Chapter II: Part 2

on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty. The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture as was inflicted by that man upon so many others.”—It is in a glowing description of one of the great fêtes at Versailles under the auspices of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Arsène Houssaye delivers himself of this pensive aside: “Et la musique de Lulli achève d’enivrer tout ce beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que près de là, à la grille même du château des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout affamée, pour ses enfants. Qu’importe! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus tard. Comment t’appelles-tu, bonne femme?—Je m’appelle la France: _je reviendrai_.”

Part of the education of the royal heir-apparent of the Incas consisted in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of skill—during which, for a period of thirty days, “the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire,—a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute.” It is to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, “Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then.... But when the hour of trouble comes—and seldom may it visit your leddyship—and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low—lang and late may it be yours—O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.” An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled wail penetrates through the “official cotton-stuffed ears of district police auditoria, district chambers of domains, military chiefs of governments, and imperial chancelleries without number,” and comes soughing into the private cabinet of the czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff,—goes on to say: “The empress, good soul, sheds tears when she hears of the dreadful sufferings of the poor people so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don’t take to plum-cake; the Emperor is affected, but goes to work,” etc. Which last expression, by the way, reminds us of a _quasi_ quotation by Mr. Carlyle of Shakespeare’s text in juxtaposition with mention of the greatest of czars: “Descend, O Donothing Pomp; quit thy down-cushions; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it! The czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright; ... and his aim was small to thine.” There was a miserable day in the Highland wanderings of Prince Charles when, with Ned Burke and Donald Macleod for companions, after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine—there being no fresh water within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for even this nauseous food—“salt-water drammock”—and to have declared, on the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to remember “those who dined with him to-day.” When Flora Macdonald and Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast,—on entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could not help shedding tears. “Charles, always the least concerned at his distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings if they had to come through such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring.” At a subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls of oatmeal and about a pound of butter—referring to which he afterwards told a Highland gentleman that he had come to know what a quarter of a peck of meal was, having once subsisted on such a quantity for the better part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and Strathglass,—a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry him. “Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of smoking a pipe.” Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath.

In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion: the incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. “The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks—for what?—for having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss.”

Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Samson at St. Edmund’s shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, _sine omni expensâ_, and returned only to sit down at the foot of St. Edmund’s shrine to shackles and bread and water. Patriotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be generated by a passive enjoyment of good; the evil tendency of which he bids us see by merely looking to a city like London; where the rich who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have every comfort provided for them without their interference, and need nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor,—such rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says Professor Kingsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for statistics—and of course, where possible, for profits. “There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these neglects of ours—not in the gross.” Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in “North and South,” lest, in her West-end ease, she should become sleepily deadened into forgetfulness of anything beyond the life that was lapping her round with luxury. “There might be toilers and moilers there in London, but she never saw them; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them.” Mr. Thackeray presents Ethel Newcome in the fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her indigent neighbours—giving much time to them and thought; visiting from house to house without ostentation; awe-stricken by that spectacle of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity, humility, and devotion. “Death never dying out; hunger always crying; and children born to it day after day,—our young London lady, flying from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found herself in the presence of these; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with wretched life; sitting by naked beds, whither by God’s blessing she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation; or whence she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by the patient resignation, of the new friends to whom fate had directed her.” No longer _ignara mali, miseris succurrere discit_. An essayist of Mr. Thackeray’s school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks out, or off, into the apostrophe: “Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver crackers; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers of blood-horses,—you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare.” Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful interest with which one of Mr. Dickens’s Christmas books affected him: “sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe ourselves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler creatures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God.” Lord Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, when the gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been unknown to him: “Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience ... you are startled and dismayed” at the sight: you say within yourself, “Can such things be? I never dreamed of this before! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself—I will remember this dread experiment.” The like is the moral of Hood’s poem of the Lady’s Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night; never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly ball—disease, and hunger, and pain, and want; but now she dreams of them all—of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed, the sorrowing she might have solaced; of each pleading that, long ago, she scanned with a heedless eye.

“I drank the richest draughts;
And ate whatever is good—
Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit
Supplied my hungry mood;
But I never remembered the wretched ones
That starve for want of food.

I dressed as the noble dress,
In cloth of silver and gold,
With silk, and satin, and costly furs,
In many an ample fold;
But I never remembered the naked limbs
That froze with winter’s cold.

The wounds I might have healed!
The human sorrow and smart!
And yet it never was in my soul
To play so ill a part
But evil is wrought by want of Thought

[So Lear’s “O, I have ta’en _too little thought_ of this!”]

As well as want of Heart!

She clasped her fervent hands,
And the tears began to stream;
Large, and bitter, and fast they fell,
Remorse was so extreme,
And yet, O yet, that many a dame
Would dream the Lady’s Dream!”

An _Edinburgh_ Reviewer of mortality in trades and professions, dwelling on the fatal conditions under which very many classes earn their daily bread, and sometimes not so much as that,—observes that the great middle and upper classes, accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of easy life and luxury, seldom give a thought as to the manner in which their wants are supplied. “Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the working-bee. The lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workmen in nearly every article that lies before her.” To take one example out of the many upon which Dr. Wynter dilates—the case of the silverer of looking-glasses: “If the charming belle, as she surveys her beauty in the glass, could but for a moment see reflected this poor shattered human creature, with trembling muscles, brown visage, and blackened teeth, she would doubtless start with horror; but, as it is, the slaves of luxury and vanity drop out of life unobserved and uncared for, as the stream of travellers disappeared one by one through the bridge of Mirza.”

“O let those cities that of plenty’s cup,
And her prosperities, so largely taste,
With their superfluous riots, hear these tears!
The misery of Tharsus may be theirs.”

The moral of the eastern tale of Nourjahad is practical and pertinent. He delivers himself up to luxury and riot. He forgets that there are wants and distresses among his fellow-creatures. He lives only for himself, and his heart becomes as hard as the coffers which hold his misapplied treasures. But before it is too late he is awakened to remorse, and looks back with shame and horror on his past life. What shall he do to expiate his offences? One thing at least is within his power, and that will he do at once: expend his riches in the relief of want—nor rest until he has found out every family in Ormuz whom calamity has overtaken, that he may restore them to prosperity. Henceforth he spends his days in his closet, laying plans for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. Ben Jonson’s Sordido promises the like amendment:—

“Pardon me, gentle friends, I’ll make fair ’mends
For my foul errors past....
My barns and garners shall stand open still
To all the poor that come, and my best grain
Be made alms-bread, to feed half-famished mouths.
Though hitherto amongst you I have lived
Like an unsavoury muck-hill to myself,
Yet now my gathered heaps, being spread abroad,
Shall turn to better and more fruitful uses.
... O how deeply
The bitter curses of the poor do pierce!
I am by wonder changed; come in with me
And witness my repentance: now I prove
No life is blest that is not graced with love.”

So again with the rich man in one of Crabbe’s Borough sketches from life; that rich man, to wit, who

“built a house, both large and high,
And entered in and set him down to sigh;
And planted ample woods and gardens fair,
And walked with anguish and compunction there;
The rich man’s pines to every friend a treat,
_He_ saw with pain and _he_ refused to eat;
His daintiest food, his richest wines, were all
Turned by remorse to vinegar and gall:
The softest down by living body pressed
The rich man bought, and tried to take his rest;
But care had thorns upon his pillow spread,
And scattered sand and nettles in his bed:
Nervous he grew—would often sigh and groan,—
He talked but little, and he walked alone;
Till by his priest convinced, that from one deed
Of genuine love would joy and health proceed,
He from that time with care and zeal began
To seek and soothe the grievous ills of man;
And as his hands their aid to grief apply,
He learns to smile and he forgets to sigh.
Now he can drink his wine and taste his food,
And feel the blessings Heaven has dealt are good;
And since the suffering seek the rich man’s door,
He sleeps as soundly as when young and poor.”

_WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE._

1 KINGS xix. 11, 12.

While Elijah stood upon the mount before the Lord, there arose a great and strong wind that rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. We are not told that the Lord was not in the still small voice. We find that He was. And with that voice He addressed Elijah, reasoned with him, admonished, sustained, and directed him. May it not be said, in applying and adapting the narrative, which things are an allegory? The import of the narrative sublimely anticipates the homely fable of sun and wind. Wind, earthquake, and fire, are mighty agents; but they may pass by without tangible result as regards real influence on the spirit of man; whereas the gentle influence of a still small voice speaks home to it at once, and it responds to the strain, and is subdued by the spell.

The drift of the present annotations, in their applied sense, finds expression in Ben Jonson’s reminder:

“There is
A way of working more by love than fear:
Fear works on servile natures, not the free.”

In Landor’s Parable of Asabel, the angel’s gentleness wrought upon that turbulent, refractory spirit, “even as the quiet and silent water wins itself an entrance where tempest and fire pass over.” It is written that other angels did look up with loving and admiration into the visage of this angel on his return; and he told the younger and more zealous of them, that whenever they would descend into the gloomy vortex of the human heart, under the softness and serenity of their voice and countenance its turbulence would subside.

Plutarch tells us of Fabius Maximus, that he thought it hard that, while those who breed dogs and horses soften their stubborn tempers, and bring down their fierce spirits by care and kindness, rather than with whips and chains, he who has the command of men should not endeavour to correct their errors by gentleness and goodness, but treat them in even a harsher and more violent manner than gardeners do the wild fig-trees, pears, and olives, whose nature they subdue by cultivation, and which by that means they bring to produce very agreeable fruit.[5]

We read of the distinguished Spanish author and statesman, Fermin Caballero, that while under the care of a kind and judicious instructor, he, as a boy, made rapid advance in the study of classical literature; but that on being removed from this tutor, and subjected to harsh and grinding discipline, he lapsed into idleness and obstinacy beyond all control. Not the least wise of the maxims to be culled from the pages of Terence is that in which _satius esse credit Pudore et liberalitate liberos retinere, quam metu_. Southey insists that no man was ever more thoroughly ignorant of the nature of children than John Wesley, as when he enjoins: “Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it.” If Wesley had been a father himself, urges that tenderest of fathers, Robert the Rhymer, “he would have known that children are more easily governed by love than by fear.” And as with children, so with men, who are but children of a larger growth; and especially so with women, if we may take the word of one of Shakspeare’s most winsome women for it:

“You may ride us
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs, ere
With spur we heat an acre.”

So with Landor’s Filippa, on whom harsh treatment and compulsory measures are simply thrown away:

“Rudeness can neither move nor discompose her:
A word, a look, of kindness, instantly
Opens her heart and brings her cheek upon you.”

And as with men and women, so with peoples, who are made up of men and women. And yet, although, as the author of the “Wealth of Nations” expresses it, management and persuasion are always the easiest and safest instruments of government, as force and violence are the worst and most dangerous; such, it seems, is the natural insolence of man, that he almost always disdains to use the good instrument, except when he cannot or dare not use the bad one. Not that nations are without diversities of character, and so of susceptibility to diverse modes of government. Gibbon apologises, as it were, for Diocletian’s utter destruction of those proud cities, Busiris and Coptos, and for his severe treatment of Egypt in general, by the remark, that the character of the Egyptian nation, insensible to kindness, but extremely susceptible to fear, could alone justify this excessive rigour. The tone is that of the courtier Crispe, to Phocas, in Corneille’s “Heraclius:”

“Il faut agir de force avec de tels esprits ...
La violence est juste où la douceur est vaine.”

And Coke maintains that if they are the best whom love induces, they are the most whom fear restrains: _Si meliores sunt quos ducit amor, plures sunt quos corrigit timor_. La Fontaine’s fable of the fishes and the flute-playing shepherd, intimates the sheer futility of wasting sweet sounds on ears not to be so caught. There are men, sententiously quoth Dr. Tempest, in the “Last Chronicle of Barset,” who are deaf as adders to courtesy, but who are compelled to obedience at once by ill-usage.

Educationists must provide for the contingency of having to deal with abnormal natures of this crabbed and distorted kind. But as exceptions only. The Jesuits are confessedly masters of the arts of education; and the rule of the Jesuits is to lead not to drive, their pupils; to allure and win, not to coerce and constrain them. Winsome womankind is mistress of the like arts. Those of the sex who _are_ winsome, it has been said, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force, always have their own way in the end. “They coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they are given privileges in excess of their rights; whereas the women who take their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour, lose them and their privileges together.” Kitely’s advice is good, in “Every Man in his Humour,” and of general application:

“But rather use the soft persuading way,
Whose powers will work more gently, and compose
The imperfect thoughts you labour to reclaim;
More winning, than enforcing the consent.”

The first bishop sent from Iona for the Northumbrian Church was Corman, a man described by Dean Milman as of austere and inflexible character, who, finding more resistance than he expected to his doctrines, in a full assembly of the nation sternly reproached the Northumbrians for their obstinacy, and declared that he would no longer waste his labours on so irreclaimable a race. A gentle voice was heard: “Brother, have you not been too harsh with your unlearned hearers? Should you not, like the apostles, have fed them with the milk of Christian doctrine, till they could receive the full feast of our sublimer truths?” All eyes, it is added, were turned on Aidan, a humble but devout monk; and by general acclamation that discreet and gentle teacher was saluted as bishop. The same historian describes Aldhelm of Malmesbury, in minstrel’s garb, arresting the careless crowd of church-goers on a bridge they must pass, and having fully enthralled their attention by the sweetness of his song, anon introducing into it some of the solemn truths of religion; thus succeeding in winning to the faith many hearts, which he would have attempted in vain to move by severer language, or even by the awful excommunication of the Church.[6] When Fénélon was intrusted by Lewis the Fourteenth with a mission to Poitou, to convert the Protestants, he refused the aid of dragoons, and resorted to suavity of persuasion alone as an instrument of conversion. Of the Protestant missions in the west of Ireland, complaint has been made of their being conducted too offensively, like raids upon heathendom: the Romanist, who might possibly open his bosom to the warm rays of charity, only folds the cloak of his hereditary faith more closely round him, when assailed by the bitter wind of a propagandism which seeks its way to the heart by violence and insult.[7]

It is at once, on the one part pleasant, on the other painful, to find the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, who had ever been the fast friend of Whitgift, frequently expressing his disapprobation of the primate’s severity against non-conformists, and his wish “that the spirit of gentleness might win, rather than severity.” And being here on Elizabethan ground, let us note Mr. Froude’s reference to the diverse procedure of Cecil and Throgmorton in their several dealings with the queen,—she being one of the many strong-willed people, on whom menaces and reproaches operate only as a spur. Cecil understood best Elizabeth’s disposition. “By ‘practices,’ by ‘bye-ways,’ as he afterwards described it, by affecting to humour what he was passionately anxious to prevent, he was holding his mistress under delicate control; and he dreaded lest his light leading-strings should be broken by a ruder touch.” As with the queen, so with her people. When Catherine de Medici expressed astonishment to Sir Thomas Smith, at a certain deference paid by his sovereign to the nation she ruled, “Madam,” he replied, “her people be not like your people; they must be trained by _douceur_ and persuasion, not by rigour and violence.” The greatest of Russian empresses emulated in this respect the greatest of English queens. Indeed, her tendency to indulgence was imputed to Catharine II. as a fault, advantage being taken of her constant reluctance to punish. But how far greater things did she, on the whole, achieve with her subjects, exclaims Mr. Herman Merivale, “thus gently led, than those of her predecessors and successors who employed on them in such abundance the more forcible methods of government!”

Mr. Freeman, in the course of showing that Harold’s way of bringing in the proud Danes of the North to his obedience was not exactly the same as William’s way, describes him as determining, with that noble and generous daring which is sometimes the highest prudence, to trust himself in the hands of the people who refused to acknowledge him. “These his enemies, who would not that he should reign over them, instead of being brought and slain before him, were to be won over by the magic of his personal presence in their own land.” To apply what the Gaulish ambassador says of a great Roman in Jonson’s tragedy,

“This magistrate hath struck an awe into me,
And by his sweetness won a more regard
Unto his place, than all the boisterous moods
That ignorant greatness practiseth, to fill
The large, unfit authority it wears.”

The Antwerp authorities had reason and experience on their side when they sought to persuade the Prince of Parma, in 1585, that the hearts of, not the Antwerpers only, but of the Hollanders and Zealanders, were easily to be won at that moment: give them religious liberty, and “govern them by gentleness rather than by Spanish grandees,” and a reconciliation would speedily be ensured. Two years later, but then two years too late, we find the prince averring that he liked “to proceed rather by the ways of love than of rigour and effusion of blood.” This was in answer to Queen Elizabeth, who, at a previous juncture, angrily derided any “slight and mild kind of dealing with a people so ingrate,” and was all for corrosives instead of lenitives for such festering wounds. Rulers, who fail to secure what they wish by gentle means, are apt very soon to resort to the less excellent way; like Chilperic, the “Nero of France,” coaxing the Jew Priscus to turn Christian; first employing argument, then trying blandishments, and anon taking to more powerful reasoning by throwing the Jew into prison. Tytler remarks of the “violent instructions” enforced by Henry VIII. on his envoy to James V., that had the overbearing Tudor adopted a suaver tone, a favourable impression might have been made; but the King o’ Scots was “not to be threatened into a compliance with a line of policy which, if suggested in a tone of conciliation, his judgment might have approved,” and his unwounded sense of self-respect have consented to carry into effect.

Simon the glover, in Scott’s story of mediæval Perth, is well described as watchful over the tactics his daughter employs towards Henry Smith, “whom he knew to be as ductile, when influenced by his affections, as he was fierce and intractable when assailed by hostile remonstrances or threats.” _Par un chemin plus doux_, says a shrewd counsellor in Racine, _vous pourrez le ramener_; whereas _les menaces le rendront plus farouche_. Archbishop Whately deprecates the bullying and browbeating system in vogue with certain barristers, and declares it to be a mistake as a means of eliciting truth: he cites his own observation of the marked success of the opposite mode of questioning, and maintains that, generally speaking, a quiet, gentle, and straightforward examination will be the most adapted to elicit truth; the browbeating and blustering which are likeliest to confuse an honest, simple-minded witness, being just what the dishonest one is the best prepared for. “The more the storm blusters, the more carefully he wraps round him the cloak which a warm sunshine will often induce him to throw off.”

We are told of Dr. Beattie, in his relations as a professor with his class, that his sway was absolute, because it was founded in reason and affection; that he never employed a harsh epithet in finding fault with any of his pupils; and that when, instead of a rebuke, which they were conscious they deserved, they met merely with a mild reproof, it was conveyed in such a manner as to throw, not only the delinquent, but sometimes the whole class into tears. Fielding’s boy-hero is at once in tears when the kind squire takes him in hand, instead of the harsh tutor; his “guilt now flew in his face more than any severity could make it. He could more easily bear the lashes of Thwackum than the generosity of Allworthy.” Mrs. Fry used to bear eager record of the docility she had found, and the gratitude she had experienced, from female prisoners, though the most abandoned of their sex: kind treatment, even with restraint obviously for their good, was so new to them, that it called forth, as Sir Samuel Romilly says, “even in the most depraved, grateful and generous feelings.” True to the life is the picture Mr. Reade has drawn of the effect on the actress, of a young wife coming to her as a supplicant, instead of inveighing against her,—coming with faith in her goodness, and sobbing to her for pity: “a big tear rolled down her cheek, and proved her something more than an actress.” In another of his books he illustrates the truth that men can resist the remonstrances that wound them, and so irritate them, better than they can those gentle appeals which rouse no anger, but soften the whole heart. “The old people stung him; but Mercy, without design, took a surer way. She never said a word; but sometimes, when the discussions were at their height, she turned her dove-like eyes on him, with a look so loving, so humbly inquiring, so timidly imploring, that his heart melted within him.” So with Janet Dempster, in George Eliot’s story of clerical life, who “was not to be made meek by cruelty; she would repent of nothing in the face of injustice, though she was subdued in a moment by a word or a look that recalled the old days of fondness.” In fine, we may conclude with the conclusion of old Master Knowell, in the Elizabethan play:

“There is a way of winning more by love,
And urging of the modesty, than fear:
Force works on servile natures, not the free.
He that’s compelled to goodness, may be good,
But ’tis but for that fit; where others, drawn
By softness and example, get a habit.”

_HAMAN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS._

ESTHER vii. 10

Harbonah was one of the chamberlains of that king Ahasuerus, who reigned from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces. And Harbonah it was that said before the king,—when Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the Jews’ enemy, had gone one step too far in his enmity to the Jews, and had let his vaulting ambition overleap itself in his insolent confidence in royal favour,—Harbonah it was that prompted royal vengeance with the suggestive reminder,—“Behold also, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman.” Then the king said—catching at once at the chamberlain’s suggestion—“Hang him thereon.” “So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.”

Somewhat musty is the adage that no law is more equitable than that by which the deviser of death perishes by his own device: _nec lex est æquior ulla, quam necis artificem arte perire suâ_. Musty it might be even in Harbonah’s days; but the chamberlain, in the excitement of so signal an example, would feel that time cannot stale, nor custom wither, the force and import of that retributive law.

Mr. de Quincey, in his memorable narrative of the revolt of the Tartars, or flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories to the frontiers of China (1771), relates in conclusion how Zebek-Dorchi, the author and originator of this great Tartar _exodus_, perished after a manner specially gratifying to those who compassed his ruin; the Chinese morality being exactly of that kind which approves in everything the _lex talionis_. “Finally, Zebek-Dorchi was invited to the imperial lodge, together with all his accomplices; and under the skilful management of the Chinese nobles in the emperor’s establishment, the murderous artifices of these Tartar chieftains were made to recoil upon themselves, and the whole of them perished by assassination at a great imperial banquet.” Iterated and reiterated in holy writ is the retributive law that the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness; that transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness; that he that seeketh mischief it shall come unto him. The presidents and princes under King Darius, who sought occasion against Daniel, and persuaded their reluctant sovereign to cast the prophet into the den of lions, who however wrought him no manner of hurt,—upon _them_ the _lex talionis_ vindicated its literal severity when they in their turn were cast into the lions’ den, and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.

The early ballads of almost every literature delight in these retributive surprises. Genuine was the zest of our fathers for such a retort as that of William of Cloudesly on the Justice who is having him measured for his grave:—

“‘I have seen as great a marvel,’ said Cloudesly,
‘As between this and prime
He that maketh a grave for me
Himself may lie therein.’”

So fond is popular history of teaching this sort of philosophy by examples, that examples to the purpose are widely accepted which are yet not historical. Cardinal Balue, under Louis XI., is pointed out in his iron cage, as a malignant inventor punished in and through his own invention; but Michelet has exposed the fallacy of supposing Balue the inventor of those iron cages which had long been known in Italy. Still he had the “merit” of being their importer into France; and the _lex talionis_ has its application to him. One remembers of course the Regent Morton hugged to death by the “maiden” he had been the means of introducing into Scotland. The French doctor, Guillotin, is even now not uncommonly believed to have perished in the reign of terror by the instrument invented by and named after him; whereas he quietly died in his bed, many, many years later than that. But the Revolution history is well stored with instances like that of Châlier, condemned to death by the criminal tribunal at Lyons,—the guillotine, which he had sent for from Paris to destroy his enemies, being first destined to sever his own head from his body. A bungling executioner prolonged the last agonies of this man, who in fact was hacked to death, not decapitated. He tasted slowly, as Lamartine says, of the death, a thirst for which he had so often sought to excite in the people; “he was glutted with blood, but it was his own.” Alison recognises in the death of Murat a memorable instance of the moral retribution which often attends upon “great deeds of iniquity, and by the instrumentality of the very acts which appeared to place them beyond its reach.” He underwent in 1815 the very fate to which, seven years before, he had consigned a hundred Spaniards at Madrid, guilty of no other crime than that of defending their country; and this, as Sir Archibald adds, “by the application of a law to his own case, which he himself had introduced, to check the attempts of the Bourbons to regain a throne which he had usurped.” No man, Lord Macaulay affirms, ever made a more unscrupulous use of the legislative power for the destruction of his enemies than Thomas Cromwell; and it was by an unscrupulous use of the legislative power that he was himself destroyed. Those who tauntingly reminded Fenwick, when attainted in 1696, that he had supported the bill which attainted Monmouth, were warned that they might perhaps themselves be tauntingly reminded in some dark and terrible hour, that they had supported the bill which attainted Fenwick. “God forbid that our tyrants should ever be able to plead, in justification of the worst that they can inflict upon us, precedents furnished by ourselves!” Again, it is in recording how, late in life, a horrible calumny settled upon Cicero, that Mr. de Quincey, without lending a moment’s credit to the foul insinuation, nevertheless is free to recognise the equity of this retribution revolving upon one who, he asserts, had so often slandered others in the same malicious way. “At last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when it wounded the most acutely.” _Sæpe_, as Seneca has it, _in magistrum scelera redierunt sua_.

For

“in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”

Plutarch rejoices in showing in Hercules an avenger who adapted the special mode of vengeance to the distinctive deserts of the wrong-doer. He punished with the very mode of punishment devised by those who were now made to suffer it. Antæus he killed in wrestling, and Termerus by breaking his skull,—it being the _specialité_ of Termerus to destroy the passengers he met by dashing his head against theirs. Theseus was the imitator of Hercules in this retributive system; he punished Sinis, a bandit,—who used to kill travellers by binding them to the boughs of two pine-trees, which were then allowed to swing back and separate—by making an end of him in the self-same way; Procrustes again he stretched on his own bed. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, infamous for his cruelty, and specially for the device devised for him by Perillus of a brazen bull in which he burnt his victims—this Phalaris first tried the device on this Perillus; and when Phalaris was deposed an indignant mob practised upon _him_ the self-same torture to which he had subjected so many. And ever memorable among other tales of antiquity,—old wives’ fables if you will, but then have not all fables a moral?—is that of Diomedes, who was devoured by the horses he had himself taught to feed on the flesh and blood of men. “Ashes always fly back in the face of him that throws them,” is a proverb in the Yoruba language, quoted by Archbishop Trench as equivalent to our “Harm watch, harm catch,” and perhaps to the Spanish, “He that sows thorns, let him not walk barefoot.” An overruling Power disposes of what the malignity of man proposes, and

“Thus doth it force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms.”

The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will, when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together, while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief, conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he made for other. “For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his wickedness shall fall on his own pate.” Owen Feltham delights to recall, from the stores of ancient and mediæval story, how Bagoas, a Persian nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by Darius, and forced to drink poison himself; how Diomedes, as we have already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules made food; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer’s mistake of the bottle, took the draught himself, “and so died by the same engine which he himself had appointed to kill another”—a sort of enginery glanced at in Ben Jonson:—

“I have you in a purse-net,
Good master Picklock, with your worming brain,
And wriggling engine-head”

too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, “but God made a hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant’s neck, and he could never rid himself of it.” The fourth book of Southey’s “Thalaba” closes with a shriek from Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains:

“What, wretch, and hast thou raised
The rushing terrors of the wilderness,
To fall on thine own head?
Death! death! inevitable death!
Driven by the breath of God,
A column of the desert met his way.”

Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, “a yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in the righteous judgment of God.” Many and many

“stories have been told of men whose lives
Were infamous, and so their end. I mean
That the red murderer has himself been murdered;
The traitor struck with treason; he who let
The orphan perish came himself to want:
Thus justice and great God have ordered it!
So that the scene of evil has been turned
Against the actor; pain paid back with pain;
And poison given for poison.”

Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for his support served only to crush him.” _Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes necem_; and that by the very means mediated.

“For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard,”

says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows, by a certain mischance, might

“have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them;”

and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled bowman a mischief. That king’s fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus punished, and owns it:—

“_Osric._ How is’t, Laertes?

_Laertes._ Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric;
I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”

And so is the king himself; and he, Laertes testifies,—

“is justly served:
It is a poison tempered by himself”

for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what Horatio calls

“Accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads.”

_TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE._

ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.

With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself:

“Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare.”

David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like, as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us to-morrow,—by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to grieve before he need, is one of Seneca’s sententious sayings: _Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est_. One of Mrs. Gore’s women of the world—who might probably be counted by the hundred—is sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. “I hate,” she says, “to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me, or direct my telescope towards a coming storm.” And herein was she wise, if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. “Leave future occurrences to their uncertainties,” writes the fine old physician, Religiosus Medicus, “think that which is present thy own; and, since ’tis easier to foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity.” Shakspeare’s noble Roman, at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man enough to utter the aspiration:

“O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come!”

But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that prospective yearning, with the reflection,

“But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.”

Swift opens his Birthday Address to Stella with the assurance,

“This day, whate’er the fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day, then, let us not be told,
That you are sick and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills;
To-morrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.”

For once, however, it is only in the opening verses that the dean is jocose; and he soon turns aside from his strain of levity to bid Stella accept some serious lines “from not the gravest of divines.” Schleiermacher, in one of his rather gushing letters,—for he, too, though nothing of a Swift, and though of real weight in divinity, was not in all senses the gravest of divines,—implores his “dearest Jette” not to look so much into the future. He cannot beg this too earnestly and too often, he says,—so depressed is Jette apt to be by anticipation of things to come, and from a perverse habit of condensing advent difficulties. “It is easy to see through _one_ pane of glass, but through ten placed one upon another we cannot see. Does this prove that each one is not transparent? or are we ever called upon to look through more than one at a time? Double panes we only have recourse to for warmth; and just so it is with life. We have but to live _one_ moment at a time. Keep each one isolated, and you will easily see your way through them.” So again writes good Frederick Perthes to his wife, whose fearful and hopeful longings, he tells her, are indeed guarantees for the great future beyond the grave, but whom he urges to bear in mind that a vigorous grasp of the present is our duty so long as we are upon earth. It is the present moment, he reminds her, that supplies the energy and decision that fit us for life; retrospect brings sadness, and the dark future excites fears, so that we should be crippled in our exertions were we not to lay a vigorous grasp upon the present. And

“Labour with what zeal you will,
Something still remains undone;
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.

By the bedside, on the stair,
At the threshold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a mendicant it waits;

Waits, and will not go away;
Waits, and will not be gainsaid:
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made;

Till at length the burden seems
Greater than our strength can bear;
Heavy as the weight of dreams
Pressing on us everywhere.

And we stand from day to day,
Like the dwarfs of times gone by,
Who, as Northern legends say,
On their shoulders held the sky.”

Quite exceptional is the temperament impersonated by Wordsworth in one who seemed a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows.

Longfellow has his midnight reflection on To-morrow; himself a watcher and contemplative, his little ones asleep: and thus the _pensées_ end:

“To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest,
Who cries to me, ‘Remember Barmecide,
And tremble to be happy with the rest.’
And I make answer, ‘I am satisfied;
I dare not ask; I know not what is best;
God hath already said what shall betide.’”

There is never, observes Madame d’Arblay, in her diary, such a superfluity of actual happiness as to make it either rational or justifiable to feed upon _expected_ misery. “That portion of philosophy which belongs to making the most of the present day, grows upon me strongly; and, as I have suffered infinitely from its neglect, it is what I most encourage, and, indeed, require.” Kindly ordained, she takes it, is the concealment of

“the day of sorrow;
And enough is the present tense of toil—
For this world, to all, is a stiffish soil—
And the mind flies back with a glad recoil
From the debts not due till to-morrow.”

It is one of Scott’s young heroes who opens a letter of troublous tidings with the confession that, until now, he had rarely known what it was to sustain a moment’s real sorrow; what he called such was, he now felt assured, only the weariness of mind which, having nothing actually present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the future—disregarding the Scriptural monition that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Is there, Armstrong asks,

“an evil worse than fear itself?
And what avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor, with needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb,
Appal the surest hours that life bestows:
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”