who are carried dead drunk to bed.” An entry in Mrs. Trench’s diary begins, “Dined at the Duke of Queensberry’s. He is very ill—has a violent cough, but _will_ eat an immense dinner, and then complains of a _digestion pénible_.” Another of his quality has been described as taking all sorts of pains to get a little enjoyment which must produce for him a world of misery. “One of his passions which he _will_ not resist, is for a particular dish, pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night into Tartarus.” Mr. Thackeray’s moribund old Madame Bernstein _will_ have her supper luxurious, “nor could any injunction of ours or the doctor’s teach her abstinence.” The Sir Miles St. John of another popular fiction does himself to death after the same manner: “He would have his own way; and he contrived to coax or to force his doctor into an authority on his side.” For doctors are not all of the kind that Sancho Panza had to deal with when governor of Barataria. _The Doctor_ cites the case of an eminent member of “the faculty,” who could never refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an age by no means advanced. Another he relates, of a physician who, at an autumnal dessert never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his hands upon, while candidly acknowledging what indigestible and hurtful things they were.

Not a doctor apparently of medicine, but (_proh pudor!_) of divinity, was that Cambridge don of whose end Gray makes memorable mention, as having gone to his grave with five fine mackarel (large and full of roe) in his inside. “He ate them all off at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones. He had not been hearty all the week; but after this sixth fish he never held up his head more.” Like Milton’s Eve, in one sense at least:—

“Greedily he ingorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death.”

Dr. Johnson’s friend, Thrale, is a noteworthy example, or warning, of the man of appetite, who _will not_ restrain it; will not put a knife to his throat, but prefers sending a full laden fork in that direction. His wife describes his natural disposition to conviviality as degenerating into a preternatural desire for food. “No one could control his appetite.” “Burney and I and Queeney tease him every meal he eats, and Mrs. Montagu is quite serious with him; but what _can_ one do? He will eat, I think; and if he does eat, I know he will not live.” The lampreys that were one too many for Henry the king, were one too many for Thrale the brewer. He begged some of an old friend, and the old friend complied, despite the frowns and negative signals of the ladies of the house—whom following out of the room, the too compliant visitor thus made his apology to Mrs. Thrale, “I understand you, Madam, but _must_ disobey. A friend I have known thirty-six years shall not ask a favour of me in his last stage of life and be refused. What difference can it make?” Tears stood in _his_ eyes, and Mrs. Thrale’s own—_les larmes dans la voix_—prevented all reply. What difference did it make? That day was Mr. Thrale’s last. The tone of the apology reminds us of General Paoli’s answer to Boswell, when whispering his fear lest Johnson, very aged and very ailing, might be hurt by the amount and variety of what he was despatching at the general’s table, “where he loved to dine.” Boswell begged Paoli not to press him. Why urge a too willing horse? “Alas!” said the host, “see how very ill he looks: he can live but a very short time. Would you refuse a slight gratification to a man under sentence of death?” And the general cited approvingly the “humane custom” in Italy, by which those in Johnson’s position were indulged with having whatever they liked best to eat and drink, even with expensive delicacies. A parallel case we have in Sir Walter Scott, during his melancholy sojourn in Italy, as Sir W. Gell describes his dining at a Roman palace, and his own fears lest, from the hospitality of the Torlonia family, and “with servants on all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome,” Sir Walter might be induced to eat more than was safe for his malady. “Colonel Blair, who sat next him, was requested to take care that this should not happen. Whenever I observed him, however, Sir Walter appeared always to be eating; while the duchess, who had discovered the nature of the office imposed on the colonel, was by no means satisfied, and after dinner observed that it was an odd sort of friendship which consisted in starving one’s neighbour to death, when he had a good appetite, and there was dinner enough.”

The selfish club-man _par excellence_ has been depicted as earthing himself from pursuit in the sanctuary of his club, there to eat his fill unmolested, with no remonstrant at hand to remind him of the gout when enjoying his turtle, or to talk of cupping when the glass of champagne is at his lips. “There he may eat his asparagus _tout à l’huile_—there he may pepper his cream-tart,” and none to say him nay. Drawn with pitiless realism from the life is Acton Bell (Anne Brontè)’s picture of the dying master of Wildfell Hall, whose extreme dread of death, when and while it seems imminent, renders easy his wife’s task of curbing his unruly greed, but who becomes intractable as the danger to dear life seems receding. “I watch and restrain him,” she writes, “as well as I can, and often get bitterly abused for my rigid severity; and sometimes he contrives to elude my vigilance, and sometimes acts in opposition to my will.” William Collins, the painter, notes in his diary a certain “dinner at C⸺’s,” where he “sat next to H⸺, who took some highly seasoned omelet. I asked him how he could venture on such stuff; he said he could not resist it, though he knew how much he should suffer from it. He took a great deal of wine, to overcome the effects of the omelet, and assured me he should be ill for four days after such a dinner, and that he always suffered in the same way after dining with C⸺! How absurd such weakness appears, and yet how common it is!” George Herbert’s counsel is never out of date, any more than King Solomon’s, in the matter of putting a knife to one’s throat, if edacious and a diner-out:—

“Look to thy mouth: diseases enter there....
... Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.
Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit;
Then say withal, Earth to earth I commit.”

_HAZAEL’S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF._

2 KINGS viii. 13.

Why wept Elisha in the presence of Hazael, when that envoy from the sick king of Syria courted the man of God, in his sovereign’s behalf, with a consignment of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels’ burden? Courteous and gentle was Benhadad’s messenger who came to inquire of the Lord of Elisha, if the royal Syrian should recover of the disease which had brought him so low. Why wept the prophet, when his prophecy had been uttered, ominously vague? “Go, say unto him [Benhadad], Thou mayest certainly recover. Howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall certainly die.” And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was ashamed.

“And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children,” etc. And Hazael said, “But what! is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?”

Yet Hazael went home, and on the very morrow commenced his justification of the seer’s previsionary tears, by spreading a thick wet cloth on the face of his master, so that Benhadad, who else would have recovered, died, and Hazael reigned in his stead.

Well might the man of God weep, nor could anything be more natural, or at least naturally assumed, than the shuddering repudiation, the deprecating protest, of the envoy that now was, the king—and dog—that to-morrow should be.

“Lui-même, à son portrait forcé de rendre hommage,
Il frémira d’horreur devant sa propre image.”

The man who is weak, observes Miss Lee in the “Canterbury Tales,” is always in danger of becoming a villain; and she exemplifies this liability in the instance of Villars, who, by indulging a passion calculated to enfeeble his understanding and corrupt his heart, is soon to be found touching that point which his high tone of romantic refinement had once induced him to believe it impossible he should even approach. But he protests too much who strenuously protests, with protestation heaped on protestation, against any such possible lapse and collapse on his part; and there are cases of this kind, of which one may say with Molière—

“Que c’est être à demi ce que l’on vient de dire,
Que de vouloir jurer qu’on ne le sera pas.”

Martial is in the right in answering the inquiry of Priscus, how would he live if he became rich and great all at once, with another query, Who can say beforehand what his future conduct will be? _Quemquam posse putas mores narrare futuros?_ If Priscus were to become a lion, what sort of one would he turn out to be? Perhaps like Hazael, a dog.

In sight of a corpse suspended to a tree, the “miserable remnant of a wretch that was hanged there for murder,” Robert, in one of Tobin’s dramas, protests to his mother that, robber though he be, _he_ is no murderer; she replies:—

“You are a robber;
And he who robs, by sharp resistance pressed,
Will end the deed in blood: ’twas so with him;
He once possessed a soul quick as your own
To mercy, and would quake, as you do now,
At the bare apprehension of the act
That has consigned him to yon blasted tree.”

Dr. Hamilton somewhere adverts to a sort of gambling in our large cities which does not look particularly repulsive—not being carried on in “hells,” and pleading the sanction of some titled names; the results, however, of which are hanging like a millstone round the neck of many a once promising young man; while, to say nothing of those whom it has reduced to beggary or blackguardism, numbers of its victims must be sought in the Portland hulks or Dartmoor prison. “They went to the race-course, or, without going there, they laid wagers on horses, and sooner or later they lost more than they could pay, and in dread of dishonour they took means to get the money at the very suggestion of which, once upon a time, they would indignantly have exclaimed, ‘Is thy servant a dog?’ and after a few miserable makeshifts, only adding sin to sin, there came detection and ruin and disgrace.” It is of the riotous living of prodigal sons that the same preacher is treating, when he shows, in his graphic way, how speedily riot, whether coarse or refined, wastes the reveller’s substance—not only sapping the constitution, and softening the brain, and shattering the nerves, and enfeebling the mind, but exhausting the estate, and soon bringing the spendthrift to poverty. And, as the discourser goes on to say, if the passion still urges, and the fear of God has departed, wild methods will be used to meet the demand and assuage the frantic craving. “Keepsakes will be sold or pledged, to part with which would, once upon a time, have looked like sacrilege.” Perhaps money will be taken from the till, and so on and on, or rather downwards and downwards, deeper and deeper, till the lowest deep is sounded, and darkness is the burier of the dead.

It has been remarked by one of the most reflective of our popular authors, that there is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change, for this reason—that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. “The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike.” Europe, it is suggestively added, adjusts itself to a _fait accompli_; and so does an individual character—until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.

Recording the appointment of Bonaparte to succeed Scherer in command of the French forces on Genoese territory, Southey observes that although the former had given indications of his military talents at Toulon, and of his remorseless nature at Paris, “the extent either of his ability or his wickedness was at this time known to none, and perhaps not even suspected by himself.” Of all the lessons derived from the history of human passion, says Lavalette, the most important is the utter impossibility which even the best men will always experience of stopping, if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they were perpetrated, the crimes of the first French Revolution, he goes on to surmise, could have been portrayed to those who committed them, “even Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror.” Men, in the case suggested, are seduced at first by plausible theories, which their heated imaginations represent as beneficial and easy of execution: “they advance unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till sensibility is destroyed by the habitual spectacle of guilt, and the most savage atrocities come to be dignified by the name of state policy.”

The world, and the spirit of the world, observes Sir Fowell Buxton in one of his letters, are very insidious; “and more than once I have seen a person who, as a youth, was single-eyed and single-hearted, and who, to any one who supposed he might glide into laxity of zeal, would have said, ‘Am I a dog?’ in maturer age become, if not a lover of the vices of the world, at least a tolerator of its vanities.” But as M. de Sainte-Beuve sententiously puts it, in one of his maxims after the manner of La Rochefoucauld, “La plupart des défauts qui éclatent dans la seconde moitié de la vie existaient en nous tout formés bien auparavant; mais ils étaient masqués, en quelque sorte, par la pudeur de la jeunesse.” The faults of after-life were there, and only the modest reserve and self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes less regard for others, and the cover is taken off.

A clerical essayist on “Future Years,” “can well believe,” he tells us, “that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to _that_!” “Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame.” And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be an aggravation in that view—to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it—_that_ being the worst of all.

Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if you will—the hue of blood—a degraded instance of the degrading power of guilt—a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse, or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects,—

“Till creatures born,
For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed)
Will act the direst crimes they cursed
But yester-morn.”

_THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT._

ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.

To some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” The atmosphere is of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret, as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy.

Yet are there, and ever will be, those—else had this earth of ours lost the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?—who—

“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”