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152 "Ah, I know the writing even at this distance of time; this letter is directed to you!"

"It is,—so are all these," said Brandon, with the same voice of preternatural and strained composure. "They have come back to me after an absence of nearly twenty-five years; they are the letters she wrote to me in the days of our courtship—(here Brandon laughed scornfully)—she carried them away with her, you know when; and (a pretty clod of consistency is woman!) she kept them, it seems, to her dying day!"

The subject in discussion, whatever it might be, appeared a sore one to Mauleverer; he turned uneasily on his chair, and said at length—

"Well, poor creature! these are painful remembrances, since it turned out so unhappily; but it was not our fault, dear Brandon; we were men of the world,—we knew the value of—of—women, and treated them accordingly!"

"Right! right! right!" cried Brandon vehemently, laughing in a wild and loud disdain; the intense force of which it would be in vain to attempt expressing.

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Rh "Right! and faith, my Lord, I repine not at my balance, nor repent my estimation."

"So, so, that's well!" said Mauleverer, still not at his ease, and hastening to change the conversation. "But, my dear Brandon, I have strange news for you! You remember that damned fellow Clifford, who had the insolence to address himself to your adorable niece? I told you I suspected that long friend of his of having made my acquaintance somewhat unpleasantly, and I therefore doubted of Clifford himself. Well, my dear friend, this Clifford is,—whom do you think?—no other than Mr. Lovett, of Newgate celebrity."

"You do not say so!" rejoined Brandon apathetically, as he slowly gathered his papers together, and deposited them in a drawer.

"Indeed it is true; and what is more, Brandon, this fellow is one of the very identical highwaymen who robbed me on my road from Bath. No doubt he did me the same kind office on my road to Mauleverer Park."

"Possibly," said Brandon, who appeared absorbed in a reverie.

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154 "Ay!" answered Mauleverer, piqued at this indifference. "But do you not see the consequences to your niece?"

"My niece!" repeated Brandon, rousing himself.

"Certainly. I grieve to say it, my dear friend,—but she was young, very young, when at Bath. She suffered this fellow to address her too openly. Nay,—for I will be frank,—she was suspected of being in love with him!"

"She was in love with him," said Brandon drily, and fixing the malignant coldness of his eye upon the suitor. "And, for aught I know," added he, "she is so at this moment."

"You are cruel!" said Mauleverer, disconcerted. "I trust not, for the sake of my continued addresses."

"My dear Lord," said Brandon, urbanely taking the courtier's hand, while the anguis in herbâ of his sneer played around his compressed lips,—"my dear Lord, we are old friends, and need not deceive each other. You wish to marry my niece, because she is an heiress of great fortune, and you suppose that my wealth will in all probability swell her own. Moreover, she is more

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Rh beautiful than any other young lady of your acquaintance; and, polished by your example, may do honour to your taste as well as your prudence. Under these circumstances, you will, I am quite sure, look with lenity on her girlish errors, and not love her the less because her foolish fancy persuades her that she is in love with another."

"Ahem!" said Mauleverer, "you view the matter with more sense than sentiment; but look you, Brandon, we must try, for both our sakes, if possible, to keep the identity of Lovett with Clifford from being known. I do not see why it should be. No doubt he was on his guard while playing the gallant, and committed no atrocity at Bath. The name of Clifford is hitherto perfectly unsullied. No fraud, no violence are attached to the appellation; and if the rogue will but keep his own counsel, we may hang him out of the way without the secret transpiring."

"But, if I remember right," said Brandon, "the newspapers say that this Lovett will be tried some seventy or eighty miles only from Bath, and that gives a chance of recognition."

"Ay, but he will be devilishly altered, I

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156 imagine, for his wound has already been but a bad beautifier to his face; moreover, if the dog has any delicacy, he will naturally dislike to be known as the gallant of that gay city, where he shone so successfully, and will disguise himself as well as he is able. I hear wonders of his powers of self-transformation."

"But he may commit himself on the point between this and his trial," said Brandon.

"I think of ascertaining how far that is likely, by sending my valet down to him (you know one treats these gentlemen highwaymen with a certain consideration, and hangs them with all due respect to their feelings,) to hint that it will be doubtless very unpleasant to him, under his 'present unfortunate circumstances,' (is not that the phrase?) to be known as the gentleman who enjoyed so deserved a popularity at Bath, and that, though 'the laws of my country compel me' to prosecute him, yet, should he desire it, he may be certain that I will preserve his secret.—Come, Brandon, what say you to that manœuvre? it will answer my purpose, and make the gentleman,—for doubtless he is all sensibility,—shed tears at my generous forbearance!"

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Rh "It is no bad idea," said Brandon. "I commend you for it. At all events, it is necessary that my niece should not know the situation of her lover. She is a girl of a singular turn of mind, and fortune has made her independent. Who knows but what she might commit some folly or another, write petitions to the King, and beg me to present them, or go—for she has a world of romance in her—to prison, to console him; or, at all events, she would beg my kind offices on his behalf—a request peculiarly awkward, as in all probability I shall have the honour of trying him."

"Ay, by-the-by, so you will. And I fancy the poor rogue's audacity will not cause you to be less severe than you usually are. They say you promise to make more human pendulums than any one of your brethren."

"They do say that, do they?" said Brandon; "well, I own I have a bile against my species; I loathe their folly and their half vices. Ridet et odit is my motto; and I allow, that it is not the philosophy that makes men merciful!"

"Well, Juvenal's wisdom be yours!—mine be

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158 Horace's!" rejoined Mauleverer, as he picked his teeth; "but I am glad you see the absolute necessity of keeping this secret from Lucy's suspicion. She never reads the papers, I suppose—girls never do!"

"No!—and I will take care not to have them thrown in her way; and as, in consequence of my poor brother's recent death, she sees nobody but us, there is little chance, should Lovett's right to the name of Clifford be discovered, that it should reach her ears!"

"But those confounded servants?"

"True enough!—but consider, that before they know it, the newspapers will; so that, should it be needful, we shall have our own time to caution them. I need only say to Lucy's woman—'A poor gentleman, a friend of the late squire's, whom your mistress used to dance with, and you must have seen—Captain Clifford,—is to be tried for his life: it will shock her, poor thing! in her present state of health, to tell her of so sad an event to her father's friend; therefore be silent, as you value your place and ten guineas,'—and I may be tolerably sure of caution!"

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Rh "You ought to be chairman to the 'Ways and Means' Committee!" cried Mauleverer; "my mind is now easy; and when once poor Clifford is gone—'fallen from a high estate,'—we may break the matter gently to her, and, as I intend thereon to be very respectful, very delicate, &c. she cannot but be sensible of my kindness and real affection!"

"And if a live dog be better than a dead lion," added Brandon, "surely an animate lord will be better than a hanged highwayman!"

"According to ordinary logic," rejoined Mauleverer, "that syllogism is clear enough; and though I believe a girl may cling, now and then, to the memory of a departed lover, I do not think she will when the memory is allied with shame. Love is nothing more than vanity pleased;—wound the vanity, and you destroy the love! Lucy will be forced, after having made so bad a choice of a lover, to make a good one in a husband,—in order to recover her self-esteem!"

"And therefore you are certain of her!" said Brandon ironically.

"Thanks to my star—my garter—my

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160, the first baron, and myself, the first earl,—I hope I am!" said Mauleverer, and the conversation turned. Mauleverer did not stay much longer with the Judge; and Brandon, left alone, recurred once more to the perusal of his letters.

We scarcely know what sensations it would have occasioned in one who had known Brandon only in his later years, could he have read these letters, referring to so much earlier a date. There was in the keen, and, if we may so say, the arid character of the man, so little that recalled any idea of courtship or youthful gallantry, that a correspondence of that nature would have appeared almost as unnatural as the fictitious loves of plants, or the amatory softenings of a mineral. The correspondence now before Brandon was descriptive of various feelings, but all appertaining to the same class: most of them were apparent answers to letters from him. One while, they replied tenderly to expressions of tenderness, but intimated a doubt whether the writer would be able to constitute his future happiness, and atone for certain sacrifices of birth and fortune, and ambitious prospects, to which she alluded: at other

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Rh times, a vein of latent coquetry seemed to pervade the style—an indescribable air of coolness and reserve contrasted former passages in the correspondence, and was calculated to convey to the reader an impression, that the feelings of the lover were not altogether adequately returned. Frequently, the writer, as if Brandon had expressed himself sensible of this conviction, reproached him for unjust jealousy and unworthy suspicion: And the tone of the reproach varied in each letter: sometimes it was gay and satirizing; at others, soft and expostulatory; at others, gravely reasoning; and often haughtily indignant. Still, throughout the whole correspondence, on the part of the mistress, there was sufficient stamp of individuality to give a shrewd examiner some probable guess at the writer's character. He would have judged her, perhaps, capable of strong and ardent feeling, but ordinarily of a light and capricious turn, and seemingly prone to imagine and to resent offence. With these letters were mingled others in Brandon's writing—of how different, of how empassioned a description! All that a deep, proud, meditative, exacting character could dream of love

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162 given, or require of love returned, was poured burningly over the pages; yet they were full of reproach—of jealousy—of a nice and torturing observation, as calculated to wound, as the ardour might be fitted to charm; and often, the bitter tendency to disdain that distinguished his temperament broke through the fondest enthusiasm of courtship, or the softest outpourings of love. "You saw me not yesterday," he wrote in one letter, "but I saw you; all day I was by you; you gave not a look which passed me unnoticed; you made not a movement which I did not chronicle in my memory.—Julia, do you tremble when I tell you this?—Yes, if you have a heart, I know these words have stabbed it to the core! You may affect to answer me indignantly! Wise dissembler!—it is very skilful—very, to assume anger, when you have no reply. I repeat, during the whole of that party of pleasure—(pleasure!—well, your tastes, it must be acknowledged, are exquisite!)—which you enjoyed yesterday, and which you so faintly asked me to share, my eye was on you. You did not know that I was in the wood when you took the arm of the incomparable

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Rh Digby, with so pretty a semblance of alarm at the moment the snake, which my foot disturbed, glided across your path. You did not know I was within hearing of the tent where you made so agreeable a repast, and from which your laughter sent peals so merry and so numerous.—Laughter!—O, Julia, can you tell me that you love, and yet be happy, even to mirth, when I am away? Love!—O God, how different a sensation is mine!—Mine makes my whole principle of life! yours!—I tell you, that I think, at moments, I would rather have your hate, than the lukewarm sentiment you bear to me, and honour by the name of 'affection.' Pretty phrase!—I have no affection for you! Give me not that sickly word; but try with me, Julia, to invent some expression that has never filtered a paltry meaning through the lips of another! Affection!—why, that is a sister's word—a girl's word to her pet squirrel!—never was it made for that ruby and most ripe mouth! Shall I come to your house this evening?—your mother has asked me, and you—you heard her, and said nothing.—Oh! but that was maiden reserve—was it?—and maiden reserve caused you

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164 to take up a book the moment I left you, as if my company made but an ordinary amusement, instantly to be replaced by another! When I have seen you, society, books, food, all are hateful to me; but you, sweet Julia, you can read, can you? Why, when I left you, I lingered by the parlour window for hours, till dusk, and you never once lifted your eyes, nor saw me pass and repass. At least, I thought you would have watched my steps, when I left the house; but I err, charming moralist! according to you, that vigilance would have been meanness."

In another part of the correspondence, a more grave, if not a deeper, gush of feeling struggled for expression.

"You say, Julia, that were you to marry one who thinks so much of what he surrenders for you, and who requires from yourself so vast a return of love, you should tremble for the future happiness of both of us. Julia, the triteness of that fear proves that you love not at all. I do not tremble for our future happiness; on the contrary, the intensity of my passion for you makes me know, that we never can be happy! never beyond

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Rh the first rapture of our union. Happiness is a quiet and tranquil feeling. No feeling that I can possibly bear to you will ever receive those epithets,—I know that I shall be wretched and accursed, when I am united to you. Start not; I will presently tell you why. But I do not dream of happiness, neither (could you fathom one drop of the dark and limitless ocean of my emotions,) would you name to me that word. It is not the mercantile and callous calculation of chances for 'future felicity,' (what homily supplied you with so choice a term?)—that enters into the heart that cherishes an all-pervading love. Passion looks only to one object, to nothing beyond,—I thirst, I consume, not for happiness, but you. Were your possession inevitably to lead me to a gulf of anguish and shame, think you I should covet it one jot the less? If you carry one thought, one hope, one dim fancy, beyond the event that makes you mine, you may be more worthy of the esteem of others; but you are utterly undeserving of my love.

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166 "I will tell you now why I know we cannot be happy. In the first place, when you say, that I am proud of birth, that I am morbidly ambitious, that I am anxious to shine in the great world, and that after the first intoxication of love has passed away, I shall feel bitterness against one who has so humbled my pride and darkened my prospects, I am not sure that you wholly err. But I am sure that the instant remedy is in your power. Have you patience, Julia, to listen to a kind of history of myself, or rather of my feelings? if so, perhaps it may be the best method of explaining all that I would convey. You will see, then, that my family pride and my worldly ambition are not founded altogether on those basements which move my laughter in another:—if my feelings thereon are really however, as you would insinuate, equal matter for derision, behold, my Julia, I can laugh equally at them! So pleasant a thing to me is scorn, that I would rather despise myself than have no one to despise;—but to my narrative! You must know that there are but two of us, sons of a country squire, of old family, which once possessed large possessions and something of

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Rh renown. We lived in an old country place; my father was a convivial dog, a fox-hunter, a drunkard, yet in his way a fine gentleman,—and a very disreputable member of society. The first feelings towards him that I can remember, were those of shame. Not much matter of family pride here, you will say! True, and that is exactly the reason which made me cherish family pride elsewhere. My father's house was filled with guests, some high, and some low,—they all united in ridicule of the host. I soon detected the laughter, and you may imagine that it did not please me. Meanwhile, the old huntsman, whose family was about as antient as ours, and whose ancestors had officiated in his capacity, for the ancestors of his master time out of mind, told me story after story about the Brandons of yore. I turned from the stories to more legitimate history, and found the legends were tolerably true. I learned to glow at this discovery: the pride humbled when I remembered my sire, revived when I remembered my ancestors,—I became resolved to emulate them, to restore a sunken name, and vowed a world of nonsense on the subject.

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168 The habit of brooding over these ideas grew on me; I never heard a jest broken on my paternal guardian; I never caught the maudlin look of his reeling eyes, nor listened to some exquisite inanity from his besotted lips, but what my thoughts flew instantly back to the Sir Charleses and the Sir Roberts of my race, and I comforted myself with the hope that the present degeneracy should pass away. Hence, Julia, my family pride; hence too another feeling you dislike in me,—disdain! I first learned to despise my father, the host, and I then despised my acquaintance, his guests; for I saw, while they laughed at him, that they flattered, and that their merriment was not the only thing suffered to feed at his expense. Thus, contempt grew up with me, and I had nothing to check it; for when I looked around I saw not one living thing that I could respect. This father of mine had the sense to think I was no idiot. He was proud (poor man!) of 'my talents,' viz.; of prizes won at school, and congratulatory letters from my masters. He sent me to college: my mind took a leap there: I will tell you, prettiest, what it was! Before I went thither, I had some

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Rh fine, vague visions about virtue. I thought to revive my ancestral honour by being good: in short, I was an embryo King Pepin. I awoke from this dream at the University. There, for the first time, I perceived the real consequence of rank.

"At school, you know, Julia, boys care nothing for a lord. A good cricketer, an excellent fellow, is worth all the earls in the peerage. But at college all that ceases: bats and balls sink into the nothingness in which corals and bells had sunk before. One grows manly, and worships coronets and carriages. I saw it was a fine thing to get a prize, but it was ten times a finer thing to get drunk with a peer. So, when I had done the first, my resolve to be worthy of my sires made me do the second—not indeed exactly; I never got drunk; my father disgusted me with that vice betimes. To his gluttony, I owe my vegetable diet, and to his inebriety my addiction to water. No—I did not get drunk with peers; but I was just as agreeable to them as if I had been equally embruted. I knew intimately all the 'Hats' in the University, and I was henceforth looked up to by 'the Caps,' as if my head had gained the height

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170 of every hat that I knew. But I did not do this immediately. I must tell you two little anecdotes, that first initiated me into the secret of real greatness. The first is this: I was sitting at dinner with some fellows of a college, grave men and clever; two of them, not knowing me, were conversing about me: they heard, they said, that I should never be so good a fellow as my father,—have such a cellar, or keep such a house.

"'I have met six earls there and a marquis,' quoth the other senior.

"'And his son,' returned the first don, 'only keeps company with sizars, I believe.'

"'So then,' said I to myself, 'to deserve the praise even of clever men, one must have good wines, know plenty of earls, and forswear sizars.'

"Nothing could be truer than my conclusion."

"Anecdote the second is this:—On the day I gained a high University prize, I invited my friends to dine with me: four of them refused, because they were engaged (they had been asked since I asked them)—to whom? the richest man at the University. These occurrences happening

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Rh at the same time, threw me into a profound reverie: I awoke, and became a Man of the World. I no longer resolved to be virtuous, and to hunt after the glory of your Romans and your Athenians—I resolved to become rich, powerful, and of worldly repute.

"I abjured my honest sizars, and, as I said before, I courted some rich 'Hats.' Behold my first grand step in the world! I became the parasite and the flatterer. What! would my pride suffer this? verily, yes, my pride delighted in it; for it soothed my spirit of contempt, to put these fine fellows to my use! it soothed me to see how easily I could cajole them, and to what a variety of purposes I could apply even the wearisome disgust of their acquaintance. Nothing is so foolish as to say the idle great are of no use; they can be put to any use whatsoever, that a wise man is inclined to make of them! Well, Julia, lo! my character already formed; family pride, disdain, and worldly ambition,—there it is for you:—after-circumstances only strengthened the impression already modelled. I desired, on leaving college, to go abroad; my father had no money to give me. What signified

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172 that? I looked carelessly round for some wealthier convenience than the paternal hoard; I found it in a Lord Mauleverer; he had been at college with me, and I endured him easily as a companion,—for he had accomplishments, wit, and good-nature; I made him wish to go abroad, and I made him think he should die of ennui if I did not accompany him. To his request to that effect, I reluctantly agreed, and saw every thing in Europe, which he neglected to see, at his expense. What amused me the most, was the perception, that I, the parasite, was respected by him, and he, the patron, was ridiculed by me! it would not have been so, if I had depended on 'my virtue.' Well, sweetest Julia, the world, as I have said, gave to my college experience a sacred authority. I returned to England, and my father died, leaving to me not a sixpence, and to my brother an estate so mortgaged, that he could not enjoy it, and so restricted, that he could not sell it. It was now the time for me to profit by the experience I boasted of. I saw that it was necessary I should take some profession. Professions are the masks to your pauper-rogue; they give respectability to

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Rh cheating, and a diploma to feed upon others. I analyzed my talents, and looked to the customs of my country; the result was, my resolution to take to the Bar. I had an inexhaustible power of application; I was keen, shrewd, and audacious. All these qualities 'tell' at the courts of justice. I kept my legitimate number of terms,—I was called,—I went the circuit,—I obtained not a brief—not a brief, Julia! my health, never robust, gave way beneath study and irritation; I was ordered to betake myself to the country; I came to this village, as one both salubrious and obscure. I lodged in the house of your aunt, you came thither daily,—I saw you,—you know the rest. But where, all this time, were my noble friends? you will say. 'Sdeath, since we had left college, they had learnt a little of the wisdom I had then possessed; they were not disposed to give something for nothing; they had younger brothers and cousins, and mistresses, and, for aught I know, children, to provide for. Besides, they had their own expenses; the richer a man is, the less he has to give. One of them would have bestowed on me a living, if I had gone in the church; another,

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174 a commission, if I had joined his regiment. But I knew the day was past both for priest and soldier; and it was not merely to live, no, nor to live comfortably, but to enjoy power, that I desired; so I declined these offers. Others of my friends would have been delighted to have kept me in their house, feasted me, joked with me, rode with me, and nothing more! But I had already the sense to see, that if a man dances himself into distinction, it is never by the steps of attendance. One must receive favours and court patronage, but it must be with the air of an independent man. My old friends thus rendered useless, my legal studies forbade me to make new, nay, they even estranged me from the old; for people may say what they please about a similarity of opinions being necessary to friendship, a similarity of habits is much more so. It is the man you dine, breakfast, and lodge with, walk, ride, gamble, or thieve with, that is your friend, not the man who likes Virgil as well as you do, and agrees with you in an admiration of Handel. Meanwhile, my chief prey, Lord Mauleverer, was gone; he had taken another man's dulcinea, and sought out a bower in Italy;

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Rh from that time to this, I have never heard of him nor seen him; I know not even his address. With the exception of a few stray gleanings from my brother, who, good easy man! I could plunder more, were I not resolved not to ruin the family stock, I have been thrown on myself; the result is, that though as clever as my fellows, I have narrowly shunned starvation; had my wants been less simple, there would have been no shunning in the case. But a man is not easily starved who drinks water, and eats by the ounce. A more effectual fate might have befallen me, disappointment, wrath, baffled hope, mortified pride, all these which gnawed at my heart, might have consumed it long ago, I might have fretted away as a garment, which the moth eateth, had it not been for that fund of obstinate and iron hardness, which nature,—I beg pardon, there is no nature,—circumstance bestowed upon me. This has borne me up, and will bear me yet through time, and shame, and bodily weakness, and mental fever, until my ambition has won a certain height, and my disdain of human pettiness, rioted in the external sources of fortune, as well as an inward fountain of bitter

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176 and self-fed consolation. Yet oh, Julia, I know not even if this would have supported me, if at that epoch of life, when I was most wounded, most stricken in body, most soured in mind, my heart had not met, and fastened itself to yours; I saw you, loved you, and life became to me a new object. Even now, as I write to you, all my bitterness, my pride, vanish; every thing I have longed for disappears; my very ambition is gone; I have no hope but for you, Julia,—beautiful, adored Julia;—when I love you, I love even my kind. Oh, you know not the power you possess over me. Do not betray it; you can yet make me all that my boyhood once dreamt; or you can harden every thought, feeling, sensation, into stone.

"I was to tell you why I look not for happiness in our union. You have now seen my nature. You have traced the history of my life, by tracing the history of my character. You see what I surrender in gaining you. I do not deny the sacrifice. I surrender the very essentials of my present mind and soul. I cease to be worldly.

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Rh I cannot raise myself. I cannot revive my ancestral name; nay, I shall relinquish it for ever. I shall adopt a disguised appellation. I shall sink into another grade of life. In some remote village, by means of some humbler profession than that I now follow, we must earn our subsistence, and smile at ambition, I tell you frankly, Julia, when I close the eyes of my heart,—when I shut you from my gaze, this sacrifice appals me. But even then, you force yourself before me, and I feel that one glance from your eye is more to me than all. If you could bear with me—if you could soothe me—if, when a cloud is on me, you could suffer it to pass away unnoticed, and smile on me the moment it is gone, O, Julia, there would then be no extreme of poverty—no abasement of fortune—no abandonment of early dreams which would not seem to me rapture if coupled with the bliss of knowing that you are mine. Never should my lip—never should my eye tell you that there is that thing on earth for which I repine, or which I could desire. No, Julia, could I flatter my heart with this hope, you would not find me dream of unhappiness and

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178 you united. But I tremble, Julia, when I think of your temper and my own: you will conceive a gloomy look, from one never mirthful, is an insult; and you will feel every vent of passion on Fortune or on others, as a reproach to you. Then, too, you cannot enter into my nature; you cannot descend into its caverns; you cannot behold, much less can you deign to lull, the exacting and lynx-eyed jealousy that dwells there. Sweetest Julia, every breath of yours, every touch of yours, every look of yours I yearn for beyond all a mother's longing for the child that has been torn from her for years. Your head leant upon an old tree—(do you remember it near * * *)—and I went every day after seeing you to kiss it. Do you wonder that I am jealous? How can I love you as I do, and be otherwise?—my whole being is intoxicated with you!

"This then, your pride and mine—your pleasure in the admiration of others—your lightness, Julia, make me foresee an eternal and gushing source of torture to my mind.—I care not;—I care for

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Rh nothing so that you are mine, if but for one hour."

It seems that, despite the strange, sometimes the unlover-like and fiercely selfish nature of these letters from Brandon, something of a genuine tone of passion,—perhaps their originality,—aided, no doubt, by some uttered eloquence of the writer, and some treacherous inclination on the part of the mistress, ultimately conquered; and that an union, so little likely to receive the smile of a prosperous star, was at length concluded. The letter which terminated the correspondence was from Brandon: it was written on the evening before the marriage, which, it appeared by the same letter, was to be private and concealed. After a rapturous burst of hope and joy, it continued thus:

"Yes, Julia, I recant my words: I have no belief that you or I shall ever have cause hereafter for unhappiness. Those eyes that dwelt so tenderly on mine; that hand whose pressure lingers yet in every nerve of my frame; those lips turned so coyly—yet, shall I say, reluctantly?—from me—all tell me that you love me—and my fears are banished. Love, which conquered my

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Rh While with a curled, yet often with a quivering lip, the austere and sarcastic Brandon slowly compelled himself to the task of proceeding through these monuments of former folly and youthful emotion, the further elucidation of those events, now rapidly urging on a fatal and dread catastrophe, spreads before us a narrative occurring many years prior to the time at which we are at present arrived.

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Rh to find very little change in the geographical aspects, but there were great inhabited areas and large cities even at that time. A very vast population lived in Western America and all round the Mexican Gulf. Eastern Asia, India, Ceylon, Southern Asia and the valley of the Nile were covered with population a thousand years later. The pyramids of Egypt were built by the descendants of the men who built those in Arizona.

My friend Martha told me that a peaceful nation had developed a high civilisation in Western America prior to the 'Black Century,' and that these people were driven across the Pacific by the constant incursions of wild tribes from the north and east of the American continent. She said, too, that vast hoards of gold, silver, and precious stones are waiting to be unearthed from beneath the old pyramids of Arizona and other places in the south and west.

'If I wanted to write a history of our old home, indeed of our present home so far as we are concerned, I would come here for my materials. For all the records here are contemporaneous; men who knew related their own knowledge of facts actually transpiring at the time of relation.'

'I am sorry,' said I, 'that I know nothing of my other life. All I know is what I can remember of a brief half hour that Grayson kindly caused me to spend in Melbourne. Ignorant I am, and can add nothing to these records, either historical or geographical.'

'Do not let that matter trouble you,' said Martha. 'Your time will come, and if you can record nothing here you can write on the Earth side, and you are doing so. I, too, from my home in Edinbro', will make some communications, though my Scotch neighbours may think me mad. But it just strikes me that, situated as you are, there is a likelihood of your being ignorant of the differences between the inhabitants of these two planets.'

'That is true,' I answered. 'I have only got a little vague information, and that only during my journey from the antipodes. I hoped to get that kind of knowledge here, but so far other matters have occupied my attention.'

'Look at me,' said Martha. 'Do you think that I am as big as the woman whom you saw on earth?'

'Yes, you appear about the same size, or perhaps a little taller than the average.'

'That is not the case,' Martha replied. 'If you had met me in the streets of Melbourne in my present form you would have seen a sharp, thin little dwarf, about three feet ten inches in height and very slight, about half the weight of an ordinary Earth woman. If you had met me in Edinbro' you would have seen a strong woman of middle age, about five feet seven inches in height. There I am the mother of four fine sons and two daughters, and I cannot make either my husband or any member of my family thoroughly understand my position. I live a very active life in my Earth home, and am

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180 nature, will conquer the only thing I would desire to see altered in yours. Nothing could ever make me adore you less, though you affect to dread it; nothing but a knowledge that you are unworthy of me—that you have a thought for another—then—then I should not hate you. No: the privilege of my past existence would revive; I should revel in a luxury of contempt—I should despise you—I should mock you, and I should be once more what I was before I knew you. But why do I talk thus? My bride, my blessing, forgive me."

In concluding our extracts from this correspondence, we wish the Reader to note—first, that the love professed by Brandon seems of that vehement and corporeal nature which, while it is often the least durable, is also the most susceptible of the fiercest extremes of hatred, or even of disgust. Secondly, that the character opened by his sarcastic candour evidently required in a mistress either an utter devotion, or a skilful address. And thirdly, that we have hinted at such qualities in the fair correspondent as did not seem sanguinely to promise either of those essentials.

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182

an obscure town in shire, there came to reside a young couple, whose appearance and habits drew towards them, from the neighbouring gossips, a more than ordinary attention. They bore the name of Welford. The man assumed

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Rh the profession of a solicitor. He came without introduction or recommendation; his manner of life bespoke poverty; his address was reserved, and even sour; and despite the notice and scrutiny with which he was regarded, he gained no clients, and made no lawsuits. The want of all those decent charlatanisms which men of every profession are almost necessitated to employ, and the sudden and unushered nature of his coming, were, perhaps, the cause of this ill-success. "His house was too small," people said, "for respectability." And little good could be got from a solicitor, the very rails round whose door were so sadly in want of repainting! Then, too, Mrs. Welford made a vast number of enemies. She was, beyond all expression, beautiful; and there was a certain coquetry in her manner, which showed she was aware of her attractions. All the ladies of hated her. A few people called on the young couple. Welford received them coldly; their invitations were unaccepted, and, what was worse, they were never returned. The devil himself could not have supported an attorney under such circumstances.

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184 —rude—introductionless—a bad house—an unpainted railing—and a beautiful wife! Nevertheless, though Welford was not engaged, he was, as we have said, watched. On their first arrival, which was in summer, the young pair were often seen walking together in the fields or groves which surrounded their home. Sometimes they walked affectionately together, and it was observed with what care Welford adjusted his wife's cloak or shawl around her slender shape, as the cool of the evening increased. But often his arm was withdrawn, he lingered behind—and they continued their walk, or returned homeward, in silence and apart. By degrees, whispers circulated throughout the town, that the new married couple lived by no means happily. The men laid the fault on the stern-looking husband; the women, on the minx of a wife. However, the solitary servant whom they kept declared, that though Mr. Welford did sometimes frown, and Mrs. Welford did sometimes weep, they were extremely attached to each other, and only quarrelled through love. The maid had had four lovers herself, and was possibly experienced in

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Rh such matters. They received no visitors, near or from a distance; and the postman declared he had never seen a letter directed to either. Thus a kind of mystery hung over the pair, and made them still more gazed on, and still more disliked, which is saying a great deal, than they would have otherwise been. Poor as Welford was, his air and walk eminently bespoke what common persons term gentility. And in this he had greatly the advantage of his beautiful wife; who, though there was certainly nothing vulgar or plebeian in her aspect, altogether wanted the refinement of manner, look, and phrase, which characterised Welford. For about two years they lived in this manner, and so frugally and tranquilly, that though Welford had not any visible means of subsistence, no one could well wonder in what manner they did subsist. About the end of that time, Welford suddenly embarked a small sum in a county speculation. In the course of this adventure, to the great surprise of his neighbours, he evinced an extraordinary turn for calculation, and his habits plainly bespoke a man both of business and ability. This disposal

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186 of capital brought a sufficient return to support the Welfords, if they had been so disposed, in rather a better style than heretofore. They remained, however, in much the same state; and the only difference that the event produced, was the retirement of Mr. Welford from the profession he had embraced. He was no longer a solicitor! It must be allowed that he resigned no great advantages in this retirement. About this time, some officers were quartered at ; and one of them, a handsome lieutenant, was so struck with the charms of Mrs. Welford, whom he saw at church, that he lost no opportunity of testifying his admiration. It was maliciously, yet not unfoundedly, remarked, that though no absolute impropriety could be detected in the manner of Mrs. Welford, she certainly seemed far from displeased with the evident homage of the young lieutenant. A blush tinged her cheek when she saw him; and the gallant coxcomb asserted, that the blush was not always without a smile. Emboldened by the interpretations of his vanity, and contrasting, as every one else did, his own animated face and glittering garb, with the ascetic

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Rh and gloomy countenance, the unstudied dress, and austere gait, which destroyed in Welford the effect of a really handsome person, our lieutenant thought fit to express his passion by a letter, which he conveyed to Mrs. Welford's pew. Mrs. Welford went not to church that day; the letter was found by a good-natured neighbour, and enclosed, anonymously, to the husband.

Whatever in the secrecy of domestic intercourse took place on this event was necessarily unknown; but the next Sunday, the face of Mr. Welford, which had never before appeared at church, was discerned by one vigilant neighbour,—probably the anonymous friend,—not in the same pew with his wife, but in a remote corner of the Sacred House. And once, when the Lieutenant was watching to read in Mrs. Welford's face some answer to his epistle, the same obliging Inspector declared that Welford's countenance assumed a sardonic and withering sneer that made his very blood to creep. However this be, the Lieutenant left his quarters, and Mrs. Welford's reputation remained dissatisfactorily untarnished Shortly after this, the county speculation failed, and it

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188 was understood that the Welfords were about to leave the town, whither none knew,—some said to gaol; but then, unhappily, no debtor could be discovered. Their bills had been "next to nothing," but at least they had been regularly paid. However, before the rumoured emigration took place, a circumstance equally wonderful to the good people of occurred. One bright spring morning, a party of pleasure from a great house in the vicinity, passed through that town. Most conspicuous of these was a young horseman richly dressed, and of a remarkably showy and handsome appearance. Not a little sensible of the sensation he created, this cavalier lingered behind his group in order to eye more deliberately certain damsels stationed in a window, and who were quite ready to return his glances with interest. At this moment, the horse, which was fretting itself fiercely against the rein that restrained it from its fellows, took fright at a knifegrinder, started violently to one side, and the graceful cavalier, who had been thinking not of the attitude best adapted to preserve his equilibrium, but to display his figure, was thrown with some force upon a heap of bricks

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Rh and rubbish which had long, to the scandal of the neighbourhood, stood before the paintless railings around Mr. Welford's house. Welford himself came out at the time, and felt compelled, for he was by no means one whose sympathetic emotions flowed easily, to give a glance to the condition of a man who lay motionless before his very door. The horseman quickly recovered his senses, but found himself unable to rise; one of his legs was broken. Supported in the arms of his groom, he looked around, and his eye met Welford's. An instant recognition gave life to the face of the former, and threw a dark blush over the sullen features of the latter. "Heavens!" said the cavalier, "is that—"

"Hist, my Lord!" cried Welford, quickly interrupting him, and glancing round. "But you are hurt—will you enter my house?"

The horseman signified his assent, and between the groom and Welford, was borne within the shabby door of the ex-solicitor. The groom was then dispatched with an excuse to the party, many of whom were already hastening around the house; and though one or two did force themselves across

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190 the inhospitable threshold, yet so soon as they had uttered a few expletives, and felt their stare sink beneath the sullen and chilling asperity of the host, they satisfied themselves, that though it was damned unlucky for their friend, yet they could do nothing for him at present; and promising to send to enquire after him the next day, they remounted and rode homeward, with an eye more attentive than usual to the motion of their steeds. They did not however depart till the surgeon of the town had made his appearance, and declared that the patient must not on any account be moved. A lord's leg was a windfall that did not happen every day to the surgeon of. All this while we may imagine the state of anxiety experienced in the town, and the agonized endurance of those rural nerves which are produced in scanty populations, and have so Talicotian a sympathy with the affairs of other people. One day—two days—three days—a week—a fortnight, nay, a month passed, and the lord was still the inmate of Mr. Welford's abode. Leaving the gossips to feed on their curiosity,—"Cannibals of their own

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Rh hearts,"—we must give a glance towards the interior of the inhospitable mansion of the ex-solicitor.

It was towards evening, the sufferer was supported on a sofa, and the beautiful Mrs. Welford, who had officiated as his nurse, was placing the pillow under the shattered limb. He himself was attempting to seize her hand, which she coyly drew back; and uttering things sweeter and more polished than she had ever listened to before. At this moment, Welford softly entered; he was unnoticed by either; and he stood at the door contemplating them with a smile of calm and self-hugging derision. The face of Mephistophiles regarding Margaret and Faust, might suggest some idea of the picture we design to paint; but the countenance of Welford was more lofty (as well as comelier) in character, though not less malignant in expression than that which the incomparable Retsch has given to the mocking fiend. So utter, so congratulatory, so lordly was the contempt on Welford's dark and striking features, that though he was in that situation in which ridicule

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192 usually attaches itself to the husband, it was the gallant and the wife that would have appeared to the beholder in a humiliating and unenviable light.

After a momentary pause, Welford approached with a heavy step,—the wife started;—but with a bland and smooth expression, which since his sojourn in the town of had been rarely visible in his aspect, the host joined the pair—smiled on the nurse, and congratulated the patient on his progress towards recovery. The nobleman, well learned in the usages of the world, replied easily and gaily; and the conversation flowed on cheerfully enough, till the wife, who had sat abstracted and apart, stealing ever and anon timid glances towards her husband, and looks of a softer meaning towards the patient, retired from the room. Welford then gave a turn to the conversation: he reminded the nobleman of the pleasant days they had passed in Italy—of the adventures they had shared, and the intrigues they had enjoyed; as the conversation warmed, it assumed a more free and licentious turn; and not a little, we ween, would the good folks of have been amazed could they have listened to the gay

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Rh jests and the libertine maxims which flowed from the thin lips of that cold and severe Welford, whose countenance gave the lie to mirth. Of women in general they spoke with that lively contempt which is the customary tone with men of the world,—only in Welford it assumed a bitterer, a deeper, and a more philosophical cast than it did in his more animated yet less energetic guest.

The nobleman seemed charmed with his friend; the conversation was just to his taste; and when Welford had supported him up to bed, he shook that person cordially by the hand, and hoped he should soon see him in very different circumstances. When the Peer's door was closed on Welford, he stood motionless for some moments; he then, with a soft step, ascended to his own chamber. His wife slept soundly; beside the bed was his infant's cradle. As his eyes fell on the latter, the rigid irony, now habitual to his features, relaxed, he bent over the cradle long, and in deep silence. The mother's face, blended with the sire's, was stamped on the sleeping and cherub countenance before him; and as at length,

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194 himself from his reverie, he kissed it gently, he murmured—

"When I look on you, I will believe that she once loved me—Pah!" he said abruptly, and rising,—"this fatherly sentiment for a 's offering is exquisite in me!" So saying, without glancing towards his wife, who, disturbed by the loudness of his last words, stirred uneasily, he left the room, and descended into that where he had conversed with his guest. He shut the door with caution, and striding to and fro the humble apartment, gave vent to thoughts marshalled somewhat in the broken array in which they now appear to the reader.

"Ay, ay, she has been my ruin! and if I were one of your weak fools who make a gospel of the silliest and most mawkish follies of this damnable social state, she would now be my disgrace; but, instead of my disgrace, I will make her my footstool to honour and wealth. And, then, to the devil with the footstool! Yes! two years I have borne what was enough to turn my whole blood into gall!—inactivity—hopelessness—a wasted heart and life in myself—contumely from the world,

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Rh coldness, bickering, ingratitude, from the one for whom—Oh, ass that I was! I gave up the most cherished part of my nature, rather my nature itself! Two years I have borne this, and now will I have my revenge,—I will sell her—sell her—God! I will sell her like the commonest beast of a market! And this paltry piece of false coin shall buy me—my world! Other men's vengeance comes from hatred—a base, rash, unphilosophical sentiment! mine comes from scorn! the only wise state for the reason to rest in. Other men's vengeance ruins themselves—mine shall save me! Christ!—how my soul chuckles when I look at this pitiful pair, who think I see them not, and know that every movement they make is on a mesh of my web!—Yet," and Welford paused slowly,—"yet I cannot but mock myself when I think of the arch gull that this boy's madness love,—love, indeed!—the very word turns me sick with loathing,—made of me. Had that woman, silly, weak, automatal as she is, really loved me,—had she been sensible of the unspeakable sacrifice I had made to her—(Anthony's was nothing to it—he lost a real world

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196 only; mine was the world of imagination,)—had she but condescended to learn my nature, to subdue the woman's devil at her own, I could have lived on in this babbling hermitage for ever, and fancied myself happy and resigned—I could have become a different being. I fancy I could have become what your moralists—(quacks!)—call 'good.' But this fretting frivolity of heart—this lust of fool's praise—this peevishness of temper—this sullenness in answer to the moody thought, which in me she neither fathomed nor forgave—this vulgar, daily, hourly pining at the paltry pinches of the body's poverty, the domestic whine, the household complaint,—when I—I have not a thought for such pitiful trials of affection; and all this while, my curses, my buried hope, and disguised spirit and sunken name not thought of; the magnitude of my surrender to her not even comprehended; nay, her 'inconveniences,'—a dim hearth, I suppose, or a daintyless table,—compared, ay, absolutely compared with all which I abandoned for her sake! As if it were not enough,—had I been a fool, an ambitionless, soulless fool,—the mere thought that I had linked my name to that of a

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Rh tradesman—I beg pardon, a retired tradesman!—as if that knowledge,—a knowledge I would strangle my whole race, every one who has ever met, seen me, rather than they should penetrate, were not enough, when she talks of 'comparing,'—to make me gnaw the very flesh from my bones! No, no, no! Never was there so bright a turn in my fate, as when this titled coxcomb with his smooth voice and gaudy fripperies came hither! I will make her the tool to carve me out of this cavern wherein she has plunged me. I will foment 'my Lord's' passion, till 'my Lord' thinks 'the passion,'—(a butterfly's passion!)—worth any price. I will then make my own terms—bind my Lord to secrecy, and get rid of my wife, my shame, and the solicitorship of Mr. Welford, for ever. Bright, bright prospects! let me shut my eyes to enjoy you! But softly, my noble friend calls himself a man of the world, skilled in human nature, and a derider of its prejudices; true enough, in his own little waythanks not to enlarged views, but a vicious experienceso he is! The book of the world is a vast miscellany; he is perfectly well acquainted, doubtless, with

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198 those pages that treat of the fashions,—profoundly versed, I warrant, in the Magasin des Modes tacked to the end of the index. But shall I, even with all the mastership which my mind must exercise over his,—shall I be able utterly to free myself in this 'Peer of the world's' mind from a degrading remembrance? Cuckold, cuckold, 'tis an ugly word; a convenient, willing cuckold, humph!—there is no grandeur, no philosophical varnish in the phrase. Let me see,—yes! I have a remedy for all that. I was married privately,—well! under disguised names,—well! it was a stolen marriage, far from her town,—well! witnesses unknown to her,—well! proofs easily secured to my possession,—excellent! the fool shall believe it a forged marriage, an ingenious gallantry of mine; I will wash out the stain cuckold, with the water of another word; I will make market of a mistress, not a wife. I will warn him not to acquaint her with this secret: let me consider for what reason,—oh! my son's legitimacy may be convenient to me hereafter. He will understand that reason, and I will have his 'honour' thereon. And by the way, I do care for that legitimacy, and will guard the

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Rh proofs; I love my child,—ambitious men do love their children; I may became a lord myself, and may wish for a lord to succeed me; and that son is mine; thank Heaven! I am sure on that point,—the only child too that ever shall arise to me. Never, I swear, will I again put myself beyond my own power! All my nature, save one passion, I have hitherto mastered, that passion shall henceforth be my slave, my only thought be ambition, my only desire the world!"

As thus terminated the reverie of a man whom the social circumstances of the world were calculated, as if by system, to render eminently and basely wicked, Welford slowly ascended the stairs, and re-entered his chamber, his wife was still sleeping; her beauty was of the fair and girlish, and harmonized order, which lovers and poets would express by the word "angelic," and as Welford looked upon her face, hushed and almost hallowed by slumber, a certain weakness and irresolution might have been discernible in the strong lines of his haughty features. At that moment, as if for ever to destroy the return of hope or virtue to either, her lips moved, they

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text:
Author:Renn Dickson Hampden

Works

 * The scholastic philosophy

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200 uttered one word,—it was the name of Welford's courtly guest.

About three weeks from that evening, Mrs. Welford eloped with the young nobleman, and on the morning following that event, the distracted husband with his child disappeared for ever from the town of. From that day, no tidings whatsoever respecting him ever reached the titilated ears of his anxious neighbours; and doubt, curiosity, discussion, gradually settled into the belief that his despair had hurried him into suicide.

Although the unfortunate Mrs. Welford was in reality of a light and frivolous turn, and, above all, susceptible to personal vanity, she was not without ardent affections and keen sensibilities. Her marriage had been one of love, that is to say on her part, the ordinary love of girls, who love not through actual and natural feeling, so much as a forced predisposition. Her choice had fallen on one superior to herself in birth, and far above all in person and address whom she had habitually met. Thus her vanity had assisted her affection, and something strange and eccentric in the temper and mind of Welford had, though at times it

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Page:Tales of two countries.djvu/179

 THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO.

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text: Category:User as

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text:
Author:Pierre Bayle

Works

 * Historical and Critical Dictionary
 * Nouvelles de la République des Lettres

title: Author:Pierre Bayle


text:
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1832.] influence of the Holy Spirit, in silence, after vocal supplication, a good old Wesleyan observed, that the remarks reminded him of the expressions in the parable of the Sower, "Immediately Satan cometh and taketh away that which was sown." This, he said, he had often noticed to be the case, in passing immediately from religious exercises to conversation, without taking time to dwell under the impressions produced.

25th. Having received the sanction of the Lieutenant Governor, to visit the Establishment for the Aborigines on Flinders Island (Great Island, of Maps) in Bass's Straits, we embarked in the Charlotte Cutter, John Thornloe, a young man from Doncaster, commanding her for the voyage. The little cabin was in such confusion when we went on board, that during much of the day, which was wet, we could do little to advantage but stand still and exercise patience, till others got their luggage out of the way. In the evening the cutter drifted against the Challenger Man-of-war, in the dark. Without discovering, so far as we could make out, that the Cutter was a Government vessel, the officers and men on board that ship, exerted themselves with civility and kindness, and cleared us without cutting a rope.

26th. Early in the morning we sailed, and in the evening, passed Cape Raoul or Basaltes, a magnificent mass of perpendicular basaltic columns, forming the south west point of Tasmans Peninsula.

27th. We put into Port Arthur, a penal settlement lately formed to receive prisoners from one, recently given up on Maria Island.—The Clarence bound for England put in here to-day, to deliver up three prisoners, found on board after sailing from Hobart Town; who had stowed themselves away in the hope of escaping.—Port Arthur is much of the same character as Macquarie Harbour, but being newly formed, it is less organized.—Allowing such of the prisoners as conducted themselves well at this place, a few square yards of ground for gardens, and a small quantity of tea and sugar, had a very beneficial influence upon their conduct, but these indulgences being considered incompatible with


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72 the rigid nature of the discipline intended to be maintained at such stations, were after a time withdrawn.

28th. We again proceeded on our voyage, but got to sea with great difficulty. At one time the cutter "missed stays." Though little of a sailor, I saw the only alternative was to get way upon the vessel, by running directly toward a rock near us, and on which there was a danger of being wrecked, and then to try again. The commander of the vessel, though an intrepid young man, had turned pale with fear, but on my promptly pointing out the possibility of escape by this means, he recovered his courage, and made the effort, which proved successful; the vessel answered her helm, and we glided safely past the point of impending of danger. In the course of the day we rounded Cape Pillar and Tasmans Island, which is also of columnar basalt, and in the evening were off the Hippolyte Rocks. Near Cape Pillar we fell in with the barque Bolina, of London, on her passage from New Zealand. Along the coast many Gannets were diving for fish, which they dart upon from a considerable height in the air. Albatrosses, Cape Pigeons, and Blue and Stormy Petrels, were seen at intervals. Large flocks of Mutton-birds were flying about Tasmans Island at sunset.

29th. We beat up between Maria Island and the main land. The coast of the latter was steep and woody. Some parts of Maria Island are lofty: the northern end is 3,000 feet high, and steep: the island is divided into two portions by a low sandy neck. Black-fish, Gannets, and Mutton-birds were seen; and in the evening, we were cheered by lights on the coast, at the house of a settler, and at a whaling station, in Spring Bay. The last proved of great service in directing the course of the cutter, which dropped anchor at midnight, the wind having failed.

30th. We had reading on deck. The company, among whom were a few other passengers, did not exhibit much appearance of religion, but some of them showed evidence of the want of it. One of the crew, a prisoner having a ticket of leave, who had been educated in a school on the system of the British and Foreign School Society, at Norwich, said he had not met with any of his school-fellows in


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220 all taste for carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake them."

Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book-learning but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a Christian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste for even the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere natural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years later we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: "On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth."

The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba, printed in the latter's article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it is, somewhat abridged:

"Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my father's church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month.


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 VI

THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS

Allies have won the War. But how have we won? The process is full of warning. We were saved, in the first place, by the readiness of the British Fleet, and by the decision which sent it to sea; so British communications with France were secured. That readiness and decision were the outcome of the British habit of looking to the one thing essential in the midst of many things that we leave slipshod; it is the way of the capable amateur. We were saved, in the second place, by the wonderful victory of French genius on the Marne, prepared for by many years of deep thought in the great French École Militaire; in other respects the French Army was not as ready as it might have been, except in courage. We were saved in the third place by the sacrifice—it was no less—of the old British professional army at Ypres, a name that will stand in history beside Thermopylae. We were saved, in short, by 191


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224 French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words.

"If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: 'Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;'—if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he,—whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.

"Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and


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192 exceptional genius and exceptional heroism from the results of an average refusal to foresee and prepare: eloquent testimony both to the strength and the weakness of democracy.

Then for two years the fighting was stabilised, and became a war of trenches on land and of submarines at sea, a war of attrition in which time told in favour of Britain but against Russia. In 1917 Russia cracked and then broke. Germany had conquered in the East, but postponed the utter subjection of the Slavs in order first to strike down her Western foes. West Europe had to call in the help of America, for West Europe alone would not have been able to reverse the decision in the East. Again time was needed, because America, the third of the greater democracies to go to war, was even less prepared than the other two. And time was bought by the heroism of British seamen, the sacrifice of British merchant shipping, and the endurance of the French and British soldiers against an offensive in France which all but overwhelmed them. In short, we once more pitted character and a right insight into essentials against German organisation, and we just managed to win. At the eleventh hour Britain accepted the principle


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Rh of the single strategical command, giving scope once more to the École Militaire.

But this whole record of Western and Oceanic fighting, so splendid and yet so humiliating, has very little direct bearing on the International Resettlement. There was no immediate quarrel between East Europe and West Europe; the time was past when France would have attacked Germany to recover Alsace and Lorraine. The War, let us never forget, began as a German effort to subdue the Slavs who were in revolt against Berlin. We all know that the murder of the Austrian (German) Archduke in Slav Bosnia was the pretext, and that the Austrian (German) ultimatum to Slav Serbia was the method of forcing the War. But it cannot be too often repeated that these events were the result of a fundamental antagonism between the Germans, who wished to be Masters in East Europe, and the Slavs, who refused to submit to them. Had Germany elected to stand on the defensive on her short frontier towards France, and had she thrown her main strength against Russia, it is not improbable that the world would be nominally at peace to-day, but overshadowed by a German East Europe in command of all the Heartland. The British and American insular peoples


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Rh would not have realised the strategical danger until too late.

Unless you would lay up trouble for the future, you cannot now accept any outcome of the War which does not finally dispose of the issue between German and Slav in East Europe. You must have a balance as between German and Slav, and true independence of each. You cannot afford to leave such a condition of affairs in East Europe and the Heartland, as would offer scope for ambition in the future, for you have escaped too narrowly from the recent danger.

A victorious Roman general, when he entered the City, amid all head-turning splendour of a 'Triumph,' had behind him on the chariot a slave who whispered into his ear that he was mortal. When our Statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying:

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Rh Viscount Grey once attributed the whole tragic course of recent events to the breach of the public law of Europe when Austria tore up the Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. Undoubtedly that was a milestone in history, but the original occupation of these two Slav provinces of Turkey by Austria in 1878, under that very Berlin Treaty, was perhaps nearer to the source. It meant to the Slav mind notice that the Prussian German stood behind the Austrian German in his advance over the country for which the Slav had fought with the Turk, for the War of 1876, it must be remembered, which led up to the Congress of Berlin, began with a rising of the Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Turkey, and became European because of the sympathy of the neighbouring Slavs of Serbia and Montenegro, which impelled them also to fight against the Turk. After 1878 there followed a few years of Russian hesitancy while Germany was beginning to build up her man-power. Then, in 1895, came the Alliance between the Czardom and the French Republic. France needed an Ally because of the still open Alsatian wound in her side; Russia needed an Ally because of the German bully by her side. Russia and France were


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[11 & 12 . 5. . 55.]


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196 not immediate neighbours, so that the incompatibihty of Democracy and Autocracy was not under the circumstances an impediment sufficient to forbid the marriage. But it was none the less some measure of the need in which Russia stood.

In 1905, when Russia was weak after the Japanese War and her first revolution, Germany imposed upon her a punishing Tariff. In 1907 Russia went so far, in consequence, as to accept an understanding even with Britain, her rival of two generations and the ally of her late enemy, Japan. Again we have evidence of the stress that was on her, especially if we remember the German influences in her Court and Bureaucracy.

When, therefore, in 1908, Austria took that further action in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina to which Viscount Grey attached such importance, she dealt a blow where there were already bruises. The little neighbour Serbia protested, and the big sister Russia supported her, for it meant the definite closing of the door to the historic aspirations of Serbian nationality, proudly held ever since the great defeat of Kossovo in the fourteenth century. But the Kaiser of Berlin put on his 'shining armour' at Vienna, and shook his 'mailed fist' in the face of the Czar at


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 and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different '-ology,' and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to


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Rh Petrograd. A few more uncomfortable years, and then, in 1912, came the First Balkan War, when the united Balkan Slavs overthrew the German-trained Turkish Army. In 1913 the Bulgarian Slavs, instead of submitting the dispute in regard to the division of the territory taken from Turkey to the arbitration of the Czar, as had been provided by the Treaty of the Balkan Alliance, were persuaded by German intrigue to attack the Serbian Slavs. The Second Balkan War ensued, in which the Bulgarians were defeated owing to the intervention of the Rumanians, and the Treaty of Bucharest registered a severe check to German ambition, and gave new hope to the subject Slavs of Austria.

The very remarkable report sent from Berlin to Paris, three months after the Treaty of Bucharest, by M. Jules Cambon, the French Ambassador, makes it clear that Germany had then decided to obtain by her own sword, whenever an opportunity could be made, the position which she had failed to win vicariously. Accumulating evidence goes to show that within a week of the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany had decided to seize that pretext in order to force the issue. Austria sought to impose such terms of punishment on Serbia for her assumed complicity


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[Ch. 55.]


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242 before you. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.

One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits. His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a conditio sine qua non of the Subject's becoming converted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians, ash me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal, indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary sense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account, for all his usual automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.

Thus that perception of external control which is so


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Author:Walter Lock

Works

 * Leaders of Religion
 * John Keble (1895)

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80 a happy woman. I do not know by what dispensation I am allowed to have two bodies and two lives. How one soul animates two bodies I cannot tell; my mental faculties are equally on the alert in both spheres. On Earth I worship in the Church of Scotland; here I attend Thanksgiving every Sabbath morning. I am equally happy in the two kinds of worship. I might have married here; have had to refuse several offers, but for the fact that my earth life is so present and real that I should feel as if guilty of bigamy. My husband in Edinbro' is a good man, but he is not a Martial, or if he is, he knows nothing about it. It seems as if there is something more in man than body and soul. John Wesley was perhaps right in speaking of body spirit and soul.'

'This difference in height and size must involve a number of differences. A given number of Martials will consume far less food than the same number of Earth dwellers, and I have previously known that they will consume less fluid?'

'Yes,' said Martha, 'the Earth man will eat three times as much food, and in many cases five times as much, and he has to take more fluid to make up for fluid waste. Sometimes, indeed, he drinks for the sake of drinking, and dies a victim to what is unknown here, the vice of drunkenness. We may say that, on the average, what will support one earth man would support four of our people. We have to remember that the earth man has to lift a body twice as cumbrous and to stand the pull of twice as much gravitation, so that in making any movement he has four times the work to do that we have. He has also to stand the pressure of a much heavier atmosphere.'

'You, being conscious on both sides, see all this, I suppose?'

'Indeed, no, I do not,' said Martha. 'I have had to learn it. In coming from one planet to the other I perceive none of these differences. Everything is in proportion in both, so that nothing strikes us as different. We must, however, in reading and writing about the two planets, remember that there are several differences, or we may make mistakes. They could not be serious ones after all. A few errors of size and distance would not invalidate the general truth of what we write and say. Our central avenue is a thousand miles to us, and if an earth man came it would be the same to him if he came as we came, the only way possible, but if he could bring his earth faculties it would be about three hundred and forty miles, still a fairly long street. He might find out that our foot is not twelve inches, but only eight; but before he could live our life with us it would be a foot again. We have only four-ninths of the heat and light of the sun that the earth people have, but here we are used to what we have and should not be able to stand a change to earth conditions any more than an earth man could stand a change to ours. Our Maker has wisely adapted us to the circumstances and surroundings of our life, and we have been wise enough to make the best of these

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[Ch. 55.]


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Rh , 31; sense of his presence, 66-72, 272, 275 ff.; historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493; mind-curer's idea of him, 101; his honor, 342; described by negatives, 417; his attributes, scholastic proof of, 439; the metaphysical ones are for us meaningless, 445; the moral ones are ill-deduced, 447; he is not a mere inference, 502; is used, not known, 506; his existence must make a difference among phenomena, 517, 522; his relation to the subconscious region, 242, 515; his tasks, 519; may be finite and plural, 525. , 96., 407. , 137. , 203. , 171. 'Grace,' the operation of, 226; the state of, 260. , 146, 476, 506. Greeks, their pessimism, 86, 142. Guidance, 472. , 527., 276, 286.

, 201, 268., 82. , 367. Happiness, 47-49, 79, 248, 279. , 100. Healthy-mindedness, Lectures IV and V, passim; its philosophy of evil, 131; compared with morbid-mindedness, 162, 488. Heart, softening of, 267. , 389, 449, 454., 497. Heroism, 364, 488, note. Heterogeneous personality, 169, 193. Higher criticism, 4. , 79, 275, 472. ., 524., 86. , 171. Hypocrisy, 338. Hypothesis, what make a useful one, 517. , 524.

, 313, 406, 410. Illness, 113. 'Imitation of Christ,' the, 44. Immortality, 524. Impulses, 261. Individuality, 501. Inhibitions, 261 ff. Insane melancholy and religion, 144. Insanity and genius, 16; and happiness, 279. Institutional religion, 335. Intellect a secondary force in religion, 431, 514. Intellectual weakness of some saints, 370. Intolerance, 342. Irascibility, 264.

, on, 100. , 76, 448., 304, 407, 413. , 258. , 476. , 347. , 176, 198. Judgments, existential and spiritual, 4.

, 54, 448. Karma, 522. , 401. Kindliness, see Charity. , 385.

, 285. Leaders, see Religious leaders. Leaders, of tribes, 371. , 113, 312., 318. , 201, 203, 220, 246, 506. Life, its significance, 151. Life, the subconscious, 207, 209. , 39. Logic, Hegelian, 449. Louis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350. Love, see Charity. Love, cases of falling out of, 179. Love of God, 276. Love your enemies, 278, 283. , 65. Loyalty, to God, 342. , 164., 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382. Lutheran self-despair, 108, 211. Luxury, 365. , 86. Lyre, 267.

Mahomet, 171. See. , 42, 44, 474., see. Margin of consciousness, 232. , 503., 475. , 303. , 19. Meaning of life, 151. Medical criticism of religion, 413.


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[Ch. 55.]


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306 "To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.

"To know all things, learn to know nothing.

"To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.

"To be all things, be willing to be nothing.

"To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for.

"To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.

"To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.

"To be what you are not, experience what you are not."

These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the All.

And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document.


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The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Memphis (Egypt)

MEMPHIS (Coptic, Menfi or Menofre, “good abode” or “the abode of the good one,” supposed to refer to Osiris; in hieroglyphic inscriptions, according to some, Ma-en-Ptah, abode of Ptah; in Scripture, Noph or Moph), an ancient capital of Egypt, on the W. bank of the Nile, 10 m. S. of the modern city of

Cairo. Its foundation is ascribed to Menes, the first king of Egypt; it was certainly very ancient, and was the first capital of the united kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt. Its situation commanded the S. entrance to the delta, and it was protected by a dike from the inundations of the Nile. According to Diodorus, Memphis was about 17 m. in circuit, but probably this included much open ground. It was remarkable for its fine climate and the beauty of the view from its walls. It controlled the inland trade of Egypt, ascending or descending the Nile. It was the chief seat of learning and of religion, the principal place of the worship of the god Ptah, and the chosen residence of the sacred bull Apis, whose temple here was celebrated for its colonnades through which the great processions were conducted. The other great temples were: that of Isis, commenced at a very early period, and completed by Amasis, 564 B. C.; the temple of Serapis, to which was attached a Nilometer, in the western quarter of the city; the temple of Phra or the sun; and the temple of Ptah, the most ancient of all, and the largest and most superb.—Memphis was the seat of successive dynasties, the 3d, 4th, 5th, 7th, and 8th of Egyptian history, who (according to Mariette) reigned, with one interval of 203 years, from 4449 to 3358 B. C. By the 4th dynasty the great pyramids were built. It was also the capital during the supremacy of the shepherd kings. It suffered severely from the Persians, who avenged the murder of their herald by the Memphians. They made it the headquarters of a Persian garrison; and Cambyses compelled Psammetik III., the last of the Pharaohs, to kill himself, slew the sacred Apis with his own hand, massacred the priests, and profaned the temple of Ptah. The Persians made it the metropolis of their African possessions, and it continued to be the chief city of Egypt until the foundation of Alexandria, after which it gradually declined, and in the course of ages sunk into such utter decay that its very site, overwhelmed with drifted sand, was a matter of dispute among antiquaries. Modern researches have proved that the village of Mitrahenny or Mitranieh, S. of Gizeh, marks the site of Memphis. Its remains extend over many hundred acres of ground, and include ruins of temples and of palaces, and statues, bass reliefs, and inscriptions, to the number of several thousand.


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1807 the event would embarrass him much,—and Mr. Madison seemed to me to share this embarrassment.... Once for all, whatever may be the disposition of mind here, though every one is lashing himself (se batte les flancs) to take a warlike attitude, I can assure your Highness that the President does not want war, and that Mr. Madison dreads it still more. I am convinced that these two personages will do everything that is possible to avoid it, and that if Congress, which will be called together only when an answer shall have arrived from England, should think itself bound, as organ of public opinion, to determine on war, its intention will be crossed by powerful intrigues, because the actual Administration has nothing to gain and everything to lose by war."

Turreau was not the only observer who saw beneath the surface of American politics. The young British minister, Erskine, who enlivened his despatches by no such lightness of touch as was usual with his French colleague, wrote to the new Foreign Secretary of England, George Canning, only brief and dry accounts of the situation at Washington, but showed almost a flash of genius in the far-reaching policy he struck out.

 * "The ferment in the public mind," he wrote July 21, "has not yet subsided, and I am confirmed in the opinion . . . that this country will engage in war rather than submit to their national armed ships being forcibly searched on the high seas.... Should his Majesty think fit to cause an apology to be offered to these States on


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The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Memphremagog, Lake

MEMPHREMAGOG, Lake, a body of water, about 35 m. long from N. to S. and from 2 to 5 m. wide, situated partly in Vermont and partly in Quebec, Canada. It discharges through Magog river into the St. Francis, and thence into the St. Lawrence. The surrounding scenery is picturesque. Along the W. shore are several mountains, prominent among which are Owl's Head, Elephantis, and the Sugar Loaf; the E. shore presents a pleasing contrast. The lake is studded with islands, and abounds in fine fish. Near its head is the

village of Newport, and at its outlet Magog, between which a steamer plies in summer, accommodating the numerous visitors.


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Rh calls 'spontaneous,' that is, fertile in self-suggestions, as distinguished from a 'passive' subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that self-suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these persons of an environment which, on the more 'passive' subjects, had easily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe's numbers are small. But his methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect; and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom three factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second, tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type; you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.

Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for "the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of how it happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained."

As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man is born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis. 'Sanctification' is the technical name of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought


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38 of the attack of his Majesty's ship 'Leopard' on the United States frigate 'Chesapeake,' it would have the most powerful effect not only on the minds of the people of this country, but would render it impossible for the Congress to bring on a war upon the other points of difference between his Majesty and the United States at present under discussion."

A single blow, however violent, could not weld a nation. Every one saw that the very violence of temper which made the month of July, 1807, a moment without a parallel in American history since the battle of Lexington, would be followed by a long reaction of doubt and discord. If the President, the Secretary of State, and great numbers of their stanchest friends hesitated to fight when a foreign nation, after robbing their commerce, fired into their ships of war, and slaughtered or carried off their fellow-citizens,—if they preferred "peaceable means of repressing injustice" at the moment when every nerve would naturally have been strung to recklessness with the impulse to strike back,—it was in the highest degree unlikely that they would be more earnest for war when time had deadened the sense of wrong. Neither England, France, nor Spain could fail to see that the moment when aggression ceased to be safe had not yet arrived.

The people were deeply excited, commerce for the moment was paralyzed, no merchant dared send out a ship, and the country resounded with cries of war when the "Revenge" sailed, bearing instructions to