14282	----	Proofreading Team. [Transcriber's Note: With the exception of hyphenation at the end of lines, the text version preserves the line breaks of the original; the html version has been treated similar to drama and starts a new paragraph for each change of speaker. An illustration of the title page is included to give an impression of the original.] A mery Dia- logue, declaringe the propertyes of shrowde shrewes, and ho- nest wyues, not onelie verie pleasaunte, but also not a lytle profitable: made by ye famous clerke D. Erasmus. Roteroda- mus. Translated into Englyshe. Anno. M.CCCCC. LVII. Eulalia. God spede, & a thousand mine old acqueintance. xantippa. xan. As many agayn, my dere hert. Eulalia. me semets ye ar waren much faire now of late. Eula. Saye you so? gyue you me a mocke at the first dash. xan. Nay veryly but I take you so. Eula. Happely mi new gown maketh me to loke fayrer then I sholde doe. xan. Sothe you saye, I haue not sene a mynioner this many dayes, I reken it Englishe cloth. Eu. It is english stuff and dyed in Venis. xan. It is softer then sylke what an oriente purpel colore here is who gaue you so rich a gift. Eu. How shoulde honeste women come by their gere? but by their husbandes. xan. Happy arte thou that hathe suche an husband, but I wolde to god for his passyon, that I had maryed an husband of clowts, when I had maried col my good man. Eula. Why say ye so. I pray you, are you at oddes now. xan. I shal neuer be at one with him ye se how beggerly I go. I haue not an hole smock to put on my backe, and he is wel contente with all: I praye god I neuer come in heuen & I be not ashamed oftimes to shewe my head, when I se other wiues how net and trim they go that ar matched with farre porer men then he is. Eula. The apparell of honest wiues is not in the aray of the body, nor in the tirements of their head as saynte Peter the apostle teacheth vs (and that I learned a late at a sermon) but in good lyuynge and honest conuersacion and in the ornamentes of the soule, the common buenes ar painted up, to please manye mennes eies we ar trime ynough yf we please our husbands only. xan. But yet my good man so euyll wylling to bestow ought vpon his wyfe, maketh good chere, and lassheth out the dowrye that hee hadde with mee no small pot of wine. Eulaly, where vpon? xantipha, wheron hym lykethe beste, at the tauerne, at the stewes and at the dyce. Eulalia Peace saye not so. xan. wel yet thus it is, then when he commeth home to me at midnight, longe watched for, he lyeth rowtyng lyke a sloyne all the leue longe nyght, yea and now and then he all bespeweth his bed, and worse then I will say at this tyme. Eulali. Peace thou dyshonesteth thy self, when thou doest dishonesteth thy husband. xantip. The deuyl take me bodye and bones but I had leuer lye by a sow with pigges, then with suche a bedfelowe. Eulali. Doest thou not then take him vp, wel favoredly for stumbling. Xantip. As he deserueth I spare no tonge. Eulalia. what doth he then. xantip. At the first breake he toke me vp vengeably, trusting that he shoulde haue shaken me of and put me to scilence with his crabid wordes. Eula Came neuer your hote wordes vnto handstrokes. xantip. On a tyme we fel so farre at wordes that we wer almost by ye eares togither. Eula what say you woman? xan. He toke vp a staffe wandryng at me, as the deuill had bene on hym ready to laye me on the bones. Eula. were thou not redye to ron in at the bench hole. xanti. Nay mary I warrant the. I gat me a thre foted stole in hand, & he had but ones layd his littell finger on me, he shulde not haue founde me lame. I woulde haue holden his nose to the grindstone Eulalia. A newe found shelde, ye wanted but youre dystaffe to haue made you a speare. xantip. And he shoulde not greatlye a laughed at his parte. Eulali. Ah my frynde. xantyppa. that way is neither good nor godly, xantippa what is neither good nor godly. yf he wyll not vse me, as hys wyfe: I wil not take him for my husbande. Eulalya. But Paule sayeth that wyues shoulde bee boner and buxome vnto their husbandes with all humylytye, and Peter also bryngethe vs an example of Sara, that called her husbande Abrahame, Lorde. xantippa. I know that as well as you then ye same paule say that men shoulde loue theyr wyues, as Christ loues his spouse the churche let him do his duete I wil do myne. Eula. But for all that, when the matter is so farre that the one muste forber the other it is reason that the woman giue place vnto the man, xan. Is he meete to be called my husbande that maketh me his vnderlynge and his dryuel? Eula. But tel me dame xantip. Would he neuer offre the stripes after that xantip. Not a stripe, and therin he was the wyser man for & he had he should haue repented euery vayne in hys harte. Eulali. But thou offered him foule wordes plentie, xantip. And will do. Eula. What doth he ye meane season. xantip. What doth he sometyme cowcheth an hogeshed, somtime he doth nothing but stande and laughe at me, other whyle takethe hys Lute wheron is scarslie three strynges layenge on that as fast as he may dryue because he would not here me. Eula. Doeth that greue thee? xantippa. To beyonde home, manie a tyme I haue much a do to hold my handes. Eula. Neighbour. xantip. wylt thou gyue me leaue to be playn with the. xantippa Good leaue haue you. Eula. Be as bolde on me agayne our olde acquayntaunce and amite, euen from our chyldhode, would it should be so. xantippa. Trueth you saie, there was neuer woman kinde that I fauoured more Elaly Whatsoeuer thy husband be, marke well this, chaunge thou canst not, In the olde lawe, where the deuill hadde cast aboone betwene the man and the wife, at the worste waye they myght be deuorsed, but now that remedie is past, euen till death depart you he must nedes be thy husbande, and thou hys wyfe, xan. Il mote they thryue & thei that taken away that liberty from vs Eulalia. Beware what thou sayest, it was christes act. Xan. I can euil beleue that Eula. It is none otherwyse, now it is beste that eyther of you one beyng with an other, ye laboure to liue at reste and peace. xantyppa. Why? can I forgeue him a new, Eu. It lieth great parte in the women, for the orderinge of theyr husbandes. xan. Leadest thou a mery life with thine. Eula Now all is well. xan. Ergo ther was somwhat to do at your fyrste metying Eula. Neuer no greate busynes, but yet as it, happeneth now and than betwene man & woman, there was foule cloudes a loft, that might haue made a storme but that they were ouer blowen with good humanitie and wyse handlynge. Euery man hath hys maner and euery man hath his seueral aptite or mynde, and thinkes hys owne way best, & yf we list not to lie there liueth no man without faulte, which yf anie were elles, ywis in wedlocke they ought to know and not vtterly hated xan, you say well, Eulalya. It happeneth many times that loue dayes breketh betwene man and wife, before ye one be perfitly knowen vnto the other beware of that in any wife, for when malice is ones begon, loue is but barely redressed agayne, namely, yf the mater grow furthe unto bytter checkes, & shamfull raylinges such things as are fastened with glew, yf a manne wyll all to shake them strayght waye whyle the glew is warme, they soone fal in peces, but after ye glew is ones dried vp they cleue togither so fast as anie thing, wherefore at the beginning a meanes must be made, that loue mai encrease and be made sure betwene ye man & the wife, & that is best brought aboute by gentilnesse and fayre condycions, for the loue that beautie onelie causeth, is in a maner but a cheri faire Xan. But I praye you hartelye tell me, by what pollycy ye brought your good man to folow your daunce. Eula. I wyll tell you on this condicyon, that ye will folowe me. xan. I can. Eula, It is as easy as water if ye can find in your hart to do it, nor yet no good time past for he is a yong man, and you ar but agirle of age, and I trowe it is not a yere ful sins ye wer maried. Xan All thys is true Eulalia. I wyll shew you then. But you must kepe it secret xantip. with a ryght good wyl. Eula. This was my chyefe care, to kepe me alwayes in my housbandes fauoure, that there shulde nothyng angre him I obserued his appetite and pleasure I marked the tymes bothe whan he woulde be pleased and when he wold be all byshrwed, as they tameth the Elephantes and Lyons or suche beastes that can not be wonne by strength xantyppa. Suche a beaste haue I at home. Eula. Thei that goth vnto the Elephantes weare no white garmentes, nor they that tame wylde bulles, weare no blasynge reedes, for experience teacheth, that suche beastes bee madde with those colours, like as the Tygers by the sound of tumbrels be made so wode, that thei plucke theymself in peces. Also thei that breake horses haue their termes and theyr soundes theyr hadlynges, and other knackes to breake their wyldnes, wyth all. Howe much more then is it oure duetyes that ye wyues to use suche craftes toward our husbandes with whom all our lyfe tyme wil we, nyl we is one house, and one bed. xantip. furthwith your tale. Eula, when I had ones marked there thynges. I applied my selfe unto hym, well ware not to displease him. xantip. How could thou do that. Eulalya. Fyrste in the ouerseynge my householde, which is the very charge and cure of wyues, I wayted euer, not onely gyuynge hede that nothing shoulde be forgotten or undoone, but that althynges should be as he woulde haue it, wer it euer so small a trifle. xan. wherin. Eulalia. As thus. Yf mi good man had a fantasye to this thynge, or to that thyng, or if he would haue his meate dressed on this fashion, or that fashion. xan. But howe couldest thou fashyon thye selfe after hys wyll and mynde, that eyther woulde not be at home or elles be as freshe as a saulte heryng. Elali. Abyde a while. I come not at that yet, yf my husband wer very sad at anye tyme, no time to speake to him. I laughed not nor tryfled him as many a woman doth but I looked rufully and heauyly, for as a glasse (if it be a true stone) representeth euer ye physnamy of hym that loketh in it, so lykewyse it becommeth a wedded woman alway to agre vnto the appetite of her husbande, that she be not mery when he murneth, nor dysposed to play when he is sad. And if that at any time he be waiward shrewshaken, either I pacyfye hym with faire wordes, or I let hym alone, vntyll the wynd be ouerblowen gyuing him neuer a word at al, vntil the time come that I may eyther excuse my faute, or tell hym of hys. In lyke wyse when he commeth home wel whitled, I gyue hym gentyll and fayre woordes, so with fayre entreatynge I gette hym to bed. xantyppa, O careful state of wyues, when they muste be gladde and fayne to followe their husbandes mindes, be thei eluyshe, dronken, or doying what myschiefe they liste. Eula. As whoe saieth this gentill dealynge serueth not for bothe partyes, for they spyte of theyr berdes muste suffre many thynges in our demeanor, yet a time ther is, when in a weighty matter it is laufull that the wyfe tell the good man his faute, if that it be matter of substaunce, for at lyght trifles, it is best to play byll under wynge. xantyp. what tune is that Eula. when he is ydle, neither angry, pensife, nor ouersen, then betwixt you two secretly he must be told his faute gently, or rather intreated, that in this thynge or that he play the better husbande to loke better to his good name and fame and to his helth and this tellyng must be myxt with mery conceites and pleasaunt wordes many times I make a meane to tel my tale after this fashyon, that he shall promise me, he shal take no displeasure wyth my thynge, that I a foolyshe woman shall breake vnto hym, that pertayneth eyther to hys helthe worshyppe or welth. When I haue sayde that I woulde, I chop cleane from that communication and falle into some other pastime, for this is all our fautes, neyghbour Xantippa, that when we begyn ones to chat our tounges neuer lie. Xantip. So men say Eulalia. Thus was I well ware on, that I neuer tell my husband his fautes before companie, nor I neuer caried any complaynte furthe a dores: the mendes is soner made when none knoweth it but two, and there were anie suche faute that myght not be wel borne nor amended by ye wyues tellige, it is more laudable that the wife make complaynte vnto the Parentes and kynsfolke of her husband, then vnto her own, and so to moderate her complaynte that she seme not to hate hym but hys vice nor let her play all the blabbe, that in some poynt vnutered, he may know & loue his wiues curteysy. Xantip. She had nede be aswellerned woman, that would do all this. Eu. Mary through suche demeanoure, we shall sterre our husbandes vnto lyke gentylnesse. Xan: There be some that cannot be amended with all the gentyll handlynge in the worlde. Eula: In faith I thyncke nay, but case there be, marke this wel the good man must be for borne, howe soeuer the game goeth, then is it better to haue him alwayes at one point or ells more kinde and louing throw oure gentill handlinge, then to haue him worse and worse throwe our cursednesse, what wyll you say and I tell you of husbandes that hath won theyr wiues by suche curtesie, howe muche more are we bounde to use the same towarde our husbandes. Xantip. Than shall you tell of one farre vnlyke vnto thyne husband. Eula. I am aquented with a certayne gentelman well lerned and a veri honest man, he maried a yonge wyfe, a mayden of. xvii. yeare olde brede and brought vp of a chylde in the countre vnder her fathers and mother wing (as gentilmen delite to dwel in the countre) to hunt & hawke This yong gentilman would haue one that were unbroken, because he might the soner breake her after hys owne mind, he began to entre her in learning syngynge, and playinge, and by lytle and lytle to vse here to repete suche thynges as she harde at sermons, and to instruct her with other things that myght haue doone her more good in time to come. This gere, because it was straunge vnto this young woman which at home was brought vp in all ydelnesse, and with the light communication of her fathers seruantes, and other pastimes, began to waxe greuouse & paynfull, vnto her. She withdrew her good mynde and dylygence and when her husband called vpon her she put ye finger in the eye, and wepte and many times she would fal downe on the grounde, beatynge her head agaynst the floure, as one that woulde be out of thys worlde. When there was no healpe for this gere, the good man as though he hadde bene wel asked his wyfe yf she woulde ryde into the countre with him a sporting vnto her fathers house, so that she graunted anone. When they were commen thyther, the gentilman left his wyfe with her mother & her sisters he went furth an huntynge with his father in lawe, there betwene theym two, he shewed al together, how that he hadde hoped to haue had a louynge companion to lead his lyfe withall, now he hath one that is alwaies blubberynge and pyninge her selfe awaye withoute anye remedie, he prayeth him to lay to hys hande in amendinge his doughters fautes her father answered that he had ones giuen hym his doughter, and yf that she woulde not be rewled by wordes (a goddes name take Stafforde lawe) she was his owne. Then the gentylman sayd agayne, I know that I may do but I had leuer haue her amended eyther by youre good counsell or commaundement, then to come vnto that extreme waies, her father promised that he would fynde a remedye. After a dai or two, he espied time and place when he might be alone with his doughter. Then he loked soureli vpon his doughter, as though he had bene horne woode with her, he began to reherse how foule a beaste she was, how he feared many tymes that she neuer haue bestowed her. And yet sayde he much a doe, vnto my great coste and charg, I haue gotten the one that moughte lye by any Ladyes syde, and she were a quene and yet thou not perceiuying what I haue done for the nor knowynge that thou hast suche a man whiche but of his goodnes myghte thynke thee to euill to be stoye in his kytchen, thou contrariest al his mind to make a short tale he spake so sharpely to her, that she feared that he wold haue beaten her. It is a man of asubtyll and wylye wytte, whyche wythout a vysarde is ready to playe anye maner of parte. Then this yonge wife what for feare, and for trouthe of the matter, cleane stryken oute of countenaunce, fell downe at her fathers fete desyryng hym that he wolde forgette and forgiue her all that was past and euer after she woulde doe her duetye Her father forgaue her, and promised that she shoulde finde him a kynd and a louynge father, yf so be that she perfourmed her promyse. xantippa. How dyd she afterwarde? Eulalya, when she was departed from her father she came backe into a chaumber, and there by chaunce found her husband alone she fel on her knees to hym and said. Man in tymes paste, I neyther knewe you nor my selfe, from this daye froward ye shall se me cleane chaunged, onelye pardon that is past, with that her husbande toke her in his armes & kyssed her sayinge she should lacke nothyng yf she woulde holde her in that mind. xantip. Why did she continue so. Eulalya. Euen tyll her endynge daye, nor there was none so vyle a thynge but that she woulde laye handes on it redely with all her herte, if her husband wolde let her, so great loue was begon and assured betwene them and many a daye after, shee thanked god that euer she met with such a man. For yf she had not she sayd she had ben cleane caste awaye. xan. We haue as greate plentie of suche housbandes, as of white crowes. Eulalya. Now, but for werieng you? I coulde tell you a thynge that chaunced a late in this same citye. xantyppa. I haue litell to doe, and I lyke your communicacyon very well. Eulalia. There was a certaine gentilman he as suche sort of men do, vsed much huntyng in the cuntre, where he happened on a younge damoysell, a very pore womans child on whom he doted a man well stryken in age, and for her sake he lay often out of his owne house his excuse was hunting. This mans wife an exceding honest woman, halfe deale suspecte the mater, tried out her husbandes falshed, on a tyme when he had taken his iourney fourth of the town vnto some other waies, she wente vnto that poore cotage and boulted out all the hoole matter, where he laye on nights, wheron he dranke, what thyng thei had to welcom him withall. There was neither one thyng nor other, but bare walles. This good woman returned home, and sone after came againe brynginge with her a good soft bed, and al therto belongyng and certain plate besydes that she gaue them moneye, chargynge them that if the Gentilman came agayne, they shold entreate him better not beyng knowen al this while that she was his wyfe, but fayued her to be her sister. Not long after her husband stale thether againe, he sawe the howse otherwyse decked, and better fare then he was wounte to haue. He asked, frome whence commeth al this goodly gere? They sayde that an honeste matrone, a kynsewoman of hys hadde broughte it thyther and commaunded thenm that he should be well cherished when so euer he came, by and by his hart gaue him that it was hys wiues dede, whan he came home he demaunded of her yf she hadde bene there or nay, she sayd yea. Then he asked her for what purpose she sente all that housholde stuffe thyther. Man (said she) ye haue ben tenderly brought vp. I perceiued that ye were but corslie handled there, me thought that it was my part, seing it was your wyll and pleasure to be there ye shoulde be better loked to. Xantippa. She was one of goddes fooles. I woulde rather for a bed haue layd vnder him a bundel of nettels: or a burden of thistels. Eula. But here the end her husbande perceyuyng the honeste of her great pacience neuer after laye from her, but made good cheare at home with his owne. I am sure ye knowe Gilberte the holander. Xan. Very well. Eu. He (as it is not vnknowen maried an old wife in his florishing youth. Xan. Per aduenture he maried the good and notthe woman. Eulalia. There sayde ye well, setting lytell stoore by hys olde wife, hunted a callette, with whom he kept much companie abrode, he dined or supped litell at home. What wouldest thou haue sayd to ye gere. Xantip. What woulde I a said? I wolde haue flowen to the hores toppe and I wolde haue crowned myne husbande at hys oute goinge to her with a pysbowle, that he so embawlmed might haue gon vnto his souerayne ladie. Eula. But how much wiselier dyd this woman? She desyred that yonge woman home vnto her, and made her good chere, so by that meanes she brought home also her husband without ani witchraft or sorserie, and yf that at anye season he supped abrode with her she would sende vnto them some good dayntie morsel, and byd him make good chere Xantippa. I had leuer be slayne then I woulde be bawde vnto myne owne husbande. Eulalia. Yea, but consyder all thynges well, was not that muche better, then she shoulde be her shrewyshnesse, haue putte her husbandes minde cleane of from her, and so haue ledde all her life in trouble and heuynesse. Xantippa. I graunte you well, that it was better so but I coulde not abyde it. Eulalya. I wyll tell you a prety story more, and so make an ende One of oure neyghboures, a well disposed and a goddes man, but that he is some what testie, on a day pomeld his wife well and thriftely aboute the pate and so good a woman as euer was borne, she picked her into an inner parler, and there weepynge and sobbynge, eased her heuye harte, anone after, by chaunce her husbande came into the same place, and founde hys wyfe wepyng. What sitest thou heare sayth he seighing & sobbing like a child Then she like a wise woman sayde. Is it not more honesty for me to lamente my dolours here in a secret place, then to make wondering and on oute crye in the strete, as other women do. At so wyfely and womanly a saing his hart melted, promysynge her faythfullye and truelie that he woulde neuer laye stroke on her afterwarde, nor neuer did. Xantippa. No more wil mine god thanke my selfe. Eulalya. But then ye are alwaies one at a nother, agreinge lyke dogges and cattes. Xan. What wouldest thou that I should do? Eu. Fyrst & formest, whatsoeuer thy husbande doeth sayde thou nothinge, for his harte must be wonne by lytell and litel by fayre meanes, gentilnesse and forbearing at the last thou shalte eyther wynne him or at the least waie thou shalt leade a better life then thou doest now. Xantippa. He his beyonde goddes forbode, he wil neuer amende. Eulalia. Eye saye not so, there is no beest so wild but by fayre handling be tamed, neuer mistrust man then. Assay a moneth or two, blame me and thou findest not that my counsell dooeth ease. There be some fautes wyth you thoughe thou se them, be wyse of this especyall that thou neuer gyue hym foule wordes in the chambre, or inbed but be sure that all thynges there bee full of pastyme and pleasure. For yf that place which is ordeined to make amendes for all fautes and so to renew loue, be polluted, eyther with strife or grugynges, then fayre wel al hope of loue daies, or atonementes, yet there be some beastes so wayward and mischeuous, that when theyr husbandes hath them in their arms a bed, they scholde & chyde making that same plesure their lewd condicions (that expelseth all displeasures oute of their husbandes mynde unpleasaunt and lytell set bi corrupting the medecine that shuld haue cured al deadly greifes, & odible offences. xantip. That is no newes to me. Eula. Though the woman shulde be well ware and wyse that she shulde neuer be disobedient vnto her husband yet she ought to be most circumspect that at meting she shew her selfe redy and pleasaunt unto him. xantyppa. Yea vnto a man, holde well withall but I am combred with a beast. Eula. No more of those wordes, most commonly our husbandes ar euyll through our owne faute, but to returne againe vnto our taile they that ar sene in the olde fables of Poetes sai that Venus whome they make chiefe lady of wedlocke (hath a girdle made by the handy worke of Vulcan her Lorde, and in that is thrust al that enforceth love and with that she girdeth her whan so ever she lyeth wyth her housbande xantippa. A tale of a tubbe. Eulalya. A tayle it is, but herken what the taile meaneth. xantippa. Tell me. Eulalia That techeth us that the wyfe ought to dyspose her selfe all the she maye that lieng by her husband she shew him al the plesure that she can; Wherby the honest love of matrimony may reuiue and be renewed, & that there with be clene dispatched al grudges & malice xant. But how shall we come by the thys gyrdle? Eula. We nede neyther wytchraft nor enchauntment, ther is non of them al, so sure as honest condicions accompayned with good feloshyp. xan. I can not fauoure suche an husbande as myne is. Eula, It is moste thy profyt that he be no longer suche. If thou couldest by thy Circes craft chaunge thin husband into an hogge, or a bore wouldest thou do it? xantip. God knoweth. Eu. Art thou in dout? haddest thou leauer marye an hogge than a man. Xantip. Mary I had leauer haue a manne. Eulalia. wel, what and thou coudest by sorcery make him of a dronkarde a soober man, of a vnthrifte a good housbande of an ydell losell a towarde body, woldest thou not doe it? xantip. yes, hardely, woulde I doe it. But where shoulde I learne the cunnyng? Eula. For soth that conning hast thou in the if thou wouldest vtter it, thyn must he be, mauger thy head, the towarde ye makest him, the better it is for the, thou lokest on nothing but on his leude condicions, and thei make the half mad, thou wouldest amende hym and thou puttest hym farther oute of frame, loke rather on his good condicions, and so shalt thou make him better. It is to late calagayne yesterdaie before thou were maryed unto hym. It was tyme to consyder what his fautes were for a women shold not only take her husbande by the eyes but by the eares. Now it is more tyme to redresse fautes then to fynd fautes. xantt. What woman euer toke her gusband by the eares. Eulali. She taketh her husbande by the eyes that loketh on nothyng, but on the beautye and pulcritude of the body. She taketh him by the eares, that harkeneth diligently what the common voice sayth by him xantip. Thy counsaile is good, but it commeth a day after the faire. Eula. Yet it commeth time ynough to bringe thyne husbande to a greate furtheraunce to that shall bee yf God sende you anie frute togither. xantippa. We are spede alredy of that. Eulaly. How long ago. Xantip. A good whyle ago Eulalia. How many monethes old is it. Xantip. It lacketh lytle of. vii. Eula What a tale is this, ye reken the monethes by nightes and dayes double. Xantippa. Not so. Eula. It can not be none other wyse, yf ye reken from the mariage day. xantippa. yea, but what then, I spake with him before we were maried. Eulalia. Be children gotten by speakinge. xantip. It befell so that he mette me alone and begon to ticke at me, and tickled me vnder the arme holes and sydes to make me laugh. I might not awaie with ticklynge, but fell downe backewarde vpon a bedde and he a lofte, neuer leuinge kyssynge on me, what he did els I can not saye, but by sayncte Marie within a while after my bely beganne to swell. Eula. Go now and disprayse thine husbande whiche yf he gette children by playe, what wyll he do when he goeth to it in good ernest. xantippa, I fere me I am payed agayin. Eula. Good locke God hath sent a fruitfull grounde, a good tylman. Xantip. In that thing he might haue lesse laboure and more thanke. Eula. Few wyues finde at theyr husbandes in that behalf but were ye then sure togither. xanti. yea that we were Eula. The offence is the lesse. Is it a man chylde. xantip. yea. Eula. He shal make you at one so that ye wil bow & forbere. What saieth other men by thin husband, they that be his companions, they delite with him abrode xan, They say that he is meruelous gentyl, redy to do euery man pleasure, liberal and sure to his frende. Eula. And that putteth me in good comfort that he wyll be ruled after our counsayll. xantip. But I fynde him not so. Eula. =Order thy selfe to him as I haue tolde thee, and cal me no more true sayer but a lier, if he be not so good vnto the as to anie creature liuinge Again considre this he is yet but a childe, I thinke he passethe not. xxiiij. the blacke oxe neuer trode on hys fote, nowe it is but loste laboure to recken vpon anye deuorse. xantippa. Yet manye a tyme and ofte I haue troubled my braynes withal Eulalia. As for that fantasye whensoeuer it commeth into your mynd first of all counte how naked a thynge woman is, deuorsed from man. It is the hyghest dignitie that longethe to the wyfe to obsequyous vnto her spouse. So hath natyre ordeined so god hath appoynted, that the woman shoulde be ruled al by the man loke onely vppon this whiche is trouth, thine husbande he is, other canste thou none haue. Againe forgette not that swete babe be gotten of both your bodies what thin beste thou to do with that, wilte thou take it awaye with thee? Thou shalte bereue thyne husband his ryght wylt thou leue it with hym? thou shalt spoile thy self of thy chefeste Jewell thou haste. Beside all this tell me trueth hast thou none euyll wyllers, Besyde all thys tell me trueth, hast thou none euyll wyllers. xan. I haue a stepdame I warrant you, and myne husbandes mother euen such another. Eula. Do they hate the so deadly. xantip. They woulde se me hanged. Eula. Then forget not then what greater plesure couldest thou shew them then to se the deuorsed from thine husband and to led a wydowes lyfe. Yea and worse then a wydow, for wydowes be at their choise. xantippa. I holde well with youre counsell, but I can not awaye with the paynes. Eulalia. yet recken what paines ye toke or ye colde teache your paret to speake. xantippa. Exceadynge much. Eu. And thinke you much to labour a lytel in reforming your husband with whom you may liue merely all the dayes of your lyfe. What busines doe men put them self to be wel & easly horsed & shal we think our selues to good to take paines that we mai haue our husbandes gentil & curteise vnto vs. xantip. What shal I do. Eu. I haue told you al redy, se that al thing be clene & trim at home, that no sluttysh or vnclenlye syghtes dryue hym oute a dores. Be your selfe alwayes redy at a becke, berynge continuali in minde what reuerence the wife oweth vnto her husband. Be neyther in your dumpes, nor alwayes on your mery pinnes go nether to homely nor to nycely. Let your meat be cleane dressed, you know yourhusbandes diet. What he loueth best that dresse. Moreouer shewe your selfe louinge and fayre spoken vnto them where he loueth, call them now and then vnto your table. At meate, se that al thinges be well sauored, and make good there, And when that he is toppe heuy playing on his lute, sytte thou by and singe to him so shalte thou make hym keepe home, and lessen hys expences This shall he thynke at length, in faythe I am a fonde felowe that maketh suche chere with a strumpet abroode with greate lossee bothe of substance and name, seyng that I haue a wyfe at home bothe muche fayrer, and one that loueth me ten times better, with whome I may be both clenlyer receiued and dayntelier cherisshed xantip. Beleuest thou that it will take and I put it into a profe. Eulali. Looke on me. I warrante it or ought longe I wyll in hande with thyne husbande, & I will tell hym his part. xantippa. ye marie that is well sayde. But be wyse that he espie not our casle, he would plaie his fages, all the house should be to lytle for hym. Eulalia. Take no thoughte. I shall so conuey my matters, that he shall dysclose all together hym selfe, what busynesse is betwene you, that done I wyll handell him pretelie as I thinke beste, and I truste to make him a new man for the and when I se my time I wyl make a lie for thee, how louinge thou hast spoken of him. xantippa. Chryst spede vs and bringe our pupose well aboute. Eulalia. He will not fayle the so thou do thy good wyll. There was a man that maried a woman whiche hadde great riches and beawtye. Howe bee it she hadde suche an impedyment of nature that she was domme and coulde not speake, whiche thynge made him ryghte pensyfe, and sayd, wherfore vpon a daye as he walked alone ryght heuye in hearte thynkynge vpon his wyfe. There came one to hym and asked him what was the cause of his heuynesse whiche answered that it was onely bycause his wife was borne domme. To whome this other said I shal shewe the soone a remedy and a medicyne (therfore that is thus) go tak an aspen leafe and lay it vnder her tonge this night shee beinge a sleape, and I warrant the that shee shall speake on the morowe whiche man beyng glad of thys medycyne prepared therfore and gathered aspen leaues, wherfore he layd thre of them vnder her tonge whan shee was a sleape. And on the morow when he him selfe awaked he Desyrous to know how hys medicine wrought being in bed with her, he demaunded of her how she did, and sodenly she answered and sayd, I beshrewe thy harte for waking me so early, and so by the vertue of that medycyne she was restored to her speche. But in conclusion her spech encresed day by day and she was so curst of condycyon that euery daie she brauled and chyd with her husbande, so muche at the laste he was more weped, and had much more trouble and disease wyth her shrewed wordes then he hadde before when she was dumme, wherfore as he walked another time alone he happened to mete agayne with the same personne that taught hym the sayde medycine and sayde to hym thys wyse. Syr ye taught me a medicin but late to make my domme wyfe to speake, byddynge me lay an aspen leafe vnder her toung when she sleapte, and I layde three Aspen leaves there. Wherfore nowe she speaketh. But yet she speaketh soo much & so shrewdlye that I am more werier of her now, then I was when she was domme: Wherfore I praie you teache me a medycine to modyfye her that she speake not so muche. This other answered and sayd thus. Sir I am a deuyl of hel but I am one of them that haue least power there. Al be yet I haue power to make a woman to speake, but and yf a woman begin ones to speake, I nor al the deuyls in hel that haue the mooste power be not able to make a woman to be styll, nor to cause her to leue speakyng. The end of this pleasant dialogue declaryng the seueral properties of ye two contrary disposers of the wyues aforesayde. Imprinted at London in Paules church yearde, at the sygne of the Sunne, by Antony Kytson. 
16246	----	[Transcriber's note: The printed text marks the first few leaves of each 16-page signature: ||A.i.||, ||A.ii.||... Other page breaks are marked in this e-text with double lines || A few apparent typographic errors were corrected and are listed at the end of the text. Other irregularities are noted but were left unchanged. All other spelling, capitalization and punctuation are as in the original.] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * A VE- ry pleasaunt & fruitful Dio- loge called the *Epicure*, made by that fa- mous clerke Eras mus of Rotero- dame, newly translated. 1545. * * * * * _S. Paule to the Ephesians_ You that haue professed Christ, suffre not your selues to be deceyued vvith false doctrine, nor vaine and noughtie talkyng, but herken vnto all Godly thynges, and especially too the doctryne of the Gospell. ||A.ii.|| THE HABOVN- daunt mercie and grace of our heauenly father Iesu Christ, maye alwaies strengthen and defende oure noble & vertuous Prynce Ed- ward too the mainte- naunce of the liue- ly woord of God. Whereas manye histories of olde & auncient antiquitie, and also al godly & Christiã writers most playnely consêt together, and agree in this, that dignitie, riches, kinred, worldly pompe, and renoume, doo neither make men better, ne yet happiar, contrarie too the blynde & fonde iudgement of the most part of menne: but by the power and strength of the mynde, that is, learnyng, wysedome, || and vertue, all menne are hyghly enriched, ornated, & most purely beutified, for these bee thinges bothe notable, eternall, and verye familiar betwene the heauenly father & vs. It is therefore euidente (most excellent Prince) that the fittest ornamêtes for your graces tender age, bee, eruditiõ and vertue. Wherunto you are bothe so ernestly addicte and therin so wõderfully doo preuaile, that I nede not too exhorte & exstimulate your grace vnto the study thereof. For that God him self hath wrought, and fourmed your mynde so apt and desirous too attayne and diligêtly too seeke for al godly doctrine, that euê now you doo shewe in all youre saiynges and dooinges suche a wonderfull pleasaûtes much lyke vnto a certayne swete musike or harmonie, that any honest hart exceadinglye woulde reioyce in the sight therof. Verely, your grace thinketh plainly all time lost, that is not bestowed vpon learnyng, which is a verie rare thyng in anye childe, and rarest of all in a Prince. Thus youre noblenes, rather desireth vertue and ||A.iii.|| learning the most surest and excellent treasures, which farre surmounte all worldly ryches, then anye vanities or trifles. Nowe youre grace prepareth for the holsome and pleasaunt foode of the mynde. Now you seke for that whiche you shal fynd most surest helper and faythfulst councellour in all your affaires. Now your magnificêt mynde studieth that, whiche all Englyshe menne with meke and humile heartes shuld desire GOD to endue your grace with all. Now with diligent labour you searche for a thyng, as one most myndeful of this saiyng: Happy is that realme that hath a lerned Prince. Nowe you trauaile for that, whiche conquereth, and kepeth doune all greuous tourmentes & outragious affections of the mynde, too the furderaunce of good liuyng, and maintenaûce of vertue, I meane holsome erudition and learnyng. Many Heathen Princes forsoth, are highly magnified with most ample prayses, which gaue them selues too the study of Philosophie, or knowledge of tongues, for their owne commoditie, and || especially for the weale of their subiectes. Who is nowe more celebrated and worthelier extolled then Mithridates? that noble kyng of Pont and Bithinia, which, (as Aulus Gellius writeth) vnderstoode so perfitly the languages of .xxii. sondrye countries that were vnder his dominiõ, that he neuer vsed any interpretour too answer his subiectes, but spake their lãguages so finelye, as thoughe he had been of the same coûtrie. Ageyn, that honorable manne Quintus Ennius saied: that he had .iii. heartes, because he coulde speake Greke, Italian, and Latin. Yea, and breuely, the most famaus writers, as well the Heathen, as the Christien, with an vniuersall consent, playnly affirme: Whan thei had weied the nature and condiciõ of the purest thinges vnder heauen, thei sawe nothyng faire, or of any pryce, or that ought too be accõpted ours, but onely vertue and learning. Euen now too acknowledge that same, it is yeouê you from aboue, for your grace delecteth in nothyng more then too bee occupied in the holye Byble: wherin, ||A.iiii.|| you beginne too sauer & smelle furth the treasure of wisedome, knowledge and fulnes of the deuyne power, that is a studie most conuenient for euery Christien Prince, that kynd of studye cannot haue sufficient laude and commendation. Whose Princely heart forsoth, is raueshed on suche a godlie and vertuous studie, it can neuer haue condigne and worthie praises, but deserueth alwaies too bee had in great price, estimation, and honour. Who dooeth not know? that Prince which is yeouen vnto the scriptures of God and with a stoute stomake and valiãt heart, both searcheth furth and also defendeth ye true doctrine of the Gospell, too bee inrolled in the assemble of Christ. Who dooeth not see? that Prince too bee moost surelye armed, which carieth in his heart the swerd of ye spirit, which is the blessed woord of God. Who is ignoraunt? that euer lastyng lyfe consisteth in the knoweledge of God. What Prince woulde not studie to maintaine that, which is written for the health, and saluation of all menne weiyuge with himselfe || that a Prince can not deserue, neither by conquest, ciuel policie, nor yet by anye other meane vnder heauen, thys name high or honorable, so wourthely as by the setting forward of Goddes woorde. What young Prince humily defendyng doune intoo him selfe and callyng to memory his bounden dutie woulde not with a glad hearte and a chearfull mynde, gredelye desyre too knowe, enlarge, and amplifie the glory and maiestie of hys derely beloued father? Your grace (forsoth) hath professed God too bee your father: Blessed are you then if you obey vnto hys word, and walke in his waies. Blessed are you, yf you supporte suche as preache the Gospell. Blessed are you, yf your mind bee full furnished with the testament of Christ, and shew your selfe too bee the most cruel too and enemy agaynst ypocrisie, supersticion, and all papistical phantasies, wherwith the true religion of God hathe been dusked and defaced these many yeres Blessed are you, if you reade it daye & nighte, that your grace maye knowe what GOD dooeth forbyd you, and ||A.v.|| euer submit your selfe therunto with seruiceable lowlines chiefly desiring to florysh and decke your mynd with godly knowledge. And most blessed are you, if you apply your self vnto al good workes, & plant surely in your heart the scriptures of Christ, If you thus doo, nether the power of any papistical realme, nor yet of hel can preuaile at any time against your grace. Nowe therfore, with humile hearte, faithfully receiue the swete promises of the Gospel. If you kepe the woordes of the Lorde and cleaue fast vnto them: there is promised you the kingdome of heauen: You are promised a weale publick most riche and welthy You are promised too bee deliuered from the deceiptes of all youre priuie enemyes. You are promised also, too conquere great and mightie nations. Agayne, let your grace bee most fully perswaded in this, that ther was neuer Kyng nor Prince, that prospered whiche tooke parte against Goddes woord, and that the greatest abhomination that can bee, either for Kyng, Prince, or any other manne, is too || forsake the true woord of God. O with howe rebukefull woordes & greuous iudgement thei be condemned, which dispice & set lytle by the holy Byble & most blessed Testamêt of God, wherin there is contained all the wil & pleasure of our heauêly father toward vs most miserable & ignoraunt wretches Who would not quake, too beholde the terrible feares & threatenynges of God ageinst al suche? Who would not lament & gladly helppe their obstinate blyndenes? Who woulde not weepe? to heare and reade in how many places, they be openly accursed by the scriptures of Christ. God him self playnely affirmeth, that he wyll sodênly consume them with the breath of his anger. Yea, besides that whoso euer declyneth from the word of God is accursed in all his doynges, whether he be Kyng, or Prynce, riche, or poore, or of what estate soeuer he bee. This fearfull saiyng (most excellent Prynce) shulde moue all men to take hede vnto their duties and to praie that gods word maie take place emõgist vs. O that al men would ||fantasie the scriptures of God, and saye with the vertuous man Iob. Wee will not bee ageynst the woordes of the holy one. Truth it is, God taketh diligent care too haue vs al know his woord. Woulde God therfore, that all wee were now willing to haue the syncere woorde of God & all holsom doctrine too go forward. O that all we would consent togither in the Gospell, brotherly admonishyng, and secretelye prouokyng one an other too true religion & vertue. O that no man would sow emongist the people pernitious doctryne, but with all lowly diligêce and Godlye monition euer prouoke, tempt, and stere them, tyll their heartes were remoued frõ their olde dautyng dreames and supersticiõ, which haue been long grafted in them thorow popyshe doctrine. By this meane wee shuld euer haue concorde emongist vs, whiche in all thynges is necessary, but most nedefull and expedient in Gods holi woord. Now truely the godlyest thynge that can bee deuysed, for any christian realme, is to haue emongist them one maner and || fourme of doctryne, & too trace trueli the steppes of God and neuer to seeke any other bywayes. Who hath not redde in ye scriptures? but that realme is endued with godly ornamentes & riches, where all men prospere, go for ward and florishe in gods woord, delectyng day and night in the swete cõsolations of the holy testament. By this way we shuld especially set forth the glory of God, and of our sauiour Iesu Christ, if we would reuerently shew one an other that whiche God hath taught vs. Yea & in this doyng all men shulde well perceaue that we were the true disciples of Christ, being knitte and coupled fast together in mynde and iudgement, preachyng God with one mouth and also with one assent euer promotyng his gloryous testament. O the good happe and grace of that king or prynce emongist whose subiectes there is such an hole consent and iudgement in the woord of God, for that most assuredly byndeth & adiuigneth ye hartes of al subiectes too their kyng. The strength of the Gospell is euen suche in this puincte, || that there was neuer man, which did humily receaue it, that would murmour ageynst his Prince. It teacheth how wyllyngly all men shulde obey their kyng. It sheweth verye lyuely and most apertly vnto euery man his ful dutie. It euer prouoketh vs from all wicked, cursed, and most obstinate disobedience. It euer instructeth men too shewe them selues most lowly, humile, and obesaunt toward their Prynce. Whosoeuer hath tasted fully therof, will declare hym selfe in al thynges, too bee a faithful subiect. Furthermore, it is clearer then the light (most vertuous prince) that it woulde make muche for the weale of this noble realme, yf all mê with heart and mynde, would nowe as well expulse the pernitious and deuelyshe doctryne af that Romishe bishop, as his name is blotted î bookes. There is none so ignoraunt, but he knoweth that, thorough hym we were brought into a wõderful blindnes, thorough hym we did sauer of nothyng, but of stynkyng Ydolatry, through hym we were deceiued with || false Ypocrisie. Now let euery blind stiffe hearted, and obstinate creature compare his abhomination with the gospell, and if he be not shameles, he will abashe to smell of his papistrie, and to walow still in ignoraunce, vn lest he bee priuely confederate and in heart consent with the detestable felowship of al wicked papistes. Now would God all suche men would reduce ageyn their heartes vnto ye gospell of Christ, would god they would bee prouoked by some meane to desire knowledge. O that god woulde yeoue them a couragious mynde too reade the gospel, there they shal sone fynde all the venoume of the romishe sort most playnely detected. Forsoth wee see dayly, that lacke of knowledge of the gospel maketh some busserdes runne hedlong on all rockes, daungers, & extreme perilles: yea, and beside that, olde popysh doctryne whiche lyeth folded vp & locked faste in their heartes, doeth so sore blynd thê that they haue neither fauour ne affectiõ too printe in their myndes, the expressed coûcels, admonitions, and || preceptes of the holy scripture, but too slepe stil in their owne conceites, dreames, & fonde phansies. Wherfore let your dignitie note well this, that all those whiche bee not wyllyng that gods woord should bee knowen, and that blyndenes should be clean expulsed from all men, whiche be baptised in ye blessed bludde of Christ, bewray themselues playne papistes: for in very deede that most deceatful wolfe and graund maister papist with his totiens quotiens, and a pena et culpa blesseth all suche as will bee blynde stil, maintaine his põpe, drinke of his cuppe of fornication, trust in his pardounes, liue in popery, ypocrisie, and dãnable ydolatrie, shut vp the kingdome of heauen, & neuer regarde the gospel. Cõtrarie too this, christ bi his holy Prophete calleth al those blessed that seke for his testimonies, al those his elect & chosê childrê, which turne frõ synne, ypocrisie, & ydolatrie, all those goddes that heare his word, yea, & breuely, al those which set it forward honorable mê. & in this puincte your grace shoulde euer beare in mynde, || that noble and vertuous kyng Hezekiah, whiche shewed hymselfe very honorable in settîg forward ye woord of God, and therby gotte hym glory and fame immortall, so that nowe he is most highly praysed amongtst all men. Ageyn his subiectes dyd obey his commaundement feynedly with Ypocrisie, but in their heartes they abhorred gods woord. O the miserie that dyd afterwarde sodeinly ensue vpon them, O the wonderfull wrath of God that was poured vpon them, O their great and obstinate blindnes whiche caused them most greuously too be scourged: Their plage was no lesse then too bee vtterly spoyled of their enemies, Their plage was no lesse then to eate one an other: Yea, their plage was no lesse then to eate their owne sonnes and doughters. This calamitie and sorow (most noble prynce) happened them because they dyd not regarde the lawes of God, but tourned too their olde abhominable Ydolatrie, and lightelye estemed gods holy woord. Wherfore euen now whosoeuer is an enemie ||B.i.|| to the holy Bible, that is, neither studiyng it himselfe, nor willyng that other men shulde knowe it, he can in no wyse be a right christian man: although he fast, pray, doo almes, & all the good workes vnder heauen. And he that hath suche a mynde, is ye most cursed and cruel enemie too god, a playne sower of sedition, and a deuelishe disquieter of all godly men. For truly those that reade the gospel of Christ, and labour diligêtly therin: doo fynde wonderfull rest & quietnes, from all woofull miserie, perturbatiõ, and vanities of this world. And surely none but ypocrites or els deuilles would go about too stoppe or allure men from suche a treasure and godly study. And it were conuenient, that all they whiche wyll remayne styll necligent, styffe, & blind: shuld set before their faces the feare of paynes infernall, and if thei haue any grace at all, their spirites ought to be moued: too note the great plages that haue happened the slouthful in gods woord, & those that haue been stubburne ageynst the settyng || out of it. There bee a thousand recordes and examples in the holy Bible agaynst such as be farre wyde from knowledge, and lye now walteryng styl in ignoraunce and will not looke vpon the bible. It woulde seme, they hope for a thyng, but their hope is in vaine: For saint Paule plainely writeth the hope of suche ypocrites shall coo[~m] too nought. And too conclude (most honorable Prince) seeyng wee haue suche knowledge opened vnto vs, as neuer had englishe mê, and are clearly deliuered from the snares and deceiptes of al false and wicked doctrine, if we shuld not now thãkefully receaue the gospell, and shewe our selues naturally enclyned to set it forwarde, yea, and pray daye and night vnto God, for the preseruatiõ and health of the kynges highnes, your graces deare, and most entierly beloued father, we were neither true subiectes nor ryght christen men. Forsoth, through the absolute wisedome, and the most godly and politike prudencie of his grace, the swete sounde of gods woorde is gone ||B.ii.|| thorough out all this realme, the holye Bible and blessed testament of oure sauiour Christ are coo[~m]ne to lighte, and thousandes haue faithfully receiued those pleasaunt, ioyfull, and most comfortable promises of God. Surely this thyng before all other, is acceptable too god. This thyng especially swageth ye ire of god. This thyng in all holi scriptures god most chiefly requireth of his elect & faithfull seruaûtes, euen too haue his lytell flocke knowe his blessed woorde, whiche woulde bee muche better knowê & more thankefulli receaued, yf al agees and degrees of men with one mynd, wyll, & voice, would nowe drawe after one lyne, leauyng their owne priuate affections, and shewe theim selues euer vigilant, prompt, & ready helpers & workers with God, (accordynge to the councell of sainct Paule) & especially priestes, scolemaisters & parêtes, which accordyng too ye Prophete Dauid are blessed, if they gladly requite ye lawe of God. They shuld therfore reade ye bible & purdge theyr mindes of al papistry: for theyr || necligence, in dooyng their duties & slugishnes toward ye blessed woord of god, dooeth too muche appere. Through them forsoth the gospel of Christ shuld bee most strongely warded and defended, for almost all the Prophetes, and a great parte of the scripture beside teache them their duties, and shew playnely what maner of men they shulde bee: Yea, and how greuously the holy Prophetes crie out vpon false and ignoraunt priestes, the thyng is very euident. But through the helppe of God all those that be ignoraunt, or els learned (as they take them selues) wyll leaue of, and repent them of their wicked and obstinate blyndnes, and bowe them selues with all oportunitie too draw mens heartes too the holy testament of God: consideryng, that in the terrible day of iudgement, euery mã shall yeoue accompte of his Beliwicke, where neither ignoraûce shall excuse vs, ne yet any worldly põpe may defêd vs. Most happye thê shall they bee, whiche haue walked iustely in the sight of the Lorde, and ||B.iii.|| that haue syncerely preached his testament and lyuely woord withoute flattery or iuggelyng: Yea, and in that fearful day, all they (as writeth S. Augustine) shal fynde mercie at the handes of god, whiche haue entised and allured other vnto goodnes and vertue. Weiyng this with my self, (most excellent, and vnto all kynd of vertues most prõpt & prestãt Prince) I thought it good too translate this Dialoge, called the Epicure, for your grace: whiche semed too me, too bee very familiar, & one of ye godliest Dialoges that any mã hath writtê in ye latin tong. Now therfore I most humili praie, that this my rude & simple trãslation may bee acceptable vnto your grace, trustyng also that your most approued gentilnes, wil take it in good part. There as I doo not folow ye latyn, woord for woord, for I omytte that of a certaine set purpose. _Your humile seruaunt, Philyppe_ Gerrard, groume of your graces Chambre. * * * * * The interlocutours {HEDONIVS} {SPVDEVS} What meaneth hit _Spudeus_, too applye hys booke so ernestlye I praye you what is the matter you murmour so with yourselfe? _SPVDEVS._ The truth is (O _Hedoni_) I seke too haue knowledge of a thing, but as yet I cannot fynde that whych maketh for my purpose. _HEDO_ What booke haue you there in your bosome? _SPVDE. Ciceros_ ||dialoge of the endes of goodnes. _HEDO._ It had bene farre more better for you, too haue sought for the begynnynges of godly thynges, then the endes. _SPVDE._ Yea, but _Marcus Tullius_ nameth that the ende of godlines which is an exquisite, a far passing, and a very absolute goodnes in euerye puincte, wherein there is contained all kynde of vertu: vnto the knowledge ther of whosoeuer can attaine, shuld desire none other thîg, but hold himselfe hauyng onely that, as one most fully content and satisfied. _HED._ That is a worke of very great learning and eloquence. But doo you thynke, that you haue preuailed in any thîg there, whereby you haue the ||rather come too the knowledge of the truth? _SPE._ I haue had such fruite and cõmoditie by it, that now verelye hereafter I shall doubt more of the effect and endes of good thinges, then I did before. _HEDO._ It is for husbãd menne too stande in doubt how farre the limittes and merebãkes extend. _SPE._ And I cannot but muse styll, yea, and wonder very muche, why ther hath been so great controuersie in iudgementes vpon so weightie a matter (as this is) emongist so well learned menne: especially suche as bee most famous and auncient writers. _HEDO._ This was euen the cause, where the verite of a thyng is playne and manifest, cõtrarily, ye errour through || ignoraunce againe in the same, is soone great & by diuers meanes encreaseth, for that thei knewe not the foundation and first beginnyng of the whole matter, they doo iudge at all auentures and are very fondly disceaued, but whose sentence thynke you too bee truest? _SPE._ Whan I heare _MARCVS Tullius_ reproue the thyng, I then fãtasie none of all their iudgementes, and whan I heare hym agayne defende the cause: it maketh me more doubtfull thê euer I was and am in suche a studie, that I can say nothyng. But as I suppose ye Stoickes haue erred the lest, and nexte vnto thê I commend the _Peripatetickes_. _HEDo._ Yet I lyke none of their opinions || so well as I doo the Epicures. _SPV._ And emõgist all the sectes: the _Epicures_ iudgement is most reproued and condemned with the whole consent and arbitremêt of all menne. _HED._ Let vs laye a side all disdayne and spite of names, and admitte the Epicure too bee suche one, as euery man maketh of hym. Let vs ponder and weighe the thyng as it is in very deed. He setteth the high and principall felicitie of man in pleasure, and thiketh that lyfe most pure and godly, whiche may haue greate delectatiõ and pleasure, and lytle pensiuenes. _SPV._ It is euen so. _HED._ What more vertuouser thyng, I praye you, is possible too bee spokê then this || saiyng. _Spu._ Yea, but all menne wonder and crye out on it, and saye: it is the voyce of a bruite beast, and not of manne. _Hedo._ I knowe thei doo so, but thei erre in ye vocables of theise thinges, and are very ignoraunt of the true and natiue significations of the woordes, for if wee speake of perfecte thynges, no kinde of menne bee more righter _Epicures_, then Christen men liuing reuerêtly towardes God and mã, and in the right seruice and worshiping of Christ. _SPV_ But I thinke the _Epicures_ bee more nerer and agree rather with the _Cynickes_, then with the Christien sorte: forsoth ye Christiens make them selues leane || with fastynge, bewayle and lament their offences, and eyther they bee nowe poore, or elles theyr charitie and liberalitie on the nedye maketh theim poore, thei suffer paciently to bee oppressed of mêne that haue great power and take many wronges at their handes, and many men also laughe theim too skorne. Nowe, if pleasure brynge felicitie wyth it, or helpe in anye wyse vnto the furderaunce of vertue: we see playnly that this kynde of lyfe is fardest from al pleasures. _Hedonius._ But doo you not admitte _Plautus_ too bee of authoritie? _Speudeus._ Yea, yf he speake vprightely. _Hedonius._ Heare nowe them, and beare awaye wyth you the saiynge of || an vnthriftie seruaunt, whyche is more wyttier then all the paradoxes of the Stoickes. _SPE._ I tarie to heare what ye wil say. _HEDO._ Ther is nothyng more miserable then a mynd vnquiet & agreued with it selfe. _SPE._ I like this saiyng well, but what doo you gather of it? _HEDO._ If nothing bee more miserable thê an vnquiet mynde, it foloweth also, that there is nothing happiar, then a mynde voyde of all feare, grudge, and vnquietnes. _SPEV._ Surely you gather the thing together with good reasõ but that notwithstandynge, in what countrie shall you fynde any such mynde, that knoweth not it selfe gyltie and culpable in some kynde of euell, _HEDO._ || I call that euyll, whiche dissolueth the pure loue and amitie betwixt God and manne. _SPV._ And I suppose there bee verye fewe, but that thei bee offêders in this thynge. _HEDO._ And in good soth I take it, that al those that bee purdged, are clere: whych wiped out their fautes with lee of teares, and saltpeter of sorowfull repentaunce, or els with the fire of charitie, their offêces nowe bee not only smalle grefe and vnquietnes too them, but also chaunce oftê for some more godlier purpose, as causing thê too lyue afterward more accordyngly vnto Gods commaûdemêtes. _SPV._ In deede I knowe saltpeter and lee, but yet I neuer hearde before, that faultes || haue been purdged with fire. _H._ Surely, if you go to the minte you shall see gould fyned wyth fyre, notwithstãdyng that ther is also, a certaine kynde of linê that brenneth not if it bee cast in ye fyre, but loketh more whiter then any water coulde haue made it, & therefore it is called _Linum asbestinum_, a kynde of lynen, whyche canne neither bee quenched with water nor brent with fyre. _Spu._ Nowe in good faith you bring a paradox more wõderful then all the maruailous and profound thynges of the Stoickes: lyue thei pleasasauntly whom Chryst calleth blessed for that they mourne & lament? _Hedonius._ Thei seme too the worlde too mourne, but || verely they lyue in greate pleasure, and as the commune saiynge is, thei lyue all together in pleasure, in somuche that _SARDANAPALVS_, _Philoxenus_, or _Apitius_ compared vnto them: or anye other spoken of, for the greate desyre and study of pleasures, did leade but a sorowefull and a myserable lyfe. _Spe._ These thinges that you declare bee so straunge and newe, that I can scarcelye yeoue any credite vnto them. _Hedo._ Proue and assaye them ones, and you shall fynde all my saiynges so true as the Gospell, and immediatly I shal bryng the thynge too suche a conclusion (as I suppose) that it shall appeare too differ very lytle from the truth ||C.i|| _SPV._ make hast then vnto your purpose. _HED._ It shalbe doone if you wyll graunt me certayne thynges or I begynne. _Spu._ If in case you demaunde suche as bee resonable. _Hedo._ I wyl take myne aduauntage, if you confesse the thyng that maketh for mine intent. _Spu._ go too. _Hedo._ I thynke ye wyll fyrste graunt me, that ther is great diuersitie betwxt the solle and the bodye _Spu._ Euen as much as there is betwene heauen and yearth, or a thyng earthly and brute, & that whiche dieth neuer, but alwayes cõtaineth in it the godly nature. _Hedo._ And also, that false deceiueable & coûterfetted holy thynges, are not too bee taken for those, which in very dede be || godly. _Spude._ No more then the shaddowes are too bee estemed for the bodies, or the illusions and wonders of wytchcraftes or the fantasies of dreames, are too bee taken as true thynges. _HE._ Hitherto you answer aptly too my purpose, and I thynke you wyl graunt me this thyng also, that true and godly pleasure can reste and take place no where but only on such a mynd that is sobree and honest. _SPV._ What elles? for no man reioyseth too beholde the Sunne, if his eyes bee bleared or elles delecteth in wyne, if the agew haue infected hys tast. _HED._ And the _Epicure_ hymselfe, or elles I am disceiued, would not clippe & enbrace that pleasure, whiche ||C.ii.|| would bring with it farre greater payne and suche as would bee of long continuaunce. _SPV_ I thynke he woulde not, if he had any wytte at all. _HED._ Nor you wyll not denye this, that God is the chiefe and especiall goodnes, then whõ there is nothyng fayrer, there is nothyng ameabler, ther is nothing more delicious and swetter. _SPVDE._ No man wyll deny thys except he bee very harde hearted and of an vngentler nature then the _Ciclopes_. _HED._ Nowe you haue graunted vnto me, that none lyue in more pleasure, then thei whyche lyue vertuouslye, and agayne, none in more sorowe and calamytie then those that || lyue vngratiously. _Spu._ Then I haue graûted more thê I thought I had. _He._ But what thing you haue ones cõfessed too bee true (as _Plato_ sayth) you should not deny it afterward. _SPV._ Go furth with your matter. _HEDO_ The litle whelpe that is set store and greate price by, is fed most daintely, lieth soft, plaieth and maketh pastime continually, doo you thinke that it lyueth plesaûtly? _SPV._ It dooeth truely. _HEDO._ Woulde you wyshe to haue suche a lyfe? _SPV._ God forbyd that, excepte I woulde rather bee a dogge then a man, _HEDO._ Then you confesse that all the chief pleasures arise and spring frõ the mynd, as though it were from a welspryng. _SPV._ ||C.iii|| That is euident ynough. _HE._ Forsoth the strength and efficacy of the minde is so great, that often it taketh away the felyng of al externe and outward pain & maketh that pleasaunt, which by it selfe is very peynful. _SPV._ We se that dayly in louers, hauyng great delight to sytte vp long & too daunce attendaunce at their louers doores all the colde wynter nyghtes. _HEDo._ Now weigh this also, if the naturall loue of man, haue suche great vehemency in it, which is a cõmune thyng vnto vs, both with bulles and dogges, howe much more should all heauenly loue excell in vs, which cõmeth of ye spirit of Christ, whose strêgthe is of suche power, that it ||would make death a thîg most terrible, too bee but a pleasure vnto vs. _Spu._ What other men thîke inwardly I know not, but certes thei wãt many pleasures which cleaue fast vnto true and perfect vertue. _He._ What pleasures? _Spu._ Thei waxe not rich, thei optein no promotiõ, thei bãket not, thei daûce not, thei sing not, thei smell not of swete oyntmêtes, thei laugh not, thei play not. _He._ We should haue made no mention in thys place of ryches and prefermente, for they bryng wyth them no pleasaunt lyfe, but rather a sadde and a pêsiue. Let vs intreate of other thynges, suche as they chiefely seeke for, whose desyre is to liue deliciously, see ye not daily ||C.iiii|| drõkerdes, fooles, and mad menne grinne and leape? _SPV._ I see it _HED._ Do you thynke that thei liue most pleasaûtly? _SPV_ God send myne enemies such myrth & pleasure. _HE._ Why so? _Sp._ For ther lacketh emongist thê sobrietie of mind. _HE._ Then you had leuer sit fastyng at your booke, then too make pastime after any suche sorte. _SP._ Of thê both: truly I had rather chose to delue. _H._ For this is plaine that betwixt the mad mã & the drûkerd ther is no diuersitie, but that slepe wil helpe the one his madnes, & with much a doo ye cure of _Physicions_ helpeth the other, but the foole natural differeth nothing frõ a brute beast except by shape and portrature of body, yet thei || be lesse miserable whom nature hathe made verye brutes, then those that walowe theim selues in foule and beastly lustes. _SP._ I confesse that. _Hedo._ But now tell me, whether you thynke thê sobre and wyse, which for playn vanities and shadowes of plesure, booth dispice the true and godlye pleasures of the mynde and chose for them selues suche thynges as bee but vexacion & sorowe. _SPV._ I take it, thei bee not. _Hedo._ In deede thei bee not drûke with wyne, but with loue with anger, with auarice, with ambicion, and other foule and filthie desires, whiche kynde of drunkenes is farre worse, thê that is gotten with drinking of wine. Yet _Sirus_ that leude cõspaniõ ||of whom mention is made in ye commedie, spake witty thynges after he had slepte hym self soobre, and called too memorie his greate and moost beastlye drunkenes: but the minde that is infected with vicious & noughty desire, hath muche a doo too call it selfe whom agein? How many yeares doeth loue, anger, spite, sensualitie, excesse, and ambition, trouble and prouoke the mynde? How many doo wee see, whiche euen from their youth, too their latter dais neuer awake nor repêt them of the drunkennes, of ambitiõ, nigardnes, wanton lust, & riatte? _Spu._ I haue knowen ouermany of that sorte. _Hedo._ You haue graûted that false and fayned good || thinges, are not too bee estemed for the pure and godly. _Sp._ And I affirme that still. _Hedo._ Nor that there is no true and perfect pleasure, except it bee taken of honest and godly thynges. _Spud._ I confesse that. _He._ Then (I pray you) bee not those good that the commune sorte seeke for, they care not howe? _Spu._ I thinke they be not. _Hedo._ Surely if thei were good, they would not chaunce but onely too good men: and would make all those vertuous that they happen vntoo. What maner of pleasure make you that, doo you thinke it too bee godly, which is not of true & honest thynges, but of deceatfull: and coometh out of ye shadowes of good thynges? _Sp._ || Nay in noo wyse. _He._ For pleasure maketh vs to liue merely. _Spu._ Yea, nothyng so muche. _He._ Therfore no man truely liueth pleasauntly, but he that lyueth godly: that is, whiche vseth and delecteth onli in good thynges: for vertue of it selfe, maketh a man to habound in all thynges that bee good, perfete, & prayse worthy: yea, it onely prouoketh God the fountaine of all goodnes, too loue and fauour man. _SP._ I almost consent with you. _HED._ But now marke howe far they bee from all pleasure, whiche seeme openly emongist all men too folowe nothyng, but the inordinate delectation in in thynges carnall. || First their mynde is vile, and corrupted with the sauour and taste of noughtie desires, in so muche that if any pleasaunt thing chaunce them, forthwith it waxeth bitter, and is nought set by, in like maner as where ye welle hed is corrupted and stynketh, there ye water must nedes be vnsauery. Agein ther is no honest pleasure, but that whiche wee receaue with a sobre and a quiet mynde. For wee see, nothyng reioyseth the angry man more, thê too bee reuenged on his offenders, but that pleasure is turned into pain after his rage bee past, and anger subdued. _Spu._ I say not the contrary. _He._ Finally, suche leude pleasures bee taken of fallible thinges, therefore || it foloweth that they be but delusiõs and shadowes. What woulde you say furthermore, if you saw a mã so deceaued with sorcerie & also other detestable witchecraftes, eat, drynke, leap, laugh, yea, and clappe handes for ioye, when ther wer no such thyng there in very dede, as he beleueth he seeth. _Spu._ I wolde say he were both mad and miserable. _Hedo._ I my self haue been often in place, where the lyke thyng hath been doone. There was a priest whiche knewe perfectly by longe experience and practise, the arte to make thynges seme that they were not, otherwise called, _deceptio visus_. _Sp._ He did not lerne that arte of the holy scripture? _Hedo._ Yea, || rather of most popeholy charmes and witchecraftes: that is too saye, of thinges, cursed, dampnable, and wourthy too bee abhorred. Certayne ladies & gentlewomen of the courte, spake vnto hym oftentimes: saiyng, they woulde coo[~m] one day too his house and see what good chere he kept: reprouyng, greatly vile and homly fare, and moderate expenses in all thynges. He graunted they shulde bee welcome, and very instauntly desired them. And they came fastyng because they would haue better appetites. Whã they wer set to dyner (as it was thought) ther wãted noo kynde of delitious meat: they filled thê selues haboûdantly: after ye feast was || doone, they gaue moost hearty thanckes, for their galaunte cheare, and departed, euery one of them vnto their owne lodgynges: but anone their stomackes beganne too waxe an hungred, they maruayled what this shuld meane, so soone to be an hungred and a thirste, after so sumptuous a feast: at the last the matter was openly knowen and laught at. _Spu._ Not without a cause, it had been muche better for thê too haue satisfied their stomackes at their owne chãbers with a messe of potage, thê too be fed so delitiousli with vain illusiõs. _H._ And as I thîk ye cõmune sort of men ar muche more too bee laught at, whiche in steede of Godlye thynges, ||chose vaine and transitory shadowes, and reioyce excedyngly in suche folishe phansies that turne not afterwarde in too a laughter, but into euerlasting lamentation and sorow. _Spudeus_ The more nerelier I note your saiynges, the better I like thê. _Hedo._ Go too, let vs graunt for a tyme these thynges too bee called pleasaunt, that in very dede ar not. Would yow saye that meeth were swete: whiche had more Aloes myngled with it, then honye? _Spud._ I woulde not so say and if there were but the third part of an ounce of Aloes mixt with it. _Hedo._ Or els, would you wishe to bee scabbed because you haue some pleasure too scratch? _Spud._ Noo, if I wer ||D.i|| in my right mynd. _HED._ Then weigh with your self how great peyne is intermyngled wyth these false and wrongly named pleasures, that vnshamefast loue filthie desire, much eatyng and drinking bring vs vnto: I doo omitte now that, which is principall grudge of cõscience, enemitie betwixt God and mã, and expectation of euerlastyng punishêment. What kynd of pleasure, I pray you is ther in these thinges, that dooeth not bryng with it a greate heape of outeward euilles? _SPV._ What bee thei? _HEDO._ We ought to let passe and forbeare in this place auarice, ambition, wrath, pryde enuy, whiche of their selues bee heuy and sorowful euylles and || let vs conferre and compare all those thynges together, that haue the name of some chief and special pleasure: wher as the agew the hedache, the swelling of the belly, dulnes of witte, infamy, hurt of memory, vomyting, decaye of stomacke, tremblyng of the body succede of ouer muche drynking: thynke you, that the _Epicure_ would haue estemed any suche lyke pleasure as thys, cõuenient and wourthy desire? _SPV._ He woulde saye it wer vtterly too bee refused. _HEDONi._ Wheras young men also with hauntynge of whores (as it is dayly seene) catche the newe leprosie, nowe otherwyse named Jobs agew, and some cal it the scabbes of Naples, throughe ||D.ii|| which desease they feele often ye most extreme and cruell paines of deathe euen in this lyfe, and cary about a bodye resemblyng very much some dead coarse or carryn, do you thynke that thei apply them selues vnto godlye pleasure. _SPVD._ Noo, for after thei haue been often familiar with their prety ones, then they must goo streighte too the barbours, that chaunceth continuallye vnto all whoremongers. _HED._ Now fayne that ther wer a lyke measure of pain and plesure, would ye then require too haue the toothache so longe as the pleasure of quaffing & whordome endured? _SPV._ Verely I had rather wãt them booth, for ther is no commoditie nor || vantage to bye pleasure with payn but only to chaûg one thing for another, but the best choise is nowe not too affectionate anye such leudnes, for _MAR. Tullius_ calleth that an inward greife & sorow. _He._ But now ye prouocation & entisemêt of vnleful plesure, besides that it is much lesse then the pain which it bringeth with it, it is also a thing of a very short time: but if the leprosye bee ones caught, it tourmêteth mê al their life daies very pitifully & oftentimes cõstraineth them to wyshe for death before thei cã dye. _SP._ Such disciples as those then, the _Epicure_ would not knowe. _HED._ For the most part pouertie, a very miserable and painfull burden, foloweth ||D.iii.|| lechery, of immoderate lust cõmeth the palsie, tremblyng of ye senewes, bleardnes of eyes, and blyndnes, the leprosie and not these only, is it not a proper pece of worke (I pray you) to chaûg this short pleasure neyther honest nor yet godly, for so manye euylles far more greuouse and of muche longer continuance. _SP._ Although there shoulde no pain com of it, I esteme hym to bee a very fond occupier, which would chaûge precious stones for glasse. _HE._ You meane that would lose the godly pleasures of the mynde, for the coloured pleasures of ye body. _SP._ That is my meanyng. _HE._ But nowe let vs come to a more perfecter supputation, neither the agewe || nor yet pouerty foloweth alwaies carnal pleasure, nor the new leprosy or els the palsy wait not on at al times the great & excessiue vse of lecherye, but grudge of cõsiêce euermore is a folower & sure companiõ of al vnleaful pleasure, then the which as it is plainly agreed betwixt vs, nothyng is more miserable. _SPV._ Yea, rather it grudgeth their cõscience sometyme before hande, & in the self pleasure it pricketh their mynde, yet ther bee some that you woulde say, want this motion and feelyng. _HE._ Thei bee nowe therfore in worse estate & cõditiõ. Who would not rather feele payne, then too haue hys body lacke any perfecte sence, truly from some ether intemperatnes ||D.iiii.|| of euel desires, euen like as it were a certayne kynde of drunkenes, or els wont and cõmune haunt of vice which ar so hardened in them, that they take a way ye felyng & cõsideration of euyl in their youth, so that whã agee commeth vpõ them beside other infinitie hurtes and perturbations agaynst whose commyng thei should haue layd vp the deedes of their former lyfe, as a special iuwel and treasure: then thei stande greatly in fear of death, a thyng emongist all other most ineuitable, & that no man canne shonne: yea, and the more they haue heretofore been dysmayed and lacked their sences, the greater now is their vnquietnes and grudge of || conscience, then truely the mynde is sodenly awaked whether it wol or noo, and verely wher as olde agee is alwayes sad and heuy of it selfe for as muche as it is in subiection and bondage vnto many incommodities of nature, but then it is farre more wretchede and also fylthye, if the mynde vnquiet with it selfe shal trouble it also: feastes, ryotous banketyng, syngyng, and daunsynge, with manye suche other wanton toyes & pastimes which he was communely yeouê vnto & thought very plesaût when he was young, bee nowe paynfull vnto hym beyng olde and crooked, ne agee hath nothyng too comforte and fortifi || it selfe withall, but onely too remembre that it hath passed ouer the course of yeares in vertue and godly liuyng and conceaue a special trust too obtaine herafter a better kynde of life. These be the two staues wherevpon age is stayed, & if in their steed you wyll lay on hym these two burdens: that is, memorie how synfully he hath ledde his life, and desperation of the felicitie that is too coome, I praye you what liuyng thyng can bee feyned too suffre sorer punishement and greater miserie? _spu._ Verely I can see nothyng although some man woulde saye an olde horse. _hedo._ Then to cõclude it is too late to waxe wise And that saiyng appereth now || too bee very true. Carefull mornynges doo oftentymes folowe mery euentides, and all vayne and outragious mirth euer turneth into sorowfull sighes: yea, & they shulde haue considered both that there is noo pleasure aboue ye ioyfulnes of the heart, and that chearefull mynde maketh agee too florishe, an heauy spirit consumeth the boones, & also that all the dayes of the poore are euell: that is, sorowfull and wretched. And agayne a quiet mynde is lyke a contynuall feaste. _SPVDEVS._ Therfore they bee wyse, that thryue in tyme, and gather too gether necessaries for that agee coo[~m]. _HEDONI._ The holy scripture intreateth not soo wordely || as too measure the felicitie and highe consolation of manne, by the goodes of fortune, onely he is very poore, that is destitute and voyde of al grace & vertue, and standeth in boundage and debette, bothe of bodye & solle vnto that tyranne oure moost foo & mortall enemie the deuill. _SPV._ Surely he is one that is veri rigorous and impatient in demaundynge of his dutie. _HE._ Moreouer that man is ryche, whiche fyndeth mercye and foryeouenes at the handes of god. What shuld he feare, that hath suche a protectour? Whether men? where as playnely theyr hole power may lesse do agaêst God, then the bytyng of a gnat, || hurteth the Elephant. Whether death? truly that is a right passage for good men vnto all sufficient ioy and perfection accordyng too the iust reward of true religion and vertue. Whether hell? For as in that the holy prophete speaketh boldely vnto God. Although I shulde walke in the middest of the shadow of death, I wil not feare any euils because ye art with me. Wherfore shulde he stande in feare of deuils, whiche beareth in his heart hym, that maketh the deuils too tremble and quake. For in diuers places the holye scripture praiseth and declareth opêly the mynde of a vertuous man, too bee the right temple of God. And this to bee so true that || that it is not too bee spoken agaynst, ne in any wise shuld bee denied. _SPV._ Forsoth I can not see, by what reason these saiynges of yours can be confuted al thoughe they seme too varye muche from the vulgar and cõmune opinion of men. _HEDO._ Why doo they soo? _SPV._ After your reasonyng euery honest poore man, shulde liue a more pleasaunt life, then any other, how much soeuer he did haboûd in riches, honour, and dignitie: and breuely though he had all kynde of pleasures. _HE._ Adde this too it (if it please you) too bee a kyng, yea, or an emperour if you take away a quiet mynd with it selfe, I dare boldely say, that the poore man sklenderlye || and homely appareled, made weake with fastyng, watchyng, great toile and labour, and that hath scarcely a groat in all the worlde, so that his mynde bee godly, he lyueth more deliciously then that man whiche hathe fyue hûdreth times greater pleasures & delicates, then euer had _Sardanapalus_. _SP._ Why is it thê, that we see communely those that bee poore looke farre more heuely then riche men. _HED._ Because some of them bee twise poore, eyther some desease, nedines, watchyng, labour, nakednesse, doo soo weaken the state of their bodyes, that by reason therof, the chearefulnes of their myndes neuer sheweth it selfe, neyther in these thinges, || nor yet in their deathe. The mynde, forsooth thoughe it bee inclosed within this mortal bodye, yet for that it is of a stronger nature, it sõwhat trãsfourmeth and fascioneth the bodie after it selfe, especially if the vehement instigation of the spirit approche the violent inclination of nature: this is the cause we see oftentymes suche men as bee vertuous die more cherefully, then those that make pastyme contynually, & bee yeouê vnto all kynd of pleasures. _SP._ In very dede, I haue meruayled oftten at that thyng. _HED_ Forsoothe it is not a thyng too bee marueyled at, though that there shulde bee vnspeakeable || ioy and comforte where God is present, whiche is the heed of all mirth and gladnes, nowe this is no straunge thyng, althoughe the mynde of a godly man doo reioyce contynually in this mortall bodye: where as if the same mynde or spirit discended into the lowest place of hell shuld lose no parte of felicitie, for whersoeuer is a pure mynd, there is god, wher God is: there is paradise, ther is heauen, ther is felicitie, wher felicitie is: ther is the true ioy and synsere gladnes. _SP._ But yet they shuld liue more pleasauntly, if certein incommodities were taken from them, and had suche pastymes as eyther they dispise orels can not get nor attaine vnto. _HE._ ||E.i.|| (I praye you) doo you meane, suche incommodities as by the commune course of nature folow the cõdition or state of mã: as hunger, thirst, desease, werynes, age, death, lyghtnyng yearthquake, fluddes & battail? _SPV._ I meane other, and these also. _HEDO._ Then we intreate styll of mortal thynges and not of immortal, & yet in these euils the state of vertuous men, may bee better borne withal, then of suche as seeke for the pleasures of the body they care not howe. _SPV._ Why so: _HEDO._ Especyally because their myndes bee accustomed and hardened with most sure and moderate gouernaunce of reason against al outragious affections of the mind || and they take more patiently those thynges that cannot bee shonned then the other sort doo Furthermore, for as muche as thei perceiue, all such thynges ar sent of god, either for the punishment of their faultes, or els too excitate and sturre them vp vnto vertue, then thei as meeke and obediente chyldren receiue them from the hãd of their mercifull father, not only desireously, but also chearefully and geue thankes also, namely for so merciful punyshment and inestimable gaines. _SPV._ But many doo occatiõ griefes vnto thê selues. _HEDO._ But mo seeke remedye at the _Phisicions_, either to preserue their bodies in helth or elles if they bee sycke, too ||E.ii.|| recouer health, but willyngly too cause their owne sorowes, that is, pouertie, sickenes, persecution, slaunder, excepte the loue of God compel vs therto, it is no vertue but folishnes: but as often as thei bee punyshed for Christ and iustice sake, who dar bee so bold as too cal them beggers & wretches? whã the Lord himself very famyliarly calleth them blessed, and commaûdeth vs to reioyse for their state and condition. _SPV._ Neuerthelesse, these thynges haue a certayne payne and griefe. _HEDO._ Thei haue, but on the onesyde, what for fear of hel, and the other for hoope of euerlastynge ioye, the payne is sone past and forgottê Now tell me if you knewe that || you myghte neuer bee sycke, or elles that you shoulde feele no payne of your body in your life tyme, if you woulde but ones suffer your vtter skinne too bee prycked with a pynnes puinct, would you not gladly and with all your very heart suffer then so lytle a payne as that is? _SPV_ Verye gladlye, yea, rather if I knewe perfectlye that my teeth would neuer ake, I would willynglye suffer too bee prycked depe with a nedle, and too haue both mine eares bored through with a bodkin. _HEDO._ Surely what payne soeuer happeneth in this lyfe, it is lesse and shorter, compared with the eternall paines, then is the soden pricke of a needle, incomparisõ of the ||E.iii.|| lyfe of man though it bee neuer so long, for there is no conuenience or proportion of the thyng that hath ende, and that whych is infinite. _SPV._ You speake very truly. _HEDO._ Now if a man coulde fully perswade you, that you should neuer feele payne in al your life, if you did but ones deuide the flame of ye fyre, with your hande, whyche thyng vndoughtely _Pithagoras_ forbade, woulde you not gladlye doo it? _SPV._ Yea, on that condicion I had liefer doo it an hundred times, if I knew precisely the promiser would kepe touch. _HE._ It is playne God cannot deceaue. But now that feelyng of paine in the fyre is longer vnto the whole lyfe of man, then is the ||lyfe of mã, in respect of the heauenlye ioye, althoughe it were thrise so long as ye yeares of _Nestor_, for that casting of the hand in the fyre thoughe it bee neuer so shorte, yet it is some parte of hys lyfe, but the whole lyfe of man is noo portion of tyme in respect of the eternal lyfe. _SPV._ I haue nothyng too saye against you. _HEDO._ Doo you then thyncke that anye affliction or tourment can disquiet those that prepare them selues wyth a chearful hearte and a stedfast hoope vnto the kyngedome of God, wher as the course of this lyfe is nowe so shorte? _SPVDE._ I thinke not, if thei haue a sure perswasion and a constant hope too attayne it. _HEDO._ I coome ||E.iiii.|| now vnto those pleasures, whiche you obiected agaynst me, they do wythdrawe them selues from daunsynge, bankettynge, from pleasaunte seeghtes, they dispyce all these thynges, as thus: for to haue the vse of thinges farre more ioyfulle, and haue as great pleasure as these bee, but after another sorte: the eye hath not seene, the eare hath not heard, nor the heart of man cannot thyncke what consolations _GOD_ hathe ordeined for them that loue hym. Sayncte Paule knewe what maner of thynges shoulde bee the songes, queeres, daunsynges, and bankettes of vertuous myndes, yea, in this lyfe. _SPVDEVS_ but there bee some leafull || pleasures, whyche they vtterlye refuse. _HEDONIVS._ That maye bee, for the immoderate vse of leafull and godly games or pastymes, is vnleaful: and if you wyll excepte this one thing onlye, in al other thei excelle whiche seeme too leade a paynfull lyfe, and whome we take too bee ouerwhelmed with all kynd of miseries. Now I prai you what more roialler sight can ther be, then ye cõtêplatiõ of this world? and such men as ye be in fauour of god keping his holy cõmaûdemêtes & loue his most blessed testamêt, receiue far geater pleasure in the syght therof, then thother sorte doo, for while thei behold wyth ouercurious eyes, ye wõderful worke, their mynde || is troubled because they can not compasse for what purpose he doeth such thinges, then thei improue the moost righte and wise gouernour of all and murmour at his doinges as though they were goddes of reprehension: and often finde faute with that lady nature, and saye that she is vnnaturall, whiche taunt forsooth with as muche spite as can bee shewed with woordes, greueth nature: but truely it reboundeth on hym, that made nature, if there bee any at all. But the vertuous man with godly & simple eyes beholdeth with an excedyng reioyce of heart the workes of his Lorde and father highly praysyng thê all, and neither reprehêdeth nor || findeth faut with any of thê, but for euery thyng yeoueth moste hearty thankes, when he considereth that al were made for the loue of man. And so in al thynges, he praieth vnto the infinite power, deuine wisedome, & goodnes of the maker, wherof he perceiueth moste euident tokens in thynges that bee here created. Now fain that there were suche a palace in verie deede as _Apuleus_ faineth, or els one that were more royall and gorgeouse, and that you shoulde take twoo thither with you too beholde it, the one a straunger, whiche gooeth for this intent onely too see the thyng, and the other the seruaût or soonne of hym that firste causeth this buyldyng, whether || will haue more delectie in it? the straunger, too whom suche maner of house dooeth nothyng appartain, or the soonne whiche beholdeth with greate ioye and pleasure, the witte, riches, and magnificence of his deerely beloued father, especially when he dooeth consider all this worke was made for his sake. _Sp._ Your question is too plain: for they most cõmunely that bee of euill condicions, knowe that heauen and all thinges contained therin, were made for mannes sake. _HEDO._ Almoste al knowe that, but some dooe not remembre it, shewyng thêselues vnthãkeful for the great and exhuberãt benefittes of god, & al though thei remember it, yet that mã taketh || greater delight in the sight of it whiche hath more loue vnto the maker therof, in like maner as, he more chearfully wyll behold the element whiche aspireth towarde the eternall life. _SPV._ Your saiynges are muche like too bee true. _HED._ Nowe the pleasures of feastes dooeth not consist in the delicates of the mouth, nor in the good sauces of cookes, but in health of body and appetite of stomacke. You may not thynke that any delicious person suppeth more pleasauntly hauyng before hym partriches, turtelles, leuerettes, bekers, sturgeon, and lamprayes: then a vertuous man hauyng nothîg too eat, but onely bread potage, or wortes: and nothyng || too drynke, but water, single bere, or wyne well alayde, be cause he taketh these thinges as prepared of God vnto all lyuyng creatures, and that they bee now yeouê vnto him of his gentyll and mercifull father, praier maketh euery thyng too sauour well. The petition in ye begynnyng of dyner sanctifieth all thynges and in a while after there is recited some holy lesson of the woorde of God: whiche more refresheth the minde, then meate the body, and grace after all this. Finally he riseth from the table, not ful: but recreated, not laden, but refreshed: yea, refreshed both in spirit and bodie, thynke you that any chief deuiser of these muche vsed bãkets, & || deintye delicaces fareth nowe more deliciously? _SPudeus._ But in _Venus_ there is greate delectacions if we beleue _Arestotell_. _Hed._ And in this behalfe the vertuous manne far excelleth as well as in good fare, wiegh you now the matter as it is, the better a manne loueth his wife, the more he delecteth in the good felowship and familiaritie that is betwene theim after the course of nature. Furthermore, no menne louê their wiues more vehemêtly then thei that loue theim euê soo, as Christ loued the churche. For thei that loue thê for the desire of bodely pleasure, loue thê not. More ouer, the seldomer any man dooeth accompany with his wife, the greater pleasure, it || is to hym afterwarde, and that thyng the wãtõ poete knew full well whiche writeth, rare and seldome vse stereth vp pleasures. Albeit, the lest parte of pleasure is in the familiare company betwene theim. There is forsothe far greater in the continuall leadyng of their liues too gether, whiche emongest none can be so plesaunt as those that loue syncerely and faithfully together in godly and christian loue, and loue a like one the other. In the other sort, oftê whêthe pleasure of ye body decaieth & waxeth old loue waxeth coold & is sone forgottõ, but emõgest right christê mê, the more ye the lust of ye flesh decreaseth & vanisheth away, ye more thê al godly loue encreseth || Are you not yet perswaded that none lyue more pleasauntly thê they whiche liue continually in vertue and true religiõ of god? _SP._ Would god all men were as well perswaded in that thyng. _He._ And if they bee Epicures that lyue pleasauntli: none bee righter Epicures then they that liue vertuously, and if we wyll that euery thyng haue it right name none deserueth more ye cogname of an Epicure, then that Prince of all godly wisedome too whõ most reuerêtly we ought alwaies too praye: for in the greeke tonge an Epicure signifieth an helper. Nowe whan the lawe of nature was first corrupted with sinne, whê the law of Moses did rather prouoke euil desires ||F.i.|| then remedy them. Whã the tyraunte Sathanas reygned in this worlde freely and wythout punishement, then thys prynce onely, dyd sodenlye helpe mankynde redy to perishe: wherfore thei erre shamefully which scoff and bable that _CHRIST_ was one that was sadd and of a malancolye nature, & that he hath prouoked vs vnto an vnpleasaunt kynde of lyfe, for onely he did shewe a kind of liuing most godly and fullest of al true pleasure, if we might haue the stone of _Tantalus_ taken awaye from vs. _SPVD._ What darke saiyng is this? _EDO._ It is a mery tale too laugh at, but this bourd induceth verye graue and sadde thynges. _SPV._ I tary too heare ||this mery conceite, that you name too bee so sage a matter. _HE_ Thei whiche gaue their studye and diligence to colour and set furth the preceptes of Philosophie wyth subtil fables, declare that there was one _Tantalus_ broughte vnto the table of the goddes, whych was euer furnished wyth all good fare, and most nete and sumptuous that myght bee, whan thys straunger shoulde take hys leave, Iupyter thought it was for his great liberalitie and highe renoume, that his guest shuld not depart wythout some rewarde, he wylled him therfore too aske what he woulde, and he shoulde haue it: _Tantalus_ (forsooth) lyke a verye leude and foolyshe person, ||F.ii.|| for that he sette all the felicitie and pleasure of man in the delectation of the bely, and glotonye, desired but only too sytte at suche a table all the dayes of hys life, Iupiter graunted him his desire, and shortly his vow was there stablished and ratifyed. _Tantalus_ nowe sytteth at the table furnyshed wyth all kindes of delicates, such drinke as the goddes druncke of was set on the table, and there wanted no rooses nor odours that could yeoue any swete smel before the Goddes, _Ganymedes_ the buttler or one lyke vnto hym, standeth euer redye, the _Muses_ stande rounde aboute syngyng pleasauntly, mery _Silenus_ daunseth, ne ther wanted noo fooles || too laugh at, and breuely, there was euerye thynge that coulde delyght any sence of mã but emongist all these, _Tantalus_ sytteth all sadde, syghyng, and vnquiet with hym selfe, neither laughing nor yet touching such thynges as were set before hym _SPVDE._ What was the cause? _HED._ Over his head as he sate there hãged by an heere a great stone euer lyke too fall. _SPV._ I woulde then haue conueied my selfe from suche a table. _HEDO_ But his vowe had bound hym too the contrarye, for Iupyter is not so easye too intreate as oure _GOD_, which dooeth vnloose the pernitious vowes of menne, that bee made contrary vnto his holy woord, if thei bee ||F.iii.|| penitent and sorye therfore, or elles it myght bee thus, the same stoone that woulde not suffer hym too eate, would neither suffer hym to ryse, for if he had but ones moued he shuld haue been quashed al in peeses with the fall thereof. _SPVDE._ You haue shewed a very mery fable _HEDON._ But nowe heare that thing, which you wil not laugh at: the commune people seeke too haue a pleasaunt life in outwarde thynges, where as noothyng can yeoue that, but onely a constant and a quiet mind: for surely a far heuier stone hangeth ouer these that grudge with them selues, then hanged ouer _Tantalus_: it only hangeth not ouer them, but greueth and || oppresseth the mynde, ne the mind is not troubled wyth any vayn hoope, but looketh euery houre to bee caste in too the paynes of hell, I praye you what can bee so pleasaunt emongist all thinges that bee yeouen vnto man, that coulde reioyse the mynde, whyche were oppressed wyth suche a stoone? _SPVDE._ Truely there is nothyng but madnes, or elles incredulitie. _HEDO._ Yf younge menne woulde weygh these thynges, that bee quyckly prouoked and entised with pleasure as it were wyth the cuppe of _Circes_, whiche in steade of theyr greatest pleasures receiue poysone myxte with honye. Howe circumspecte would they bee too doo anye thynge ||F.iiii|| vnaduisedly that shoulde grudge their mindes afterward? What thinge is it that thei would not doo too haue suche a godly treasure in store against their latter daies? that is a minde knowyng it selfe cleane & honest and a name that hath not been defiled at any time. But what thyng now is more miserable then is agee? Whan it beholdeth, and loketh backward on thinges that be past seeth plainly with great grudg of conscience howe fayre thynges he hathe despiced and sette lyght by, (that is, howe farre he hath discented and gone astray from the promyses made vnto God in baptime) & agayn, how foule & noughty thîges he hath clipped and enbraced, and whã || hee looketh forwarde, hee seeth then the daye of iudgemente drawe neere, and shortely after the eternall punyshemente of of hell. _SPVDE._ I esteme theim most happie whych haue neuer defyled theyr youthe, but euer haue increased in vertu, til thei haue coomne vnto the last puincte of age. _HEDO._ Next them thei ar too bee commended that haue wythdrawne theim selues from the folie of youth in tyme. _SPVDE._ But what councel wil you yeoue agee that is in suche great myserie. _HEDO._ No man shoulde dispayre so long as life endureth, I wyl exhorte him to flee for helpe vnto the infinitie mercye & gentilnes of God. _SP._ But the longer that he hath liued || the heape of his synnes hath euer waxen greate and greater, so that nowe it passeth the nomber of the sandes in the sea, _HE_ But the mercies of our lord far excede those sãdes, for although the sande can not bee numbred of manne, yet hit hath an ende, but the mercie of God neither knoweth ende, ne measure. _SP._ Yea but he hath no space that shall dye by and by, _HEDONI._ The lesse tyme he hath the more feruêtly he should cal vnto god for grace, that thyng is long inough before God, whiche is of suche power as too ascende from the yearth vnto heauê, for a short prayer forsoth streght entreth heauê, if it bee made with a vehemêt spirit. It is written, that || ye womã synner spoken of in the gospell did penaunce al her life dayes: but with how fewe wordes again did the thief obtain Paradise in the houre of death? If he will crye with hearte and mynde, God haue mercie on me after thy great mercie: God wil take awaye from hym _Tantalus_ stone and yeoue in his hea- ryng ioye and cõfort and his bones hu- miled throughe cõtrition, wil reioyse that he hath his synnes foryeouen hym. *FINIS.* * * * * * Imprinted at London within the precinct of the late dissolued house of the gray Friers, by Richarde Grafton, Printer too the Princes grace. the. XXIX. daie of Iuly, the yere of our Lorde. M.D.XLV. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [Typographic Errors: arabic numeral = unnumbered page _v_ = verso (back of page) A.5 _v_ most blessed Testament _was_ bessed B.5 _v_ - B.6 then this || saiyng. _end of B.5v reads_ sai-/yng _including catchword_ C.7 _v_ in too a laughter _was_ in too a/a laughter _at line break_ D.7 _v_ where god is present _was_ where god is/is present _at line break_ E.iii it is no vertue but folishnes: but as often as thei bee punyshed _was_ it is no-/vertue _at line break_ _and_ but as of-/often _at line break_ E.8 _v_ - F.i rather prouoke euil desires || then remedy them _end of E.8v reads_ thê/reme _including catchword_ F.i _v_ to colour and set furth the preceptes _was_ set-/furth _at line break_ F.ii _v_ breuely, there was _was_ breuely, there/there was _at line break_ Irregularities in text (not changed): D.5 the two staues wherevpon age is stayed _text reads_ ...where-/vpon _at line break_ D.6 oure moost foo & mortal enemie _unchanged_: ?fool (foul) Mismatched catchwords (text uses second form): C.iiii - C.iiii _v_ [bee] || be C.7 _v_ - C.8 [done] || doone D.iiii _v_ - D.5 [hym] || it D.8 - D.8 _v_ [ioye] || ioy D.8 _v_ - E.i [I] || (I... E.ii _v_ - E.iii [life] || lyfe E.iii _v_ - E.iiii [nowe] || now E.iiii - E.iiii _v_ plea-[sure] || sures E.5 - E.5 _v_ [fyndeth] || findeth E.7 - E.7 _v_ [deyntie] || deintye F.iiii - F.iiii _v_ [he] || hee F.5 - V.5 _v_ [the] || [ye] ] 
14746	----	[Transcriber's note: The original text has no page numbers; instead, the first few leaves of each 16-page signature are marked. This information is shown between paired double lines: || A iij.||. Other page breaks have been marked with double lines || A few apparent typographic errors were corrected and are listed at the end of the text. Other possible errors are also noted but were left unchanged. All other spelling and punctuation are as in the original.] * * * * * A dialoge or communication of two persons, deuysyd and set forthe in the la- tê tonge, by the noble and famose clarke. _Desiderius Erasmus_ intituled ye pyl- gremage of pure de- uoty- on. Newly trãslatyd into Englishe. * * * * * || [+] ij.|| To the reder. Amongest the writinges of all men, dearly belouyd reder, not onely of the diuersyte of tongues, but also the noble drawghts of so artificyall paynted figures, whiche haue so lyuely expressed to ye quycke ymage, the nature, ordre, & proporcyon of all states, as concernynge the gouernaunce of a Christen comêwealthe, that ther is (as I suppose) no parte of the scripture, which is not so enpowndyde, furnysshed, and set forthe, but that euery Christen man, therby may lerne his dewty to god, hys prynce, and hys nebure, and so consequently passe thourough the strayte pathe of the whiche scripture doth testyfye vpõ, very fewe can fynde ye entrye, wherby thorough faythe in the redêptyon of the worlde thorowe ye bloode of Christe the sone of god, to rayne || with the father and the holy goste eternally, accordynge to the promyse of Christe, sayinge. In my fathers hawse ther be many placys to dwell in, we wyll come to hym and make a mansyon place with hym and I haue and shall open thy name vnto them, that the same loue with the whiche thou louydest me, may be in theym, and I in thê, and thys is the kyngdome of god so often mouyd to vs in holy scripture, whiche all faythfull shall possesse and inheret for euermore: where as ye vnfaythfull, vnryghtswye, and synner shall not entre in to the kyngdome of god, bycause, of chaûgynge the glory of gode immortall in to the ymage of a corruptyble man, and therfore to incentiously he hathe suffrede them to wandre in theyr clowdes of ygnoraunce, preferrynge the lyes and corrupte || [+] iij.|| iudgmentes of man the veryte and the truthe of god, rather seruynge the creature then the creator, amongest all the parties of the whiche (as was spoken at the begynnyng) thys alwaye not alonely in the newe law, but also in the olde Testament was as a thynge moost abhomynable and displesant in the sight of gode prohybyte and forbyden: but our nature whiche hath in hym, the dampnable repugnaûce of synne agaynst the omnypotêt power of gode, lest euyn frome owre fyrst father Adam, is so enclyned to vyces, amongest the whiche it hath not gyuen the least parte to thys desperate synne of ydolatrye, agaynst the immaculate, and fearefull commandement of god. Thou shalt haue no straunge Gods in my syght, that it is sore to be dreadde the same iudgement to be gyuyn || vpon vs that was gyuen vpon the cytye of Ninyue to be absorped of the yerthe in to the yre and vengeannce of gode, whiche hathe ben the cause that so many wryters bothe of late dayes, and many yeres passede, haue euyn to deathe, resisted thes dampnable bolsterers of ydolatrye, gyuen theyr selues to the crosse in example of reformacyon to theyr bretherne, bothe in wrytinge and cownsell, exhortynge the flocke of Christe frome soche prophane doctryne, amongest whome the noble and famouse clerke _Desiderius Erasmus_ hath setforthe to the quycke ymage, before mennys eyes, the supersticyouse worshype and false honor gyuyn to bones, heddes, iawes, armes, stockes, stones, shyrtes, smokes, cotes, cappes, hattes, shoes, mytres, slyppers, sadles, rynges, bedes, gyrdles, bolles, || [+] iiij.|| belles, bokes, gloues, ropes, taperes, candelles, bootes, sporres, (my breath was almost past me) with many other soche dampnable allusyones of the deuylle to use theme as goddes contrary to the immaculate scripture of gode, morouer he notethe as it were of arrogancye the pryuate iudgment of certayne that of theyr owne brayne wolde cast out ymages of the temple, with out a comen consent and authoryte, some there be that alway seke halowes, and go vpon pylgramages vnder a pretense of holynes, whervpon thes brotherhoddes and systerhoodes be now inuented, morouer they that haue ben at Hierusalem be called knightes of the sepulcre, and call one an other bretherne, and vpon palme-sondaye they play the foles sadely, drawynge after them an asse in a || rope, when they be not moche distante frome the woden asse that they drawe. The same do they conterfayte that haue ben at saynt Iames in Compostella. But they be more pernycyouse, that set forthe vncertayn relyques, for certayne, and attrybute more to them than they oughte to haue, and prostytute or sett theym forthe for fylthye lukre. But now whan they perceyue, that this theyr dãpnable *Corbane [*A tresure boxe of ye Iewes.] dothe decay, and that theyr most to be lamented blyndnes and longe accustomed errours shuld be redressed, they, all fayre bothe of god and man set asyde, rebelle and make insurrectyones contrary to the ordynaunce of gode, agaynst theyr kynge and liege lorde, prouokynge and allurynge the symple comynaitye to theyre dampnable ypocrysye and conspyracy, myndyng || [+] v.|| and goynge about to preuente our most soueraigne lordes iudgment, not yet gyuê vpon theyr Sodomiticall actes, and most horryble ypocrysy. But the worde of the lorde whiche they so tyrannously go aboute to suppresse with all the fauerours therof shall ouercome & destroy all soch most to be abhorred & deceyuable inuegelers & dysturbers of ye symple people to soch detestable treason. And that it may so do to the terryble example of thes and a11 other rebelles and most dysloyal subiectes, and to ye greate comforthe & cõsolacyõ of his gracys faythfull and true comens. I requyre him which brethethe where he willithe and raygnethe eternall gode to graût vnto our seyde most dradde soueraygne lorde whose maiesty as it euydently appereth onely applieth his diligence to the aduaunsynge || & lettynge forthe of the most holsome documenth and teachyng of almyghty god, to the redres of long accustome euylls and damnable sectes, to the supportacion and mayntenaunce of godly and alowable ceremonyes, to the suppressynge and most to be desired abolishyng of the deuelishe and detestable vsurped aucthoryties, dampnable errours and prophane abuses brought in by that myghty Golyas, that obdurated Phareo, that proude Nembroth (whome god amêde) the byshope of Rome, to graunte (I say) vnto hys hyghnes, suche hys godly ayde and assistence, that hys grace with hys moost honorable counsell (agaynst whome this arrogant conspyracy is nowe moued and begonne) may ouercome and debelle the stud traytres as in tymes paste hys maiestye hath prudently || do other, that haue hertofore attempted to perpetrate and brynge to passe like sedicyous mishief, and so to establishe the hartes of hys gracys true subiectes that they may wyllyngly and according to theyr dueties, obey and fulfyll hys most lawfull and godly ordened lawes and commaundements wherby they shall not onely do the thyng agreable to goddes wylle and teachynges, in that he willeth euery soule to be subiected to the hygher power and obedyent to theyr prynce, but also (to theyr greate laude and prayse) shall shewe them selfe to be redy and confirmable to do theyr dueties in aydyng hys excellent hyghnes to the reformacyon of all pernicious abuses & chiefly of detestable ydolatrye, whiche is so muche prohibited in holy scripture and most displeasant to god, || for whiche intent and purpose the sayd most noble and famous clarke _Desiderius Erasmus_, compiled & made this dialoge in Laten, as it foloweth herafter nowe lately translated into our mother the Englishhe tonge. Auoyd therfore, most deare readere, all abuses whereby any inconuenyence may growe, other to the hynderaunce of godes worde, to the displeasure of thy prynce, (whome thou arte so straytly commaunded to obaye, or to the domage of a publike weale, whiche aboue all vices is noted most to be abhorred, not alonely of the most holy wryteres and expownderes of scripture, but also of prophane gentylles, whiche neuer perceyuyd other thinge than nature enclyned theyr hartes vnto, and so consequently to obtayne the fruytion of the godhode thorowe the faythe that was || spoken of at the begynnynge to the whiche the lorde Iesus Chri- ste brynge vs all with a perfaycte quyetnes, So be it. + * * * * * || A.|| A pylgremage, for pure deuocyõ. _Menedemus._ [*Signifieth to forsake.] What new thynge ys it, that I se? doo I nat see _Ogygyus_ my neybur, whom no mã could espie of all thes sex monthes before? yt was a sayng that he was deed, It is euen he, except that I be ferre deceyuyd. I wyll go to hym, & byd hym good morow. Good morow Ogygyus.[*was faynyd of an old kynge of Thebanes.] Good morow to you Menedemus. _Mene._ I pray you frome what contray do you come to vs ayen so saffe. For here was a great comunicacyõ that you dyd sayle streght to hell. _Ogy._ No, thankyd be god, I haue faryd as well syns I went hens, as euer I dyd in all my lyffe. _Me._ Well, a man may well perceyue that all soche rumours be but vanytye. But I pray you what araye is this that you be in, me thynke that you be clothyd with cokle schelles, and be || ladê on euery syde with bruches of lead and tynne. And you be pretely garnyshyd with wrethes of strawe & your arme is full of *snakes egges.[*Signifyeth bedes. Malsyngam ys callyd parathalassia by cause it is ny to ye see.] _Ogy._ I haue bene on pylgremage at saynt Iames in Compostella, & at my retourne I dyd more relygyously vysyte our lady of Walsyngã in England, a very holy pylgremage, but I dyd rather vysyte her. For I was ther before within this thre yere. _Me._ I trowe, it was but for your pleasure. _Ogy._ Nay, it was for pure deuocyon. _Me._ I suppose you learnyd that relygyõ of the Grecyanes. _Ogy._ My mother in law dyd make a vowe that if her dougther shuld be delyueryd of a man chyld alyue, than that I shuld go to saynt Iames on pylgremage, and ther to salute and thãke hym. _Me._ Dyd you salute saynt Iames alonly in your name, and your mothers. _Ogy._ No, in the name of all owre house. _Me._ || A ij.|| Verely I thynke that your howshold as well shold haue prosperd, in case you had not salutyd hym at all. But I pray you what answer dyd he make to your salutacyon. _Ogy._ Nothynge at all. But whã I dyd offre, me tought he dyd lawghe vpon me, and becke at me with hedde, & dyd reche to me this cokleshell. _Me._ Wherfore dothe he gyue rather suche schelles, than other thynges. _Ogygy._ For the see, whiche is nye vnto hym dothe mynystre plenty of suche. _Me._ O holy saynt Iames, that bothe is a mydwyffe to women with chyld, and also dothe helpe his pylgrymes. But I pray you what new kynd of makyng vowes is that that whan a mã is ydle he shall put the burden apon an other mannes bakke? In case that you doo bynd youre selffe with a vowe, that yf ye matter chaunche happyly whiche you haue in hande, that I for you || shall fast twyse in on weke, do you beleue that I can fulfyl youre vow? _Ogy._ No, I doo not beleue it if that you dyd vowe it in youre awne name. It is but a sport with yow to mokke sayntes. But this was my mother in law, I must nedys obey her, you know womenes affectyones, & I must obaye heres. _Me._ If that you had not perfourmyd your vowe, what iopertye had you be in? _Ogy._ I graunt, he could not haue had an accyon ayenst me in ye law, but he myght from hensforthe be deafe to my vowes, orels pryuyly send some calamytye or wretchednes amongste my housholde, yow know well enuffe the maneres of great men. _Me._ Tell me now what that same honest mã saynt Iames dothe, and howe he farythe. _Ogy._ Moche colder thã he was wontyd to do. _Me._ What is the cause of it? His age? _Ogy._ Oh you scoffer, yow || A iij.|| know wel enoghe that sayntes wax nat olde. But this new learnynge, whiche runnythe all the world ouer now a dayes, dothe cause hym to be vysytyd moche lesse than he was wontyd to be, for if any doo come thay salute him alonly, but they offre lytle or nothinge, and say that theyr monaye may bettre be disposyd amongste pore people. _Me._ O a wykyd comunicacyon. _Ogy._ Ye & so great an Apostle whiche was wõtyd to stand all in precyous stones & gold, now stãdythe all of wodde hauynge before hym skaresly a wax candle. _Me._ If it be trew that I here, it is great ioperdy lest that same chance to all the rest of the sayntes. _Ogy._ I thynk it wel, for ther is an epistle abrode whiche our lady dyd wryte apon the same matter. _Me._ What lady? _Ogy._ *She that hathe her name of a stone.[*Our ladi of stone in Raurachia whiche is a certayne cuntre.] _Me._ I trawe it is in Raurachia. _Ogy._ That same || is it. _Me._ yow tell me of a stony lady, But to whome dyd she wryte? _Ogy._ The epistle dothe playnely shew his name. _Me._ By whome was it sent? _Ogy._ No dowbt but by an angell, whiche dyd lay the wrytynges apõ the aultre, wherof he prechythe to whome it was sent. And lest there shuld be any suspectyõ of crafty cõuayance in you, you shall se the epistle wryten with his owne hande. _Me._ Do you know so well the hand of thangell whiche is secretary to our lady? _Ogy._ Yee why nat? _Me._ By what argumêt? _Ogy._ I haue redde that *Epithaphe [*Is a scripture wryten on a graue.] of Bede which was grauyd of the angell: and the letteres agre in all thynges. I haue redde also ye obligacyõ whiche was sent to saynt Gyles as dothe aper. Dothe not thes argumentes proue that mater to be good enoghe. _Me._ May a man loke apon them? _Ogy._ ye and if you wyll swere to kepe it || A iiij.|| preuy. _Me._ Oh you shall speake to a stone. _Ogy._ Ther be stones now a dayes of that name very slawnderous, that wyll hyde nothynge. _Me._ you shall speake to a domme man, & yow trust nat a stone. _Ogy._ Apon ye condycyon I wyll tell it, loke that you here with bothe youre eyares. _Me._ So I doo. [The epistle of our Lady.] _Ogy._ Mary the mother of Iesu to *Glaucoplutus [*Glaucoplutus desirus of ryches.] sêdythe gretynge. Insomoche as you folowe Luther, you nobly perswade, that it is but in vayne to call apõ sayntes, do ye well know for that to be grettly in my fauore. For vntyll thys day I haue almost be slayne with the importunate prayers of men. Of me alone they askyd althynges, as who shuld say my sone were alway a babe, because he is so faynyd and payntyd apõ my breste, that yet he wold be at my commaundemêt and durst nat denye my petycyon, dredynge that if he denye my petycyon, || that I shuld denye hym my teate whan he is a thurst: and very oft thay requyre that of me, whiche a shamfast yongman dare scantly aske of a Bawde, yee they be suche thynges as I am ashamyd to put in wrytynge. Now comythe ye marchauntman and he redy to sayle into Spayne for a vantage, dothe cõmytte hys wyues honesty to me. Than commythe thet lytle preaty Nunne and she castythe away her vayle redy to runne away, she leuythe with me the good name of her vyrgynytye, whiche shortly she entendythe to take monay for. Than cryeth the wykyd soudyer purposyd to robbe & saythe, blessyd lady send me a good praye. Now cõmythe the vnthryfty dyasser and cryethe, send me good chance Lady & thow shalt haue parte of my wynnynges: and if the dyasse runne ayenst hym, he blasphemes, and cursythe me, bycause || I wyll nat fauor his noghtynes. Now cryeth she that sellythe her selffe for fylthye lukre & saythe, swete lady send me some costomers, & if I denye it, they exclame ayenst me & say, thou arte not the mother of marcy. Moreouer the vowes of some women be no lesse wykyd thã folishe. The mayd cryeth & saythe, O swet Mary send me a fayre and riche husbond. The maryed womã saythe send me goodly chylderen. Now laborythe the woman with chyld, and cryeth dere lady dylyuer me of my bondes. Than cõmythe ye olde wyffe, and saythe flowre of all women send me to lyue longe withowt coghe and drynes. Now crepythe the the dotynge old man & saythe, lady send me for to wax yonge ayê. Thã cõmythe forth the phylosopher and cryethe send me some argumêtis that be îsoluble. The great prest cryeth send me a fat benefyce. Thã || saythe the bysshope kepe well my churche. Thã cryethe ye hye Iustyce shew me thy sone or I passe out of this worlde. Thã saythe ye Cowrtyer send me trwe confession at the howre of my deathe. The husbondman saythe send vs temperate wether. The mylke wyffe cryethe owt blessyd lady saue our catell. Now if I denye anythynge by & by I am crwell. If I cõmytte it to my sone, I here them say, he wyll what so euer you wyll. Shall I than alone bothe a woman and a mayd helpe maryneres, sawdyeres, marchantmen, dyasseres, maryed mê, women with chyld, iudges, kynges, and husbondmen? ye and this that I haue sayd is the least parte of my payne. But I am nat now so moche trobled with soche busynes, for that I wold hartely thanke you, but that this commodytye dothe brynge a greater discõmodytye with hym. I || haue now more ease, but lesse honor & profett. Before this tyme I was callyd quene of heuen, lady of the world, but now any man wyll skarsly say aue Maria or hayle Mary. Before I was clothyd with precyous stones and gold, and had my chaunges, and dayly ther was offeryd gold and precyous stones, now I am skarsly coueryd with halffe a gowne and that is all beeyten with mysse. My yerly rentes be now so smalle that I am skarsly able to fynde my pore quere kepar to light a wax cãdle before me. Yet all this myght be sufferyd, but you be abowt to pluke away greater thynges, you be abowt (as they say) that what so euer any saynte hathe in any place, to take hyt frome the churches, but take hede what you doo. For ther is no saynte without a way to reuêge his wronge. If you cast saynt Petre forthe of the churche, he may serue || you of the same sauce, and shite vp heuyngates ayenst you. ye saynt Paule hathe his sworde. Barthylmew is nat withowt his great knyffe. Saynt Wyllyam is harnysyd vnder his monkes cloke, nat withowt a greate speare. What canst thou doo ayenst saynt George whiche is bothe a knyght & all armyd with hys longe spere and his fearfull sword? Nor saynt Antony is nat withowt hys weapenes for he hathe holy fyre with hym. Ye the rest of the sayntes haue theyr weapones or myschefues, whiche they send apon whome they liste. But as for me thou canst not cast owt, except thou cast owt my sone, whiche I hold in myne armes. I wyll nat be seperat frome hym, other thou shalt cast hym owt with me or els thou shalt let vs bothe be, except that you wold haue a temple withowt a Christe. These be the thynges that I wold || yow shall know ymagyne you therfore what shal be your answer. For this thinge pleasythe me very well. Frome oure stony churche the calendes of Auguste, the yere frome my sonnes passyon a M. CCCCC. xiiij. I stony lady subscrybyd thys with myne owne hande. _Me._ Trewly that was a soro and fearfull epistle, I suppose that Glaucoplutus wyll beware frõ hêsforthe. _Ogy._ Ye & if he be wyse. _Me._ Wherfore dyd nat that good saynt Iames wryte to that man of the same mater. _Ogy._ I can nat tell, except it be bycause he is so ferre of, and now a dayes men be moche searchyd for suche maters, & in theyr iornaye theyr lettres takê frome them. _Me._ I pray you, what god dyd send you into Englõd? _Ogy._ I saw the wynd maruelouse prosperouse thyderward, and I had almoste promysyd this to that blessyd lady of Walsyngã that I wold seke || her within .ij. yere, _Me._ What wold you axe of her. _Ogy._ No new thyngs at all, but suche as be comen, as to kepe saffe and sownd my housholde, to encreasse my goodes, and in thys world to haue a lõge and mery liffe, and whã I dye euerlastynge lyffe in another worlde. _Me._ May nat owr lady grante the same at home with vs? She hathe at Antwarpe a moche more lordly temple thã at Walsyngame. _Ogy._ I denye nat but it may be so, but in dyuers places she grantes dyuers thynges, wether it be her pleasur so to do, or bycause she is so gentle, that as cõcernynge this purpose, she wyll gyue her selfe to our affectyões. _Me._ I haue harde oft of saynt Iames, but I pray you describe to me the kyngdome of Walsyngam. _Ogy._ Verely I shall tell you as shortly as I canne. Yt is the most holy name in all England, and you may fynde some in || that yle, that suppose thayr substãce shal nat prospayre except they vysyte her with thayr offerynge euery yere ones as thay be able to gyue. _Me._ Wher dothe she dwell? _Ogy._ At the vttermost parte of all England betwyxt the Northe and the Weste, nat vary ferre from the see, skarsly iii myles, the towne is almost susteynyd by the resort of pylgrymes. The college is of Canões, but thay be suche as hathe thayr name of the Laten tonge and be called Seculares, a kynd betwyxte monkes & Chanones. _Me._ What you tell me of *Amphybyanes, [*Amphybyanes be thynges doutfull.] suche as ye mõstre *Fyber is.[*Fyber is a beste of ye see & ye land.] _Ogy._ No thay be rather suche as the *Cocatrice. [*A Cocatrice wil kyll a man with a loke,] But withowt dissimulation, I shall put you owt of this dowte in thre wordes. To them that thay hate, thay be Chanones, and to them that thay loue thay be Monkes _Menede._ Yet yowe doo nat open thys redle. _Ogy._ || I shall paynte it before youre eyes, if the bysshope of Rome doo shot hys thonderbowlt amõgst all monkes, thay wyll than be chanones, & nat monkes, but and if he wold suffre all monkes to take wyues, thã wyll they be monkes, _Me._ O new partakeres, I wold to god they wold take away my wyffe. _Ogy._ But to come to our purpose, the college hathe skarsly any other *emolumêtes [*Rêttes.] but of the liberalite of our lady. For the great offeryngs be kepyd stylle, but if ther be any litle some of monaye offerid that goith to the comens of the company, & the mayster whome thay call pryoure. _Me._ Be thay of a vertuous lyffe? _Ogy._ Nat to be dispraysyd, thay be more vertuous thã ryche of thayr yerely renttes. The temple ys goodly & goregious, but oure Lady dwellythe nat in it, but that was purchasyd for the honor of her sone. She hathe her owne temple, || B.|| that she may be of the ryght hand of her sone. _Me._ Apon the right hãd. Whiche way dothe her sonne loke than? _Ogy._ It is well remembryd. Whan he lokythe to the West, his mother is apõ his right hand, but whã he turnythe hym to the Este she is apon the lefte hand. But yet she dwellythe nat in that churche, for it is nat yet buyldyd all vpe, and the wynde runnythe thorow euery parte with open wyndowes & dowres, and also nat ferre of is the Occiane seye father of all wyndes. _Me._ what doo yow tell me wher dothe she dwell thã? _Ogy._ In ye same churche whiche I told you was nat all fynyshyd, ther is a lytle chapell seelyd ouer with wodde, on ether syde a lytle dore wher ye pylgrymes go thorow, ther is lytle light, but of ye taperes, with a fragrant smell. _Me._ All these be mete for religyon. _Ogy._ Ye Menedemus if you loke within you || wyll say that it is a seate mete for sayntes, all thynges be so bright in gold, syluer, and precyous stones. _Me._ You almost moue me to go thyther also. _Ogy._ It shalnat repente you of your iornay. _Me._ Spryngithe ther no holy oyle? _Ogy._ I trowe you dote, that spryngythe nat but owt of the sepulchres of sayntes, as saynt Andrew, & saynt Katerê, owr lady was nat beried. _Me._ I graût I sayd amysse, but tell on your tale. _Ogy._ So moche more as thay persayue youre deuocyõ, so moche larger reliques wyl thay shew to you. _Me._ Ye and peraduêture that thay may haue larger offerynges, as is sayd that, many lytle offerynges makythe a heuy boxe. _Ogygy._ Her chaplens be alway at hand. _Me._ Be thay of ye Chanones? _Ogy._ No, thay be nat permyttyd to be with her, lest that peraduenture by occasyon of that religyon, thay shuld be plukkyd || B ij.|| frome thayr owne religyõ, and whylst thay kepe that virgyne, thay regard very lytle thayr awne virgynyte, alonly in that inner chapell whiche is our ladyes preuy chãbre, ther standithe a certayne Chanõ at the autre. _Me._ For what purpose? _Ogy._ To receyue and kepe, that whiche is offeryd. _Me._ dothe any man gyue ayenst hys wyll. _Ogy._ No, but many men hathe suche a gentle shamfastnes, that thay wyll gyue some thynge to hym that standythe by, other thay wyll offre more largely, whiche thay wold nat doo perauêture if that he were absent, that standithe there. _Me._ You tell me of mannes affectiones, whiche I my selffe prouyd very ofte. _Ogy._ Ye trewly there be some so gyuê to our blessyd lady, that whan thay apere to put vpe thayr handes to offre, with a pure cõusyance, thay stayl that whiche other men hathe gyuen. _Me._ Than || lett no man be there, wyll nat oure Lady shote her thonderbowlte at suche. _Ogy._ Wherfor shuld our lady rather doo so, than God hymselffe, whom thay be nat affrayd to pluke owt hys robes, & breake ye churche walles therfore. _Mene._ I am in a great doubt whether I shuld, rather maruayle apon thayre wykyd boldnes, or Goddys great gêtlenes and longe sufferynge. _Ogy._ Apõ the Northe parte ther is a certayne gaate, but lest that you should make a lye, it is nat of the churche, but of the pale that compassithe a bowte the churche yarde, and that hathe a lytle wykyt, suche as be in great mennes gaates, that who so euer wyll entre, must fyrst putin hys legge, nat withowt some ioperdie, and than bowe downe hys hedde. _Me._ It is ioperdie to goo thorow suche a dore, to a mannes enemye. _Ogy._ So it is, the sexten dyd tell me that || B iij.|| ther was ones a knyght whiche fleeynge hys enemye, than aprochynge, dyd ride thorow ye wykyte, and than the wretche dispayrynge in hym selffe, apon a soden motion, dyd commend hymselffe to ye blessyd virgyne, whiche was than at hand. But now commythe the myrakle. By and by that knyght was all in the churche yarde, and hys aduersary was ragynge at the dore wowte. _Me._ And dyd he tell you so maruylous a myrakle for a trewthe? _Ogy._ No dowte. _Me._ But I suppose that he could nat so lyghtely doo that to you so a great a philosopher. _Ogy._ He dyd shewe to me in that same wykytte in a plate of coper, the ymage of the knyght fastenyd with nayles and with the same garmentes that the Englishmen were wontyd to wayre at that tyme, as you may see in that olde pictures, whiche wyl nat lye, Barbours had || but lytle lyuynge at that tyme: and dieres & websteres gotte but litle monay. _Me._ Why so? _Ogy._ For he had a berd like a goote, and his cote had neuer a plyte, & it was so litle, that with strayte gyrdynge it mayd hys body to apere lesse than it was. Ther was another plate, that was in quantyte and fourme like to a cheste. _Me._ Well now it is nat to be doubtyd apõ. _Ogy._ Under ye wykyte ther was a grate of yrne, that no man cã passe theryn but a footemã, for it is nat conuenyent that any horsse shuld tread after apon ye place, whiche the knyght dyd cõsecrate to owr lady. _Me._ Nat withowt a good cause. _Ogy._ Frome that parte toward the Este, there is a litle chapell, full of maruayles and thyther I wête, ther was I receyuyd of another of our ladyes chaplenes, ther we knelyd downe, to make our litle prayeres. By & by, he broght forthe || B iiij.|| the ioynte of a mannes fynger, the greatyste of thre, which I kyssyd, & askyd whose relyques thay were, he dyd say that thay were saynt Petres. What thapostle sayd I. Ye sayd he. Than I dyd better beholde the ioynte, whiche for hys greatenes myght well haue be a Gyãtes ioynte, rather than a mannes. Than sayd I, saynt Peter must nedys be a great man of stature. But at that word, ther was one of the gentlemê that stode by, that could not forbere lawghynge, for the which I was very sory. For if he had holden hys pease, we had sene all the relyques, yet we metely well pleasyd mayster Sextê, with gyuynge hym .ij. or .iij. grotes. Before that chapell there was a litle howsse, which he sayd ones in wynter tyme whan that there was litle rowme to couer the reliques, that it was sodenly broght & sett in that place. Under that house || there was a couple of pittes, bothe fulle of water to the brynkys, and thay say that ye sprynge of thos pittes is dedicate to our lady, that water is very colde, and medycynable for the hede ake and that hartburnynge. _Me._ If that cold water wyll hele the paynes in the hede and stomake, than wyll oyle put owte fyre from hensforthe. _Ogy._ It is a myrakle that I tell, good syr, or els what maruayle shuld it be, that cowld water shuld slake thurste? _Me._ This may well be one parte of your tale. _Ogy._ Thay say that the fowntayne dyd sodenly sprynge owte of the erthe at the commaundement of our lady, & I dilygently examenynge althynges, dyd aske hym how many yeres it was sythe that howsse was so sodenly broght thyther. Many yeres agone saythe he. Yet, sayde I, the wallys doo nat apere so old. He dyd nat denay it. No mor thes woden || B v.|| pyleres. He cowld nat denay but that they were sette there nat longe agoo, and also the mater dyd playnly testyfye ye same. Afterward, sayd I, thys roffe which is all of rede dothe apere nat to be very olde, & he granted also, thes greete bemes which lye ouerthwerte, and these rafteres that hold vpe that howsse were nat sett longe agone. He affyrmyd my saynge. Well sayd I seynge that no parte of the housse is lefte but all is new, how can yow say that this was the house whiche was broght hyther so longe agoo. _Me._ I pray you how dyd the howskeper, auoyde hymselffe frome your argumêt. _Ogy._ By & by he dyd shew to vs the mater by the skyne of a bayre whiche had hangyd be the rafteres a longe season, and dyd almost moke the symplenes of owre wyttes that could nat perceyue so manyfeste an argumête we beynge || perswadyd by this argument, askid pardon of our ignorance, and callid into our communycacyon the heuêly mylke of our lady. _Me._ O how like to the sone is the mother, for he hath left to vs so moche blood here in erthe, & she so moche mylke, that a man wyl skarysly beleue a woman to haue so moche mylke of one chylde, in case the chyld shuld sukke none at all. _Ogy._ Thay saye the same of the holy crosse, whiche is shewyd in so many places bothe openly, and pryuately, that if ye fragmentes were gathered apon one heape, they wold apere to be a iuste fraghte for a shipe, and yet Christe dyd bere all his crosse hymselffe. _Me._ But do nat you maruayll at this? _Ogy._ It may welbe a strãge thynge, but no maruayle, seynge that the lord whiche dothe encreasse this at hys pleasure, is almyghty. _Me._ It is very gently expownded, but I am || afrayd, that many of thes be faynyd for lukre. _Ogy._ I suppose that God wold nat suffre hymselffe to be deludyd of suche a fasshion. _Mene._ Yis, haue nat you sene that whã bothe the mother, the sone, the father, and the holy ghoste hathe be robbyd of thes sacrilegyous theues, that thay woldnat ones moue, or styre nother with bekke or crakke wherby thay myght fray away the theues. So great is the gentles of God. _Ogy._ So it is, but here out me tale. This mylke is kepyd apon the hye aultre, and in the myddys ther is Christe, with his mother apon hys ryght hand, for her honor sake, the mylke dothe represente the mother. _Me._ It may be sene than? _Ogy._ It is closyd in crystalle. _Me._ It is moyste thã? _Ogy._ What tell you me of moystenes, whã it was mylkyd more than a thowsand and fyue hunthrithe yere agone, it is so congelyd, that a mã wold || saye that it were chalke temperyd with the whyte of a egge. _Me._ Ye, but do thay sette it forthe bare? _Ogy._ No, lest so holy mylke shuld be defowlyd with the kyssynge of men. _Me._ You say well. For I suppose that ther be many that kysse it, whiche be nother clene mouthyd, nor yet be pure virgynes. _Ogy._ Whan ye sexten sawe vs, he dyd runne to the aultre, & put apon hym his surplese, & his stole about his nekke, knelyd downe relygyously, and worshipyd it, and streghtforthe dyd offre the mylke to vs to kysse. And at the ende of the aultre we knelyd downe deuoutly, & the fyrste of all we salutyd Christe, & than after we callyd apon our lady with thys prayer, whiche we had mayd redy for the same purpose. O mother & mayde, whiche dyd gyue sukke with thy virgynes teates the lorde of heuen and yerthe, thy sone Iesus Christe, we beynge puryfyed || thorowe hys precyous blode, do desyre that we may attayne, and come to that blessyd infancye of thy colombynes meknes, whiche is immaculate without malice, frawde, or diseyte, and with all affectyon of harte dothe couett and stody for the heuenly mylke of the euangelicall doctryne, to go forthe and encrease with it into a perfaycte man, into the mesure of the plentefulnes of Christe, of whose cõpany thou haste the fruycyon, togyther with the father, & the holy ghost for euermore, so be it. _Me._ Uerely thys is a holy prayer. But what dyd she? _Ogygy._ Thay bothe bekkyd at vs, excepte my eyes waggyd, and me thoght that the mylke daunsyd. In the meanseson the sexten came to vs, withowt any wordes, but he held out a table suche as the Germanes vse to gather tolle apon bridges. _Me._ By my trothe I haue cursyd veryofte suche || crauynge boxes, whan I dyd ryde thorowe Germany. _Ogy._ We dyd gyue hym certayne monay whiche he offeryd to our lady. Thã I axyd by a certayne yonge man, yt was well learnyd, whiche dyd expownde and tell vs the saynge of ye Sextê, hys name (as fere as I remembre) was Robert alderisse, by what tokenes or argumêtes he dyd know that it was the mylke of owr lady. And that I very fayne, & for a good purpose desyred to knowe, that I myght stope the mowthes of certayne newfanglyd felowes, that be wotyd to haue suche holy relyques in derysyon and mokage. Fyrst of all the Sexten with a froward cowntenãce wold nat tell, but I desyryd the yong man to moue hym more instantly, but somwhat more gently he so courtesly behauyd hymselffe, that and he had prayd owr lady herselffe || after that fashion, she wold nat haue be dysplesyd therwith. And thã this mystycall chapleyn, as and if he had be inspyryd with ye holy ghoste, castynge at vs a frounynge loke, as & if he wold haue shote at vs ye horryble thonderbolte of the greate curse, what nede you (saythe he) to moue suche questyones, whan yow see before your eyes so autentycall & old a table. And we were afrayd lest that he wold haue cast vs out of the churche for heretykes, but that oure monay dyd tempte hys greate furye. _Mene._ What dyd you in the meaneseason? _Ogygyus._ What suppose you? We were amasyd as and if a man had stryke vs with a clube, or we had be slayne with a thonderclape, and we very lowly axid pardon of oure folishe boldenes, and gote vs frome thens. For so must we entreate holy thynges. || Frome thens we went in to ye howse where owre lady dwellithe, and whan we came there, we sawe another Sexten whiche was but a noues, he lokyd famylarly as and if he had knowê vs, and whã we came a litle further in, we sawe another, that lokyd moch after suche a fashion, at the last came the thyrd. _Me._ Perauenture thay desyryd to descrybe you. _Ogy._ But I suspecte another mater. _Mene._ What was it? _Ogygy._ There was a certayne theffe that had stole almost all owr ladyes frontlet, and I supposyd that they had me in suspycyon thereof. And therfore whan I was within the chapell I mayd my prayers to our lady after thys fashiõ. Oh cheffe of all women Mary the mayd, most happy mother, moste pure virgyne, we vnclene, and synners, doo vysyte the pure & holy, and after our abylytye we haue offeryd vnto the, we pray thy that thy || C.|| sone may grante this to vs, that we may folow thy holy lyffe, and that we may deserue thorow the grace of the holy ghoste, spirytually to cõceyue the lord Iesus Christ, & after that conceptyon neuer to be separat from hym, Amen. This done I kyssyd the aultre, and layd downe certayne grotes for myne offerynge and went my waye. _Me._ What dyde our lady now, dyd nat she make one sygne, that you myght know that she had hard youre prayeres. _Ogy._ The lyght (as I told you before) was but litle, and she stode at the ryght ende of the aultre in the derke corner, at the last the communicatyõ of the fyrst Sexten had so discoregyd me, that I durst not ones loke vpe with myne eyes. _Me._ This pylgremage came but to smale effecte. _Ogy.._ Yes, it had a very good & mery ende. _Me._ You haue causyd me to take harte of grasse, for (as Homere || saythe) my harte was almost in my hose. _Ogy._ Whan dynar was done, we returnyd to ye temple. _Me._ Durste you goo & be susspecte of felonye? _Ogy._ Perauenture so, but I had nat my selffe in suspiciõ, a gyltles mynde puttythe away feare. I was very desyrous to see that table whiche the holy Sexten dyd open to vs. At the last we fownde it, but it was hãgyd so hye that very fewe could rede it. My eyes be of that fashion, that I can nother be callyd *Linceus, [*Linceus ys a beaste so quike eyed that it wyll see thorow any wall] nother purre blynd. And therefore I instantly desyryd Alldryge to rede it, whose redynge I folowyd with myne owne eyes, because I wold skarsly truste hym in suche a mater. _Me._ Well, now all doubtes be discussyd. _Ogy._ I was ashamyd that I doubtyd so moche, ye mater was so playne set forthe before oure eyes, bothe the name, the place, the thynge it selffe as it was || C ij.|| done, to be breffe, there was nothynge lefte owte. There was a mane whos name was Wylyam whiche was borne in Parise, a man very deuoute in many thyngs but pryncypally excedynge relygyous in searchynge for the relyques of all sayntes thorowowt all the world. He after that he had vysytyd many places, contrayes, and regyones, at the laste came to Cõstantynenople. For Wylhelmes brother was there byshope, whiche dyd make hym pry to a certayne mayde, whiche had professyd chastyte, that hadde parte of oure ladyes mylke, which were an excedynge precyous relyque, if that other with prayer, or monaye, or by any crafte it myghte be gotte. For all the reliques that he hadde gotte before were but tryfles to so holy mylke. Wyllyam wold not rest there tyll that he had gotte halffe of that holy mylke, but whan he had || it, he thoghte that he was richer than Croeseus. _Me._ Why nat, but was it nat withowt any goodhope? _Ogy._ He went thã streght home, but in hys iornay he fell seke. _Me._ Iesu there is nothynge in thys worlde that is other permanent, or alwayes in good state. _Ogy._ But whan he sawe & perceyuyd that he was in greate ioperdye of his lyffe, he callyd to him a frenchman, whiche was a very trusty companyon to hym in hys iornay. And commaundyd all to auoyd the place, and make sylence, & pryuyly dyd betake to hym thys mylke, apon this condycyõ, that if it chãcyd to come home saffe & sownde he wuld offre that precyous tresure to our ladyes aultre in Paryse, whiche standythe in the myddys of the ryuere Sequana, whiche dothe apere to separat hymselffe to honor and obaye our blessyd lady. But to make short tale. Wylyam is deade, & || C iij.|| buryed, the Frenchman mayd hym redy to departe apon hys iornay, & sodêly fell seke also. And he in great dyspayre of amendynge, dyd commyth ye mylke to an Englishmã, but nat withowt great instance, and moche prayer he dyd that whiche he was mouyd to doo. Than dyed he. And ye other dyd take the mylke, and put it apon an aultre of ye same place the Chanones beynge present, whiche were yt as we call Regulares. Thay be yet in the abbaye of saynt Genofeffe. But ye Englishmã obtaynyd the halffe of that mylke, & caryed it to Walsyngã in England, the holy ghost put suche in hys mynde. _Me._ By my trothe this is a godly tale. _Ogy._ But lest there shuld be any doubte of this mater, ye Byshopes whiche dyd grante pardon to it thayre names be wryten there, as thay came to vysyte it, nat withowt thayre offerynges, and thay haue || gyuen to it remyssyon, as moche as thay had to gyue by thayre authorite. _Me._ How moche is that? _Ogy._ Fowrty dayes. _Mene._ Yee is there dayes in hell. _Ogy._ Trewly ther is tyme. Ye but whan thay haue grãtyd all thayre stynte, thay haue no more to grante. _Ogy._ That is nat so for whan one parte is gone another dothe encrease, and it chansythe dyuersly euyn as the tonne of Canaidus. For that althoghe it be incontynently fyllyd, yet it is alway emptye: and if thou be takynge owt of it, yet there is neuer the lesse in the barell. _Me._ If thay grãte to an hunderithe thowsand mê fowrty dayes of pardone, wuld euery man haue elyke? _Ogy._ No doubte of that. _Me._ And if any haue forty byfore dynar, may he axe other forty at after souper, is there any thynge left than to gyue him? _Ogy._ Ye, & if thou aske it ten tymes in one howre. _Me._ I wold || C iiij.|| to God that I had suche a pardon bagge, I wold aske but .iij. grotes, and if thay wold flowe so faste. _Ogy._ Ye but you desyre to be to ryche, if that you myght for wyshynge, but I wyl turne to my tale, but there was some good holy man whiche dyd gyue this argumente of holynes to that mylke, and sayd that our Ladyes mylke whiche is in many other places, is precyous & to be worshipyd but thys is moche more precyous, & to be honoryd, bycause the other was shauen of stones, but this is the same that came out of the virgynes brest. _Me._ How kno you that? _Ogy._ The mayd of Cõstantynople, which dyd gyue it, dyd saye so. _Me._ Perauenture saynt Barnard dyd gyue it to her. _Ogy._ So I suppose. For whã he was an old man, yet he was so happy that he sukkyd of ye same mylke, that Iesus hymselffe sukkyd apon. _Me._ But I maruayle why he was || rather callyd a hony sukker than a mylke sukker. But how is it callyd oure ladyes mylke that came neuer owt of her breste? _Ogy._ Yes it came owt at her breste, but perauenture it light apon the stone that he whiche sukkyd knelyd apon, and ther was receyuyd, and so is encreasyd, & by ye wyll of god is so multyplyed. _Me._ It is wel sayd. _Ogy._ Whan we had sene all thys, whyle that we were walkynge vpe & downe, if that any thynge of valure were offeryd, so that anybody were present to see thaym ye Sextens mayd great haste for feare of crafty cõuayêce, lokynge apõ thaym as thay wold eate thaym. Thay poynte at hym with there fynger, thay runne, thay goo, thay come, thay bekke one to an other, as tho thay wold speake to thaym that stand by if thay durste haue be bold. _Mene._ Were you afrayd of nothynge there? _Ogy._ Yis I dyd loke || C v.|| apõ hym, lawghynge as who shold saye I wold moue him to speake to me, at laste he cam to me, and axid me what was my name, I told him. He axid me if yt were nat I that dyd hange vpe there a table of my vowe writen in Hebrew, within .ij. yere before. I confessid that it was ye same. _Me._ Cã you wryte hebrewe? _Ogygy._ No but all that thay cãnat vnderstond, thay suppose to be Hebrewe. And than (I suppose he was send for) came the posterior pryor. _Me._ What name of worshipe is that? Haue thay nat an abbate? _Ogy._ No _Me._ Why so? _Ogy._ For thay cannat speake Hebrew. _Me._ Haue thay nat a Bishope? _Ogy._ No. _Me._ What is ye cause? _Ogy._ For oure lady is nat as yet so ryche, that she is able to bye a crosse, & a mytre, whiche be so deare, _Me._ Yet at least haue thay nat a presedente? _Ogy._ No veryly. What lettythe thaym? _Ogy._ That is a name || of dygnyte and nat of relygyõ. And also for that cause suche abbayes of Chanones, doo nat receyue the name of an abbate, thay doo call thaym maysters? _Me._ Ye, but I neuer hard tell of pryor posterior before. _Ogy._ Dyd you neuer learne youre grãmere before. _Me._ Yis I know prior posterior amõgst the fygures. _Ogy._ That same is it. It is he that is nexte to the prioure, for there priour is posterior. _Me._ You speake apon the supprioure. _Ogy._ That same dyd entertayne me very gently, he told me what greate labure had be abowt ye readynge of thos verses, & how many dyd rubbe thayr spectakles abowt thaym. As oft as any old ancyent doctor other of deuynyte or of the lawe, resorted thyder, by and by he was broght to that table, some sayd that thay were lettres of Arabia, some sayd thay were faynyd lettres. Well || at the last came one that redde the tytle, it was wryten in laten with greate Romayne lettres, ye Greke was wryten with capytale lettres of Greke, whiche at the fyrst syght do apere to be capytale latê lettres, at thayr desyer I dyd expownde ye verses in laten, trãslatynge thaym word for word. But whã thay wold haue gyuyn me for my labour, I refusyd it, seynge that ther was nothynge so hard that I wold not doo for our blessyd ladyes sake, ye thogh she wold commaûd me to bere this table to Hierusalê. _Me._ What nede you to be her caryoure, seynge that she hathe so many angelles bothe at her hedde and at her fette. _Ogy._ Than he pullid owt of hys purse a pece of wodde, that was cutt owte of the blokke that our ladye lenyd apon. I perceyuyd by and by thorow the smell of it, that it was a holy thynge. Than whan I sawe so || greate a relyque, putt of my cappe, and fel down flatte, & very deuoutly kyssyd it .iij. or .iiii tymes, poppyd it in my pursse. _Me._ I pray you may a man see it? _Ogy._ I gyue you good leue. But if you be nat fastynge, or if you accompanyed with yowre wyffe the nyght before, I conceyle you nat to loke apon it. _Me._ O blessed arte thou that euer thou gotte this relyque. _Ogy._ I may tell you in cowncell, I wold nat gyue thys litle pece for all ye gold that Tagus hathe, I wyll sett it in gold, but so that it shall apere thorow a crystall stone. And than the Supprioure whã he sawe that I dyd take the relyque so honorably, he thoght it shuld nat be lost, in case he shuld shew me greater mysteries, he dyd aske me whether I hadde euer sene our ladyes secretes, but at that word I was astonyed, yet I durst nat be so so bold as to demande what thos || secretes were. For in so holy thynges to speake a mysse is no small danger. I sayd that I dyd neuer se thaym but I sayd that I wold be very glade to see thaym. But now I was broght in, and as I had be inspired with the holy ghost, than thay lyghted a couple of taperes, & set forthe a litle ymage, nat couryously wroght, nor yet very gorgeous, but of a meruelous virtue. _Me._ That litle body hathe smale powre to worke myrakles. I saw saynt Christopher at Parise, nat a carte lode, but as moche as a greate hylle, yet he neuer dyd myrakles as farre as euer I herd telle. _Ogy._ At our ladyes fette there is a precyous stone, whos name as it is nother in Greke nor Laten. The Frenchemã gaue it the name of a tode, bycause it is so like, that no man (althoghe he be conynge) can set it forthe more lyuely. But so moche greater is || the myrakle, that the stone is litle, the fourme of the tode dothe nat apere, but it shynythe as it were enclosyd within that precyous stone. _Me._ Perauenture they ymagyne ye symylytude of a tode to be there, euyn as we suppose whan we cutte ye fearne stalke there to be an egle, and euyn as chyldren (whiche they see nat indede) in ye clowdes, thynke they see dragones spyttynge fyre, & hylles flammynge with fyre, & armyd mê encownterynge. _Ogy._ No, I wold you shuld know it, there is no lyuynge tode that more euydêtly dothe expresse hymselffe than it dyd there playnly apere. _Me._ Hetherto I haue sufferyd thy lyes, but now get the another that wyll beleue the, thy tale of a tode. _Ogy._ No maruayle Menedemus thogh you be so disposyd, for all the world cannot make me to beleue yt, not & all doctoures of dyuynyte wold swere || it were trewe. But that I sawe it with myne eyes, ye with thes same eyes, dyd I proue it. But in ye meanseson me thynke you regard naturall phylosophye but litle. _Me._ why so, because I wyll nat beleue ye asses flye? _Ogy._ An do you nat se, how nature the worker of all thynges, dothe so excell in expressynge ye fourme bewty, & coloure of thaym maruylously in other thynges, but pryncypaly in precyous stones? moreouer she hathe gyuen to ye same stones wonderouse vertu and strêkthe that is almost incredyble, but that experience dothe otherwyse testyfye. Tell me, do you beleue that a Adamand stone wold drawe vnto him stele withowt any towchynge therof, and also to be separate frome him ayen of hys owne accorde, excepte that yow had sene it with yowre eyes. _Me._ No verely, nat and if .x. Arystoteles wold perswade me || to the contrarye. _Ogy._ Therfore bycause you shuld nat say thys were a lye, in case you here any thynge, whiche you haue not sene prouyd. In a stone callyd Ceraunia we see ye fashon of lightnynge, in the stone Pyropo wyldfyre, Chelazia dothe expresse bothe the coldnes and the fourme of hayle, and thoghe thou cast in to the hote fyre, an Emrode, wyll expresse the clere water of the seye. Carcinas dothe counterfayte ye shape of a crabfishe. Echites of the serpente vyper. But to what purpose shuld I entreat, or inuestygate the nature of suche thynges whiche be innumerable, whã there is no parte of nature nor in the elementes, nother in any lyuynge creature, other in planetes, or herbes ye nature euyn as it were all of pleasure hathe not expressyd in precyous stones? Doo yow maruayle thã that in thys stone at owre ladies fote, || D.|| is the fourme and fashon of a tode. _Me._ I maruayle that nature shuld haue so moche lesure, so to counterfayt the nature of althynges. _Ogy._ It was but to exercyse, or occupye the curyosytye of mannes wytte, and so at the lest wyse to kepe vs frome ydlenes, and yet as thoghe we had nothynge to passe ye tyme with all, we be in a maner made apon foles, apon dyesse, and crafty iogeleres. _Me._ You saye very truthe. _Ogy._ There be many men of no smale grauytye, that wyll say thys kynd of stones, if that you put it in vynagre, it wyll swyme, thoge you wold thruste it downe with violence. _Me._ Wherfore do thay sette a tode byfore our lady? _Ogy._ Bycause she hathe ouercome, trode vnderfote, abolyshyd all maner of vnclennes, poysõ, pryde, couytousnes, and all wordly affectyones that raygne in man. _Me._ Woo be to vs, that hathe so many todes in owre hartes. || _Ogygy._ We shal be purgyd frome thaym all, if we dylygêtly worshipe owre lady. _Me._ How wold she be worshipyd. _Ogy._ The most acceptable honor, that thou canste doo to her is to folowe her lyuynge. _Me._ You haue told all at ones. But this is hard to brynge to pass. _Ogy._ You saye truthe, but it is an excellente thynge. _Me._ But go to, and tell on as you begane. _Ogy._ After thys to come to owre purpose, the Supprioure shewyed to me ymages of gold and syluer, and sayd, thes be pure gold, and thes be syluer and gyltyd, he told the pryce of euery one of thaym, and the patrone. Whan I wonderyd, reioycynge of so maruelous ryches, as was abowt our lady, than saythe the Sextê bycause I percayue, that you be so vertuously affecte, I suppose it greate wronge, to hyde any thynge frome you, but now you shall see the pryuytyes || D ij.|| of our lady, and than he pullyd owt of the aultre a whole world of maruayles, if I shuld tell you of all, a whole daye wold nat suffyse, & so thys pylgremage chansyd to me most happy. I was fyllyd euyn full withe goodly syghts, and I brynge also with me this wonderous relyque, whiche was a tokê gyuen to me frõe our lady. _Me._ Haue you nat it prouyd, what valewre your woden relyque is on? _Ogy._ Yis, that I haue, in a certayne Inne within thys thre dayes, ther I fownde a certayne man that was bestraght of hys wytte, whiche shuld haue be bownde, but thys woden relyque was put vnder hys nekke pryuyly, wherapon he gad a sadde and sownd sleape, but in the mornynge he was hole and sownde as euer he was before. _Me._ It was nat the phrenysy, but the dronkê dropsye, sleape ys wontyd to be a good medicyne for ye dysease. || _Ogy._ Whã you be dysposyd to skoffe Menedemus, yt ys best that you gette a nother maner of gestynge stokke than thys, for I tell you it is nother good nor holsome, to bowrde so with sayntes. For thys same mã dyd say, that a woman dyd apere to hym, in hys sleape, after a maruelouse fashion, which shold gyue hym a cuppe to drynke apon. _Mene._ I suppose it was *Elleborû. [*Elleborum wyll restore a man to hys senses that hathe lost thê.] _Ogy._ That is vncertayne, but I kno well ye mã was well broght into hys mynde ayen. _Me._ Dyd you other come or goo by Sante Thomas of Cantorbury that good archebishope. _Ogy._ What els/there ys no pylgremage more holy. _Me._ I wold fayne here of yt, and I shold nat trouble you. _Ogy._ I pray you here, & take good hedd. Kente ys callyd that parte of England, that buttythe apon Fraûce and Flanders, the cheffe cytye there of ys Cantorburye, in yt there be ij. || D iij.|| Abbayes, bothe of thaym be of Saynte Benedycts ordre, but that which ys callyd Saynte Augustyns dothe apere to be the oldre, that whiche ys callyd now Saynte Thomas dothe apere to haue be the Archebyshope of Cantorburys see, where as he was wontyd to lyue with a sorte of monkes electe for hymselffe, as Byshopes now adayes be wontyd to haue thayr howses nye vnto the churche, but aparte frome other canons howses. In tymes paste bothe Byshopes & Chanones were wontyde to be monkes, as may be playnly prouyd by many argumentes. The churche which ys dedycate to Saynte Thomas, dothe streche vpe apon heght so gorgeously, that it wyll moue pylgrymes to deuocion a ferre of, and also withe hys bryghtnes and shynynge he dothe lyght hys neybures, & the old place whiche was wontyd to be most holy, || now in respecte of it, is but a darke hole and a lytle cotage. There be a couple of great hye toures, which doo seme to salute strangeres aferre of, and thay dow fyll all the contray abowt bothe farre and nere, with the sownde of great belles, in the fronte of the temple, whiche is apõ the southe syde, there stand grauen in a stone thre armyd men, whiche with thayr cruell handes dyd sleye the most holy saynte Thomas, and there is wryten thayr surnames Tracy, Breton, and Beryston. _Me._ I pray you wharfore doo thay suffer thos wykyd knyghtes be so had in honoure. _Ogy._ Euyn suche honor is gyuen to thaym as was gyuê to Iudas, Pylate, and Caiphas, & to the compauy of the wykyd sowdyeres, as you may se payntyd in the tables that be sett before aultres. Thayr surnames be putto lest any man hereafter shuld vsurpe any || D iiij.|| cause of thayr prayse. Thay be payntyd byfore mennes eyes, bycause that no cowrtyer after thys shuld laye violêt handes other apõ Byshopes, or the churche goodes. For thes thre of this garde strayght apon that wykyd acte, wente starke madde, nor thay had neuer had thayr mynde ayen, but that thay prayd to blessyd saynt Thomas. _Me._ O blessyd pacyence of suche martyres. _Ogy._ At our entre in, lord what a pryncely place dyd apere vnto vs, where as euery mã that wyll may goo in. _Me._ Is there no maruayle to be sene. _Ogy._ Nothynge but the greate wydnes of the place, and a sorte of bokes, that be bownde to pyleres wherein is the gospell of Nicodemus, and I cannat tell whos sepulkre. _Me._ What than? _Ogy._ Thay do so dylygêtle watche lest any mã shulde entre in to the quere of yron, that thay wyll skarsly suffre a man || to loke apon it, whiche is betwyxte the greate churche & the hye quere (as thay calle it) a man that wyll go thyther must clyme vp many stayres byfore, vndre the whiche there is a certayne wykyt with a barre that openythe the dore apon the northe syde. There standythe forthe a certayne aultre whiche is dedycate to our lady, it is but a lytle one, and I suppose set there for no other purpose, but to be a olde monumêt or sygne, that in thos dayes there was no greate superfluyte. There thay saye that thys blessyd martyr sayd his last good nyght to our lady, whã he shuld departe hensse. In ye aultre is the poynte of the sword that styryd abowt the braynes of thys blessyd martyr. And there lye his braynes shed apon the yerthe, whereby you may well knowe yt he was nere deade. But the holly ruste of thys grat I deuoutly kyssed for loue of ye || D v.|| blessyd martyr. From thens we wêt vndre the crowdes, whiche is nat withowt hys chaplaynes, & there we sawe the brayne panne of that holy martyr whiche was thraste quyte thorow, all the other was coueryd with syluer, the ouerparte of the brayne panne was bare to be kyssyd, and there with all is seth forthe a certayn leden table hauynge grauyd in hym a tytle of saynte Thomas of Acrese. There hange also the sherte of heyre, & hys gyrdle with hys heren breches where with that noble champyõ chastnyd hys body, thay be horryble to loke apon, and greatly reproue oure delycate gorgeousnes. _Me._ Ye perauêture so thay do the mõkes slotefulnes. _Ogy._ As for that mater I cãnat affyrme nor yet denye, nor yet it is no poynte of my charge. _Me._ Ye saye truthe. _Ogy._ Frome thens we returnyd in to the quere, & apon || ye northe syde be ye relyques shewyd, a wonderouse thynge to se, what a sort of bones be broght forthe, skulles, iawes, thethe, handes, fyngres, hole armes, whã we had worshipyd thaym all, we kyssyd thaym, that I thoght we shuld neuer haue mayd an ende, but that my pylgremage felow whiche was an vnmete companyon for suche a busynes, prayd thaym to make an end of sethynge forthe thayre relyques. _Me._ What felowe was that? _Ogy._ He was an Englyshma callyd Gratiane colte a man bothe vertuouse and well learnyd, but he had lesse affectyon toward pylgremages than I wold that he shuld haue. _Me._ One of Wyclyffes scoleres I warrante you? _Ogy._ I thynke nat, althoghe he had redde hys bokes, how he came by thaym I cannat tell. _Me._ He dysplesyd mayster Sextê greuosly. _Ogy._ Thã was there broght forthe || an arme whiche had yet the redde fleshe apon it, he abhorryd to kysse it, a man myght se by hys countenance that he was nothynge well pleasyd, & than by and by mayster Sexten put vp hys relyques. But than we lokyd apõ the table whiche was apõ the aultre, and all hys gorgeousnes, aftrewarde thos thyngs that were hydde vnder the aultre. ther was nothynge but riches excedynge, a man wold accompte both Midas and Cresus beggers in respecte of thos riches that ther was sett abrode. _Me._ Was ther no more kyssynge thê? _Ogy._ No, but an other affection and desyre came apõ me. _Me._ What was that? _Ogy._ I syghed that I had no suche relyques at home. _Me._ Oh a wycked desyre & an euyl thought _Ogy._ I graunt, and therefore I axyd, forgyfnes of saynt Thomas before I remouyd one fote, to departe out of the church. After || thes thus we were brought in to ye reuestry, o good lorde what a goodly syght was ther of vestmêtes of veluet & clothe of golde, what a some of candlestykes of gold? We sawe ther saynt Thomas crosse staffe, ther was seê also a rede ouerlayed with syluer, it was but of a smalle wyght, vnwrought, nor no longer then wold retch vnto a mans mydgle. _Me._ Was ther no crosse? _Ogy._ I sawe none at all, ther was shewed vs a robe of sylke treuly, but sowed with cowrse threde, garnysshyd with nother gold nor stone. Ther was also a napkyn full of swette blody, wher with saynt Thomas wypyd bothe hys nose and hys face, these thynges as monumêtes of auncyent sobernes we kyssed gladely. _Me._ Be not these thynges showed to euery body? _Ogy._ No for sothe good syr. _Me._ How happened it that you were in so good credens, that no || secret thynges were hyd frome you? _Ogy._ I was well acquyntede with the reuerende father Gwylyame warham the archbyshope. He wrote .ij. or .iij. wordes in my fauour. _Me._ I here of many that he is a mã of syngler humanite. _Ogy._ But rather thou woldest call hym humanite it selfe if thou dydest well know hym. For ther is in hym soche lernynge, so vertuouse lyffe, soche purenes of maneres, that a mã cowld wyshe no gyfte of a parfayte Byshope in him, that he hathe nat. Frome thens afterward we were ladde to greater thynges. For behynde the hyghe aultre, we ascêdyd as it were in to a nother new churche, ther was shewed vs in a chapell the face of the blessed man ouergylted and with many precyous stones goodly garnysshed. A soden chaunse here had almost marred the matter and put vs out of conceyte. _Me._ I tary || to knowe what euyl chaunse yow wyll speke of. _Ogy._ Here my companyõ Gratiã gote hym lytle fauoure, for he, after we had mad an ende of praynge, inquyred of hym that sate by the hede, herke, he seyd, good father, is it true that I here, that saynt Thomas whyl he it lyued was mercyfull toward ye poer people? That is very true saythe he, and he begã to tell greatly of his liberalyte and compassyon that he shewede to the poer and nedy. Then sayd Gratiã: I thynke that affection and good mynd in him not to be chaungyde, but that it is now moche better. Unto this graunted ye keper of the hede, agayn sayd he, then in as moche as thys holy man was so gratyouse vnto ye poer, whan he was yet poer, & he hym selfe had nede of monay for ye necessarys of hys body, thynke ye nat that he wold be contêt, now that he is so ryche, and also nedethe || nothynge, that if a poer womã hauynge at home chylderne lakynge mete and drynke, or els doughters beynge in danger to lose ther virginite, for defaute of ther substaunce to mary them with, or hauynge her husbande sore syke, and destitute of all helpe, in case she askyd lycens, & pryuyly stole away a small porcyon of so greate riches, to sukkre her howshold, as and if the shold haue it of one that wold other leane, or gyue it to herre? And whan he wold nat answere that kepyd the golden hedde, Gracyane, as he is som what hasty, I, saythe he, doo suppose playnly, that this holy man wold be gladde, yf that she, now beynge deade, myght sustayne the necestiye of pore people. But there mayster parson begone to frowne, & byte hys lyppe, with hys holowe eyes lyke to *Gorgone [*A mõster that hathe snakes for heares apon her hedde.] ye monstre to luke apõ vs. I doo not dowbte he wold haue || cast vs out of the temple, and spytte apõ vs, but that he dyd knowe that we were comendyd of the archebsyhope. But I dyd somwhat myttygate the manes ire, with my fayre wordes, saynge that Gratiane dyd nat speake as he thoghte, but that he gestyd as he was wontyd to doo, and stoppyd hys mouthe with a fewe pens. _Mene._ Treuly I do greatly alow your goodly fashion, but oftentymes ernestly I cõsyder, by what meaynes they may be acõpted without faute & blame, that bestow so moche substance in buyldyng churchys, in garnysshynge, and enrychynge them without all mesure. I thynke as touchyng the holy vestmentes, & the syluer plate of the temple ther ought to be gyuyn, to the solempne seruys, hys dygnyte and comlynes, I wyll also that the buyldyng of the churche shall haue hys maiesty decent and || E.|| conuenyent. But to what purpose seruyth so many holy water pottes, so many cãdlestyckes, so many ymages of gold. What nede there so many payre of organes (as thay call them) so costely & chargeable? For one payre can not serue vs: what profyteth ye musicall criynge out in the temples that is so derely bought and payed for, whan in the meaneseson our brothers and systers the lyuely temples of Christe liynge by the walles/dye for hungre & colde. _Ogy._ Ther is no vertuouse or wyse man, that wold nat desyre a meane to be hadde in thes thynges. But in as moche as thys euyl is growen and spronge vp of superstityon beyond mesure, yet may it better be sufferde, specially when we consyder on the other syde the euyll conscience and behauyor of them that robb the churches of what so euer iuellys ther may be so founde, thes || ryches were gyuen in a maner great men, & of pryncys, the whiche they wold haue bestowede vpon a worse vse, that is to say other at the dyce or in the warres. And if a man take any thynge from thense. Fyrst of all it is taken sacrylege, then they hold ther handes that were accustomed to gyfe, besyde that morouer they be allured & mouyde to robbynge & vaynynge. Therfore thes mene be rather the kepers of thys treasures thê lordes. And to speake a worde for all, me thynket it is a better syght to beholde a temple rychely adourned, as ther be some with bare wolles, fylthy and euyl fauorde, more mete for stables to put horses then churches for Chrysten people. _Me._ Yet we rede that Byshopes in tymes paste were praysede and cõmended bycause they solde the holy vesseles of theyr churches, and with that money helped and releued the || E ij.|| nedy and poure people. _Ogy._ Thay be praysede also now in our tyme, but thay be praysed onely, to folow ther doynge (I suppose) thay may not, nor be any thynge dysposede. _Me._ I interrupte and lett yowr cõmunycatyon. I loke now for the cõclusyon of ye tale. _Ogy._ Gyffe audyence, I wyll make an ende shortly. In the meane seson comyth forthe he that is the cheffe of them all. _Me._ Who is he? the abbot of the place? _Ogy._ He werythe a mytre, he may spend so moche as an abbot, he wãted nothynge but ye name, and he is called prior for this cause tharchebyshope is takê in the abbotes sted. For in old tyme who so euer was archbyshope of ye dyocese, the same was also a monke. _Me._ In good faythe I wold be content to be namyde a Camelle, if I myght spende yerely the rentes and reuennes of an abbot. _Ogy._ Me semede he was a || man bothe vertuous and wyse, and not vnlearnede Duns diuinite. He opened the shryne to vs in whiche ye holle body of the holy mã, thay say, dothe rest and remayne. _Me._ Dydste thou see hys bones. _Ogy._ That is not conuenient, nor we cowld not come to it, except we sett vp laders, but a shryne of wod couerede a shryne of gold, when that is drawne vp with cordes, thã apperith treasure and riches inestimable. _Me._ What do I here? the vilest part and worst was golde, all thynges dyd shyne, florishe, and as it were with lyghtnynge appered with precyouse stones and those many and of great multitude: some were greater than a gowse egge. Dyuerse of ye monks stode ther aboute with greate reuerence, the couer takyn a way, all we kneled downe and worshyped. The pryor with a whyte rodde showed vs euery stone, addynge therto the || E iij.|| frenche name, the value, & the autor of the gyfte, for the cheffe stonys were sent thyther by great prynces. _Me._ He ought to be a man of an excedyng witt & memory. _Ogy._ You gesse well, how beit exercyse & vse helpeth moche, for euyn the same he dothe oftentymes. He brought vs agayne in to the crowdes. Our lady hathe ther an habitacyon, but somwhat darke, closed rownde aboute with double yren grats. _Me._ What feared she? _Ogy._ Nothinge I trow, except theues. For I saw neuer any thing more laden with riches synse I was borne of my mother. _Me._ You show vnto me blinde ryches. _Ogy._ Whê they brought vs candells we saw a sight passynge ye ryches of any kynge. _Me._ Dothe it excede our lady of walsyngã? _Ogy._ To loke vpõ this, is richer, the secret tresure she knoweth her selfe, but this is not shewede, but to great || men, or to specyall frendes. At the last we were brought agayne in to the reuettry, there was taken out a cofer couered with blacke lether, it was sett downe apon the table, it was sett open, by and by euery body kneled downe and worshipyd. _Me._ What was in it? _Ogy._ Certayne torne ragges of lynnen clothe, many hauynge yet remaynynge in them the token of the fylthe of the holy mannes nose. With these (as they say) saynt Thomas dyd wype a way the swett of hys face or hys neke, ye fylthe of hys nose, or other lyke fylthynes with whiche mannes body dothe abownde. Then my companyon Gratian, yet ones agayn, got hym but smalle fauour. Unto hym an Englyshe man and of famylyare acquayntenance and besyde that, a man of no smalle authorite, the Prior gaff gentylly one of the lynnê ragges, thynkynge to haue gyuen || E iiij.|| a gyfte very acceptable & pleasaunt, But Gratian there with lyttle plea sede and content, not with out an euydent synge of dyspleasure, toke one of them betwene hys fyngers, and dysdaynyngly layd it down agayne, made a mocke and a mow at it, after the maner of puppettes, for thys was hys maner, if any thing lykede hym not, that he thought worthy to be despysede. Wher at I was bothe ashamed and wonderously afrayed. Not withstondynge the Prior as he is a man not at all dull wytted, dyd dyssemble the matter, & after he had caused vs drinke a cuppe of wyne, gentylly he let vs departe. When we came agayne to London. _Me._ What shuld ye do at Londo: seynge ye were not farre from the see cost, to seale in to yowr cuntre? _Ogy._ It is true. But that see cost I refused and gladely dyd fle from it, as from a place that is || noted and more euyl spoken of it, for robbyng, stelynge, and vntrue dealynge, then is of dangerouse ioperdy in the see, be that hyll Malea wher many shyppes be drowned & vtterly destroyed for euer. I wyll tell the what I dyd se the last passage, at my commynge ouer. We were many caryed in a bote frome Calys shore to go to the shyppe. Amongest vs all was a pour yõge mã of Fraûce, and barely appayrelled. Of hym he demauuded halfe a grote. For so moche thay dow take and exacte of euery one for so smalle a way rowynge. He allegede pouerty, then for ther pastyme thay searched hym, plucked of his shoes, and betwene the shoo and the soule, thay fownde .x. or .xij. grotes, thay toke thê from hym laughyng at the mater: mockinge and scornyng the poer & myserable Frenchman. _Me._ What dyd ye fellow than? _Ogy._ What thyng dyd || E v.|| he? He wept. _Me._ Whether dyd they thys by any authoryte? _Ogy._ Suerly by the same authoryte that thay steyle and pycke straungers males and bowgettes, by the whiche they take a way mennes pursys, if they se tyme and place conuenyent. _Me._ I meruayll that they dare be so bold to doo soch a dede, so many lokynge vpon them. _Ogy._ They be so accustomed, that they thynk it well done. Many that were in the shyp lokede owt and sawe it also, in the bote were dyuerse Englyshe marchauntes, whiche grudged agaynst it, but all in vayne. The botemê as it had ben a tryflyng mater reiosed and were glade that they had so taken and handelyd the myserable Frenchman. _Me._ I wold play and sporte with these see theues, & hange them vpon the gallowes. _Ogy._ Yet of such both the shores swarme full. Here tell me, I pray the. What || wyll great mê do, whê theues take vpõ them to enterpryse soch masterys. Therfore, herafter I had leuer go fourty myllys aboute, thê to go that way, thoffe it be moche shorter. Morouer euyn as ye goynge downe to hell, is easy and leyght, but ye cõmynge frome thens of greate dyffyculty, so to take shyppynge of this syde the see, is not very easy, and the landynge very hard & dangeroufe. Ther was at London dyuerse maryners of Antwerpe, with them I purposed to take the see. _Me._ Hathe that cûtre so holy maryners? _Ogy._ As an ape is euer an ape, I graûte, so is a maryner euer a maryner: yet if thou compare them vnto these, ye lyfe by robbynge, and pyllynge and pollynge, they be angelles. _Me._ I will remembre thy saynge, if at any tyme I be dysposed to go and se Englãde. But come agayne in to ye waye, frome whens I broght the || E vi.|| owt. _Ogy._ Then as we whent toward London not farre from Canterbury, we came in to a great hollow and strayt way, morouer bowyng so downe, with hyllys of eyther syde, that a man can not escape, nor it cannot be auoyed, but he must nedes ryde that way. Upõ the lefte hand of the way, ther is an almes howse for olde people, frome them runnyth on owt, as sone as they here a horseman commynge, he casteth holy water vpon hym, and anone he offereth hym the ouerlether of a shoo bownde abowte with an yerne whope, wherin is a glasse lyke a precyouse stone, they that kysse it gyf a pece of monay. _Me._ In soche a way I had leuer haue an almes howse of olde folkes, then a company of stronge theues. _Ogy._ Gratian rode vpon my lefte hande nerer the almes howse, he caste holy water vpon hym, he toke it in worthe so so, || when the shoo was proferred hym, he asked what he ment by it, saythe he, it is saynt Thomas shoo. There at he turned and was very angry, & turned toward me: what (saythe he) meane these bestes, that wold haue vs kysse ye shoes of euery good man? Why doo they not lyke wyse gyue vs to kysse the spottel, & other fylthe & dyrt of the body? I was sory for the old mã, & gaue hym a pece of money to cõforthe hym with all. _Me._ In myn opynyõ Gratian was not all together angry with owt a good cause. If shoes and slyppers were kept for a tokê of sobre lyuynge, I wold not be moch dyscontent ther with, but me thynks it is a shame full fashyon for shoes, slyppers, and breches to be offered to kysse to any man. If some wold do it by there owne fre wyll, of a certene affectyõ of holynes, I thynke they were whorthy of pardon. _Ogy._ It were || better not to thes thynges, if I may say as I thynke, yet owt of thes thynges that cannat forthwith be amended, it is my maner if ther be any goodnes thereyn, to take it out, and apply it to the best. In ye meanseson that contemplacyõ and light delited my mynde, that a good mã is lykened to a shepe, an euyll man to a benemouse best. The serpent after she is dede, cã stynge no more, not withstondyng with her euyll sauour and poyson she infecteth and corruptyth other. The shepe as lõge as she is a lyue norryseth with her mylke, clothet with her wolle, makyth riche with her lambes, when she is deade she gyueth vs good and profytable lether, and all her body is good meat. Euen so, cruell men, gyuen all to the world, so longe as they lyue be vnprofitable to all mê, when they be deade, what with ryngyng of bellys, and pompyouse || funeralles they greue them that be on lyue, and often tymes vexe ther successours with new exactyones. Good men of the other syde at all assais be profytable to all men, and hurtfull to noo man. As thys holy man, whyle he was yet alyue, by hys good example, hys doctryne, his goodly exhortatyons prouokyd vs to vertuouse lyuynge, he dyd cõfort the cõforthlesse, he helped ye poure, ye and now that he is deade, he is in a maner more profytable. He hathe buylded thys costly & gorgeouse churche, he hath caused greate authoryte thorough out all Englande vnto the ordre and presthode. At ye last, thys pece of the show dothe susteyne a company of poure people. _Me._ Thys is of my faythe a godely cõtemplacyõ, but I maruayll greatly, seyng you ar thus mynded, that ye neuer dyd vysyte saynt Patryckes purgatory in Yerlande, of the || whiche the comyn people boost many wonderouse thynges, whiche seme to me not lyke to be true. _Ogy._ Of a suerty ther is not so meruelouse talkynge of it here, but the thynge it selffe doth fare excede. _Me._ Hast thou bene ther than, & gonne thorow saynt Patryckes purgatory? _Ogy._ I haue saylede ouer a ryuer ot hell, I went downe vnto the gates of hell, I saw what was dõe ther. _Me._ Thou dost me a greate pleasure, if thou wyll wotsaue to tell me. _Ogy._ Lett this be the prohemy or begynnynge of owr communycatyon, longe enough as I suppose. I wyll gett me home, & cause my souper to be made redy, for I am yet vndynede. _Me._ Why haue you not yet dyned? is it bycause of holynes? _Ogy._ Noo of a truthe, but it is bycause of enuy and euyll will. _Me._ Owe ye euyll wyll to yowr bely? _Ogy._ No, but to the couetyse || tauerners euer catchynge and snatchynge the whiche when they wyll not sett afore a man that is mete & conuenyent, yet they are not afearde to take of straûgers that, whiche is bothe vnright and agaynst good consciens. Of thys fashyõ I am acustomed to be auengede vpon thê. If I thynke to fare well at souper other with myne acquayntauns, or with some host som what an honest man, at dyner tyme I am sycke in my stomacke, but if I chaunce to fare after myne appetyte at dyner, before souper also I begynne to be well at ease in my stomacke. _Me._ Wre ye not ashamede to be taken for a couetouse fellow & a nygerde? _Ogy._ Menedeme they that make cost of shame in soche thynges, beleue me, bestow theyr money euyll. I haue lerned to kepe my shame for other purposys. _Me._ Now I longe for the rest of yowr comunycacyon, || wherfore loke to haue me yowr geste at souper, where ye shall tell it more conuenyently. _Ogy._ For sothe I thanke you, that ye offere yowr selfe to be my gest vndesyred, when many hertely prayed refuse it, but I wyll gyue yow double thankes, if ye wyll soupe to day at home. For I must passe that tyme in doynge my dewty to my howsehold. But I haue counsell to eyther of vs moche more profytable. To morrow vnto me and my wyfe, prepare our dyner at yowr howse, then and if it be to souper tyme, we will not leyue of talkynge, vntyll you say that ye are wery, and if ye wyll at souper also we wyll not forsake you. Why, claw you your hede? prepare for vs in good fayth we wyll come. _Me._ I had leuer haue no tales at all. Well go to, you shall haue a dyner, but vnsauery, except you spyce it with good & mery tales. _Ogy._ But here || you, are ye not mouyd and styrrede in your mynde, to take vpon yow these pylgremages? _Me._ Perauenture it wyll sett me a fyre, after ye haue told me the resydew, as I am now mynded, I haue enough to do with my statyons of Rome. _Ogy._ Of Rome, that dyd neuer see Rome?. _Me._ I wyll tell you, thus I go my statyons at home, I go in to the parler, and I se vnto the chast lyuynge of my doughters, agayne frome thense I go in to my shope, I beholde what my seruauntes, bothe men and women be doynge. Frome thense into the kytchyn, lokynge abowt, if ther nede any of my cownsell, frome thense hyther and thyther obseruynge howe my chylderne be occupyed, what my wyffe dothe, beynge carefull that euery thynge be in ordre, these be statyons of Rome. _Ogy._ But these thynges saynt Iames wold dow || for yow. _Mene._ That I shuld se vn- to these thynges holy scriptu- re commaundethe, that I shuld commyt the charge to sayntes I dyd rede yt neuer com- maun- ded. God saue the kynge FINIS. * * * * * [Corrected Errors: _v_ = verso (back of page) [+] iiij. the pryuate iudgmegt of certayne _was_ iudgmegt [+] v. cõsolacyõ of his gracys faythfull and true comens _was_ ofh is [+] v. _v_ prudently _was_ prudenly, but catchword has _prudently_ [+] vi. but also (to theyr greate laude and prayse) _was_ prayse( [+] vi. _v_ Desiderius Erasmus _was_ Dsiderius Erasmus B Whan he lokythe to the West _was_ te West D iij. _v_ to the company of the wykyd sowdyeres _was_ compauy D v. Frome thens we returnyd in to the quere _was_ returuyd E ij. _v_ Me semede he was a man bothe vertuous and wyse word _a_ printed only as catchword E viij. I haue saylede ouer a ryuer to hell _was_ ot Additional Problems: [+] iiij. to use theme as goddes _u_ printed for _v_ whervpon thes brotherhoddes and systerhoodes _v_ printed for _u_ A Good morow Ogygyus. / Good morow to you Menedemus. change of speaker not marked C v. _Ogy._ No veryly. What lettythe thaym? _Ogy._ That is a name of dygnyte and nat of relygyõ. change of speaker not marked E ij. _v_ What do I here? the vilest part and worst was golde, change of speaker unclear 
39038	----	In this version [~e] and so forth indicate scribal abbreviations over letters. ¶ One dialogue, or Colloquye of Erasmus (entituled Diuersoria) Translated oute of Latten into Englyshe: And Imprinted, to the ende that the Judgem[~e]t of the Learned maye be hadde before the Translator pro- cede in the reste. E. H. [Illustration] ¶ Imprinted at London in Fleetstreete, at the signe of the Faucon by William Griffyth, and are to be solde at his shop in S. Dunstons Churchyard in the west. 1566 * * * * * ¶ The Translator to the indifferent reader. If I were throughlye perswaded (g[~e]tle reader) y^t mine attempt of the learned were in all points allowed and the order in my translation correspondent thereunto, I woulde at this present proceede in mine enterprise, with entent by gods helpe to finishe the translation of the whole boke: But because I am vnlearned & therfore must not be mine owne iudge therein, I geue the here a tast of my store for proofe of mine abilitie: desiring the at the least wise not to be offended at the same so boldly attemted and simplye perfourmed. For sithe mine entent is good, & my good wil not small I dare at this present yelde it to thy curtesye. Fare wel. ¶ Thine in will (though not in power) E.H. * * * * * _Diuersoria._ ¶ The speakers. _Bertulphe._ _William._ Why haue men taken suche pleasure and felicity (I pray you) in tariynge ii. or iii. dayes at Lions together, when they trauaile through the contrey? if I fall to trauailinge once, be fore suche time as I be come vnto my iourneyes ende, me thinks I am neuer at quiet in my mind. William. ¶ Say ye so indeede? And I put you out of doubt, I wonder howe men can bee withdrawen thence againe after they be once come thether. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea doe? And how so I pray you? William. ¶ Mary sir because that is the verye place from whence Ulisses companions coulde in no wise be gotten by perswasion. There are the sweet Mermaides (that are spoken of) I warrant ye. Assuredlie, no man is better vsed at home at his own house then a guest is entertained there in a common Inne. Bertulphe. ¶ Why? What is their order and vsage there? William. ¶ Some woman or other did alwayes attende vpon the table to cheere the company with pleasaunt talke and prety conceites. And I tell you the women are meruailous bewtiful and wel fauoured there. Firste of all the good wife of the house came & welcomed vs, praying vs all there to bee merye, and to take well in woorthe suche poore cheere as shee hadde prouided: when shee was gone, in commeth her Daughter (beeinge a verye proper woman) and tooke her roome: also whose behauioure and tongue were so pleasaunt and delectable, that she was able to make euen the grimme Sire Cato to bee merye and laugh, and besyde that they doe not talke wyth theyr guestes as with men whome they neuer sawe before, but euen so famylyarlye and freendlye, as if they were menne that were of their olde acquaintaunce. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea, thys is the ciuilytye of Fraunce in deede. William. ¶ And because the Mother and the Daughter coulde not bee alwayes in the waye (for that they muste goe aboute theyr houssholde businesse, and welcome their other guestes in other places) a pretye little minion Girle stode forthe there by and by (hauinge learned her liripuppe and lesson alreadye in all pointes I warraunte you) to make all the pastime that mighte be possible, and to aunswere (at omnia quare) all such as shoulde be busye to talke and dally with her, So shee didde prolonge or vpholde the Enterlude, till the goodwifes Daughter came vnto vs againe. For as for the mother she was somewhat striken in yeres. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea but tell vs what good cheere yee had there (I praye you) for a manne cannot fill his bellye with pleasaunte talke you knowe well inoughe. William. ¶ I promise you faithfullye wee had notable good chere there, in so much that I wonder how they can entertaine their guestes so good cheape as they doe. And then when our table was tak[~e] vp, they fedde oure mindes wyth their merye deuises, leaste wee shoulde thinke the time werysome. Me thought I was euen at home at mine owne house, and not a trauayler abroade in a straunge co[~u]try. Bertulphe. ¶ And what was the facion in your bed chambers there? William. ¶ Why? some wenches went in euerye corner giggelinge there, playing the wantons, and dalying with vs, of their owne motion they would aske whether we had any foule gere to washe or no. That they washed and brought vs cleane againe, what should I make a longe proces or circumstance, we sawe nothinge els there but wenches and wemen sauinge in the stable. And yet many times they would fetche their vagaries in thether also. When the guestes be going awaye, they embrace them, and take their leaue sweetlye with suche kindnes and curtesye, as if they were all brethern, or (at least) nighe a kinne the one to the other. Bertulphe. ¶ This behauiour doth well beseme Frenchmen peraduenture, how be it the fashions of Duche lande[1] shall go for my monye when all is done, which are altogether manlike. William. ¶ Yt was neuer my chaunce to see the Contreye yet: and therfore I pray you take so muche paine as to tell in what sorte they entertaine a straunger with them. Bertulphe. ¶ I am not sure whether it be so in euerye place or no, but I will not sticke to reherse that whiche I haue sene with mine owne eyes. There no man biddeth him welcome that comes, lest they shuld seme to go about to procure a guest. And that of all sauces, they accompt a dishonest and beggarly thing, and vnmete for their demurenes & grauetie. After you haue stoode cryinge oute at the doore a good while, at the length some one or other pereth out his hed at the stoue[2] window like as a snaile should pepe out of his shell: for they liue ther in stoues, til the somer be almoste in the Tropick of Cancer. Then must you aske of him, whether you may haue a lodging there or no? yf he do not geue a contrary beck with his hed, you may perceiue, that you shall haue entertainment. To those whiche aske where aboutes the stable standes, he pointes vnto it with the wagging of his hand. There maye you vse youre horse after your own diet, for no seruaunt of the house shall once lay handes vnto it to help you. But if it bee an Inne some what occupied or haunted, th[~e] the seruaunt sheweth there which is the stable, & telleth you also a place where your horse shal stãd, full vnhansomely for that purpose god knoweth for they reserue the better romes for the after commers, specially for the noble men, yf you finde any fault with any thinge, by an by they snub you with this: Sir, if mine Inne please you not, goe seeke an other elsewhere in the name of god in cities, it is longe ere they wil bring you hay forthe for your horse, and when they do bring it, it is after a niuer facion[3] I warraunt you, and yet will they aske asmuch mony of you for it (in a maner) as if it were Otes. After your horse is once dressed you come with all your cariage into the stoue with Bootes, Male, or Packe, and with Dirte, Bag and Baggage and all. Euery man is vsed to this generally. William. ¶ In Fraunce they haue certaine chaumbers for the nonce, where guests may put of their clothes may wipe or make clean th[~e] selues, may warme them selues: yea may take their ease to, if they bee so disposed. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea, but here is no suche facions I tel you. In the stoue, you pul of youre Bootes, you pull on youre Shooes, you chaunge youre Shirt if you bee so minded, you hange vp youre clothes all weate, with raine harde by the Chimney, and to make youre selfe drye doe stande by the same your selfe, you haue also water sette readye for your handes, which moste commonly is so clenlye, that you muste after seeke other water, to washe of that water againe. William. ¶ I commende them as menne not corrupted with to much finenesse or daintinesse. Bertulphe. ¶ Thoughe it be youre chaunce to come thether about iiii. of the clocke at afternoone, yet shall you not go to supper for all that vntill it be nine of the clocke at night, and sometime not before tenne. William. ¶ How so? Bertulphe. ¶ They make nothinge ready til they see all their guestes come in, that they may serue them all vnder one without more adoe. William. ¶ These men seeke the neerest way to woorke, I see wel. Bertulphe. ¶ You say true in deede: They doe so, and therfore often times there come all into one Stooue, lxxx. or xC. Footemen, Horsemen, Marchauntmen, Mariners, Carters, Plowemen, Children, Wemen, hole and sicke. William. ¶ Marye this is a communitye of lyfe in deede. Bertulphe. ¶ One kembes his head there. An other doth rubbe of his sweat there. An other maketh cleane his startops[4] or bootes there. An other belcks out hys Garlicke there. What needes manye wordes? There is as muche mingle mangle of parsons there, as was in the old time at the Towre of Babell. And if they chaunce to see a straunger amonge them, whiche in his apparell semeth somewhat braue, galaunt and gentlemanlike, they all stand prying vpon him with their eyes, gasing and gapinge as if some straunge beaste were brought them out of Aphrick, in so much as after they are once set, they be eye him stil an end and neuer looke of, as men forgetting th[~e] selues that they be now at supper. William. ¶ At Rome, at Parise, and at Venice, no mã maketh any such wonderment at all. Bertulphe. ¶ Nowe it is a sore matter I tell you to call for ought there al this while: when it is farre night and they looke for no more guestes at that time, then commeth forthe an olde stager of the house, with a gray beard, a polled hed, a frowning co[~u]tenaunce, clad in il fauored apparaile. William. ¶ Yea mary suche fellowes as these you speak of, should fill the Cardinals cups at Rome. Bertulphe. ¶ He casting his eyes about, reckeneth vnto him selfe howe manye therebe in the stoue at all, the moe he seeth there, the greater he maketh his fire, though the sonne beside doth greatly annoy with his perching heat. Among them, this is accoumpted the principallest pointe of good entertainment, if they all sweat like Bulles, that they doe euen drop again. But if one not vsed to this choking and smotheringe ayre, should chaunce to open but a chinke of the window to keepe him self from stifeling, he should by and by haue this saied vnto him: Shut it I pray you, if you aunswere that you canne not abide it, ye haue this in your nose for your labor, why? then go seeke you an other Inne, on gods name. William. ¶ But me thinkes there can be no greater daunger for health, then that so many should drawe in and out all one vapour: specially when the body is in a sweat, and in this same place to eat meate together, and to tarye together a great while in company, for now I wil not speak of belchinges that sauour of garlick, nor of fistinge, or fisseling[5] nor of stinking breths, many there be (I tel you) that haue priuy diseases, and euery desease hath his proper infection. And surely the moste of th[~e] haue the spanishe scabbe, or as some terme it the frenche pockes: thoughe now adaies one nation hathe it commonlye asmuche as an other. I suppose (I tel you) that there is as great ieobardye in companyinge with these as it is with lepers, and nowe gesse you howe muche difference is betwene this and the pestilence? Bertulphe. ¶ Tushe man they bee stoute fellowes: they doe scorne theise thinges, and make as it were no accompt of them. William. ¶ But yet they are stout with hazardinge of many a mannes helth I tell you plainely. Bertulphe. ¶ Why? What should a man do? They haue thus vsed them selues euermore, and it is a token of constancy and stabilitie neuer to varye or geue ouer that whiche they haue once taken in hand. William. ¶ But aboue twentye yeeres agone, there was nothinge more vsed amonge the Brabanders, then the common Bathes. And now adaies, the same are laied a side euery where: for this stra[~u]g scabbe (I speake of) hathe taught men to come no more thether. Bertulphe. ¶ But go toe? Harken to the rest of my tale that is behind. That grim bearded Ganimede coms to vs afterwardes againe, and layeth as many tables as he then thinkes will serue for the nomber of his guestes, But Lord, what baggage are the table clothes? if you saw them I dare say you would think them h[~e]pen cloths, that are taken from the sailes of ships: they be so course, for he hath apointed that viii. guests shall sit at one table at the least. Nowe those that are acquainted with the facion of the country, doe sit downe euery man, where he listeth him selfe, for there is no diuersitie or cursye I tell you there, betweene the poore man and the riche, betweene the Master and his seruaunt. They are all one. One as good as an other, there is heere (as they say) no difference betwene the shepherd and his dog. William. ¶ Yea marye: this is the olde facion when all is done, that Tiranny hath now abolished and put away from amõg vs: I think Christ liued iump[6] after this maner on the earth when he was here conuersaunt with his Apostles. Bertulphe. ¶ After they be all set, in commeth the frowning minion againe, and once more falleth to recken what company he hathe there: by and by retourning he layeth euery one a trenchar, and a spone of the same siluer: and then after that, hee setteth downe a drinkinge glasse and within a while bringes in bread which euery manne (at leysure) chippeth and pareth for him selfe, whiles the potage is a sethinge. They sit mopinge after thys manner, otherwhiles a whole houre together, ere they can get any thinge to eate. William. ¶ Why? Doe none of the guestes call earnestlye vpon them to haue in the Supper all this while? Bertulphe. ¶ No, none of them all that knowes the Facion of the countrye. At the laste they are serued with Wyne: but youe woulde wonder to see what small geare it is, Scoolemen or Sophisters shoulde drinke none other by myne aduise, because it is so thinne and tarte: how bee it if a guest shoulde chaunce (beside his shotte) to offer Monye to one, and desyre him to gette some better Wyne thenne that some other where, because he lykes it not: they firste make as though they hearde him not: but yet they bee eye hym with suche a bigge an frowning countenaunce as if the Deuyl should loke ouer LINCOLN (as they doe saye) If you will not linne[7] callinge vppon them, thenne they make youe this aunswere. So many EARLES and MARQUESES, haue lodged here in our house, & yet the time is yet to come, that euer they founde any fault with our wine. And therefore if ye fancy it not, get ye packing in the name of God, and seeke an other Inne where ye liste. For they accompt great men and noble men for men onely in their contrye I tell you, setting their armes abroade in euery corner of their house for a shewe. Now by this time they are serued with a soupe, to alay and pacify their pore hongry and crookling stomackes, well nigh loste for meat, hard at the heeles of that comes forthe the dishes with greate ceremonie, pompe or solemnitie. For the firste course they haue soppes or slices of bread, soaked in fleshe brothe, or if it be a fishe day, in the broth of pulce. Then nexte they haue an other brothe: and after that they are serued wyth fleshe twise sod[8], or fishe twise het. And yet, after this, they haue potage once againe, immediatly after, they haue some stiffer meate til suche time as they world beinge well amended with them, they set roste on the table, or sodde[8] freshe fishe, whiche a man can not all together mislike. But when it comes to that once they make spare and whip it away at a sodaine I warraunt you, they facion out euery thinge in his dew time & place. And as the players of Enterludes or comedies, are wonte in their Scenes, to entermedle theyr Chories, so doe these Duche men serue forthe to their guests, Soppes and Potage enterchañgeably or by course. But they prouide that the latter inde of the feast be best furnished. William. ¶ And this (I tell you) is the poynte of a good Poet. Bertulphe. ¶ Besides this it were a sore offence for one all this while to say: Away with this dishe, no man doth eat of it, here you must sit out your time appointed, being so euen and iumpe, that I thinke they measure it oute by some water clockes. At l[~e]gth that bearded Grimson[9] comes forth againe or els the Inholder him selfe, litle or nothing differing from his seruauntes in his apparaile and brauery. He asketh what cheere is with vs: by & by some stronger wine is brought, and they caste a great loue to him that drinketh lustely: wheras he payes no more money that drinketh moste then he, that drinketh least. William. ¶ I put you out of doubt, it is a wonderful nature of the countrey. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea, this doe they in deede: whereas there bee sometime there, that drink two times somuche in wine, as they paye in all for the shot. But before I doe make an end of this Supper, it is a wonderful thing to tell what noise and iangeling of tongues there is, after they begin all to bee well whitled with wine. What shoulde I neede manye wordes? All things there haue lost their hearing and are becom deafe. And many times disguised patches or coxecomes doe come amonge them to make sporte: whiche kinde of men, althoughe of all other it be most to be abhorred, yet you wil scant beleue howe muche the Germaines are delighted with them. They keepe sike a coile with their singinge, theire chatting, their hoopinge and hallowinge, theire praunsinge, theire bounsinge, that the Stooue seemeth as if it woulde fall downe vpon their heds, and none can heare what an other saith. And yet all thys while they, perswade them selues, that they liue as well as hearte canne thinke, or, as the day is broad and longe to. William. ¶ Wel nowe make an ende of this Supper, I pray: for I am weary of so tedious a Supper my selfe to. Bertulphe. ¶ So I will. At the laste when the cheese is ones taken vp, whiche scantly pleaseth their aptite, onlesse it craule ful of magots, that old Siuicoxe[10] comes forth againe, bringinge with hym a meate Trenchoure in his hande, vppon the whiche with chalke he hath made certaine rundelles and halfe rundelles: that same he layeth downe vpon the table, loking very demurelye & sadlye all the while. They that are acquainted with those markes or skoares, doe laye downe their monye, after them an other, then another, vntill suche time as the trenchoure bee couered, then markinge those whiche layed downe anye thinge, he counteth or maketh reckening softely vnto him selfe: if he misse nothing of that which the reckening comes to, hee maketh a becke or dieugard with his hed. William. ¶ What if theer be any ouerplus there? Bertulphe. ¶ Peraduenture he woulde giue it them againe, and some whiles they doeso, if it strike in their braines. William. ¶ And is there none that speaketh againste this vnegall reckening? Bertulphe. ¶ No, none that hathe any witte in his head, for by and by they woulde saye thus vnto hym. What kinde of man arte thou? I tell thee thou shalt paye no more for thy Supper heere, then other men do. William. ¶ Marye this kinde of people is franke and free I see wel. Bertulphe. ¶ But if one (beeinge werye with trauaile) should desire to go to bed as soone as Supper is done, they will him tarye, till all the other go to bed to. William. ¶ Me thinkes I se Platoes common welth heere. Bertulphe. ¶ Then euerye mannes Cabin is shewed him, & in deede, nothinge elles but a bare chaumber for all that is there, is but beddes, and the Deuill a whit there is else beside there, eyther to occupye or els to steale. William. ¶ There is neatnesse or clenlinesse I warraunt you. Bertulphe. ¶ Yea by roode, euen suche as was at the Supper. The Sheetes peraduenture were washed halfe a yeere before. William. ¶ And how fayres your horses all this while. Bertulphe. ¶ They are vsed after the same rate that the m[~e] bee. William. ¶ But is this maner of entertainement in eueryplace there? Bertulphe. ¶ In some place it is more curteous, in some place againe, it is more currishe then I haue made rehersall, howbeit generallye it is euen after this order. William. ¶ What would you say if I should now tell you how strañgers are entreated in that part of Italy which they call Lõbardy, and again in spaine howe they be vsed, and how in Englande and in Wales for Englishe men in conditions are halfe Frenche, halfe Dutche as men indifferente betweene both. Of theise two contries, Welche men say that they are the right Brittaines first inhabiting the land. Bertulphe. ¶ Mary I pray thee hartely tell me, for it was neuer my fortune to trauaile into them. William. ¶ Nay, I haue no laysure nowe at this time, for the Mariner bad me bee with him at three of the clock, except I would be left behinde, and he hath a Packette of mine. Another time wee shall haue laysure enough to tell of these thinges our bellies full. [Illustration] * * * * * 
49450	----	PETRARCH'S SECRET OR THE SOUL'S CONFLICT WITH PASSION THREE DIALOGUES BETWEEN HIMSELF AND S. AUGUSTINE TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN BY WILLIAM H. DRAPER WITH TWO ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS MDCCCCXI FRANCIS PETRARCH EMILIAE AUGUSTAE PER ANNUS XXII COLLABORANTI MECUM, COMPATIENTI, COLLAETANTI PETRARCAE HOC COLLOQUIUM MEMORABILE AMORIS DULCEDINE LACRIMISQUE TINCTUM IAM DEMUM ANGLICE REDDITUM GRATUS DEDICO A. S. MDCCCCXI CONTENTS INTRODUCTION AUTHOR'S PREFACE DIALOGUE THE FIRST DIALOGUE THE SECOND DIALOGUE THE THIRD INTRODUCTION Most modern writers on Petrarch agree in stating that of all his works the Dialogues which he calls _Secretum meum_ are the one which throws most light upon the man himself. Yet no English translation has hitherto been published. A French version by M. Victor Develay was issued a few years ago, and received the recognition of the French Academy; and, considering the great importance of Petrarch in the history of the Renaissance, not merely in Italy but in Europe, it is time that a similar opportunity of knowing him more fully was offered to English readers; for there are signs on both sides of the Atlantic that the number of those interested in him is steadily growing. The reason for this is undoubtedly the fact that, as the whole work of Petrarch comes to be better known, interest in him as a man increases. Mr. Sidney Lee has lately reminded us of his wide range and predominating influence in the matter of the sonnet in France and in Elizabethan England, as well as in his own country; and yet that influence was very far indeed from revealing all that Petrarch was. It was largely an influence of style, a triumph of the perfection of form, and his imitators did not trouble much about the precise nature of the sentiment and spirit informing the style. When this came to be weighed in the balances of a later day, the tendency of English feeling was to regard his sentiment as a trifle too serious and weak. The love-making of the Cavaliers brought in a robuster tone. When once the question was raised, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" there was really no good answer to it on Petrarchan lines, and the consequence was that his name and fame suffered something of eclipse among us. But eclipses are transient events, and when literary England felt once more the attraction of Italy in the end of the eighteenth century it was not only Dante who began to resume his sway and to provoke translation, but Petrarch also. Then attention was turned chiefly to his Italian poetry, but also in some degree to the general body of his Latin works and to his Letters, of which it is reported that Fox was among the first to perceive the high value. In England the pioneers in this direction were Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who published first a Life of Petrarch in two volumes in 1775, which had by 1805 reached a sixth edition, and, soon after, another volume called _Petrarch's View of Life_, purporting to be a translation, but in fact a very loose and attenuated abstract of the treatise _De remediis utriusque Fortunæ,_ which nevertheless reached a new edition in 1797. Then came a volume of Essays on Petrarch (Murray 1823) by the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, and a little later a second Life of the Poet by no less a person than Thomas Campbell, also in two volumes. Testifying to the re-awakened interest in Petrarch, numerous translations also of his poetry were published by Lady Dacre, Hugh Boyd, Leigh Hunt, Capel Lofft, and many others, who took up after a long interval the tradition begun by Chaucer and handed on by Surrey, Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Drummond of Hawthornden, and George Chapman. Then for a while there was a pause, and the main drift of such attention in England as could be spared for things Italian in mid-Victorian days was concentrated on the greater luminary of the _Divine Comedy_ and the exciting political events of the sixties; though some attention was drawn to things connected with Petrarch by Lytton's novel of _Rienzi_, which was first published in 1835 and had a considerable vogue. Meanwhile in Italy itself his fame was well served by the excellent collection and reprint of his Latin letters by Fracasetti in three vols. (1859-63), and since that time there have appeared several important works dealing with the larger aspects of his life and work, most notable among them being Koerting's _Petrarka's Leben und Werke_ (Leipsig 1878), and in France M. P. de Nolhac's _Pétrarque et l'Humanisme_ (two vols., 1907, new edition), with other subsidiary works, and four small volumes by M. Henri Cochin, elucidating what is known of Petrarch's brother Gherardo and some of his many friends. Amongst ourselves in late years, following the labours of J. A. Symonds in his history of the Renaissance, we have Henry Reeve's small but well-planned volume in the "Foreign Classics for English Readers," and, more recently still, Mr. Hollway Calthrop's _Petrarch: his Life, Work and Times_ (1907), and Mrs. Maud Jerrold's _Francesco Petrarca: Poet and Humanist_ (1909). It is significant that both the last writers single out the _Secretum_ for its psychological interest, the former stating that "to those who feel the charm of Petrarch's nature and the intense humanity of his character, these three Dialogues are the most fascinating of all his writings"; and the latter "that this conflict of the dual self is of quite peculiar interest." Mrs. Jerrold indeed goes so far as to say that Petrarch "plunges into the most scathing self-examination that any man ever made. Whether the book was intended for the public we may well doubt, both from the words of the preface and from the fact that it does not appear to have been published till after the author's death. But however this may be, it remains one of the world's great monuments of self-revelation and ranks with the _Confessions of S. Augustine_"--a verdict which to some critics will seem to have a touch of overstatement, though hardly beyond the opinion of Petrarch's French students, and not altogether unpardonable in so enthusiastic an admirer of her subject, and a verdict which at least would not have been displeasing to Petrarch himself. Among the many points of human interest to be found in the Dialogues not the least is the one connected with Accidie, a theme which has of itself attracted special study in the present day, particularly since attention was called to it by the late Bishop of Oxford in his well-known introduction to the _Spirit of Discipline._ Observers of mental life incline to the view that the form of depression denoted by the mediæval word was not confined to those times or met with only in monasteries, and it is curious that he who is sometimes called the "first of the moderns" should take us into his confidence as to his sufferings from this trouble, and exemplify the truth of the observation to which reference has been made. M. P. de Nolhac, in his interesting work entitled _Le Frère de Pétrarque,_ calls particular attention to this trait in Petrarch's character, and in an appendix on the subject writes, "Mais il faut surtout lire l'émouvante discussion que Pétrarque, dans le second dialogue du _Secretum_, suppose entre Saint Augustin et lui-meme, les aveux entrecoupés de sanglots qu'il laisse échapper. Cette torture, dit-il, où il passe des jours et des nuits, a pourtant en elle je ne sais quelle atroce volupté tellement que parfois il en conte de s'y arracher" (p. 220). It is the remarking on this note of self-will, this _voluptas dolendi,_ that M. de Nolhac considers is Petrarch's special contribution to the subject and furnishes a new point beyond what is in previous definitions. The fundamental question raised by these Dialogues is the question of what was the real nature and character of Petrarch, and wherein lay the secret of his extraordinary charm and influence among his contemporaries, and especially among contemporary men? It is difficult to convey in few words how great an impression the study of his Latin works makes in regard to this influence in his own lifetime. Of course, a reader is soon aware of the trait of personal vanity in Petrarch and of certain unconscious littlenesses, as in the matter of his appreciation of Dante; but the strange thing is how little this interfered with the regard and admiration extended to him by many sorts and conditions of men. In the ordinary intercourse of life one is apt to think such a trait fatal to anything like respect, and it must always detract somewhat from the full stature of any mind, but in the case of Petrarch it seems evident that he was one to whom much was forgiven, and that the reason is to be found in the presence in him of so rich an assemblage of other and better qualities that this one hardly counted at all, or was looked on with kindly amusement by friends large-hearted enough to think it nothing compared with what was good and admirable in his mind. We may take it for granted that, as he hints in his "Letter to Posterity," he started with the advantage of a good presence and a sufficient care of his own person and appearance in younger days; and it is evident that he had by nature a certain engaging frankness and impulsiveness, which nevertheless were not inconsistent with the contrasted qualities of gravity and dignity, learned at first from his father and mother and their friends, and cultivated by his study of the Law and afterwards by his attendance on the Papal court at Avignon. One can discern this in his Letters and see it reflected in those that were written to him or about him. But beyond these introductory qualities, as they may be called, there were other deeper traits, of rarer kind, that must be noted before one can understand the position he attained and has held so long. Studying his work from the cool distance of six centuries, one is inclined to judge that the most fundamental quality of his nature was his love of literature, and that every other trait took a subordinate place to this. It is perhaps doubtful whether this or the life of personal affection, or even of devotion in a monastery, would have gained the upper hand if the circumstances of his life had been different in the matter of his love for Laura; but taking into consideration that she was separated from him apparently by temperament and circumstance, the one course that remained open to him without let or hindrance was the life of literature in the sense of devotion to the great writers of the Past and the practice of the art of writing for himself. He loved this for its own sake, and at the same time he was quickened by the sense of a new learning, which, since his time and largely by the impetus he gave it, has taken form and outline in a wonderful way, but was then only like the first streak of dawn upon the sky. Petrarch was not the first man to find a certain contradiction between his desires and the possibilities of life around him, and to pass many years under the pain of contrary attractions that could not all be followed to fulfilment This conflict is what gives interest to the _Secretum._ Some have thought, and the idea was expressed by one of his correspondents, that his love for Laura was very much of a literary pose. Yet that such a view is an insufficient account of it seems pretty clearly established by the work here translated. It is, indeed, plain that his feelings ran a course, and not a smooth one, and did not continue in one stay; he came to see the whole matter in a changed light, and yet not wholly changed; his relation was transfigured, not abandoned, and after the death of Laura, which took place when he was forty-four, it continued as a memory from which the pain had faded away and only what was uplifting remained. That which persisted unchanged all through his life and seems most to have had the colour and substance of a passion was the love of Letters. To this his friendship, his very real patriotism, and (must we not add?) his religion also were in a sense second. But the mention of this last factor in the life of Petrarch leads one to express the opinion that this has not yet been quite sufficiently reckoned with. That it should not have been thought worthy of such reckoning has probably arisen from the one ugly fact in his life which he himself does not conceal, and indeed expressly refers to in his "Letter to Posterity," in the following words:-- "As for the looser indulgences of appetite, would indeed I could say I was a stranger to them altogether; but if I should so say, I should lie. This I can safely affirm that, although I was hurried away to them by the fervour of my age and temperament, their vileness I have always inwardly execrated. As soon as I approached my fortieth year I repelled these weaknesses entirely from _my_ thoughts and my remembrance, as if I had never known them. And this I count among my earliest happy recollections, thanking God, who has freed me, while yet my powers were unimpaired and strong, from this so vile and always hateful servitude."[1] Now, although Petrarch did not, as some other men have done, including his own brother, express his repentance by retiring to a monastery, yet there is evidence enough that the change of will here referred to, and professed in the _Secretum_, was real, and that the older he grew the more he lifted up his heart. Among other signs of this there is the curious little group of what he calls _Penitential Psalms,_ which were translated into English by George Chapman, into whose translation of Homer Keats looked and was inspired In his Will also there are not a few passages through which one hears a note of genuine penitence. Among other curious points in it is the mention of the exact spot in which he would wish to be laid to rest in some one of seven different places where he might happen to die, the last being the city of Parma, of which he says, "At si Parmæ, in ecclesiâ majori, ubi per multos annos archidiaconus fui inutilis et semper fere absens." Petrarch must have fully weighed in his own case the pros and cons for such retirement. His treatise _De Otio Religiosorum_ shows that he understood what good side that kind of life has, and his whole attitude towards his brother--generous, and attached, almost to the point of romance--reveals how he could admire it. But in his own case he felt that it would cramp his faculties too much to be endurable, and hinder more than it would help the kind of work to which he had put his hand. There was also another influence that told strongly on this father of Humanism. He whose nature was so full of unsatisfied natural affection had begun in his latter years to find some rest and blessing in the love and tendance of a daughter, the light of whose care and companionship for him shines through his declining days like the rays of the sun in the evening after a dark and troubled day. But if we are right in judging that the love of Letters was the dominant factor in the life of Petrarch, it was but the main thread in a singularly complex nature. Not much less in substance and strength was his genius for friendship. Indeed, his study of the writers of past ages partook of the nature of friendship, just as his friendship with living men had a deep literary tinge. He loved books and he loved men, and he loved them in the same way. This is by no means a frequent combination in the degree in which it was shown in Petrarch. More often the book-lover becomes a recluse, and the lover of his fellow-men loses his ardour for study. But not even the love of books and of men took up all the activities of this rich nature. He was also a keen traveller and among the first to write of natural scenery in the modern spirit. He had that in him which, in spite of his love for reading and writing, sent him forth into other lands and made him eager to see men and cities. Yet the love of the country in him prevailed over the love of cities. His many references to his life at Vaucluse, though to readers of to-day they may seem sometimes affected, yet show only a superficial affectation, a mere mode, which does not seriously lessen the impression of his simple taste and his genuine delight in his garden and his fishing, and his talk with the charming old farmer-man and that sun-burnt wife for whom he had such an unbounded respect. In the two recent lives of Petrarch in English a reader may make closer acquaintance with this side of his character, and will find much that falls in with modern feeling as to simplicity of living and the joys of escaping from "the man-stifled town." But what is still a desideratum is a good English translation of his Letters to his friends, which will add many glimpses of his daily interests and thoughts, and fill up the picture of his interior life as it is disclosed to us in the Dialogues here presented. What the _Secretum gives_ us is the picture of Petrarch as he was in the crisis of his middle years. It was written in or about the year 1342 when he was thirty-eight, and in these Dialogues we find him looking back over his youth and early life--the sap and vigour of his mind as strong as ever, the recollection of many sensations green and still powerful--but finding that the sheer march of time and experience of manhood are forcing him now to see things with more mature vision. Five years later he will be seen suddenly kindled into surprising excitement in that strange Rienzi episode, but in one of his letters to that unhappy politician there is a sentence which might have been penned by Bishop Butler, and has in it the accent of grave experience:[2] _"Ibunt res quâ sempiterna lex statuit: mutare ista non possum, fugere possum"_ (Things will go as the law eternal has decided: to alter their course is out of our power; what we can do is to get out of their way). The interest of the _Secretum_ is heightened by remembering the time of life in which it was composed.[3] Some will find most pleasure in reading what men have written _De Senectute_, and others prefer the charm that belongs to youth; but is there not much to be said for the interest of what men write from that high tableland that lies between the two, in the full strength of their mind when they have lived long enough to know what is hidden from the eyes of youth and not long enough to be wearied and broken with the greatness of the way? Such is the tone that seems to pervade the Dialogues between S. Augustine and Petrarch. In the preface he looks forward to cherishing the little book himself in future years, like some flower that keeps alive remembrance of past days and yet is not cherished for memory only, but to guard the resolution which has been taken to go forward and not back, and, as his French translator suggests, "Is it to be wondered at that these pages, written with such _abandon_, in which he has laid bare his whole soul, should have been his own favourite work? It was the book he kept at his bedside, his faithful counsellor and friend, and to which he turned ever and again with pleasure in the hours of remembering the time past." It is not necessary to tell over again the story of Petrarch's lifelong devotion to the study of S. Augustine's _Confessions,_ or to dwell on the obvious reasons for that devotion. Every man loves the book which tells the history of conflicts like his own, and which has helped to give him courage in his warfare and its sorrows and joys. "That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more;" sings the poet, but if one reads the experience of those who have suffered and contended and conquered, and is sure that their load was as heavy as his own, then there is a spirit which is breathed over from one life to another, and which even though it tells us how great is the burden of sorrow in the world, yet also tells us that a man is not alone, but that there are companions in patience who a little strengthen each other and give the sense of fellowship from age to age, _donec aspiret dies et inclinentur umbrae._ Many of the letters of Petrarch's later years show how wistfully he waited for that day. But they also show how gallant a heart he kept, and how faithful to those friends that remained, including the one so lovable and generous and true, Giovanni Boccaccio, who survived him little more than a year. Petrarch passed the end of his life in a modest house which he built in one of the loveliest parts of Italy, that to English readers will be for ever dear because of the haunting music that Shelley wove around its name. It was in the Euganæan Hills at Arqua where Petrarch chose to wait for the dawn, and, till it came, to go on working among the books he loved as his own soul. "Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery," and to read the story of his last years there is to think of one of those green isles. These were days of calm, and the book of the Secret ends with the expression of hope for a deeper calm still. In due time it came, but, as the English Poet sang, after more than six centuries-- The love from Petrarch's urn Yet amid yon hills doth burn, [1] Translation by H. Reeve. [2] _De rebus fam.,_ vii. 7. [3] The profile portrait, reproduced by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, publisher of Mr. E. J. Mills' book on Petrarch, is from Lombardo's copy of the _De viris illustribus,_ finished about five years after the death of Petrarch, and is believed to be an authentic picture of him in later life. A QUENCHLESS LAMP. [Illustration] [Illustration: S. AUGUSTINE GREETING A FRIEND _From a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimignano_] PETRARCH'S SECRET AUTHOR'S PREFACE Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure. When I was ruminating lately on this matter, not in any dream as one in sickness and slumber, but wide awake and with all my wits about me, I was greatly astonished to behold a very beautiful Lady, shining with an indescribable light about her. She seemed as one whose beauty is not known, as it might be, to mankind. I could not tell how she came there, but from her raiment and appearance I judged her a fair Virgin, and her eyes, like the sun, seemed to send forth rays of such light that they made me lower my own before her, so that I was afraid to look up. When she saw this she said, Fear not; and let not the strangeness of my presence affright you in any wise. I saw your steps had gone astray; and I had compassion on you and have come down from above to bring you timely succour. Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you, what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal! When I heard her thus speak, though my fear still clung about me with trembling voice I made reply in Virgil's words-- "What name to call thee by, O Virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenance."[1] I am that Lady, she answered, whom you have depicted in your poem _Africa_ with rare art and skill, and for whom, like another Amphion of Thebes, you have with poetic hands built a fair and glorious Palace in the far West on Atlas's lofty peak. Be not afraid, then, to listen and to look upon the face of her who, as your finely-wrought allegory proves, has been well-known to you from of old. Scarcely had she uttered these words when, as I pondered all these things in my mind, it occurred to me this could be none other than Truth herself who thus spoke. I remembered how I had described her abode on the heights of Atlas; yet was I ignorant from what region she had come, save only that I felt assured she could have come from none other place than Heaven. Therefore I turned my gaze towards her, eagerly desiring to look upon her face; but lo, the eye of man is unable to gaze on that ethereal Form, wherefore again was I forced to turn them towards the ground. When she took note of this, after a short silence, she spoke once more; and, questioning me many times, she led me to engage with her in long discourse. From this converse I was sensible of gaining a twofold benefit for I won knowledge, and the very act of talking with her gave me confidence. I found myself by degrees becoming able to look upon the face which at first dismayed me by its splendour, and as soon as I was able to bear it without dread, and gaze fixedly on her wondrous beauty, I looked to see if she were accompanied with any other, or had come upon the retirement of my solitude alone; and as I did so I discerned at her side the figure of an aged man, of aspect venerable and full of majesty. There was no need to inquire his name. His religious bearing, modest brow, his eyes full of dignity, his measured step, his African look, but Roman speech, plainly declared him to be that most illustrious Father, Augustine. Moreover, he had so gracious a mien, and withal so noble, that one could not possibly imagine it to belong to any other than to him. Even so I was on the point of opening my lips to ask, when at that moment I heard the name so dear to me uttered from the lips of Truth herself. Turning herself to him, as if to intervene upon his deep meditation, she addressed him in these words: "Augustine, dear to me above a thousand others, you know how devoted to yourself this man is, and you are aware also with how dangerous and long a malady he is stricken, and that he is so much nearer to Death as he knows not the gravity of his disease. It is needful, then, that one take thought for this man's life forthwith, and who so fit to undertake the pious work as yourself? He has ever been deeply attached to your name and person; and all good doctrine is wont more easily to enter the mind of the disciple when he already starts with loving the Master from whom he is to learn. Unless your present happiness has made you quite forget your former sorrow, you will remember that when you were shut in the prison of the mortal body you also were subject to like temptation as his. And if that were so, most excellent Physician of those passions yourself experienced, even though your silent meditation be full of sweetness to your mind, I beg that your sacred voice, which to me is ever a delight, shall break its silence, and try whether you are able by some means to bring calm to one so deeply distressed." Augustine answered her: "You are my guide, my Counsellor, my Sovereign, my Ruler; what is it, then, you would have me say in your presence?" "I would," she replied, "that some human voice speak to the ears of this mortal man. He will better bear to hear truth so. But seeing that whatever you shall say to him he will take as said by me, I also will be present in person during your discourse." Augustine answered her, "The love I bear to this sick man, as well as the authority of her who speaks, make it my duty to obey." Then, looking kindly at me and pressing me to his heart in fatherly embrace, he led me away to the most retired corner he could find, and Truth herself went on a few steps in front. There we all three sat down. Then while Truth listened as the silent Judge, none other beside her being present, we held long converse on one side and the other; and because of the greatness of the theme, the discourse between us lasted over three days. Though we talked of many things much against the manners of this age, and on faults and failings common to mankind, in such wise that the reproaches of the Master seemed in a sense more directed against men in general than against myself, yet those which to me came closest home I have graven with more especial vividness on the tablet of my memory. That this discourse, so intimate and deep, might not be lost, I have sot it down in writing and made this book; not that I wish to class it with my other works, or desire from it any credit. My thoughts aim higher. What I desire is that I may be able by reading to renew as often as I wish the pleasure I felt from the discourse itself. So, little Book, I bid you flee the haunts of men and be content to stay with me, true to the title I have given you of "My Secret": and when I would think upon deep matters, all that you keep in remembrance that was spoken in secret you in secret will tell to me over again. To avoid the too frequent iteration of the words "said I," "said he," and to bring the personages of the Dialogue, as it were, before one's very eyes, I have acted on Cicero's method and merely placed the name of each interlocutor before each paragraph.[2] My dear Master learned this mode himself from Plato. But to cut short all further digression, this is how Augustine opened the discourse. [1] _Æneid,_ i. 327-28. [2] _De Amicitiâ_, i. DIALOGUE THE FIRST S. AUGUSTINE--PETRARCH _S. Augustine._ What have you to say, O man of little strength? Of what are you dreaming? For what are you looking? Remember you not you are mortal? _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember it right well, and a shudder comes upon me every time that remembrance rises in my breast. _S. Augustine._ May you, indeed, remember as you say, and take heed for yourself. You will spare me much trouble by so doing. For there con be no doubt that to recollect one's misery and to practise frequent meditation on death is the surest aid in scorning the seductions of this world, and in ordering the soul amid its storms and tempests, if only such meditation be not superficial, but sink into the bones and marrow of the heart. Yet am I greatly afraid lest that happen in your case which I have seen in so many others, and you be found deceiving your own self. _Petrarch_. In what way do you mean? For I do not clearly understand the drift of your remarks. _S. Augustine._ O race of mortal men, this it is that above all makes me astonished and fearful for you, when I behold you, of your own will clinging to your miseries; pretending that you do not know the peril hanging over your heads and if one bring it under your very eyes, you try to thrust it from your sight and put it afar off. _Petrarch._ In what way are we so mad? _S. Augustine._ Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health? _Petrarch._ I do not suppose such a case has ever been heard of. _S. Augustine._ And do you think if one wished for a thing with all one's soul one would be so idle and careless as not to use all possible means to obtain what one desired? _Petrarch._ No one, I think, would be so foolish. _S. Augustine._ If we are agreed on these two points, so we ought also to agree on a third. _Petrarch._ What is this third point? _S. Augustine._ It is this: that just as he who by deep meditation has discovered he is miserable will ardently wish to be so no more; and as he who has formed this wish will seek to have it realised, so he who seeks will be able to reach what he wishes. It is clear that the third step depends on the second as the second on the first. And therefore the first should be, as it were, a root of salvation in man's heart. Now you mortal men, and you yourself with all your power of mind, keep doing your best by all the pleasures of the world to pull up this saving root out of your hearts, which, as I said, fills me with horror and wonder. With justice, therefore, you are punished by the loss of this root of salvation and the consequent loss of all the rest. _Petrarch_. I foresee this complaint you bring is likely to be lengthy, and take many words to develop it. Would you mind, therefore, postponing it to another occasion? And that I may travel more surely to your conclusion, may we send a little more time over the premisses? _S. Augustine_. I must concede something to, your slowness of mind; so please stop me at any point where you wish. _Petrarch_. Well, if I must speak for myself, I do not follow your chain of reasoning. _S. Augustine_. What possible obscurity is there in it? What are you in doubt about now? _Petrarch_. I believe there is a multitude of things for which we ardently long, which we seek for with all our energy, but which nevertheless, however diligent we are, we never have obtained and never shall. _S. Augustine_. That may be true of other desires, but in regard to that we have now under discussion the case is wholly different. _Petrarch._ What makes you say that? _S. Augustine._ Because every man who desires to be delivered from his misery, provided only he desires sincerely and with all his heart, cannot fail to obtain that which he desires. _Petrarch_. O father, what is this I hear? There are few men indeed who do not feel they lack many things and who would not confess they were so far unhappy. Every one who questions his own heart will acknowledge it is so. By natural consequence if the fulness of blessing makes man happy, all things he lacks will so far make him unhappy. This burden of unhappiness all men would fain lay down, as every one is aware; but every one is aware also that very few have been able. How many there are who have felt the crushing weight of grief, through bodily disease, or the loss of those they loved, or imprisonment, or exile, or hard poverty, or other misfortunes it would take too long to tell over; and yet they who suffer these things have only too often to lament that it is not permitted them, as you suggest, to be set free. To me, then, it seems quite beyond dispute that a multitude of men are unhappy by compulsion and in spite of themselves. _S. Augustine_. I must take you a long way back, and as one does with the very young whose wits are slight and slow, I must ask you to follow out the thread of my discourse from its very simplest elements. I thought your mind was more advanced, and I had no idea you still needed lessons so childish. Ah, if only you had kept in mind those true and saving maxims of the wise which you have so often read and re-read with me; if, I must take leave to say, you had but wrought for yourself instead of others; if you had but applied your study of so many volumes to the ruling of your own conduct, instead of to vanity and gaining the empty praise of men, you would not want to retail such low and absurd follies. _Petrarch._ I know not where you want to take me, but already I am aware of the blush mounting to my brow, and I feel like schoolboys in presence of an angry master. Before they know what they are accused of they think of many offences of which they are guilty, and at the very first word from the master's lips they are filled with confusion. In like case I too am conscious of my ignorance and of many other faults, and though I perceive not the drift of your admonition, yet as I know almost everything bad may be brought against me, I blush even before you have done speaking. So pray state more clearly what is this biting accusation that you have made. _S. Augustine_. I shall have many things to lay to your charge presently. Just now what makes me so indignant is to hear you suppose that any one can become or can be unhappy against his will. _Petrarch_. I might as well spare my blushes. For what more obvious truth than this can possibly be imagined? What man exists so ignorant or so far removed from all contact with the world as not to know that penury, grief, disgrace, illness, death, and other evils too that are reckoned among the greatest, often befall us in spite of ourselves, and never with our own consent? From which it follows that it is easy enough to know and to detest one's own misery, but not to remove it; so that if the two first steps depend on ourselves, the third is nevertheless in Fortune's hand. _S. Augustine._ When I saw you ashamed I was ready to give you pardon, but brazen impudence angers me more than error itself. How is it you have forgotten all those wise precepts of Philosophy, which declare that no man can be made unhappy by those things you rattle off by name? Now if it is Virtue only that makes the happiness of man, which is demonstrated by Cicero and a whole multitude of weighty reasons, it follows of necessity that nothing is opposed to true happiness except what is also opposed to Virtue. This truth you can yourself call to mind even without a word from me, at least unless your wits are very dull. _Petrarch._ I remember it quite well. You would have me bear in mind the precepts of the Stoics, which contradict the opinions of the crowd and are nearer truth than common custom is. _S. Augustine._ You would indeed be of all men the most miserable were you to try to arrive at the truth through the absurdities of the crowd, or to suppose that under the leadership of blind guides you would reach the light. You must avoid the common beaten track and set your aspirations higher; take the way marked by the steps of very few who have gone before, if you would be counted worthy to hear the Poet's word-- "On, brave lad, on! your courage leading you, So only Heaven is scaled."[1] _Petrarch._ Heaven grant I may hear it ere I die! But I pray you to proceed. For I assure you I have by no means become shameless. I do not doubt the Stoics' rules are wiser far than the blunders of the crowd. I await therefore your further counsel. _S. Augustine_. Since we are agreed on this, that no one can become or be unhappy except through his own fault, what need of more words is there? _Petrarch._ Just this need, that I think I have seen very many people, and I am one of them, to whom nothing is more distressful than the inability to break the yoke of their faults, though all their life long they make the greatest efforts so to do. Wherefore, even allowing that the maxim of the Stoics holds good, one may yet admit that many people are very unhappy in spite of themselves, yes, and although they lament it and wish they were not, with their whole heart. _S. Augustine_. We have wandered somewhat from our course, but we are slowly working back to our starting-point. Or have you quite forgotten whence we set out? _Petrarch._ I had begun to lose sight of it, but it is coming back to me now. _S. Augustine._ What I had set out to do with you was to make clear that the first step in avoiding the distresses of this mortal life and raising the soul to higher things is to practise meditation on death and on man's misery; and that the second is to have a vehement desire and purpose to rise. When these two things were present, I promised a comparatively easy ascent to the goal of our desire. Unless haply to you it seems otherwise? _Petrarch_. I should certainly never venture to affirm this, for from my youth upwards I have had the increasing conviction that if in any matter I was inclined to think differently from yourself I was certain to be wrong. _S. Augustine._ We will please waive all compliments. And as I observe you are inclined to admit the truth of my words more out of deference than conviction, pray feel at liberty to say whatever your real judgment suggests. _Petrarch._ I am still afraid to be found differing, but nevertheless I will make use of the liberty you grant. Not to speak of other men, I call to witness Her who has ever been the ruling spirit of my life; you yourself also I call to witness how many times I have pondered over my own misery and over the subject of Death; with what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains, so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping; yet hitherto, as you see, all is in vain. This alone leads me to doubt the truth of that proposition you seek to establish, that no man has ever fallen into misery but of his own free will, or remained, miserable except of his own accord; the exact opposite of which I have proved in my own sad experience. _S. Augustine_. That complaint is an old one and seems likely to prove unending. Though I have already several times stated the truth in vain, I shall not cease to maintain it yet. No man can become or can be unhappy unless he so chooses; but as I said at the beginning, there is in men a certain perverse and dangerous inclination to deceive themselves, which is the most deadly thing in life. For if it is true that we rightly fear being taken in by those with whom we live, because our natural habit of trusting them tends to make us unsuspicious, and the pleasantly familiar sound of their voice is apt to put us off our guard,--how much rather ought you to fear the deceptions you practise on yourself, where love, influence, familiarity play so large a part, a case wherein every one esteems himself more than he deserves, loves himself more than he ought, and where Deceiver and Deceived are one and the same person? _Petrarch._ You have said this kind of thing pretty often to-day already. But I do not recollect ever practising such deception on myself; and I hope other people have not deceived me either. _S. Augustine._ Now at this very moment you are notably deceiving yourself when you boast never to have done such a thing at all; and I have a good enough hope of your own wit and talent to make me think that if you pay close attention you will see for yourself that no man can fall into misery of his own will. For on this point our whole discussion rests. I pray you to think well before answering, and give your closest attention, and be jealous for truth more than for disputation, but then tell me what man in the world was ever forced to sin? For the Seers and Wise Men require that sin must be a voluntary action, and so rigid is their definition that if this voluntariness is absent then the sin also is not there. But without sin no man is made unhappy, as you agreed to admit a few minutes ago. _Petrarch._ I perceive that by degrees I am getting away from my proposition and am being compelled to acknowledge that the beginning of my misery did arise from my own will. I feel it is true in myself, and I conjecture the same to be true of others. Now I beg you on your part to acknowledge a certain truth also. _S. Augustine._ What is it you wish me to acknowledge? _Petrarch_. That as it is true no man ever fell involuntarily, so this also is true that countless numbers of those who thus are voluntarily fallen, nevertheless do not voluntarily remain so. I affirm this confidently of my own self. And I believe that I have received this for my punishment, as I would not stand when I might, so now I cannot rise when I would. _S. Augustine._ That is indeed a wise and true view to take. Still as you now confess you were wrong in your first proposition, so I think you should own you are wrong in your second. _Petrarch._ Then you would say there is no distinction between falling and remaining fallen? _S. Augustine._ No, they are indeed different things; that is to say, different in time, but in the nature of the action and in the mind of the person concerned they are one and the same. _Petrarch._ I see in what knots you entangle me. But the wrestler who wins his victory by a trick is not necessarily the stronger man, though he may be the more practised. _S. Augustine._ It is Truth herself in whose presence we are discoursing. To her, plain simplicity is ever dear, and cunning is hateful. That you may see this beyond all doubt I will go forward from this point with all the plainness you can desire. _Petrarch._ You could give me no more welcome news. Tell me, then, as it is a question concerning myself, by what line of reasoning you mean to prove I am unhappy. I do not deny that I am; but I deny that it is with my own consent I remain so. For, on the contrary, I feel this to be most hateful and the very opposite of what I wish. But yet I can do nothing except wish. _S. Augustine._ If only the conditions laid down are observed, I will prove to you that you are misusing words. _Petrarch._ What conditions do you mean, and how would you have me use words differently? _S. Augustine._ Our conditions were to lay aside all juggling with terms and to seek truth in all plain simplicity, and the words I would have you use are these: instead of saying you _can_not, you ought to say you _will_ not. _Petrarch._ There will be no end then to our discussion, for that is what I never shall confess. I tell you I know, and you yourself are witness, how often I have wished to and yet could not rise. What floods of tears have I shed, and all to no purpose? _S. Augustine._ O yes, I have witnessed many tears, but very little will. _Petrarch._ Heaven is witness (for indeed I think no man on this earth knows) what I have suffered, and how I have longed earnestly to rise, if only I might. _S. Augustine_. Hush, hush. Heaven and earth will crash in ruin, the stars themselves will fall to hell, and all harmonious Nature be divided against itself, sooner than Truth, who is our Judge, can be deceived. _Petrarch._ And what do you mean by that? _S. Augustine_. I mean that your tears have often stung your conscience but not changed your will. _Petrarch._ I wonder how many times I must tell you that it is just this impossibility of change which I bewail. _S. Augustine._ And I wonder how many times I must reply that it is want of will, not want of power, which is the trouble. And yet I wonder not that now you find yourself involved in these perplexities; in which in time past I too was tossed about, when I was beginning to contemplate entering upon a new way of life.[2] I tore my hair; I beat my brow; my fingers I twisted nervously; I bent double and held my knees; I filled the air of heaven with most bitter sighs; I poured out tears like water on every side: yet nevertheless I remained what I was and no other, until a deep meditation at last showed me the root of all my misery and made it plain before my eyes. And then my will after that became fully changed, and my weakness also was changed in that same moment to power, and by a marvellous and most blessed alteration I was transformed instantly and made another man, another Augustine altogether. The full history of that transformation is known, if I mistake not, to you already in my _Confessions._ _Petrarch._ Yes, in truth I know it well, and never can I forget the story of that health-bringing fig-tree, beneath whose shade the miracle took place.[3] _S. Augustine._ Well indeed may you remember it. And no tree to you should be more dear: no, not the myrtle, nor the ivy, nor the laurel beloved of Apollo and ever afterwards favoured by all the band of Poets, favoured too by you, above all, who alone in your age have been counted worthy to be crowned with its leaves; yet dearer than these should be to you the memory of that fig-tree, for it greets you like some mariner coming into haven after many storms; it holds out to you the path of righteousness, and a sure hope which fadeth not away, that presently the divine Forgiveness shall be yours. _Petrarch_. I would not say one word in contradiction. Go on, I beseech you, with what you have begun. _S. Augustine._ This is what I undertook and will go on with, to prove to you that so far you are like those many others of whom it may be said in the words of Virgil-- "Unchanged their mind while vainly flow their tears."[4] Though I might multiply examples, yet I will rather content myself with this alone, that we might almost reckon as belonging to ourselves, and so all the more likely to come home. _Petrarch_. How wisely you have made choice; for indeed it were useless to add more, and no other could be so deeply graven in my heart. Great as the gulf which parts us may be--I mean between you in your safe haven and me in peril of shipwreck, you in felicity, me in distress--still amid my winds and tempests I can recognise from time to time the traces of, your own storm-tossed passions. So that as often as I read the book of your _Confessions_, and am made partaker of your conflict between two contrary emotions, between hope and fear, (and weep as I read), I seem to be hearing the story of my own self, the story not of another's wandering, but of my own. Therefore, since now I have put away every inclination to mere dispute, go on, I beg, as you desire. For all my heart wishes now is not to hinder but only to follow where you lead. _S. Augustine_. I make no such demand on you as that. For though a certain very wise man[5] has laid it down that "Through overmuch contention truth is lost," yet often it happens that a well-ordered discussion leads to truth. It is not then expedient to accept everything advanced, which is the token of a slack and sleepy mind, any more than it is expedient to set oneself to oppose a plain and open truth, which indicates only the mind of one who likes fighting for fighting's sake. _Petrarch_. I understand and agree with you and will act on your advice. Now, pray go on. _S. Augustine_. You admit, therefore, that the argument is just and the chain of reasoning valid, when we say that a perfect knowledge of one's misery will beget a perfect desire to be rid of it, if only the power to be rid may follow the desire. _Petrarch_. I have professed that I will believe you in everything. _S. Augustine._ I feel there is still something you would like to urge, even now. Do, please, confess it, no matter what it may be. _Petrarch._ Nothing, only that I am much amazed I to think I should never yet have wished what I have believed I always wished. _S. Augustine._ You still stick at that point. O well, to put an end to this kind of talk I will agree that you have wished sometimes. _Petrarch._ What then? _S. Augustine._ Do you not remember the phrase of Ovid-- "To wish for what you want is not enough; With ardent longing you must strive for it."[6] _Petrarch._ I understand, but thought that was just what I had been doing. _S. Augustine._ You were mistaken. _Petrarch._ Well, I will believe so. _S. Augustine._ To make your belief certain, examine your own conscience. Conscience is the best judge of virtue. It is a guide, true and unerring, that weighs every thought and deed. It will tell you that you have never longed for spiritual health as you ought, but that, considering what great dangers beset you, your wishes were but feeble and ineffective. _Petrarch._ I have been examining my conscience, as you suggested. _S. Augustine._ What do you find? _Petrarch._ That what you say is true. _S. Augustine._ We have made a little progress, if you are beginning to be awake. It will soon be better with you now you acknowledge it was not well hitherto. _Petrarch._ If it is enough to acknowledge, I hope to be able to be not only well but quite well, for never have I understood more clearly that my wishes for liberty and for an end to my misery have been too lukewarm. But can it be enough to desire only? _S. Augustine._ Why do you ask? _Petrarch._ I mean, to desire without doing anything. _S. Augustine._ What you propose is an impossibility. No one desires ardently and goes to sleep. _Petrarch._ Of what use is desire, then? _S. Augustine._ Doubtless the path leads through many difficulties, but the desire of virtue is itself a great part of virtue. _Petrarch._ There you give me ground for good hope. _S. Augustine._ All my discourse is just to teach you how to hope and to fear. _Petrarch._ Why to fear? _S. Augustine._ Then tell me why to hope? _Petrarch._ Because whereas so far I have striven, and with much tribulation, merely not to become worse, you now open a way to me whereby I may become better and better, even to perfection. _S. Augustine._ But maybe you do not think how toilsome that way is. _Petrarch._ Have you some now terror in store for me? _S. Augustine._ To desire is but one word, but how many things go to make it up! _Petrarch._ Your words make me tremble. _S. Augustine._ Not to mention the positive elements in desire, it involves the destruction of many other objects. _Petrarch._ I do not quite take in your meaning. _S. Augustine._ The desire of all good cannot exist without thrusting out every lower wish. You know how many different objects one longs for in life. All these you must first learn to count as nothing before you can rise to the desire for the chief good; which a man loves less when along with it he loves something else that does not minister to it. _Petrarch_. I recognise the thought. _S. Augustine_. How many men are there who have extinguished all their passions, or, not to speak of extinguishing, tell me how many are there who have subdued their spirit to the control of Reason, and will dare to say, "I have no more in common with my body; all that once seemed so pleasing to me is become poor in my sight. I aspire now to joys of nobler nature"? _Petrarch_. Such men are rare indeed. And now I understand what those difficulties are with which you threatened me. _S. Augustine_. When all these passions are extinguished, then, and not till then, will desire be full and free. For when the soul is uplifted on one side to heaven by its own nobility, and on the other dragged down to earth by the weight of the flesh and the seductions of the world, so that it both desires to rise and also to sink at one and the same time, then, drawn contrary ways, you find you arrive nowhither. _Petrarch._ What, then, would you say a man must do for his soul to break the fetters of the world, and mount up perfect and entire to the realms above? _S. Augustine._ What leads to this goal is, as I said in the first instance, the practice of meditation on death and the perpetual recollection of our mortal nature. _Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived, there is no man alive who is more often revolving this thought in his heart than I. _S. Augustine._ Ah, here is another delusion, a fresh obstacle in your way! _Petrarch._ What! Do you mean to say I am once more lying? _Augustine._ I would sooner hear you use more civil language. _Petrarch._ But to say the same thing? _S. Augustine._ Yes, to say nothing else. _Petrarch._ So then you mean I care nothing at all about death? _S. Augustine._ To tell the truth you think very seldom of it, and in so feeble a way that your thought never touches the root of your trouble. _Petrarch._ I supposed just the opposite. _S. Augustine._ I am not concerned with what you suppose, but with what you ought to suppose. _Petrarch._ Well, I may tell you that in spite of that I will suppose it no more, if you prove to me that my supposition was a false one. _S. Augustine._ That I will do easily enough, provided you are willing to admit the truth in good faith. For this end I will call in a witness who is not far away. _Petrarch_. And who may that be, pray? _S. Augustine._ Your conscience. _Petrarch_. She testifies just the contrary. _S. Augustine._ When you make an obscure, confused demand no witness can give precise or clear answers. _Petrarch._ What has that to do with the subject, I would like to know? _S. Augustine._ Much, every way. To see dearly, listen well. No man is so senseless (unless he be altogether out of his mind) as never once to remember his own weak nature, or who, if asked the question whether he were mortal and dwelt in a frail body, would not answer that he was. The pains of the body, the onsets of fever, attest the fact; and whom has the favour of Heaven made exempt? Moreover, your friends are carried out to their burial before your eyes; and this fills the soul with dread. When one goes to the graveside of some friend of one's own age one is forced to tremble at another's fall and to begin feeling uneasy for oneself; just as when you see your neighbour's roof on fire, you cannot fool quite happy for your own, because, as Horace puts it-- "On your own head you see the stroke will fall."[7] The impression will be more strong in case you see some sudden death carry off one younger, more vigorous, finer looking than yourself. In such an event a man will say, "This one seemed to live secure, and yet he is snatched off. His youth, his beauty, his strength have brought him no help. What God or what magician has promised me any surer warrant of security? Verily, I too am mortal." When the like fate befalls kings and rulers of the earth, people of great might and such as are regarded with awe, those who see it are struck with more dread, are more shaken with alarm; they are amazed when they behold a sudden terror, or perchance hours of intense agony seize on one who was wont to strike terror into others. From what other cause proceed the doings of people who seem beside themselves upon the death of men in highest place, such as, to take an instance from history, the many things of this kind that, as you have related, were done at the funeral of Julius Cæsar? A public spectacle like this strikes the attention and touches the heart of mortal men; and what then they see in the case of another is brought home as pertaining also to themselves. Beside all these, are there not the rage of savage boasts, and of men, and the furious madness of war? Are there not the falls of those great buildings which, as some one neatly says, are first the safeguards, then the sepulchres of men? Are there not malignant motions of the air beneath some evil star and pestilential sky? And so many perils on sea and land that, look wheresoever you will, you cannot turn your gaze anywhither but you will meet the visible image and memento of your own mortality. _Petrarch_. I beg your pardon, but I cannot wait any longer, for, as for having my reason fortified, I do not think any more powerful aid can be brought than the many arguments you have adduced. As I listened I wondered what end you were aiming at, and when your discourse would finish. _S. Augustine._ As a matter of fact, you have interrupted me, and it has not yet reached its end. However, here is the conclusion--although a host of little pin-pricks play upon the surface of your mind, nothing yet has penetrated the centre. The miserable heart is hardened by long habit, and becomes like some indurated stone; impervious to warnings, however salutary, you will find few people considering with any seriousness the fact that they will die. _Petrarch_. Then few people are aware of the very definition of man, which nevertheless is so hackneyed in the schools, that it ought not merely to weary the ears of those who hear it, but is now long since scrawled upon the walls and pillars of every room. This prattling of the Dialecticians will never come to an end; it throws up summaries and definitions like bubbles, matter indeed for endless controversies, but for the most part they know nothing of the real truth of the things they talk about. So, if you ask one of this set of men for a definition of a man or of anything else, they have their answer quite pat, as the saying goes; if you press him further, he will lie low, or if by sheer practice in arguing he has acquired a certain boldness and power of speech, the very tone of the man will tell you he possesses no real knowledge of the thing he sets out to define. The best way of dealing with this brood, with their studied air of carelessness and empty curiosity, is to launch at their head some such invective as this, "You wretched creatures, why this everlasting labour for nothing; this expense of wit on silly subtleties? Why in total oblivion of the real basis of things will you grow old simply conversant with words, and with whitening hair and wrinkled brow, spend all your time in babyish babble? Heaven grant that your foolishness hurt no one but yourselves, and do as little harm as possible to the excellent minds and capacities of the young." _S. Augustine._ I agree that nothing half severe enough can be said of this monstrous perversion of learning. But let me remind you that your zeal of denunciation has so carried you away that you have omitted to finish your definition of man. _Petrarch_. I thought I had explained sufficiently, but I will be more explicit still. Man is an animal, or rather the chief of all animals. The veriest rustic knows that much. Every schoolboy could tell you also, if you asked him, that man is, moreover, a rational animal and that he is mortal. This definition, then, is a matter of common knowledge. _S. Augustine._ No, it is not. Those who are acquainted with it are very few in number. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine._ When you can find a man so governed by Reason that all his conduct is regulated by her, all his appetites subject to her alone, a man who has so mastered every motion of his spirit by Reason's curb that he knows it is she alone who distinguishes him from the savagery of the brute, and that it is only by submission to her guidance that he deserves the name of man at all; when you have found one so convinced of his own mortality as to have that always before his eyes, always to be ruling himself by it, and holding perishable things in such light esteem that he ever sighs after that life, which Reason always foresaw, wherein mortality shall be cast away; when you have found such a man, then you may say that he has some true and fruitful idea of what the definition of man is. This definition, of which we were speaking, I said it was given to few men to know, and to reflect upon as the nature of the truth requires. _Petrarch._ Hitherto I had believed I was of that number. _S. Augustine_. I have no doubt that when you turn over in your mind the many things you have learned, whether in the school of experience or in your reading of books, the thought of death has several times entered your head. But still it has not sunk down into your heart as deeply as it ought, nor is it lodged there as firmly as it should be. _Petrarch_. What do you call sinking down into my heart? Though I think I understand, I would like you to explain more clearly. _S. Augustine._ This is what I mean. Every one knows, and the greatest philosophers are of the same opinion, that of all tremendous realities Death is the most tremendous. So true is this, that from ever of old its very name is terrible and dreadful to hear. Yet though so it is, it will not do that we hear that name but lightly, or allow the remembrance of it to slip quickly from our mind. No, we must take time to realise it. We must meditate with attention thereon. We must picture to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily frame, the cold extremities, the breast in the sweat of fever, the side throbbing with pain, the vital spirits running slower and slower as death draws near, the eyes sunken and weeping, every look filled with tears, the forehead pale and drawn, the cheeks hanging and hollow, the teeth staring and discoloured, the nostrils shrunk and sharpened, the lips foaming, the tongue foul and motionless, the palate parched and dry, the languid head and panting breast, the hoarse murmur and sorrowful sigh, the evil smell of the whole body, the horror of seeing the face utterly unlike itself--all these things will come to mind and, so to speak, be ready to one's hand, if one recalls what one has seen in any close observation of some deathbed where it has fallen to our lot to attend. For things seen cling closer to our remembrance than things heard. And, moreover, it is not without a profound instinct of wisdom that in certain Religious Orders, of the stricter kind, the custom has survived, even down to our own time (though I do not think it makes for good character altogether), of allowing the members to watch the bodies of the dead being washed and put in shrouds for their burial; while the stern professors of the Rule stand by, in order that this sad and pitiful spectacle, thrust forsooth beneath their very eyes, may admonish their remembrance continually, and affright the minds of those who survive from every hope of this transitory world. This, then, is what I meant by sinking down deeply into the soul. Perchance you never name the name of Death, that so you may fall in with the custom of the time, although nothing is more certain than the fact or more uncertain than the hour. Yet in daily converse you must often speak of things connected with it, only they soon fly out of mind and leave no trace. _Petrarch._ I follow your counsel the more readily because now I recognise much in your words that I have myself revolved in my own breast. But please, if you think it well, will you impress some mark on my memory which will act as a warning to me and prevent me from this time henceforth from telling lies to myself and fondling my own mistakes. For this, it seems to me, is what turns men from the right way, that they dream they have already reached the goal, and make therefore no effort any more. _S. Augustine._ I like to hear you speak so. Your words are those of a man alert and watchful, who will not bear to be idle and trust to chance. So here is a test which will never play you false: every time you meditate on death without the least sign of motion, know that you have meditated in vain, as about any ordinary topic. But if in the act of meditation you find yourself suddenly grow stiff, if you tremble, turn pale, and feel as if already you endured its pains; if at the same time you seem to yourself as if you were leaving your body behind, and were forced to render up your account before the bar of eternal judgment, of all the words and deeds of your past life, nothing omitted or passed over; that nothing any more is to be hoped for from good looks or worldly position, nothing from eloquence, or riches, or power: if you realise that this Judge takes no bribe and that all things are naked and open in His sight; that death itself will not turn aside for any plea; that it is not the end of sufferings, but only a passage: if you picture to yourself a thousand forms of punishment and pain, the noise and wailing of Hell, the sulphurous rivers, the thick darkness, and avenging Furies,--in a word, the fierce malignity everywhere of that dark abode; and, what is the climax of its horror, that the misery knows no end, and despair thereof itself is everlasting, since the time of God's mercy is passed by; if, I say, all these things rise up before your eyes at once, not as fictions but as truth, not as being possible, but inevitable, and of a surety bound to come, yes, and even now at the door; and if you think on these things, not lightly, nor with desperation, but full of hope in God, and that His strong right hand is able and ready to pluck you out of so great calamities; if you but show yourself willing to be healed and wishful to be raised up; if you cleave to your purpose and persist in your endeavour, then you may be assured you have not meditated in vain. _Petrarch_. I will not deny you have terrified me greatly by putting so huge a mass of suffering before my eyes. But may God give me such plenteous mercy as that I may steep my thought in meditations like these; not only day by day, but more especially at night, when the mind, with all its daily interests laid aside, relaxes and is wont to return upon itself. When I lay my body down, as those who die, and my shrinking mind imagines the hour itself with all its horrors is at hand: so intently do I conceive it all, as though I were in the very agony of dying, that I shall seem to be already in the place of torment, beholding what you speak of and every kind of anguish. And so stricken shall I be at that sight, so terrified and affrighted, that I shall rise up (I know it) before my horrified household and cry aloud, "What am I doing? What suffering is this? For what miserable destruction is Fate keeping me alive? Jesu, by Thy mercy, "Thou whom none yet hath conquered, succour me,"[8] "Give Thy right hand to me in misery Through the dark waves, O bear me up with Thee, That dying I may rest and be in peace."[9] Many other things shall I say to myself, as one in a fever whose mind every chance impression carries hither and thither in his fear; and then I go talking strangely to my friends, weeping and making them weep, and then presently after this we shall return to what we were before. And since these things are so, what is it, I ask, which holds me back? What little hidden obstacle is there which makes it come to pass that hitherto all these meditations avail nothing but to bring me troubles and terrors: and I continue the same man that I have ever been; the same, it may be, as men to whom no reflections like these have ever come? Yet am I more miserable than they, for they, whatever may be their latter end, enjoy at least the pleasures of the present time; but as for me, I know not either what my end will be, and I taste no pleasure that is not poisoned with these embittering thoughts. _S. Augustine._ Vex not yourself, I pray you, when you ought rather to rejoice. The more the sinner feels pleasure in his sin, the more unhappy should we think him and the more in need of pity. _Petrarch._ I suppose you mean that a man whose pleasures are uninterrupted comes to forget himself, and is never led back into virtue's path; but that he who amid his carnal delights is sometime visited with adversity will come to the recollection of his true condition just in proportion as he finds fickle and wayward Pleasure desert him. If both kind of life had one and the same end, I do not see why he should not be counted the happier who enjoys the present time and puts off affliction to another day, rather than the man who neither enjoys the present nor looks for any joy hereafter; unless you are perhaps moved by this consideration that in the end the laughter of the former will be changed to more bitter tears? _S. Augustine._ Yes, much more bitter. For I have often noticed that if a man throws away the rein of reason altogether (and in the most excessive pleasure of all this is commonly the case), his fall is more dangerous than that of the man who may come rushing down from the same height, but keeps still some hold, though feebly, on the reins. But before all else I attach importance to what you said before, that in the case of the one there is some hope of his conversion, but in that of the other nothing remains but despair. _Petrarch._ Yes, that is my view also; in the meanwhile, however, have you not forgotten my first question? _S. Augustine._ What was it? _Petrarch_. Concerning what keeps me back. I asked you why I am the only one to whom the profound meditation on Death, that you said was so full of benefit, brings no good whatever. _S. Augustine._ In the first place it is perhaps because you look on death as something remote, whereas when one thinks how very short life is and how many divers kinds of accidents befall it, you ought not to think death is far away. "What deludes almost all of us," as Cicero says, "is that we regard death from afar off." Some correctors--I would prefer to call them corruptors--of the text have wished to change the reading by inserting a negative before the verb, and have maintained that he ought to have said, "We do NOT regard death from afar off." For the rest, there is no one in his senses who does not see death one way or another, and in reality Cicero's word _prospicere_ means to see from afar. The one thing that makes so many people suffer illusion in their ideas on death is that they are wont to forecast for their own life some limit, which is indeed possible according to nature, but at which, nevertheless, very few arrive. Hardly any one, in fact, dies of whom the poet's line might not be quoted-- "Grey hairs and length of years he for himself Expected."[10] The fault may touch you nearly, for your age, your vigorous constitution and temperate way of life perchance have fostered a like hope in your heart. _Petrarch._ Please do not suspect that of me. God keep me from such madness-- "As in that monster false to put my trust!"[11] If I may borrow the words Virgil puts in the mouth of his famous pilot Palinurus. For I too am cast upon a wide ocean, cruel and full of storms. I sail across its angry waves and struggle with the wind; and the little boat I steer shivers and seems to be letting in the water in every part. I know well she cannot hold out for long, and I see I have no hope at all of safety unless the Almighty Pity put forth His strong right hand and guide my vessel rightly ere it be too late, and bring me to shore-- "So that I who have lived upon the waters may die in port."[12] Of this I think I should have a good hope, because it has never been my lot to put any confidence in those riches and power on which I see so many of my contemporaries, yes, and older men as well, relying. For what folly would it be to pass all one's life in toil and poverty and care, heaping up riches, just to die at last and have no time to enjoy them? So, then, in truth, I regard this dark shadow of death, not as something afar off, but very nigh and ever at the doors. And I have not forgotten a certain little verse I wrote in my youth at the end of a letter to a friend-- "E'en while we speak, along a thousand ways With stealthy steps up to our very door Death creeps." If I could say words like these at that time of life, what shall I say now that I am more advanced in age and more experienced in what life is? For everything I see or hear or feel or think seems, unless I deceive myself, connected in my mind with that last end. And yet the question still remains, what is it that holds me back? _S. Augustine._ Give humble thanks to God who so regards you and guides you with his merciful rein, and so pricks you with his spur. It is not surely possible, that he who thus has the thought of death before him day by day should ever be doomed to death eternal. But since you feel, and rightly so, that something still is wanting, I will try and unfold to you what it is, and, if God so please, remove it also; to the end that you may arise and with free, uplifted mind shake off that old bondage that so long has kept you down. _Petrarch_. O would that indeed you may prove able so to help me, and I on my part be capable of receiving such a boon! _S. Augustine._ It shall be yours if you wish. The thing is not impossible. But in the nature of man's actions two things are required, and if either be wanting, the action will come to nought. There must be will, and that will must be so strong and earnest that it can deserve the name of purpose. _Petrarch._ So let it be. _S. Augustine_. Do you know what stands in the way of your purpose of heart? _Petrarch._ That is what I want to know; what for so long I have earnestly desired to understand. _S. Augustine_. Then listen. It was from Heaven your soul came forth: never will I assert a lower origin than that. But in its contact with the flesh, wherein it is imprisoned, it has lost much of its first splendour. Have no doubt of this in your mind. And not only is it so, but by reason of the length of time it has in a manner fallen asleep; and, if one may so express it, forgotten its own beginning and its heavenly Creator. And these passions that are born in the soul through its connection with the body, and that forgetfulness of its nobler nature, seem to me to have been touched by Virgil with pen almost inspired when he writes-- "The souls of men still shine with heavenly fire, That tells from whence they come, save that the flesh And limbs of earth breed dullness, hence spring fears, Desire, and grief and pleasures of the world, And so, in darkness prisoned, they no more Look upward to heaven's face."[13] Do you not in the poet's words discern that monster with four heads so deadly to the nature of man? _Petrarch_. I discern very clearly the fourfold passion of our nature, which, first of all, we divide in two as it has respect to past and future, and then subdivide again in respect of good and evil. And so, by these four winds distraught, the rest and quietness of man's soul is perished and gone. _S. Augustine._ You discern rightly, and the words of the Apostle are fulfilled in us, which say, "The corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things."[14] Of a truth the countless forms and images of things visible, that one by one are brought into the soul by the senses of the body, gather there in the inner centre in a mass, and the soul, not being akin to these or capable of learning them, they weigh it down and overwhelm it with their contrariety. Hence that plague of too many impressions tears apart and wounds the thinking faculty of the soul, and with its fatal, distracting complexity bars the way of clear meditation, whereby it would mount up to the threshold of the One Chief Good. _Petrarch_. You have spoken admirably of that plague in many places, and especially in your book on _True Religion_ (with which it is, indeed, quite incompatible). It was but the other day that I lighted on that work of yours in one of my digressions from the study of philosophy and poetry, and it was with very great eagerness that I began to peruse it. Indeed, I was like a man setting out from his own country to see the world, and coming to the gate of some famous city quite new to him, where, charmed by the novelty of all around, he stops now here, now there, and looks intently on all that meets his gaze. _S. Augustine._ And yet in that book, allowing for a difference of phraseology such as becomes a teacher of catholic truth, you will find a large part of its doctrine is drawn from philosophers, more especially from those of the Platonist and Socratic school. And, to keep nothing from you, I may say that what especially moved me to undertake that work was a word of your favourite Cicero. God blessed that work of mine so that from a few seeds there came an abundant harvest. But let us come back to the matter in hand. _Petrarch._ As you wish; but, O best of Fathers, do not hide from me what that word was which gave you the starting-point of so excellent a work. _S. Augustine._ It was the passage where in a certain book Cicero says, by way of expressing his detestation of the errors of his time: "They could look at nothing with their mind, but judged everything by the sight of their eyes; yet a man of any greatness of understanding is known by his detaching his thought from objects of sense, and his meditations from the ordinary track in which others move."[15] This, then, I took as my foundation, and built upon it the work which you say has given you pleasure. _Petrarch._ I remember the place; it is in the _Tusculan Orations._ I have been delighted to notice what a habit it is of yours to quote those words here and elsewhere in your works; and they deserve it, for they are words that seem to blend in one phrase truth and dignity and grace. Now, since it seems good to you, pray return to our subject. _S. Augustine._ This, then, is that plague that has hurt you, this is what will quickly drive you to destruction, unless you take care. Overwhelmed with too many divers impressions made on it, and everlastingly fighting with its own cares, your weak spirit is crushed so that it has not strength to judge what it should first attack or to discern what to cherish, what to destroy, what to repel; all its strength and what time the niggard hand of Fate allows are not sufficient for so many demands. So it suffers that same evil which befalls those who sow too many seeds in one small space of ground. As they spring up they choke each other. So in your overcrowded mind what there is sown can make no root and bear no fruit. With no considered plan, you are tossed now here now there in strange fluctuation, and can never put your whole strength to anything. Hence it happens that whenever the generous mind approaches (if it is allowed) the contemplation of death, or some other meditation that might help it in the path of life, and penetrates by its own acumen to the depths of its own nature, it is unable to stand there, and, driven by hosts of various cares, it starts back. And then the work, that promised so well and seemed so good, flags and grows unsteady; and there comes to pass that inward discord of which we have said so much, and that worrying torment of a mind angry with itself; when it loathes its own defilements, yet cleanses them not away; sees the crooked paths, yet does not forsake them; dreads the impending danger, yet stirs not a step to avoid it. _Petrarch._ Ah, woe is me! Now you have probed my wound to the quick. There is the seat of my pain, from there I fear my death will come. _S. Augustine._ It is well. You are awakening to life. But as we have now prolonged our discussion enough for to-day, let us, if you will, defer the rest until to-morrow, and let us take a breathing space in silence. _Petrarch._ Yes, I am tired somewhat, and most gladly shall I welcome quiet and rest. [1] _Æneid,_ ix. 641. [2] _S. Augustine Confessions_, viii. 8. [3] _S. Augustine Confessions,_ viii. 12. [4] _Æneid_, iv. 449. [5] Publius Cyrus. [6] Ovid, _Pontic._, III i. 35. [7] Horace, _Epist.,_ I. 18, 83. [8] _Æneid,_ vi 365. [9] _Ibid.,_ vi 370. [10] _Æneid,_ x. 649. [11] _Ibid.,_ v. 849. [12] Seneca, _Letters,_ xix. [13] _Æneid,_ vi. 730-34. [14] Book of wisdom, ix. 15 [15] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 16. DIALOGUE THE SECOND S. AUGUSTINE--PETRARCH _S. Augustine_. Well, have we rested long enough? _Petrarch._ Certainly, if it so please you. _S. Augustine._ Let me hear if you feel now in good heart and confidence. For when a man has been ill, a hopeful spirit in him is no small sign of returning health. _Petrarch._ What hope I have is no whit in myself: God is my hope. _S. Augustine._ It is wisely spoken. And now I return to our theme. Many things are against you, many temptations assail, but you yourself still seem ignorant both of their numbers and their strength. And what in warfare generally happens to one who, from a distance, sees some closely marshalled battalion, has happened to you. Such a man is often deceived into thinking his foes fewer in number than they are. But when they draw nearer, when they have deployed their serried ranks before his eyes in all their martial pomp, then his fears soon increase, and he repents him of his boldness. So likewise will it be with you when I shall display before your eyes, on this side and on that, all the evils that are pressing upon you and hemming you in from every quarter. You will be ashamed of your own boldness, you will be sorry you were so light-hearted, and begin to bewail that in its sore straits your soul has been unable to break through the wedged phalanx of your foes. You will discover presently how many foolish fancies of too easy victory you have let come into your mind, excluding that wholesome dread to which I am endeavouring to bring you. _Petrarch_. Indeed, you make me horribly afraid. That my danger was great I have always been aware; and now, in spite of this, you tell me I have very much under-estimated it, and indeed that, compared with what they should be, my fears have been nothing at all. What hope have I then left? _S. Augustine_. It is never time to despair. Be sure of that. Despair is the very last and worst of evils, and therefore I would have you make it a first principle to put it away wholly. _Petrarch_. I knew the truth of the maxim, but in my dread forgot it at the moment. _S. Augustine_. Now give me all your attention, look and listen while I recall words of your favourite seer. "Behold what foemen gather round your walls And at your gates make sharp their gleaming sword To murder you and yours."[1] Look what snares the world spreads for you; what vanities it dangles before your eyes; what vain cares it has to weigh you down. To begin at the beginning, consider what made those most noble spirits among all creatures fall into the abyss of ruin; and take heed lest in like manner you also fall after them. All your forethought, all your care will be needed to save you from this danger. Think how many temptations urge your mind to perilous and soaring flights. They make you dream of nobleness and forget your frailty; they choke your faculties with fumes of self-esteem, until you think of nothing else; they lead you to wax so proud and confident in your own strength that at length you hate your Creator. So you live for self-pleasing and imagine that great things are what you deserve. Whereas if you had a truer remembrance, great blessings ought to make you not proud but humble, when you realise that they came to you for no merit of your own. What need for me to speak of the Eternal Lord God when even to earthly lords men feel their minds more humbly bound if they experience any bounty of theirs which they are conscious of being undeserved. Do we not see them striving to merit afterwards what they feel they should have earned before? Now let your mind realise, as it easily can, on what paltry grounds your pride is set up. You trust in your intellect; you boast of what eloquence much reading has given you; you take pleasure in the beauty of your mortal body. Yet do you not feel that in many things your intellect fails you? Are there not many things in which you cannot rival the skill of the humblest of mankind? Nay, might I not go further and, without mentioning mankind, may I not say that with all your labour and study you will find yourself no match in skill for some of the meanest and smallest of God's creatures? Will you boast, then, of intellect after that? And as for reading, what has it profited you? Of the multitude of things you have perused how many have remained in your mind? How many have struck root and borne fruit in due season? Search well your heart and you will find that the whole of what you know is but like a little shrunken stream dried by the summer heat compared to the mighty ocean. And of what relevance is it to know a multitude of things? Suppose you shall have learned all the circuits of the heavens and the earth, the spaces of the sea, the courses of the stars, the virtues of herbs and stones, the secrets of nature, and then be ignorant of yourself? Of what profit is it? If by the help of Scripture you shall have discovered the right and upward path, what use is it if wrath and passion make you swerve aside into the crooked, downward way? Supposing you shall have learned by heart the deeds of illustrious men of all the ages, of what profit will it be if you yourself day by day care not what you do? What need for me to speak of eloquence? Will not you yourself readily confess how often the putting any confidence in this has proved vain? And, moreover, what boots it that others shall approve what you have said if in the court of your own conscience it stands condemned? For though the applause of those who hear you may seem to yield a certain fruit which is not to be despised, yet of what worth is it after all if in his heart the speaker himself is not able to applaud? How petty is the pleasure that comes from the plaudits of the multitude! And how can a man soothe and flatter others unless he first soothe and flatter himself? Therefore you will easily understand how often you are deluded by that glory you hope for from your eloquence, and how your pride therein rests but upon a foundation of wind. For what can be more childish, nay, might I not say more insane, than to waste time and trouble over matters where all the things themselves are worthless and the words about them vain? What worse folly than to go on blind to one's real defects, and be infatuated with words and the pleasure of hearing one's own voice, like those little birds they tell of who are so ravished with the sweetness of their own song that they sing themselves to death? And furthermore, in the common affairs of every-day life does it not often happen to you to find yourself put to the blush to discover that in the use of words you are no match even for some whom you think are very inferior men? Consider also how in Nature there are many things for which names are altogether wanting, and many more to which names have indeed been given, but to express the beauty of them--as you know by experience--words are altogether inadequate. How often have I heard you lament, how often seen you dumb and dissatisfied, because neither your tongue nor your pen could sufficiently utter ideas, which nevertheless to your reflecting mind were very clear and intelligible? What, then, is this Eloquence, so limited and so weak, which is neither able to compass and bring within its scope all the things that it would, nor yet to hold fast even those things that it has compassed? The Greeks reproach you, and you in turn the Greeks, with having a paucity of words. Seneca, it is true, accounts their vocabulary the richer, but Cicero at the beginning of his treatise _On the Distinctions of Good and Evil_ makes the following declaration, "I cannot enough marvel whence should arise that insolent scorn of our national literature. Though this is not the place to discuss it, yet I will express my conviction, which I have often maintained, not only that the Latin tongue is not poor, as it is the fashion to assert, but that it is, in fact, richer than the Greek;"[2] and as he frequently repeats elsewhere the same opinion, so, especially in the _Tusculan Orations_, he exclaims, "Thou Greek that countest thyself rich in words, how poor art thou in phrases."[3] This is the saying, mark you, of one who know quite well that he was the prince of Latin oratory, and had already shown that he was not afraid to challenge Greece for the palm of literary glory. Let me add that Seneca, so notable an admirer of the Greek tongue, says in his _Declamations_, "All that Roman eloquence can bring forward to rival or excel the pride of Greece is connected with the name of Cicero."[4] A magnificent tribute, but unquestionably true! There is, then, as you see, on the subject of the primacy in Eloquence a very great controversy, not only between you and the Greeks, but among our own most learned writers themselves. There are in our camp those who hold for the Greeks, and it may be among them there are some who hold for us, if at least we may judge from what is reported of the illustrious philosopher Plutarch. In a word, Seneca, who is ours, while doing all justice to Cicero, gives his final verdict for the Greeks, notwithstanding that Cicero is of the contrary opinion. As to my own opinion on the question in debate, I consider that both parties to the controversy have some truth on their side when they accuse both Latin and Greek of poverty of words: and if this judgment be correct in regard to two such famous languages, what hope is there for any other? Bethink you therefore what sort of confidence you can have in your own simple powers when the whole resources of that people of which you are but a little part are adjudged poor, and how ashamed you should be to have spent so much time in pursuing something which cannot be attained, and which, if it could be, would prove after all but vanity itself. I will pass on to other points. Are you perhaps inclined to plume yourself on your physical advantages? But think what a thread they hang upon! What is it you are most pleased with in this way? Is it your good health and strength? But truly nothing is more frail. It is proved by the fatigue you suffer from even little things. The various maladies to which the body is liable; the stings of insects; a slight draught of air, and a thousand other such small vexations all tell the same tale. Will you perchance be taken in by your own good-looking face, and when you behold in the glass your smooth complexion and comely features are you minded to be smitten, entranced, charmed? The story of Narcissus has no warning for you, and, content with gazing only at the outward envelope of the body, you consider not that the eyes of the mind tell you how vile and plain it is within. Moreover, if you had no other warning, the stormy course of life itself, which every day robs you of something, ought to show you how transient and perishing that flower of beauty is. And if, perhaps, which you will hardly dare affirm, you fancy yourself invincible by age, by illness, and whatever else may change the grace of bodily form, you have at least not forgotten that Last Enemy which destroys all, and you will do well to engrave in your inmost heart and mind this word of the satirist-- "'Tis death alone compels us all to see What little things we are."[5] Here, unless I am mistaken, are the causes that inflate your mind with pride, forbid you to recognise your low estate, and keep you from the recollection of death. But others there still are that I now propose to pass in review. _Petrarch._ Stop a little, I beg you, lest, overwhelmed by the weight of so many reproaches, I have no strength or spirit to reply. _S. Augustine._ By all means say on. Gladly will I hold my peace. _Petrarch._ You have astonished me not a little by casting in my teeth a multitude of things of which I am perfectly sure they have never entered my head at all. You allege that I trusted in my own intelligence. But surely the one sign I have given of possessing some little intelligence is that never have I counted on that faculty at all. Shall I pride myself on much reading of books, which with a little wisdom has brought me a thousand anxieties? How can you say I have sought the glory of eloquence, I, who, as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago, am wont above all things to complain that speech is inadequate to my thoughts? Unless you wish to try and prove the contrary, I may say that you know I am always conscious of my own littleness, and that if by chance I have ever thought myself to be anything, such a thought has come but rarely and then only from seeing the ignorance of other men; for, as I often remark, we are reduced to acknowledge, according to Cicero's celebrated phrase, that "what powers we may possess come rather from the feebleness of others than from any merit in ourselves." But even were I endowed as richly as you imagine with those advantages of which you speak, what is there so magnificent about them that I should be vain? I am surely not so forgetful of myself nor so feather-brained as to let myself trouble about cares of that sort. For what use in the world are intellect, knowledge, eloquence, if they can bring no healing to a soul diseased? I remember having given expression already in one of my letters to my sad sense of this truth. As to what you remarked with an air of quasi gravity about my physical advantages, I must confess it makes me smile. That I of all men should be thought to have plumed myself on my mortal and perishing body, when every day of my life I feel in it the ravages of time at work! Heaven save me from such folly! I will not deny that in the days of my youth I took some care to trim my head and to adorn my face; but the taste for that kind of thing has gone with my early years, and I recognise now the truth of that saying of the Emperor Domitian who, writing of himself in a letter to a lady friend, and complaining of the too swift decay of the goodliness of man, said, "Know you that nothing is so sweet, but nothing also is so fleeting, as the beauty of the body."[6] _S. Augustine._ It would be an easy task to refute all you have advanced, but I prefer that your own conscience should send the shaft of shame to your heart rather than words of mine. I will not labour the point or draw the truth from you by torture; but as those who take revenge magnanimously, I will merely prefer a simple request that you will continue to avoid what you profess you have hitherto avoided. If by any chance the fashion of your countenance should at any time have stirred the least motion of conceit, then I beg you to reflect what soon those bodily members must become, though now they please your eye: think how their destiny is to be foul and hideous, and what repulsion they would cause even in yourself were you able to see them then. Then call often to mind this maxim of the Philosopher: "I was born for some higher destiny than to be the slave of my body."[7] Assuredly it is the very climax of folly to see men neglect their real selves in order to cosset the body and limbs in which they dwell. If a man is imprisoned for a little while in some dungeon, dark, damp, and dirty, would he not seem to have lost his senses if he did not shield himself as far as he was able from any contact with the walls and soil? And with the expectation of freedom would he not eagerly listen for the footsteps of his deliverer? But if giving up that expectation, covered with filth and plunged in darkness, he dreads to leave his prison; if he turns all his attention to painting and adorning the walls which shut him in, in a vain endeavour to counteract the nature of his dripping prison-house, will he not rightly be counted a wretched fool? Well, you yourself know and love your prison-house, wretched that you are! And on the very eve of your issuing or being dragged therefrom you chain yourself more firmly in it, labouring to adorn what you ought to despise, if you would follow the advice you yourself had tendered to the father of the great Scipio in your poem called _Africa._ "The bonds and fetters known and suffered long, The clogs on liberty are hateful to us, And the new freedom now attained we love."[8] Wonderful is it if you made others give the counsel which you yourself refuse! But I cannot disguise from you one word in your discourse which to you may seem very humble, but to me seems full of pride and arrogance. _Petrarch._ I am sorry if I have in any way expressed myself arrogantly, but if the spirit is the true rule of one's deeds and words, then my own bears me witness that I intended nothing in that sense. _S. Augustine._ To depreciate others is a kind of pride more intolerable than to exalt oneself above one's due measure; I would much rather see you exalt others and then put yourself above them than degrade all the world in a heap at your feet, and by a refinement of pride fashion for yourself a shield of humanity out of scorn for your neighbour. _Petrarch._ Take it how you will, I profess but small esteem either for others or myself. I am ashamed to tell you what experience has made me think of the majority of mankind. _S. Augustine_. It is very prudent to despise oneself; but it is very dangerous and very useless to despise others. However, let us proceed. Are you aware of what still makes you turn from the right way? _Petrarch._ Pray say anything you like, only do not accuse me of envy. _S. Augustine_. Please God may pride have done you as little hurt as envy! So far as I judge, you have escaped this sin, but I have others whereof to accuse you. _Petrarch_. Still you will not vex me whatever reproaches you may bring. Tell me freely everything that leads me astray. _S. Augustine._ The desire of things temporal. _Petrarch._ Come, come! I truly have never heard anything so absurd. _S. Augustine._ There! you see everything vexes you. You have forgotten your promise. This is not, however, any question of envy. _Petrarch._ No, but of cupidity, and I do not believe there is a man in the world more free of this fault than myself. _S. Augustine._ You are great at self-justification, but, believe me, you are not so clear of this fault as you think you are. _Petrarch._ What? do you mean to say that I, I am not free from the reproach of cupidity? _S. Augustine._ I do, and that you are likewise guilty of ambition. _Petrarch._ Go on, ill-treat me more still, double your reproaches, make full proof of your work of an accuser. I wonder what fresh blow you have in store for me. _S. Augustine._ What is mere truth and right testimony you call accusation and ill-treatment. The satirist was quite right who wrote-- "To speak the truth to men is to accuse."[9] And the saying of the comic poet is equally true-- "'Tis flattery makes friends and candour foes."[10] But tell me, pray, what is the use of this irritation and anger that makes you so on edge? Was it necessary in a life so short to weave such long hopes? "Have no long hopes! life's shortness cries to man."[11] You read that often enough but take no count of it. You will reply, I suppose, that you do this from a tender solicitude for your friends, and so find a fair pretext for your error; but what madness it is, under pretext of friendship to others, to declare war on yourself and treat yourself as an enemy. _Petrarch._ I am neither covetous nor inhuman enough to be without solicitude for my friends, especially for those whose virtue or deserts attach me to them, for it is those whom I admire, revere, love, and compassionate; but, on the other hand, I do not pretend to be generous enough to court my own ruin for the sake of my friends. What I desire is so to manage my affairs as to have a decent subsistence while I live; and as you have delivered a shot at me from Horace, let me also from the same poet put up a shield in self-defence and profess my desire is the same as his,-- "Let me have books and stores for one year hence, Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!"[12] And further how I shape my course so that I may in the same poet's words-- "Pass my old age and not my honour lose, And, if I may, still serve the lyric Muse."[13] Let me own also that I dread very much the rocks ahead if life should be prolonged, and so would provide beforehand for this double wish of mine to blend with my work for the Muses some simpler occupation in household affairs. But this I do with such indifference that it is plain enough I only descend to such necessities because I am so obliged. _Augustine._ I see clearly how these pretexts texts which serve as an excuse for your folly have penetrated deeply into your very spirit. How is it, then, you have not engraved equally deeply in your heart the words of the satirist-- "Why keep such hoarded gold to vex the mind? Why should such madness still delude mankind? To scrape through life on water and dry bread That you may have a fortune when you're dead?"[14] Undoubtedly it is more because you think that it is a fine thing to die in a winding-sheet of purple, and rest in a marble tomb, and leave to your heirs the business of disputing over a great succession, than that you yourself care for the money which wins such advantages. It is a futile trouble, believe me, and quite devoid of good sense. If you will steadily observe human nature, you will discover that in a general way it is content with very little, and, in your case particularly, there is hardly a man who needs less for his satisfaction, unless you had been blinded by prejudices. Doubtless the poet was thinking of the average run of men, or possibly his own actual self, when he said-- "My sorry fare is dogwood fruit; I pluck Wild herbs and roots that in the fields do grow, And a few berries."[15] But, unlike him, you will acknowledge yourself that such a mode of life is far from sorry, and that in fact nothing would be pleasanter if you were to consult only your own taste and not the customs of a deluded world. Why, then, continue to torment yourself? If you order your life as your nature dictates, you were rich long ago, but you never will be able to be rich if you follow the standard of the world; you will always think something wanting, and in 'rushing after it you will find yourself swept away by your passion. Do you remember with what delight you used to wander in the depth of the country? Sometimes, laying yourself down on a bed of turf, you would listen to the water of a brook murmuring over the stones; at another time, seated on some open hill, you would let your eye wander freely over the plain stretched at your feet; at others, again, you enjoyed a sweet slumber beneath the shady trees of some valley in the noontide heat, and revelled in the delicious silence. Never idle, in your soul you would ponder over some high meditation, with only the Muses for your friends--you were never less alone than when in their company, and then, like the old man in Virgil who reckoned himself "As rich askings, when, at the close of day, Home to his cot he took his happy way, And on his table spread his simple fare, Fresh from the meadow without cost or care,"[16] you would come at sunset back to your humble roof; and, contented with your good things, did you not find yourself the richest and happiest of mortal men? _Petrarch._ Ah, well-a-day! I recall it all now, and the remembrance of that time makes me sigh with regret. _S. Augustine._ Why--why do you speak of sighing? And who, pray, is the author of your woes? It is, indeed, your own spirit and none other which too long has not dared to follow the true law of its nature, and has thought itself a prisoner only because it would not break its chain. Even now it is dragging you along like a runaway horse, and unless you tighten the rein it will rush you to destruction. Ever since you grew tired of your leafy trees, of your simple way of life, and society of country people, egged on by cupidity, you have plunged once more into the midst of the tumultuous life of cities. I read in your face and speech what a happy and peaceful life you lived; for what miseries have you not endured since then? Too rebellious against the teachings of experience, you still hesitate! It is without a doubt the bonds of your own sins that keep you back, and God allows that, as you passed your childhood under a harsh muster, so, though you once became free, you have again fallen into bondage, and there will end your miserable old age. Verily, I was at your side once, when, quite young, unstained by avarice or ambition, you gave promise of becoming a great man; now, alas, having quite changed your character, the nearer you get to the end of your journey the more you trouble yourself about provisions for the way. What remains then but that you will be found, when the day comes for you to die--and it may be even now at hand, and certainly cannot be any great way off--you will be found, I say, still hungering after gold, poring half-dead over the calendar? For those anxious cares, which increase day after day, must by necessity at last have grown to a huge figure and a prodigious amount. _Petrarch_. Well, after all, if I foresee the poverty of old age, and gather some provision against that time of weariness, what is there so much to find fault with? _S. Augustine._ Ah! ludicrous anxiety and tragic neglect, to worry and trouble yourself about a time at which you may never arrive and in which you assuredly will not have long to stay, and yet to be quite oblivious of that end at which you cannot help arriving, and of which there is no remedy when you once have reached it. But such is your execrable habit--to care for what's temporal, and be careless for all that's eternal. As for this delusion of providing a shield against old age, no doubt what put it into your head was the verse in Virgil which speaks of "The ant who dreads a destitute old age."[17] And so you have made an ant your mentor and you are as excusable as the satiric poet who wrote-- "Some people, like the ant, fear hunger and cold,"[18] but if you are going to put no limit to the following of ants, you will discover that there is nothing more melancholy and nothing more absurd than to ward off poverty one day by loading yourself with it all your days. _Petrarch._ What will you say next! Do you counsel me to court Poverty? I have no longing for it, but I will bear it with courage if Fortune, who delights to overturn human affairs, reduces me to it. _S. Augustine._ My opinion is that in every condition man should aim at the golden mean. I would not then restrict you to the rules of those who say, "All that is needed for man's life is bread and water; with these none is poor; whosoever desires no more than these will rival in felicity the Father of the Gods."[19] No, I do not tie man's life down to dry bread and water; such maxims are as extreme as they are troublesome and odious to listen to. Also, in regard to your infirmity, what I enjoin is not to over-indulge natural appetite, but to control it. What you already have would be sufficient for your wants if you had known how to be sufficient to yourself. But as it is you are yourself the cause of your own poverty. To heap up riches is to heap up cares and anxieties. This truth has been proved so continually that there is no need to bring more arguments. What a strange delusion, what a melancholy blindness of the soul of man, whose nature is so noble, whose birth is from above, that it will neglect all that is lofty and debase itself to care for the metals of the earth. Every time you have been drawn by these hooks of cupidity you come down from your high meditations to these grovelling thoughts, and do you not feel each time as if hurled from heaven to earth, from the bosom of the stars to a bottomless pit of blackness? _Petrarch_. Yes; in truth, I feel it, and one knows not how to express what I have suffered in my fall. _S. Augustine_. Why, then, are you not afraid of a danger you have so often experienced? And when you were raised up to the higher life, why did you not attach yourself to it more firmly? _Petrarch_. I make all the efforts I can to do so; but inasmuch as the various exigencies of our human lot shake and unsettle me, I am torn away in spite of myself. It is not without reason, I imagine, that the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus a plentiful supply of external goods, way of regarding it is suggested to me not only by the teaching of experience, but by the frequent testimony of wise men whom I need not quote to you. Moreover, although the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the Poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise. _S. Augustine_. I deny not you are right in your view, but the poor way you divide your time stirs my indignation. You had already devoted your whole life to honourable work; if anything compelled you to spend any of your time on other occupations, you regarded it as lost. But I now you only concede to what is Good and Beautiful the moments you can spare from avarice. Any man in the world would desire to reach old age on such terms as that; but what limit or check would be to such a state of mind? Choose for yourself some defined goal, and when you have attained it, then stay there and breathe awhile. Doubtless you know that the saying I am about to quote is from lips of man, but has all the force of a divine oracle-- "The miser's voice for ever cries, Give, give; Then curb your lusts if you would wisely live."[20] _Petrarch._ Neither to want nor to abound, neither to command others or obey them--there you have my heart's wish. _S. Augustine_. Then you must drop your humanity and become God, if you would want nothing. Can you be ignorant that of all the creatures Man is the one that has most wants? _Petrarch_. Many a time have I heard that said, but I would still like to hear it afresh from your lips and lodge it in my remembrance. _S. Augustine._ Behold him naked and unformed, born in wailings and tears, comforted with a few drops of milk, trembling and crawling, needing the hand of another, fed and clothed from the beasts of the field, his body feeble, his spirit restless, subject to all kinds of sickness, the prey of passions innumerable, devoid of reason, joyful to-day, to-morrow sorrowful, in both full of agitation, incapable of mastering himself, unable to restrain his appetite, ignorant of what things are useful to him and in what proportion, knowing not how to control himself in meat or drink, forced with great labour to gain the food that other creatures find ready at their need, made dull with sleep, swollen with food, stupefied with drink, emaciated with watching, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, at once greedy and timid, disgusted with what he has, longing after what he has lost, discontented alike with past, present and future, full of pride in his misery, and aware of his frailty, baser than the vilest worms, his life is short, his days uncertain, his fate inevitable, since Death in a thousand forms is waiting for him at last. _Petrarch._ You have so piled up his miseries and beggary that I feel it were good if I had never been born. _S. Augustine._ Yet, in the midst of such wretchedness and such deep destitution of good in man's estate, you go on dreaming of riches and power such as neither emperors nor kings have ever fully enjoyed. _Petrarch_. Kindly tell me who ever made use of those words? Who spoke either of riches or of power? _S. Augustine._ You imply both, for what greater riches can there be than to lack nothing? What greater power than to be independent of every one else in the world? Certainly those kings and masters of the earth whom you think so rich have wanted a multitude of things. The generals of great armies depend on those whom they seem to command, and, kept in check by their armed legions, they find the very soldiers who render them invincible also render them in turn helpless. Give up, therefore, your dreams of the impossible, and be content to accept the lot of humanity; learn to live in want and in abundance, to command and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend your neck wholly to the rule of Virtue. Then you will be free, wanting nothing, then. you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a king, truly powerful and perfectly happy. _Petrarch_. Now I do indeed repent for all that is past, and I desire nothing. But I am still in bondage to one evil habit and am conscious always of a certain need at the bottom of my heart. _S. Augustine._ Well, to come back to our subject, there is the very thing which keeps you back from the contemplation of death. It is that which makes you harassed with earthly anxieties; you do not lift up your heart at all to higher things. If you will take my counsel you will utterly cast away these anxieties, which are as so many dead weights upon the spirit, and you will find that it is not so hard after all to order your life by your nature, and let that rule and govern you more than the foolish opinions of the crowd. _Petrarch_. I will do so very willingly, but may I ask you to finish what you were beginning to say about ambition, which I have long desired to hear? _S. Augustine_. Why ask me to do what you can quite well do for yourself? Examine your own heart; you will see that among its other faults it is not ambition which holds the least place there. _Petrarch._ It has profited me nothing then to have fled from towns whenever I could, to have thought scorn of the world and public affairs, to have gone into the recesses of the woods and silence of the fields, to have proved my aversion from empty honours, if still I am to be accused of ambition. _S. Augustine._ You renounce many things well,--all you mortal men; but not so much; because you despise them as because you despair of getting them. Hope and desire inflame each other by the mutual stings of those passions, so that when the one grows cold the other dies away, and when one gets warm the other boils over. _Petrarch._ Why, then, should I not hope? Was I quite destitute of any accomplishment? _S. Augustine._ I am not now speaking of your accomplishments, but certainly you had not those by help of which, especially in the present day, men mount to high places; I mean the art of ingratiating yourself in the palaces of the great, the trick of flattery, deceit, promising, lying, pretending, dissembling, and putting up with all kinds of slights and indignities. Devoid of these accomplishments and others of the kind, and seeing clearly that you could not overcome nature, you turned your steps elsewhere. And you acted wisely and with prudence, for, as Cicero expresses it, "to contend against the gods as did the giants, what is it but to make war with nature itself."[21] _Petrarch_. Farewell such honours as these, if they have to be sought by such means! _S. Augustine._ Your words are golden, but you have not convinced me of your innocence, for you do not assert your indifference to honours so much as to the vexations their pursuit involves, like the man who pretended he did not want to see Rome because he really would not endure the trouble of the journey thither. Observe, you have not yet desisted from the pursuit of honour, as you seem to believe and as you try to persuade me. But leave off trying to hide behind your finger, as the saying goes; all your thoughts, all your actions are plain before my eyes: and when you boast of having fled from cities and become enamoured of the woods, I see no real excuse, but only a shifting of your culpability. We travel many ways to the same end, and, believe me, though you have left the road worn by feet of the crowd, you still direct your feet by a side-path towards this same ambition that you say you have thought scorn of; it is repose, solitude, a total disregard of human affairs, yes, and your own activities also, which just at present take you along that chosen path, but the end and object is glory. _Petrarch_. You drive me into a corner whence I think, however, I could manage to escape; but, as the time is short and we must discriminate between many things, let us proceed, if you have no objection. _S. Augustine_. Follow me, then, as I go forward. We will say nothing of gourmandising, for which you have no more inclination than a harmless pleasure in an occasional meeting with a few friends at the hospitable board. But I have no fear for you on this score, for when the country has regained its denizen, now snatched away to the towns, these temptations will disappear in a moment; and I have noticed, and have pleasure in acknowledging, that when you are alone you live in such a simple way as to surpass your friends and neighbours in frugality and temperance. I leave on one side anger also, though you often get carried away by it more than is reasonable, yet at the same time, thanks to your sweet natural temperament, you commonly control the motions of your spirit, and recall the advice of Horace-- "Anger's a kind of madness, though not long; Master the passion, since it's very strong; And, if you rule it not, it will rule you, So put the curb on quickly."[22] _Petrarch._ That saying of the poet, and other words of philosophy like it, have helped me a little, I own; but what has helped me above all is the thought of the shortness of life. What insensate folly to spend in hating and hurting our fellow-men the few days we pass among them! Soon enough the last day of all will arrive, which will quite extinguish this flame in human breasts and put an end to all our hatred, and if we have desired for any of them nothing worse than death, our evil wish will soon be fulfilled. Why, then, seek to take one's life or that of others? Why let pass unused the better part of a time so short? When the days are hardly long enough for honest joys of this life, and for meditating on that which is to come, no matter what economy of time we practise, what good is there in robbing any of them of their right and needful use, and turning them to instruments of sorrow and death for ourselves and others? This reflection has helped me, when I found myself under any temptation to anger, not to fall utterly under its dominion, or if I fell has helped me quickly to recover; but hitherto I have not been able quite to arm myself at all points from some little gusts of irritation. _S. Augustine._ As I am not afraid that this wind of anger will cause you to make shipwreck of yourself or others, I agree willingly that without paying attention to the promises of the Stoics, who set out to extirpate root and branch all the maladies of the soul, you content yourself with the milder treatment of the Peripatetics. Leaving, then, on one side for the moment these particular failings, I hasten to treat of others more dangerous than these and against which you will need to be on guard with more care. _Petrarch_. Gracious Heaven, what is yet to come that is more dangerous still? _S. Augustine._ Well, has the sin of lust never touched you with its flames? _Petrarch_. Yes, indeed, at times so fiercely us to make me mourn sorely that I was not born without feelings. I would sooner have been a senseless stone than be tormented by so many stings of the flesh. _S. Augustine_. Ah, there is that which turns you most aside from the thought of things divine. For what does the doctrine of the heavenly Plato show but that the soul must separate itself far from the passion of the flesh and tread down its imaginings before it can rise pure and free to the contemplation of the mystery of the Divine; for otherwise the thought of its mortality will make it cling to those seducing charms. You know what I mean, and you have learned this truth in Plato's writings, to the study of which you said not long ago you had given yourself up with ardour. _Petrarch_. Yes, I own I had given myself to studying him with great hopefulness and desire, but the novelty of a strange language and the sudden departure of my teacher cut short my purpose.[23] For the rest this doctrine of which you speak is very well known to me from your own writings and those of the Platonists. _S. Augustine._ It matters little from whom you learned the truth, though it is a fact that the authority of a great master will often have a profound influence. _Petrarch._ Yes, in my own case I must confess I feel profoundly the influence of a man of whom Cicero in his _Tusculan Orations_ made this remark, which has remained graven in the bottom of my heart: "When Plato vouchsafes not to bring forward any proof (you see what deference I pay him), his mere authority would make me yield consent."[24] Often in reflecting on this heavenly genius it has appeared to me an injustice when the disciples of Pythagoras dispense their chief from submitting proofs, that Plato should be supposed to have less liberty than he. But, not to be carried away from our subject, authority, reason and experience alike have for a long time so much commended this axiom of Plato to me that I do not believe anything more true or more truly holy could be said by any man. Every time I have raised myself up, thanks to the hand of God stretched out to me, I have recognised with infinite joy, beyond belief, who it was that then preserved me and who had cast me down in times of old. Now that I am once more fallen into my old misery, I feel with a keen sense of bitterness that failing which again has undone me. And this I tell you, that you may see nothing strange in my saying I had put Plato's maxim to the proof. _S. Augustine._ Indeed, I think it not strange, for I have been witness of your conflicts; I have seen you fall and then once again rise up, and now that you are down once more I determined from pity to bring you my succour. _Petrarch._ I am grateful for your compassionate feeling, but of what avail is any human succour? _S. Augustine._ It avails nothing, but the succour of God is much every way. None can be chaste except God give him the grace of chastity.[25] You must therefore implore this grace from Him above all, with humbleness, and often it may be with tears. He is wont never to deny him who asks as he should. _Petrarch_. So often have I done it that I fear I am as one too importunate. _S. Augustine_. But you have not asked with due humbleness or singleness of heart. You have ever kept a corner for your passions to creep in; you have always asked that your prayers may be granted presently. I speak from experience, for I did likewise in my old life. I said, "Give me chastity, but not now. Put it off a little while; the time will soon come. My life is still in all its vigour; let it follow its own course, obey its natural laws; it will feel it more of a shame later, to return to its youthful folly. I will give up this failing when the course of time itself shall have rendered me less inclined that way, and when satiety will have delivered me from the fear of going back."[26] In talking thus do you not perceive that you prayed for one thing but wished another in your heart? _Petrarch_. How so? _S. Augustine._ Because to ask for a thing to-morrow is to put it aside for to-day. _Petrarch._ With tears have I often asked for it to-day. My hope was that after breaking the chain of my passions and casting away the misery of life, I should escape safe and sound, and after so many storms of vain anxieties, I might swim ashore in some haven of safety; but you see, alas, how many shipwrecks I have suffered among the same rocks and shoals, and how I shall still suffer more if I am left to myself. _S. Augustine._ Trust me, there has always been something wanting in your prayer; otherwise the Supreme Giver would have granted it or, as in the case of the Apostle, would have only denied you to make you more perfect in virtue and convince you entirely of your own frailty.[27] _Petrarch._ That is my conviction also; and I will go on praying constantly, unwearied, unashamed, undespairing. The Almighty, taking pity on my sorrows, will perchance lend an ear to my prayer, sent up daily to His throne, and even as He would not have denied His grace if my prayers had been pure, so He will also purify them. _S. Augustine._ You are quite right, but redouble your efforts; and, as men wounded and fallen in battle raise themselves on their elbow, so do you keep a look out on all sides for the dangers that beset you, for fear that some foe; unseen come near and do you hurt yet more, where you lie on the ground. In the mean time, pray instantly for the aid of Him who is able to raise you up again. He will perchance be nearer to you just then when you think Him furthest off. Keep ever in mind that saying of Plato we were speaking of just now, "Nothing so much hinders the knowledge of the Divine as lust and the burning desire of carnal passion." Ponder well, therefore, this doctrine; it is the very basis of our purpose that we have in hand. _Petrarch._ To let you see how much I welcome this teaching, I have treasured it with earnest care, not only when it dwells in the court of Plato's royal demesne, but also where it lurks hidden in the forests of other writers, and I have kept note in my memory of the very place where it was first perceived by my mind. _S. Augustine._ I wonder what is your meaning. Do you mind being more explicit? _Petrarch._ You know Virgil: you remember through what dangers he makes his hero pass in that last awful night of the sack of Troy? _S. Augustine._ Yes, it is a topic repeated over and over again in all the schools. He makes him recount his adventures thus-- "What tongue could tell the horrors of that night, Paint all the forms of death, or who have tears Enough to weep so many wretched wights? Hath the great city that so long was queen Fallen at last? Behold in all the streets The bodies of the dead by thousands strewn, And in their homes and on the temple's steps! Yet is there other blood than that of Troy, What time her vanquished heroes gathering up Their quenchless courage smite anon their foes, They, though triumphant, fall. Everywhere grief, Dread everywhere, and in all places Death!"[28] _Petrarch._ Now wherever he wandered accompanied by the goddess of Love, through crowding foes, through burning fire, he could not discern, though his eyes were open, the wrath of the angered gods, and so long as Venus was speaking to him he only had understanding for things of earth. But as soon as she left him you remember what happened; he immediately beheld the frowning faces of the deities, and recognised what dangers beset him round about. "Then I beheld the awe-inspiring form Of gods in anger for the fall of Troy."[29] From which my conclusion is that commerce with Venus takes away the vision of the Divine. _S. Augustine._ Among the clouds themselves you have clearly discerned the light of truth. It is in this way that truth abides in the fictions of the poets, and one perceives it shining out through the crevices of their thought. But, as we shall have to return to this question later on, let us reserve what we have to say for the end of our discourse. _Petrarch._ That I may not get lost in tracks unknown to me, may I ask when you propose to return to this point? _S. Augustine._ I have not yet probed the deepest wounds of your soul, and I have purposely deferred to do so, in order that, coming at the end, my counsels may be more deeply graven in your remembrance. In another dialogue we will treat more fully of the subject of the desires of the flesh, on which we have just now lightly touched. _Petrarch._ Go on, then, now as you proposed. _S. Augustine._ Yes, there need be nothing to hinder me, unless you are obstinately bent on stopping me. _Petrarch._ Indeed, nothing will please me better than to banish for ever every cause of dispute from the earth. I have never engaged in disputation, even on things perfectly familiar, without regretting it; for the contentions that arise, even between friends, have a certain character of sharpness and hostility contrary to the laws of friendship. But pass on to those matters in which you think I shall welcome your good counsel. _S. Augustine._ You are the victim of a terrible plague of the soul--melancholy; which the moderns call _accidie_, but which in old days used to be called _ægritudo._ _Petrarch._ The very name of this complaint makes me shudder. _S. Augustine._ Nor do I wonder, for you have endured its burden long enough. _Petrarch._ Yes, and though in almost all other diseases which torment me there is mingled a certain false delight, in this wretched state everything is harsh, gloomy, frightful. The way to despair is for ever open, and everything goads one's miserable soul to self-destruction. Moreover, while other passions attack me only in bouts, which, though frequent, are but short and for a moment, this one usually has invested me so closely that it clings to and tortures me for whole days and nights together. In such times I take no pleasure in the light of day, I see nothing, I am as one plunged in the darkness of hell itself, and seem to endure death in its most cruel form. But what one may call the climax of the misery is, that I so feed upon my tears and sufferings with a morbid attraction that I can only be rescued from it by main force and in despite of myself. _S. Augustine._ So well do you know your symptoms, so familiar are you become with their cause, that I beg you will tell me what is it that depresses you most at the present hour? Is it the general course of human affairs? Is it some physical trouble, or some disgrace of fortune in men's eyes? _Petrarch._ It is no one of these separately. Had I only been challenged to single combat, I would certainly have come off victorious; but now, as it is, I am besieged by a whole host of enemies. _S. Augustine_. I pray you will tell me fully all that torments you. _Petrarch._ Every time that fortune pushes me back one step, I stand firm and courageous, recalling to myself that often before I have been struck in the same way and yet have come off conqueror; if, after that, she presently deals me a sterner blow, I begin to stagger somewhat; if then she returns to the charge a third and fourth time, driven by force, I retreat, not hurriedly but step by step, to the citadel of Reason. If fortune still lays siege to me there with all her troops, and if, to reduce me to surrender, she piles up the sorrows of our human lot, the remembrance of my old miseries and the dread of evils yet to come, then, at lost, hemmed in on all sides, seized with terror at these heaped-up calamities, I bemoan my wretched fate, and feel rising in my very soul this bitter disdain of life. Picture to yourself some one beset with countless enemies, with no hope of escape or of pity, with no comfort anywhere, with every one and everything against him; his foes bring up their batteries, they mine the very ground beneath his feet, the towers are already falling, the ladders are at the gates, the grappling-hooks are fastened to the walls, the fire is seen crackling through the roofs, and, at sight of those gleaming swords on every side, those fierce faces of his foes, and that utter ruin that is upon him, how should he not be utterly dismayed and overwhelmed, since, even if life itself should be left, yet to men not quite bereft of every feeling the loss of liberty alone is a mortal stroke? _S. Augustine._ Although your confession is a little confused, I make out that your misfortunes all proceed from a single false conception which has in the past claimed and in futuro will still claim innumerable victims. You have a bad conceit of yourself. _Petrarch._ Yes, truly, a very bad one. _S. Augustine._ And why? _Petrarch._ Not for one, but a thousand reasons. _S. Augustine._ You are like people who on the slightest offence rake up all the old grounds of quarrel they ever had. _Petrarch._ In my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten: my sufferings are all quite fresh, and if anything by chance were made better through time, Fortune has so soon redoubled her strokes that the open wound has never been perfectly healed over. I cannot, moreover, rid myself of that hate and disdain of our life which I spoke of. Oppressed with that, I cannot but be grieved and sorrowful exceedingly. That you call this grief _accidie_ or _ægritudo_ makes no difference; in substance we mean one and the same thing. _S. Augustine._ As from what I can understand the evil is so deep-seated, it will do no good to heal it slightly, for it will soon throw out more shoots. It must be entirely rooted up. Yet I know not where to begin, so many complications alarm me. But to make the task of dividing the matter easier, I will examine each point in detail. Tell me, then, what is it that has hurt you most? _Petrarch_. Whatever I see, or hear, or feel. _S. Augustine._ Come, come, does nothing please you? _Petrarch_. Nothing, or almost nothing. _S. Augustine._ Would to God that at least the better things in your life might be dear, to you. But tell me what is it that is to you the most displeasing of all? I beg you give me an answer. _Petrarch._ I have already answered. _S. Augustine._ It is this melancholy I spoke of which is the true cause of all your displeasure with yourself. _Petrarch._ I am just as displeased with what I see in others as with what I see in myself. _S. Augustine._ That too comes from the same source. But to get a little order into our discourse, does what you see in yourself truly displease you as much as you say? _Petrarch._ Stop worrying me with your petty questions, that are more than I know how to reply to. _S. Augustine._ I see, then, that those things which make many other people envy you are nevertheless in your own eyes of no account at all? _Petrarch._ Any one who envies a wretch like me must indeed himself be wretched. _S. Augustine._ But now please tell me what is it that most displeases you? _Petrarch._ I am sure I do not know. _S. Augustine._ If I guess right will you acknowledge it? _Petrarch._ Yes, I will, quite freely. _S. Augustine._ You are vexed with Fortune. _Petrarch._ And am I not right to hate her? Proud, violent, blind, she makes a mock of mankind. _S. Augustine._ It is an idle complaint. Let us look now at your own troubles. If I prove you have complained unjustly, will you consent to retract? _Petrarch._ You will find it very hard to convince me. If, however, you prove me in the wrong, I will give in. _S. Augustine._ You find that Fortune is to you too unkind. _Petrarch_. Not too unkind; too unjust, too proud, too cruel. _S. Augustine_. The comic poets have more than one comedy called "The Grumbler." There are scores of them. And now you are making yourself one of the crowd. I should rather find you in more select company. But as this subject is so very threadbare that no one can add anything new on it, will you allow me to offer you an old remedy for an old complaint? _Petrarch_. As you wish. _S. Augustine_. Well then, has poverty yet made you endure hunger and thirst and cold? _Petrarch_. No, Fortune has not yet brought me to this pass. _S. Augustine._ Yet such is the hard lot of a great many people every day of their lives. Is it not? _Petrarch_. Use some other remedy than this if you can, for this brings me no relief. I am not one of those who in their own misfortunes rejoice to behold the crowd of other wretched ones who sob around them; and not seldom I mourn as much for the griefs of others as for my own. _S. Augustine_. I wish no man to rejoice in witnessing the misfortunes of others, but they ought at any rate to give him some consolation, and teach him not to complain of his own lot. All the world cannot possibly occupy the first and best place. How could there be any first unless there was also a second following after? Only be thankful, you mortal men, if you are not reduced to the last of all; and that of so many blows of outrageous Fortune you only bear her milder strokes. For the rest, to those who are doomed to endure the extremes of misery, one must offer more potent remedies than you have need of whom Fortune has wounded but a little. That which casts men down into these doleful moods is that each one, forgetting his own condition, dreams of the highest place, and, like every one else, as I just now pointed out, cannot possibly attain it; then when he fails he is discontented. If they only knew the sorrows that attend on greatness they would recoil from that which they now pursue. Let me call as witnesses those who by dint of toil have reached the pinnacle, and who no sooner have arrived than they forthwith bewail the too easy accomplishment of their wish. This truth should be familiar to every one, and especially to you, to whom long experience has shown that the summit of rank, surrounded as it is with trouble and anxieties, is only deserving of pity. It follows that no earthly lot of man is free from complaint, since those who have attained what they desire and those who have missed it alike show some reason for discontent. The first allege they have been cheated, and the second that they have suffered neglect. Take Seneca's advice then, "When you see how many people are in front of you, think also how many are behind. If you would be reconciled with Providence and your own lot in life, think of all those you have surpassed;" and as the same wise man says in the same place, "Set a goal to your desires such as you cannot overleap, even if you wish." _Petrarch._ I have long ago set such a goal to my desires, and, unless I am mistaken, a very modest one; but in the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth? _S. Augustine._ Can your peace of mind be disturbed by the opinion of the crowd, whose judgment is never true, who never call anything by its right name? But unless my recollection is at fault, you used to look down on their opinion. _Petrarch._ Never, believe me, did I despise it more than I do now. I care as much for what the crowd thinks of me as I care what I am thought of by the beasts of the field. _S. Augustine._ Well, then? _Petrarch._ What raises my spleen is that having, of all my contemporaries whom I know, the least exalted ambitions, not one of them has encountered so many difficulties as I have in the accomplishment of my desires. Most assuredly I never aspired to the highest place; I call the spirit of Truth as witness who judges us, who sees all, and who has always read my most secret thoughts. She knows very well that whenever after the manner of men I have gone over in my mind all the degrees and conditions of our human lot. I have never found in the highest place that tranquillity and serenity of soul which I place above all other goods; and for that matter, having a horror of a life full of disquiet and care, I have ever chosen, in my modest judgment, some middle position, and given, not lip-service, but the homage of my heart to that truth expressed by Horace-- "Whoso with little wealth will live content, Easy and free his days shall all be spent; His well-built house keeps out the winter wind, Too modest to excite an envious mind."[30] And I admire the reasons he gives in the same Ode not less than the sentiment itself. "The tallest trees most fear the tempest's might, The highest towers come down with most affright, The loftiest hills feel first the thunder smite." Alas! it is just the middle place that it has never been my lot to enjoy. _S. Augustine._ And what if that which you think is a middle position is in truth below you? What if as a matter of fact you have for a long while enjoyed a really middle place, enjoyed it abundantly? Nay, what if you have in truth left the middle far behind, and are become to a great many people a man more to be envied than despised? _Petrarch._ Well, if they think my lot one to be envied, I think the contrary. _S. Augustine._ Yes, your false opinion is precisely the cause of all your miseries, and especially of this last. As Cicero puts it, "You must flee Charybdis, with all hands to the oars, and sails as well!"[31] _Petrarch._ Whither can I flee? where direct my ship? In a word, what am I to think except what I see before my eyes? _S. Augustine._ You only see from side to side where your view is limited. If you look behind you will discover a countless throng coming after, and that you are somewhat nearer to the front rank than to that in the rear, but pride and stubbornness suffer you not to turn your gaze behind you. _Petrarch._ Nevertheless from time to time I have done so, and have noticed many people coming along behind. I have no cause to blush at my condition, but I complain of having so many cares. I deplore, if I may yet again make use of a phrase of Horace, that I must live "only from day to day."[32] As to this restlessness of which I have suffered more than enough, I gladly subscribe to what the same poet says in the same place. "What prayers are mine? O may I yet possess The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less! Let the few years that Fate may grant me still Be all my own, not held at others' will."[33] Always in a state of suspense, always uncertain of the future, Fortune's favours have no attraction for me. Up to now, as you see, I have lived always in dependence on others; it is the bitterest cup of all. May heaven grant me some peace in what is left of my old age, and that the mariner who has lived so long amid the stormy waves may die in port! _S. Augustine._ So then in this great whirlpool of human affairs, amid so many vicissitudes, with the future all dark before you; in a word, placed as you are at the caprice of Fortune, you will be the only one of so many millions of mankind who shall live a life exempt from care! Look what you are asking for, O mortal man! look what you demand! As for that complaint you have brought forward of never having lived a life of your own, what it really amounts to is not that you have lived in poverty, but more or less in subservience. I admit, as you say, that it is a thing very troublesome. However, if you look around you will find very few men who have lived a life of their own. Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others. To quote you a striking instance, Julius Cæsar, of whom some one has reported this true but arrogant saying, "The human race only lives for a small number,"[34] Julius Cæsar, after he had subdued the human race to live for himself alone, did himself live for other people. Perhaps you will ask me for whom did he live? and I reply, for those who slew him--for Brutus, Cimber, and other traitorous heads of that conspiracy, for whom his inexhaustible munificence proved too small to satisfy their rapacity. _Petrarch_. I must admit you have brought me to my senses, and I will never any more complain either of my obligations to others or of my poverty. _S. Augustine._ Complain rather of your want of wisdom, for it is this alone that can obtain for you liberty and true riches. For the rest, the man who quietly endures to go without the cause of those good effects, and then makes complaint of not having them, cannot truly be said to have any intelligent understanding of either the cause or the effects. But now tell me what is it that makes you suffer, apart from what we have been speaking of? Is it any weakness of health or any secret trouble? _Petrarch_. I confess that my body has always been a burden every time I think of myself; but when I cast my eyes on the unwieldiness of other people's bodies, I acknowledge that I have a fairly obedient slave. I would to Heaven I could say as much of my soul, but I am afraid that in it there is what is more than a match for me. _S. Augustine_. May it please God to bring that also under the rule of reason. But to come back to your body, of what do you complain? _Petrarch._ Of that of which most other people also complain. I charge it with being mortal, with implicating me in its sufferings, loading me with its burdens, asking me to sleep when my soul is awake, and subjecting me to other human necessities which it would be tedious to go through. _S. Augustine._ Calm yourself, I entreat you, and remember you are a man. Presently your agitation will cease. If any other thing troubles you, tell me. _Petrarch._ Have you never heard how cruelly Fortune used me? This stepdame, who in a single day with her ruthless hand laid low all my hopes, all my resources, my family and home?[35] _S. Augustine._ I see your tears are running down, and I pass on. The present is not the time for instruction, but only for giving warning; let, then, this simple one suffice. If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which; you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to nought along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field for long meditation. _Petrarch._ Who shall find words to utter my daily disgust for this place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns,[36] the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collected? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle --streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of characters--such diverse rôles in life--the endless clamour of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets? All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student's habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit. "Now," I say in mockery, "now betake yourself to noble thoughts "-- "Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre."[37] S. _Augustine._ That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study, for as the same poet says-- "Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade."[38] And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words-- "The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse, And bards the noisy life of towns refuse."[39] If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca's letter[40] on this subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also on "Tranquillity of Soul"; you have beside, for combating this mental malady, an excellent book of Cicero's which sums up the discussions of the third day in his _Tusculan Orations_, and is dedicated to Brutus.[41] _Petrarch._ You know I have read all that work and with great attention. _S. Augustine_. And have you got no help from it? _Petrarch._ Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes. _S. Augustine._ This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life, which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the fruit of your reading. _Petrarch._ What kind of notes? _S. Augustine._ Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control. _Petrarch._ Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself.[42] In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.[43] It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high--what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil's words-- "There, in a cave profound, King Æolus Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind, Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand."[44] So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,--who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line-- "And calms their passion and allays their wrath."[45] _S. Augustine_. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth. But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away. By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero-- "The fount and head of all miseries."[46] Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins--always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair--then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain. As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will find the same result easily if you will but first calm down the tumult of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world. And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has oppressed your soul. _Petrarch_. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite overthrown. _S. Augustine_. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and be more reconciled to your fortune? _Petrarch_. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty.[47] And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous orator. Sallust has said of fortune that "all things are under her dominion."[48] And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that "she is the mistress; of human affairs."[49] For myself, perhaps I will declare what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did. _S. Augustine_. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you, and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion? _Petrarch._ With my whole heart I adore the very number three itself, not so much because the three Graces are contained in it, as because it is held to be nearest of kin to the Deity; which is not only the persuasion of yourself and other professors of the true faith, who place all your faith in the Trinity, but also that of Gentile philosophers who have a traditional use of the same number in worshipping their own deities. And my beloved Virgil seems to have been conversant with this when he wrote-- "Uneven number to the gods is dear."[50] For what goes before makes it clear that three is the number to which he alludes. I will therefore presently await from your hands the third part of this your threefold gift. [1] _Æneid_, viii. 385-86. [2] _De bonis et malis_, i. 3. [3] _Tusculan Orations_, ii. 15. But Cicero's words are more guarded, "_inops interdum._" [4] _Declamations_, i. [5] Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 172-73. [6] Suetonius Domitian, xviii. [7] Seneca, _Epist.,_ 65. [8] Scipio is speaking of the souls admitted to heaven, freed from the body. _Africa,_ i. 329. [9] Juvenal, i. 161 (not correctly quoted). [10] Terence L'Audrienne, 68. [11] Horace, _Odes_, i. 4, 15. [12] Horace, _Epist._ i. 18, 109. Conington's translation. [13] Horace, _Odes_, I. xxxi. 19, 20. [14] Juvenal, _Sat.,_ xiv. 135. [15] _Æneid,_ iii. 629. [16] _Georgics,_ iv. 132. [17] _Georgics_, i. 106. [18] Juvenal, vi. 361. [19] Seneca, _Epist.,_ xxv. [20] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 2, 56. [21] _De Senectute,_ xi. [22] Horace, _Epist._ i. 2, 62-3. [23] Petrarch refers to a Calabrian monk who had begun giving him lessons in Greek, but left him on being appointed to a bishopric. [24] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 21. [25] Wisdom, viii. 21. [26] _Cor_. xii. 9. [27] _Confessions_, viii. 7. [28] _Æneid_, ii. 361-9. [29] _Æneid_, ii. 622. [30] Horace, _Odes,_ xi. 10, 6-8. [31] _Tusculan Orations,_ iii. 11. [32] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 110. [33] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 106-8. [34] Lucian, 343. [35] He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence, and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo. [36] Avignon. [37] Horace, _Epist._, ii. 2, 76. [38] _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77 (Conington). [39] Petrarch's _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77. [40] Seneca's _Letters,_ lvi. [41] _Tusculan Orations,_ cxi. [42] _Æneid,_ i. 58. [43] _Ibid.,_ vi. 730. [44] _Ibid.,_ i. 52-57. [45] _Æneid_ i. 57. [46] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 38. [47] _Æneid,_ viii. 334. [48] _Pro Marcello,_ ii. [49] _Catilina_, viii. [50] _Eclogue_, vii. 75. DIALOGUE THE THIRD PETRARCH--S. AUGUSTINE _S. Augustine_. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and contradiction. _Petrarch._ You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you may still have to say. _S. Augustine._ I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without flinching a severer handling of the trouble. _Petrarch._ Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the surgeon's hand. _S. Augustine_. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is. In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains. Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain your freedom by breaking your chains. _Petrarch_. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am unconscious? _S. Augustine_. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and, what is most sad of all, you glory in them! _Petrarch._ What may these chains be of which you speak? _S. Augustine._ Love and glory. _Petrarch._ Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you? _S. Augustine._ Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed. All the other things that held you back were less strong and also less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good. Nevertheless I mean to try. _Petrarch._ Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul? _S. Augustine._ Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right? _Petrarch._ I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of all. _Augustine._ Let us take them separately for the present, while I endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately. Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not hold it to be the height of all madness? _Petrarch._ To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest action of the soul. _S. Augustine._ Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view you have put forward? _Petrarch._ If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed? Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is hardly any greater blessing to it; if it so happen that you hold an opposite view, let each one follow his own feeling, for, as you are well aware, truth is a large field and every man should have freedom to judge for himself. _S. Augustine_. In matters directly contradictory opinions also may be diverse. But truth itself is one and always the same. _Petrarch_. I admit that is so. But what makes us go wrong is that we bind ourselves obstinately to old opinions, and will not easily part from them. _S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you may think as wisely on the whole matter of love as you do on this point. _Petrarch_. To speak briefly, I think I am so certainly right that those who think the opposite I believe to be quite out of their senses. _S. Augustine_. I should certainly maintain that to take for truth some ancient falsehood, and to take as falsehood some newly-discovered truth, as though all authority for truth were a matter of time, is the very climax of madness. _Petrarch._ You are wasting your labour. Whoever asserts that view of love I shall never believe him. And I will rest on Cicero's saying, "If I err here I err willingly, and I shall never consent to part with this error as long as I live."[1] _S. Augustine._ When Cicero uses those words he is speaking of the immortality of the soul, and referring to it as the noblest of conceptions, and declaring his own belief in it to be so firm that he would not endure to listen to any one who maintained the contrary. You, however, to urge the ignoblest and most false of all opinions, make use of those same terms. Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal, it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human nature being what it is. But you see what will be the consequences of that error in which you stand; it will precipitate your soul into all manner of folly, when shame, and fear, even reason, that now acts as some check on passion, and the knowledge of truth itself shall all have disappeared. _Petrarch._ I have already told you you were wasting your time. My own remembrance tells mo that I have never loved anything to be ashamed of, and, on the contrary, have ever loved what is most noble. _S. Augustine._ Even noble things may be loved in a shameful way; it is beyond doubt. _Petrarch._ Neither in the object of love nor in the manner of loving am I guilty. So you may as well give up tormenting me. _S. Augustine._ Well, well! Do you wish, like those with fever on the brain, to die laughing and joking? Or will you rather take some remedy for your mind so pitiable and so far from its true health? _Petrarch._ I will not refuse a remedy if you will prove to me that I am ill, but, when a man is quite well, to begin taking remedies is often fatal. _S. Augustine._ As soon as you have reached the stage of convalescence you will perceive quickly enough, as men generally do, that you have been seriously ill. _Petrarch._ After all, I cannot but show deference to one who often in the past, and especially in these last two days, has given me proof how good were his counsels. So please go on. _S. Augustine._ In the first place I ask you to forgive me if, compelled by the subject, I have to deal severely with what has been so delightful to you. For I cannot but foresee that the truth will sound bitterly in your ears. _Petrarch_. Just one word before you begin. Do you thoroughly know the matter you are to touch upon? _S. Augustine._ I have gone into it all carefully beforehand. It is about a mortal woman, in admiring and celebrating whom you have, alas! spent a large part of your life. That a mind like yours should have felt such an insensate passion and for so long a time does greatly astonish me. _Petrarch_. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form and motion is not as that of others. Consider this again and again, I entreat you, and I trust you may have understanding in what words to speak. _S. Augustine._ Ah! out of all reason have you grown! Have you then for sixteen long years been feeding: with false joys this flame of your heart? Of a truth not longer did Italy once suffer the assaults of her most famous enemy, the great Hannibal; nor did she then endure more frequent onsets of her would-be lover, nor was consumed with more furious fires. You to-day carry within you as hot a flame of passion, you endure as fierce stings. Yet was there found one who forced him to retreat and, though late, to take his leave! But who shall expel this invader from your soul if you yourself forbid him to depart; if you of your own will invite him to stay long with you; if you, unhappy as you are, delight in your own calamity? Far other will be your thoughts when the fatal day shall come that will close for ever those eyes that are now so pleasing to you to look upon; when you shall see that face and those pale limbs changed by death; then you will be filled with shame to have so knit your mortal affections to a perishing body such as this, and what now you so obstinately maintain you will then blush to remember. _Petrarch_. Heaven forbid any such misery. I shall not see your threats fulfilled. _S. Augustine_. They will inevitably come to pass. _Petrarch_. I know it. But the stars in their courses will not so fight against me as to prevent the order of Nature by hastening her death like that. First came I into this world and I shall be first to depart. _S. Augustine._ I think you will not have forgotten that time when you feared the contrary event, and made a song of your beloved as if she were presently to die, a song full of moving sorrow. _Petrarch._ Certainly I remember very well, but the thought that filled me then with grief, and the memory of which makes me shiver, was a jealous indignation at the bare possibility of my outliving her who is the best part of my life and whose presence makes all its sweetness. For that is the motive of that song; I remember it well, and how I was overcome with tears. Its spirit is still with me, if with you perchance are the words. _S. Augustine._ I was not complaining how many tears the fear of her death made you shed, nor of how much grief you felt. I was only concerned that you should realise how this fear of yours in the past may certainly return; and more easily, in that every day is a step nearer to death, and that that fair form, worn by sicknesses and the bearing of many children, has already lost much of its first strength. _Petrarch._ I also am borne down with cares and am worn with age, and in that onward path towards death I have outrun her whom I love. _S. Augustine._ What folly it is to calculate the order of death by that of birth! For what are those sad lamentations of the old but because of the early deaths of their young children? What is it that yonder aged nurse is grieving over but that she sees the loss of her little nursling-- "Whom some dark day Has stripped of his sweet life; and cruel fate Snatched from his mother's breast and covered him In a too early grave."[2] In your own case the small number of years by which you have preceded her gives you a very uncertain hope that you will be gone before the fire of your passion shall be extinguished; and yet you indulge the fiction that this order of Nature is unchangeable. _Petrarch_. Not exactly unchangeable, but I pray without ceasing that it may not be changed, and whenever I think of death I remember Ovid's line-- "Late may her time arrive, and after mine."[3] _S. Augustine._ I can listen to these trifles no more; but since you now admit that she may possibly die before you, I ask what should you say if she really were dead? _Petrarch_. What should I say but that such a calamity would be the climax of all my miseries? Yet I should try and comfort myself with what was past. But may the winds bear away the words from our lips and the hurricane scatter such an omen to the ends of the earth! _S. Augustine._ Ah, blindfold one! you see not yet what foolishness it is so to subject your soul to things of earth, that kindle in it the flames of desire, that have no power to give it rest, that cannot endure; and, while promising to charm you with their sweetness, torment you with perpetual agitations. _Petrarch_. If you have any more effectual remedy, I beg you will point it out. You will never frighten me with talk like this; for I am not, as you suppose, infatuated with any creature that is mortal. You might have known that I have loved her physical charm loss than her soul, that what has captivated me has been a life above that of ordinary lives, the witnessing of which has shown me how the blessed live above. Therefore, since you inquire of me (and the mere question is a torture to listen to) what I should do supposing she were to leave me and be the first to die--well, I should try and console myself in sorrow with Lælius, the wisest of the Romans. With him I should say, "It is her goodness that I loved and that is not dead;" and I would say to myself those other words that he pronounced after the death of him for whom he had conceived an affection surpassing all common affection.[4] _S. Augustine._ You retire to Error's inaccessible fastness, and it will not be easy to dislodge you. But as I notice you are inclined to listen much more patiently to the truth about yourself and her, sing the praises of your darling lady as much as you will, and I will gainsay nothing. Were she a queen, a saint-- "A very goddess, or to Apollo's self Own sister, or a mother of the nymphs,"[5] yet all her excellence will in nowise excuse your error. _Petrarch_. Let us see what fresh quarrel you seek with me? _S. Augustine._ It is unquestionably true that oftentimes the loveliest things are loved in a shameful way. _Petrarch._ I have already met that insinuation on a previous occasion. If any one could see the image of the love that reigns in my heart, he would recognise that there is no difference between it and that face that I have praised indeed much, but less by far than it deserves to be praised. I call to witness the spirit of Truth in whose presence we are speaking when I assert that in my love there has never been anything dishonourable, never anything of the flesh, never anything that any man could blame unless it were its mere intensity. And if you add that even so it never passed the line of right, I think a fairer thing could never be conceived. _S. Augustine._ I might reply to you with a word of Cicero and tell you, "You are talking of putting boundary lines in vice itself."[6] _Petrarch_. Not in vice, but in love. _S. Augustine_. But in that very passage he was speaking of love. Do you remember where it occurs? _Petrarch._ Do I remember indeed? Of course I have read it in the _Tusculans_. But he was speaking of men's common love; mine is one by itself. _S. Augustine._ Other people, I fancy, might say the same of theirs; for true it is that in all the passions, and most of all in this, every man interprets his own case favourably, and there is point in the verse though from a common poet-- "To every man his lady, Then one to me assign; To every man his love affairs, And so let me have mine!"[7] _Petrarch._ Would you like, if you have time, to hear me tell you a few of those many charms of hers that would strike you with astonishment and admiration? _S. Augustine._ Do you think I am ignorant of all "Those pleasant dreams that lovers use to weave"? Every schoolboy knows the line, but I confess I am ashamed to hear such silliness from the lips of one whose words and thoughts should seek a higher range. _Petrarch._ One thing I will not keep silence on,--call it silliness, call it gratitude, as you please,--namely, that to her I owe whatever I am, and I should never have attained such little renown and glory as I have unless she by the power of this love had quickened into life the feeble germ of virtue that Nature had sown in my heart. It was she who turned my youthful soul away from all that was base, who drew me as it were by a grappling chain, and forced me to look upwards. Why should you not believe it? It is a sure truth that by love we grow like what we love. Now there is no backbiter alive, let his tongue be as sharp as it may, that has ventured to touch her good name, or dared to say he had seen a single fault, I will not say in her conduct, but even in any one of her gestures or words. Moreover, those whisperers who leave no one's reputation untouched if they can help it, have been obliged in her, case to utter only reverence and respect. It is no wonder, then, if such a glory as hers should have fostered in my heart the longing for more conspicuous glory, and should have sweetened those hard toils which I had to endure if I would attain that which I desired. What were all the wishes of my youth but solely to please her who above all others had pleased me? And you are not ignorant that to gain my end I scorned delights a thousand times, I gave myself before my time to labour and to cares without number; and now you bid me forget or diminish somewhat of my love for her who first taught me how to escape the vulgar crowd, who guided all my steps, spurred on my lagging mind, and wakened into life my drowsy spirit. _S. Augustine._ Poor man! you would have done better to be silent than to speak, although even if you had been silent I should have discerned what you are within. But such stout words as these stir my indignation and anger. _Petrarch._ I wonder why? _S. Augustine._ To have a false opinion shows ignorance, but to keep on boldly proclaiming it shows pride as well as ignorance. _Petrarch_. Suppose you try and prove that what I think and say is false. _S. Augustine._ It is all false; and, first, what you say as to owing all you are to her. If you mean that she has made you what you are, there you certainly lie; but if you were to say that it is she. who has prevented you being any more than you are, you would speak the truth. O what long contention would you have been spared if by the charm of her beauty she had not held you back. What you are you owe to the bounty of Nature; what you might have been she has quite cut off, or rather let me say you yourself have cut it off, for she indeed is innocent. That beauty which seemed so charming and so sweet, through the burning flame of your desire, through the continual rain of your tears, has done away all that harvest that should have grown from the seeds of virtue in your soul. It is a false boast of yours that she has held you back from base things; from some perhaps she may, but only to plunge you into evils worse still. For if one leads you from some miry path to bring you to a precipice, or in lancing some small abscess cuts your throat, he deserves not the name of deliverer but assassin. Likewise she whom you hold up as your guide, though she drew you away from some base courses, has none the less overwhelmed you in a deep gulf of splendid ruin. As for her having taught you to look upwards and separate yourself from the vulgar crowd, what else is it than to say by sitting at her feet you became so infatuated with the charm of her above as to studiously neglect everything else? And in the common intercourse of human life what can be more injurious than that? when you say she has involved you in toils without number, there indeed you speak truth. But what great gain is there in that? When there are such varied labours that a man is perforce obliged to engage in, what madness is it of one's own accord to go after fresh ones! As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this. But the time for this is not yet come. _Petrarch_. I believe the readiest of warriors first threatens and then strikes. I seem, however, to find threat and wound together. And already I begin to stagger. _S. Augustine_. How much more will you stagger when I deliver my sharpest thrust of all? Forsooth that woman to whom you profess you owe everything, she, even she, has been your ruin. _Petrarch._ Good Heavens! How do you think you will persuade me of that? _S. Augustine._ She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator: and that one path alone leads, sooner than any other, to death. _Petrarch._ I pray you make no rash judgment. The love which I feel for her has most certainly led me to love God. _S. Augustine._ But it has inverted the true order. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine._ Because 'every creature' should be dear to us because of our love for the Creator. But in your case, on the contrary, held captive by the charm of the creature, you have not loved the Creator as you ought. You have admired the Divine Artificer as though in all His works He had made nothing fairer than the object of your love, although in truth the beauty of the body should be reckoned last of all. _Petrarch._ I call Truth to witness as she stands here between us, and I take my conscience to witness also, as I said before, that the body. of my lady has been less dear to me than her soul. The proof of it is here, that the further she has advanced in age (which for the beauty of the body is a fatal thunderstroke) the more firm has been my admiration; for albeit the flower of her youth has withered visibly with time, the beauty of her soul has grown with the years, and as it was the beginning of my love for her, even so has it been its sustainer. Otherwise if it had been her bodily form which attracted me, it was, ere this, time to make a change. _S. Augustine._ Are you mocking me? Do you mean to assert that if the same soul had been lodged in a body ill-formed and poor to look upon, you would have taken equal delight therein? _Petrarch._ I dare not say that. For the soul itself cannot be discerned, and the image of a body like that would have given no indication of such a soul. But were it possible for the soul to be visible to my gaze, I should most certainly have loved its beauty even though its dwelling-place were poor. _S. Augustine._ You are relying on mere words; for if you are only able to love that which is visible to your gaze, then what you love is the bodily form. However, I deny not that her soul and her character have helped to feed your flame, for (as I will show you before long) her name alone has both little and much kindled your mad passion; for, as in all the affections of the soul, it happens most of all in this one that oftentimes a very little spark will light a great fire. _Petrarch._ I see where you would drive me. You want to make me say with Ovid-- "I love at once her body and her soul."[8] _S. Augustine._ Yes, and you ought to confess this also, that neither in one or the other case has your love been temperate or what it should be. _Petrarch._ You will have to put me to the torture ere I will make any such confession. _S. Augustine._ And you will allow that this love has also cast you into great miseries. _Petrarch._ Though you place me on the block itself, I will not acknowledge any such thing. _S. Augustine._ If you do not ignore my questions and conclusions, you will soon make both those confessions. Tell me, then, can you recall the years when you were a little child, or have the crowding cares of your present life blotted all that time out? _Petrarch._ My childhood and youth are as vividly before my eyes as if they were yesterday. _S. Augustine._ Do you remember, then, how in those times you had the fear of God, how you thought about Death, what love you had for Religion, how dear goodness and virtue were to you? _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember it all, and I am sorry when I see that as my years increased these virtues grew less and less in me. _S. Augustine._ For my part I have ever been afraid lest the wind of Spring should cut that early blossom off, which, if only it might be left whole and unhurt, would have produced a wondrous fruitage. _Petrarch._ Pray do not wander from the subject; for what has this to do with the question we were discussing? _S. Augustine._ I will tell you. Recall each step in your life, since your remembrance is so complete and fresh; recall all the course of your life, and recollect at what period this great change you speak of began. _Petrarch._ I have run over in my mind all the course and number of my years. _S. Augustine._ And what do you find? _Petrarch._ I see that the doctrine in the treatise of Pythagoras, of which I have heard tell and have read, is by no means void of truth. For when travelling the right road, still temperate and modest, I had reached the parting of the ways and had been bidden to turn to the right hand, whether from carelessness or perversity I know not, behold I turned to the left; and what I had read in my boyhood was of no profit to me-- "Here the ways part: the right will thee conduct To the walled palace of the mighty King And to Elysium, but the left will lead Where sin is punished and the malefactor Goes to his dreaded doom."[9] Although I had read of all this before, yet I understood it not until I found it by experience. Afterwards I went wrong, in this foul and crooked pathway, and often in mind went back with tears and sorrow, yet could not keep the right way; and it was when I left that way, yes, that was certainly the time when all this confusion in my life began. _S. Augustine_. And in what period of your age did this take place? _Petrarch._ About the middle of my growing youth. But if you give me a minute or two, I think I can recall the exact year when it took place. _S. Augustine_. I do not ask for the precise date, but tell me about when was it that you saw the form and feature of this woman for the first time? _Petrarch._ Never assuredly shall I forget that day. _S. Augustine._ Well now, put two and two together; compare the two dates. _Petrarch._ I must confess in truth they coincide. I first saw her and I turned from my right course at one and the same time. _S. Augustine._ That is all I wanted. You became infatuated. The unwonted dazzle blinded your eyes, so I believe. For they say the first effect of love is blindness. So one reads in the poet most conversant with Nature-- "At the first sight was that Sidonian dame Blinded," and then he adds presently-- "With love was Dido burning."[10] And though, as you well know, the story is but on ancient fable, yet did the Poet in making it follow the order of Nature. And when you had been struck blind by this meeting, if you chose the left-hand path it was because to you it seemed more broad and easy; for that to the right is steep and narrow, and of its hardship you were afraid. But that woman so renowned, whom you imagine as your most safe guide, wherefore did not she direct you upward, hesitating and trembling as you were? Why did she not take you by the hand as one does the blind, and set you in the way where you should walk? _Petrarch_. She certainly did so, as far as it was in her power. What but this was in her heart when, unmoved by my entreaties, unyielding to my caress, she safeguarded her woman's honour, and in spite of her youth and mine, in spite of a thousand circumstances that would have bent a heart of adamant, she stood her ground, resolute and unsubdued? Yes, this womanly soul taught me what should be the honour and duty of a man; and to preserve her chastity she did, as Seneca expresses it-- "What was to me at once an example and a reproach."[11] And at last, when she saw the reins of my chariot were broken and that I was rushing to the abyss, she chose rather to part from me than follow where I went. _S. Augustine_. Base desires, then, sometimes you felt, though not long since you denied it? But it is the common folly of lovers, let me say of mad folk. One may say of them all alike-- "I would not, yet I would; I would, yet would not."[12] You know not, any of you, what you want or what you want not. _Petrarch_. Without seeing, I fell into the snare. But if in past days my feelings were other than they are now, love and youth were the cause. Now I know what I wish and what I desire, and I have at last made firm my staggering soul. She for her part has ever been firm in her mind and always the same. The more I understand this woman's constancy, the more I admire it; and if sometimes I regretted her resolution, now I rejoice in it and give her thanks. _S. Augustine._ It is not easy to believe a man who has once taken you in. You may have changed the outside fashion of your life, but have not yet persuaded me that your soul is also changed. If your flame is calmed and softened somewhat, yet it is not for certain quite put out. But you who set such price on her you love, do you not see how deeply by absolving her you condemn yourself? You delight in seeing in her the model of purity, and you avow yourself to be without any feeling and a criminal; and you protest that she is the most happy of women, while her love has made you the most unhappy of men. If you remember, it is just what I said at the beginning. _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember. I cannot deny that what you say is true, and I see whither you are gradually leading me. _S. Augustine._ To see it better still, lend me all your attention. Nothing so much leads a man to forget or despise God as the love of things temporal, and most of all this passion that we call love; and to which, by the greatest of all desecrations, we even gave the name of God, without doubt only that we may throw a heavenly veil over our human follies and make a pretext of divine inspiration when we want to commit an enormous transgression. In the case of the other passions, the sight of the object, the hope of enjoying it, and the ardour of the will take us captive. Love also demands all that, but in addition it asks also a reciprocal passion, without which it will be forced to die away. So, whereas in the other cases one loves singly and alone, in this case we must give love for love, and thus man's heart is stung and stung again. Therefore, Cicero was right when he wrote that "Of all the passions of the soul, assuredly the most violent is love,"[13] and he must have been very certain of his ground when he added that "assuredly"--he who in four books shows he was aware how Plato's Academy doubted everything.[14] _Petrarch_. I have often noticed that reference, and wondered that of the passions he should call this the most violent of all. _S. Augustine._ Your surprise would have vanished if you had not lost your powers of memory. But I must recall you by a short admonition to a recollection of its many evils. Think what you were when that plague seized upon your soul; how suddenly you fell to bemoaning, and came to such a pitch of wretchedness that you felt a morbid pleasure in feeding on tears and sighs. Passing sleepless nights, and murmuring ever the name of your beloved, scorning everything, hating life, desiring death, with a melancholy love for being alone, avoiding all your fellow-men, one might well apply to you, for they exactly fit your case, the lines in which Homer describes Bellerophon-- "There in the pleasant fields he wandered sad, Eating his heart, far from the ways of men."[15] What meant that pale face and wasted figure? that flower of your age withering before its time, those heavy eyes, ever bathed in tears, your mind in a state of agitation, your broken rest and troubled moans, even when you were asleep? Why was your voice weak and altered through your sorrow of heart, and the very sound of your words, indistinct and broken, with whatever other token can be imagined, of a heart distressed and in disorder? Do you call these the signs of one in good health? Was it not this lady with whom for you every day, whether feast or fast, began and ended? Was it not at her coming the sun shone forth, and when she left you, night returned? Every change of her countenance brought a change in your heart; and if she were sad, you forthwith were filled with sadness. In a word, your life became wholly dependent upon hers. You know that I say but what is true and what is in every one's mouth. And what could be more senseless than that, not content with the presence of her living face, the cause of all your woes, you must needs obtain a painted picture by an artist[16] of high repute, that you might carry it everywhere with you, to have an everlasting spring of tears, fearing, I suppose, lest otherwise their fountain might dry up? Of all such things you were only too vigilant, and you neglected everything else. But to come to that which is the very crowning instance of your folly, and of which I gave you warning a little while ago, who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that, infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as of her person, you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honour to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself? Had you any liking for the laurel of empire or of poetry, it was forsooth because the name they bore was hers; and from this time onwards there is hardly a verse from your pen but in it you have made mention of the laurel, as if indeed you were a denizen of Peneus' stream,[17] or some priest on Cirrha's[18] Mount. And finally, discovering that the laurel of empire was beyond your reach, you have, with as little self-restraint as you showed in the case of your beloved herself, now coveted the laurel of Poetry of which the merit of your works seemed to give more promise. Although to gain your reward you were borne up on the wings of genius, yet will you shudder to remember with what trouble you attained it. I clearly divine what excuse you will make, and I see your thought the moment you open your lips. You will allege that you were devoted to these studies some time before you became a lover at all, and that desire for the glory of the poet's crown had kindled your heart from childhood. I neither deny it or forget it; but the fact of the usage being obsolete for centuries, and this being an epoch very unfavourable for studies like yours, the dangers also of long voyages, which would have brought you to the threshold of prison and of death itself, not to mention other obstacles of fortune no less violent than those--all these difficulties, I say, would perhaps have broken your resolve entirely, if the remembrance of a name so sweet, always entwining itself with your inmost soul, had not banished every other care, and drawn you over sea, over land, across mountains of difficulty, to Rome and to Naples, where at length you attained what you had longed for with such ardour. If all this seems to you the token of but a moderate passion, then at least shall be quite certain you are the victim of the moderate delusion. I purposely leave out what Cicero was not ashamed to imitate from Terence when he wrote, "Wrongs, suspicions, fierce quarrels, jealousies, war, and then again peace--behold the miseries of love." Do you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you may reply: "I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such excess." Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added-- "Such fickle things to settle by sane rule Is to be sanely insane."[19] The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end, unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours. Such, then, are the miseries of love, the particulars of which it is needless to mention to those who have proved them, and which would not be believed by those who never tried. But the worst of them all, to come back to our subject, is that it engenders a forgetfulness of God and of man's real state. For how should the soul thus crushed beneath these weights ever arise to that one and only most pure fountain of true Good? And since it is so, you may lay aside your wonder that Cicero should tell us no passion of man's soul seemed to him more violent than love. _Petrarch_. I must own myself beaten; for it appears all you have said is taken from the very heart of the book of experience. And as you have quoted from the play of Terence, let me please myself by bringing from there also this sad complaint-- "O deed of shame! now am I foil of woe. Weary I burn with love; with open eyes, Brain clear, I am undone; and what to do I know not."[20] I would also call to mind this counsel from the same poet's words-- "Think, while there's time, again and yet again."[21] _S. Augustine._ And I likewise from the lips of Terence will give you my reply-- "What in itself contains no rule or reason, By rule or reason you can never hold."[22] _Petrarch._ What is to be done, then? Am I to despair? _S. Augustine._ That is the last thing in the world to do. However, let me briefly tell you the remedy I propose. You know that on this subject there are not only special treatises compiled by philosophers of eminence, but that some of the most famous poets have written on it whole books. It would be almost an insult to point out which they are, above all, to you who are a past-master in the whole field, or to offer any advice as to reading them; but perhaps I might say a word without offence to suggest in what way their study might be applied for your own welfare. First, then, notice what is said by Cicero-- "Some think that an old love can best be driven out by a new, as one nail is by another."[23] And Ovid agrees, giving this general rule-- "Old love affairs must always yield to new."[24] And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided and parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less force towards each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable by the enemy; so Fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power in the world, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced. On the other hand, I think this is not to be overlooked, that there may be great danger when you lay aside a passion and, if one may say so, a passion of the nobler kind; you may, if you are not watchful, fall into dissipation of another sort, run after women and become a loose libertine. In my judgment, then, if one must die for certain, there is some consolation in dying of a nobler rather than a less noble wound. So if you ask my advice, it is this: Take your courage in both hands. Fly, if you possibly can; and I would even say, go from one prison to another; perchance you might escape by the way or else find a milder discipline to be under. Only beware, when your neck is freed from one such yoke as this, that you place it not under the weight of a crowd of more base and vile oppressions. _S. Petrarch._ While the doctor is finishing his advice, will he allow the patient, in the throes of his malady, to interrupt him for a minute? _Augustine._ Of course. Why not? Many a doctor, guided by the symptoms of his patient thus declared, has been able to find the very remedy he needed. _Petrarch._ Then what I want to say is just this: For me to love another is impossible. My mind has grown only to love her; my eyes to look only for her; excepting her, all to them is nothing, or is mere darkness. And so if your remedy is that in order to be healed of this love I should love another, your condition is an impossible one. In that case all is over, and I am lost. _S. Augustine._ Your senses are dulled, your appetite is lost; since then you can take no internal remedy, one must have recourse to other treatment and see what can be done by change of scene. Can you bring your mind to think of flight or exile and going right away from the places that you know? _Petrarch_. Though I feel that her attraction draws me to her with hooks of steel, nevertheless if I have to go, I can. _S. Augustine_. If you can, you will be safe. What else can I say, then, but this advice of Virgil's, changing only two little words-- "Ah! flee this land beloved, and leave behind shore to thee so dear."[25] For how can you continue in safety in these scenes where there are so many memories of your wounds, where things present and the memory of things past cling always to you? So that I say, as Cicero also advises, "Seek change of scene; take care to do as one does who is recovering from some illness."[26] _Petrarch_. Think of what you are prescribing. For how often and often, longing to get well, and familiar with advice like this, have I tried this remedy of flight; and though I have feigned various other reasons for it, yet the end and aim of all my peregrinations and all my retirement to the country was this one thing--to become free! For that I have wandered far away to the West, to the North, to the very confines of the ocean. Far and wide have I roamed. You see what good it has done me. And so Virgil's simile has many a time come home to my heart,-- "E'en as the stricken deer, that unaware Rooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete, The hunter pierces with his weapon keen. And she unknowing o'er Mount Dicte's side Flees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleaves To her poor side."[27] I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound with me. _S. Augustine._ Yourself have given me the answer for which you look. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine_. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him no good whatever. "You went touring with yourself,"[28] said the Sage. You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must make your soul ready. _Then_ you must fly. For it is proved to demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor's help is in vain. Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that Horace only spoke truth when he said-- "Who cross the ocean making peace their goal, Change but their sky and cannot change their soul." Or thus-- "We come to this; when o'er the world we range, 'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change."[29] _Petrarch_. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell me briefly what are the remedies I must use? _S. Augustine._ I did not say that you must cure and heal your soul. What I said was you must make it ready. As for the rest, either you will be cured, and the change of scene will then establish your health on a firm footing; or you will not yet be cured, but only made ready, and then the change of scene will have the same ultimate result. But, if your soul is neither cured nor made ready, this change and frequent moving from place to place will only stir up its grief. I will still advise you to take a leaf out of Horace's book-- "For if the cure of mental ills is due To sense and wisdom, not a fine sea view,"[30] --what he says is true. You will set out full of the hope and the wish to return, carrying along with you all that has ensnared your soul. In whatever place you are, to whatever side you turn, you will behold the face, you will hear the voice of her whom you have left. By that sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have power to see her though you are absent, and to hear her though she is far away; and do you imagine that love is to be extinguished by subterfuges like this? Believe me, it will rather burn more fiercely. Those who call themselves masters in the art of love enjoin among their other maxims short absences one from another on the part of lovers, for fear they should become tired of seeing each other face to face or from their importunity. Therefore I advise, I recommend, I enjoin upon you that you learn to wholly sever your soul from that which weighs it down and go away without hope of return. You will discover then, but not before, what absence is able to do for the soul's healing. If fate had placed your lot in some unhealthy plague-stricken region where you were liable to constant illness, should you not flee from it never to return? And so I counsel you to do now, unless, as I much fear, men care more for their body than their soul. _Petrarch_. That is their affair. But undoubtedly if I found myself ill on account of the unhealthiness of the place I was in, I should choose for my recovery some place with a healthier climate, and I should act in the same way, and with stronger reasons still, in case of maladies of the soul. Yet, as far as I can see, the cure of these is a more difficult matter. _S. Augustine_. The united testimony of the greatest philosophers proves the falsity of that assertion. It is evident that all the maladies of the soul can be healed if only the patient puts no obstacle in the way, although many diseases of the body are incurable by any known means. For the rest, and not to go too far from our subject, I stick to my judgment. You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back, never to see that which it was wont to look for. This is the only sure road for a lover; and if you wish to preserve your soul from ruin, this is what you must do. _Petrarch._ That you may see how perfectly I have learned all you have said, let me recapitulate that to go for change of scene is useless, unless the soul is first made ready; such journeys will cure it when made ready, and will establish it when once cured. Is not that the conclusion of your threefold precept? _S. Augustine._ Yes, it is precisely that, and you sum up very well what I have unfolded. _Petrarch._ I could have divined your two first truths by myself, without you pointing them out; but as for the third, that the soul, when it is cured and established in health, still needs absence, I do not understand it, unless it is the fear of a relapse that is the motive of what you say. _S. Augustine._ But you surely do not suppose that to be a slight point even in bodily health? And how much more grave a matter ought one to think it in regard to the soul, where a relapse is so much more rapid and dangerous. So I would say, let us refer once more to what seems one of the soundest remarks of Seneca, where in a letter he writes, "If any man wishes to have done with love he must avoid all recollection of the beloved form," and adds as his reason, "For nothing is so easily rekindled to life again as love."[31] O how true a saying is that, and from what profound experience of life is he speaking! But it is needless to call any other witness of this than your own knowledge will supply. _Petrarch._ Yes, I agree he speaks truth, but if you notice he is speaking not of one who already has done with love, but of one who wishes to have done with it. _S. Augustine_. He speaks of any man who is in danger. Any kind of blow is more dangerous if there is some wound before unhealed, or some disease not yet cured; and even afterwards it is not safe. And since we remember most, instances that have come home to us in our own experience, let me ask how often have you who speak to me not found yourself, as you went about these well-known spots, by their mere look, though no person met you, reminded of your former vanities; standing speechless, full of sighs, as you pace this town that has been, I will not say the cause, but at any rate the scene of all your evils; though before you came back to it you thought you were cured, and would have been to a very great extent if only you had remained away? And then with difficulty restraining your tears, half-wounded to death, you have fled, and cried to your own heart, "Here in these places I see at every turn the ambush of my ancient foe. The signs of death are ever about me!" So, then, were you healed already, if you would take counsel of me, I should say, "Do not stay long in this place. It is not wise for the prisoner who has broken his chains to go wandering round the prison gates, ever ready to take him in again, before which the jailer is ever on guard, laying his traps with special care to recapture those whose escape he regrets. "The downward path to hell is ever smooth, Its dismal gate is open night and day."[32] If precautions like these are needful for men in health, how much more are they in the case of those who have not yet shaken off their sickness. It is of the latter that Seneca was thinking when he wrote that maxim. He was giving counsel to those who were most in danger, for it was no use to speak of those whom the flame had already devoured and who were past all care for their safety. He addressed himself to those in another stage, who still felt the heat but tried to come forth of the flame. Many a sick man on the way to recovery has been thrown back by a draught of water which before his illness would have done him no harm; and often has one wearied out, with a long day's work, been knocked down by some trifling shake which when he was in his full strength would not have moved him at all. It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love. It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. And since it is so, it is not enough merely to leave a plague-stricken spot, but you, O man, must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back, you lose your Eurydice once more. Such is the sum of my counsel. _Petrarch_. I accept it heartily and with thankfulness, for I feel that the remedy is suited to my wound. My intention is to fly, but I know not yet where lies the direction I should choose. _S. Augustine._ A thousand ways are open to you to make choice of on every side; a thousand ports are ready to receive you. I know that, more than to other lands, your heart turns to Italy, and that a love of your native soil is inborn in you; and you are right, for-- "Not Media's forests rich, nor Ganges' stream, Though fair it be, nor Hermus rolling gold, May vie with Italy; Bactria and Ind, And all Pachaia with its odours rare Shall not be mentioned."[33] I think you have yourself not long ago, in a letter to one of your friends,[34] treated this theme of the famous Poet at fuller length in a Latin poem. Italy then would be my choice for you; because the ways of its people, its climate, the sea washing its shores, the Apennine range coming between them, all promise that a sojourn there would be better suited to extirpate your troubles than going anywhere else in the world. I would not, however, wish to confine you only to one corner of the land. Go under good auspices wherever inclination may lead; go without fear and with a free mind; take no backward glances, forget the past and step forward to the future. See how long you have been a stranger to your own country and your own self. It is time to return, for-- "O now 'tis evening, and the night Is chiefly friend to thieves."[35] I warn you in words of your own. One further counsel I must urge which I had nearly forgotten. You must avoid solitude, until you are quite sure that you have not a trace of your old ailment left. You told me that a country life had done you no good. There is nothing surprising in that. What remedy were you likely to find in a place all lonely and remote? Let me confess that often when you were retreating thither all by yourself, sighing, and turning longing eyes back to the town, I have laughed heartily and said to myself: "What a blindfold fool love has made of this unhappy wight! and led him to quite forget the verse that every schoolboy knows, about flying from his trouble and finding his death." _Petrarch_. I am afraid you are right, but what are the lines to which you allude? _S. Augustine._ Ovid, of course. "Lover! whoe'er you be, dwell not alone; In solitude you're sure to be undone. You're safer in a crowd; the word is true, Lone woods are not the place for such as you."[36] _Petrarch_. Yes, I remember them perfectly, and knew them almost by heart from my childhood. _S. Augustine._ Much good has it done you to know so many things yet not know how to suit them to your need. When you not only know all the testimony of the ancients, but have yourself proved the evils of solitude, it astonishes me that you should commit such a blunder as to seek it. You have, in fact, often complained that there was no good in being alone. You have expressed it in a thousand places, and especially in the fine poem you composed on your own misfortune. The sweet accents of it charmed me while you were writing.[37] It surprised me to hear a song so harmonious arise from a soul so full of agitation, and come from the lips of a man so far out of his senses and I asked myself what power of love can stay the offended Muses from abandoning so dire a nest of troubles, and, scared by such aberration of mind in their host, forsaking utterly their wonted dwelling? I thought of words of Plato, "Let no man wholly sane knock at Poe try'd door," and then of Aristotle, who followed him and said, "All great genius has a touch of madness in it,"[38] but I remembered that in these sayings of theirs they were thinking of a frenzy far indeed removed from yours. However, we will return to this subject at some other time. _Petrarch_. I must fain own what you say is the truth; but I never thought to have made verses so harmonious as to be worth your praise and commendation. They will be all the dearer to me now that I know it. If you have other remedy to offer me, I beg you withhold it not from him who is in need. _S. Augustine_. To unfold all one knows is the act of a braggart more than of a wise friend. And remember that men did not invent all the sundry kinds of remedies, internal and external, for diverse kinds of sickness, on purpose that each and every one should be tried on every occasion; but that, as Seneca remarks to Lucilius, "Nothing is so contrary to the work of healing as a frequent change of remedy; and no wound will ever be healed perfectly, to which first one and then another medicine is continually applied. The true way is only to try the new when the old remedy has failed."[39] So, then, although the remedies for this kind of ailment are many and varied, I will content myself with only pointing out a few, and I will choose those which in my judgment will best suit your need. For indeed, I have no wish merely to show you what is new, but only to tell you, of all those which are known, what remedies, so far as I can judge, are most likely in your case to be efficacious. There are three things, as Cicero says, that will avert the mind of man from Love,--Satiety, Shamefastness, Reflection.[40] There may indeed be more; there may be less. But, to follow the steps of so great an authority, let us suppose there are three. It will be useless for me to speak of the first in your case, because you will judge it is impossible you should ever come to satiety of your love. But still if your passion will hear the voice of reason and judge the future from the past, you will readily agree that an object, even the most beloved, can produce, I do not say satiety only, but even weariness and disgust. Now, as I am quite sure I should be entering on a vain quest if I embark on this track, because, even if it were granted that satiety is a possible thing, and that it kills love, you will pretend that by the ardour of your passion you are a thousand leagues removed from any such possibility, and, as I am not at all disposed to deny it, what remains is for me to touch only upon the other two remedies that are left. You will not wish to dispute my assertion that Nature has endowed you with a certain power of reason, and also with some talent for forming a weighty judgment. _Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived by acting as judge in my own cause, what you say is so true that I am often inclined to fear I am too wanting in what is due both to my sex and this age; wherein, as you doubtless observe, everything goes to the shameless. Honours, prosperity, wealth--all these hold the field; and to these, virtue itself, nay even fortune, must give way.[41] _S. Augustine._ Do you not see what conflict there is between Love and Shamefastness? While the one urges the soul forward, the other holds it back; the one drives in the spur, the other pulls hard at the bridle; the one looks at nothing, the other watches carefully on every side. _Petrarch_. This is only too familiar to me, and I feel to my cost how distracted is my life by passions so contrary. They come upon me by turn, so that my poor spirit, tossed hither and thither, knows not which impulse to obey. _S. Augustine._ Do you mind telling me if you have looked in your glass lately? _Petrarch._ And, pray, what do you ask that question for? I have only done as usual. _S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you do it no oftener, neither with more self-complacency, than you should! Well, and have you not noticed that your face is changing from day to day, and that from time to time grey hairs begin to show themselves around your temples? _Petrarch._ Is that all? I thought you were about to ask me something out of the common; but to grow up, to grow old, to die is the common lot of all that are born. I have observed what befalls almost all my contemporaries; for nowadays men seem to age more quickly than they used to, though I know not why or wherefore. _S. Augustine._ The growing old of others will not give you back your youth, neither will their dying bring you immortality. So let us leave on one side everything else and return to your own case. Tell me; when you have noticed these signs of change in your body, has it not brought some change also in your soul? _Petrarch._ It has certainly made some impression on me, but not exactly a change. _S. Augustine._ What, then, were your thoughts, and what did you say to yourself? _Petrarch._ What would you have me say, except what was said by Domitian the Emperor, "With even mind I brook the sight of watching, though still young, my hairs grow grey."[42] So illustrious an example has consoled me for what grey hairs I too behold. And if I needed more, I brought to mind a king beside that emperor; I mean Numa Pompilius the Second, who, as the historian relates, had grey hair even from his youth. And Poetry as well as History comes to my aid, since in his Bucolics our own Virgil, writing when he was but five-and-twenty, speaking of himself in the person of a shepherd, exclaims-- "When now my whitening beard the razor knew."[43] _S. Augustine._ What vast abundance of examples you can command! Pray heaven you have as many recollections of your own death. For I praise not those exemplars that lead one to dissemble grey hairs which are the heralds of old age, and the _avant-couriers_ of Death. And good those examples are not, if their effect is to take you off the trouble of remembering how time flies, and to lead you to forget your own last hour; to the recollection of which the whole of my discourse is entirely and without ceasing directed. When I bid you think on your own whitening forehead, do you quote me a crowd of famous men whose locks were white also? What does it prove? Ah, if you were able to say these were immortal, then you might from their example put away the dread of your changing brow. If instead of mentioning greyness I had ventured to hint that you were getting bald, you would, I suppose, have thrown Julius Cæsar in my teeth! _Petrarch_. Certainly. What more illustrious example could I need? Now, unless I am mistaken, it is in fact a great comfort to find oneself surrounded by companions so famous. Yes, I will freely admit that I am not disposed for a moment to reject such examples, which are, for me, part of the luggage I carry daily in my mind; for it is a pleasure to me not only in such misfortunes as Nature or chance have already allotted me, but also in those which they may still have in store; it is a pleasure, I say, to have ever at hand such matter of comfort and consolation as I can obtain only from some truly cogent reason or outstanding example. If, then, you meant to reproach me for being afraid of thunder--a charge I could not deny (and one of the chief reasons why I love the laurel is because it is said that thunder will not strike this tree), then I shall reply to you that this was a weakness Cæsar Augustus shared; if you allege that I am getting blind (and there also you would be right), I should quote you Appius Cæcus and also Homer, the Prince of Poets; if you call me one-eyed, I will, shield myself behind Hannibal, the Punic leader, or Philip, King of Macedon; call me deaf, and Marcus Crassus shall be my defence; say I cannot stand the heat, and I will say I am but like Alexander, Prince of Macedonia. It were tedious to go through all the list; but after these you can judge who they would be. _S. Augustine._ Yes, perfectly. I am nowise displeased with your wealth of instances, provided it does not make you self-negligent and only serves to disperse the clouds of fear and sadness. I applaud anything that helps a man to face with courage the coming of old age, and keeps him from bewailing its presence when it has arrived. But I loathe and abominate profoundly everything that conceals from him the truth that old age is the port of departure from this life, and blinds him to the need of reflecting on death. To take with equanimity the going grey before one's time is the sign of a good natural disposition; but to try and interpose artificial checks, to cheat time of his years, to raise an outcry and declare grey hairs are come too soon, to begin dyeing or plucking them out, is a piece of folly, which, common as it may be, is none the less egregious for all that. You perceive not, O blind that you are, how swiftly the stars roll in their course, and how soon the flight of time consumes the space of your short life, and you marvel when you see old age coming on, hastening quickly the despatch of all your days. Two causes seem to foster this delusion. The first is that even the shortest life is partitioned out by some people into four, by others into six, and by others again into a still larger number of periods; that is to say, the reality is so small, and as you cannot make it longer, you think you will enlarge it by division. But of what profit tis all this dividing? Make as many particles as you like, and they are all gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. "Yesterday was born the baby, See to-day the lovely boy, Then the young man quick as may be, Then an end of life and joy." You observe with what quick hurrying words the subtle poet has sketched out the swift course of our life. So it is in vain you strive to lengthen out what Nature, the mother of us all, has made so short. The second cause is that you will persist in letting old age find you still in the midst of games and empty pleasures; like the old Trojans who in their customary ways passed the last night without perceiving. "The cunning, fatal horse, who bore within Those armed bands, had overleapt the wall Of Pergamos."[44] Yes, even so you perceive not that old age, bringing in his train the armed warrior Death, unpitying and stem, has over-leapt the weakly-guarded rampart of your body; and then you find your foe has already glided by stealth along his rope-- "And now the invader climbs within the gate And takes the city in its drunken sleep."[45] For in the gross body and the pleasure of things temporal, not less drunk are you than those old Trojans were, as Virgil saw them, in their slumber and their wine. Or, looking to another quarter, no less truth is to be found in the neat lines of the Satirist-- "Our lives unfold in morning air As lilies of a day, 'Come bring us wine,' we shout. 'Ho, there, Fetch garlands, odours, damsels fair.' But ah! before we are aware, Old Age sweeps all away."[46] Now, to come back to our subject and to yourself, when this old age comes stealing on and knocks at your door, you make an effort to bar him out. You pretend that by some infraction of the order of Nature he has come too soon. You are delighted when you come across some rather elderly person who declares he knew you when you were a child, especially if, as people generally do, he makes out it was but yesterday or the day before. You find it convenient to forget that one can say as much about any old dotard however decrepit. Who was not a child yesterday, or to-day, as far as that goes? We can look here and there and find infants of ninety quarrelling about trifles and even now occupied with infantine toys. The days flee away, the body decays, the soul is where it was. Though everything is rotten with age, the soul has never grown up, never come to maturity, and it is a truth, as the proverb says, "One soul uses up many bodies." Infancy passes, but, as Seneca remarks, "childishness remains."[47] And, believe me, perhaps you are not so young as you imagine, for the greater part of mankind have not yet reached the age which you have. Blush, therefore, to pass for an aged lover; blush to be so long the Public's jest; and if true glory has no charm for you and ridicule no terror, at least let change of heart come to the rescue and save you from disgrace. For, if I see things at all truly, a man should guard his reputation, if only to spare his own friends the shameful necessity of telling lies. All the world owes this to itself, but especially such a man as yourself, who have so great a public to justify, and one which is always talking of you. "Great is the task to guard a great man's name."[48] If in your poem of _Africa_ you make a truculent enemy tender such good counsel to your beloved Scipio, you may well allow, for your own profit, a father, who loves you tenderly, to utter with his lips the very same monition. Put away the childish things of infancy; quench the burning desires of youth; think not all the time of what you are going to be and do next; look carefully what you are now; do not imagine that the mirror has been put before your eyes for nothing, but remember that which is written in the Book of Questions on Nature:-- "Mirrors were invented that men might know themselves. Much profit comes thereby. First, knowledge of self; second, wise counsel. You are handsome, then beware of what disfigures: plain, then make up by virtue what is wanting in good looks. You are young, then remember youth's springtime is the time for study and for manly work: old, then lay aside the ugly vices off the flesh and turn your thoughts to what will be the latter end."[49] _Petrarch_. It has dwelt in my remembrance always, from the first day that ever I read it; for the thing itself is worth remembering and its warning is wise. _S. Augustine._ Of what profit has it been to you to read and remember? You had better excused yourself had you pleaded ignorance for your shield. Knowing what you do, are you not ashamed to see that your grey hairs have brought no change in you? _Petrarch._ I am ashamed, I regret it, I repent of it, but as for doing more, I cannot. Moreover, you know I have this much of consolation, that she too is growing old with me. _S. Augustine._ The very word of Julia, Cæsar Augustus' daughter! Doubtless it has lain fixed in your mind, has it not? When her father found fault because she would not have older people round her, as did Livia, she parried the paternal reproof by the neat rejoinder--"They will be older as soon as I am."[50] But pray, tell me, do you suppose that at your age it will be more becoming to doat upon an old woman than to love a young one? On the contrary, it is the more unbecoming, as the reason for loving is less. Well may you take shame to yourself never to grow any wiser though you see your body daily growing older. That is all I can say on the subject of shame. But, as Cicero tells us, it is but a poor thing to make shame do the work of reason; and so to reason, the true source of all remedies, let us now turn for help. You will assuredly find it through using deep Reflection--the third of the things that turn the soul away from love. Remember what you are now called to is that citadel wherein alone you can be quite safe against the incursions of passion and by which alone you will deserve the name of Man. Consider, then, first how noble a thing is the soul, and that so great is it that were I to discourse as I should wish, I must needs make a whole book thereon. Consider, again, the frailty and vileness of the body, which would demand no less full treatment than the other. Think also of the shortness of our life, concerning which many great men have left their books. Think of the flight of time, that no one yet has been able to express in words. Think of Death, the fact so certain, the hour so uncertain, but everywhere and at all times imminent. Think how men are deceived just in this one point, that they believe they can put off what in fact never can be put off: for no one is really such a fool as, supposing the question is asked him, not to answer that of course some day he will die. And so let not the hope of longer life mock you, as it mocks so many others, but rather lay up in your heart the verse that seems as it were an oracle of heaven-- "Count every day that dawns to be your last,"[51] For is it not so that to mortal men every day is in truth the last, or all but the last? Consider, moreover, how shameful it is to have men point the finger at you, and to become a public laughing-stock; remember, too, how ill your profession accords with a life like this. Think how this woman has injured your soul, your body, your fortune. Remember what you have borne for her, all to no purpose: how many times you have been mocked, despised, scorned; think what flatteries, what lamentations, and of all the tears you have cast upon the wind; think how again and again she has heaped all this on you with an air of haughty disdain, and how if for a moment she showed herself more kind, it was but for the passing of a breath and then was gone. Think, moreover, how much you have added to her fame, and of what she has subtracted from your life: how you have ever been jealous for her good name, but she has been always regardless of your very self and condition. Remember how she has turned you aside from loving God, and into how great miseries you have fallen, known to me, but which I pass in silence lest the birds of the air carry the matter abroad. Think, moreover, what tasks on all sides are claiming your attention, and by which you may do far more good and deserve far more honour: how many things you have on hand, as yet uncompleted, to which it would be far better for you to return, and devote more time, instead of attempting them so perfunctorily as you have en doing lately. Finally, ponder well what that thing is for which you have such consuming desire. But think like a man and with your wits about you; for fear lest while you are in the act of flying you be cunningly entangled, as not a few have been when Beauty's fascinating charm steals upon them by some little, unlooked-for channel, and then is fed and strengthened by evil remedies. For how be there that have once tasted this seductive pleasure and can retain enough manliness, not to say courage, to rate at its true value that poor form of woman of which I speak. Only too easily Man's strength of mind gives way, and with nature pressing on, he falls soonest on that side to which he has long leaned. Take most earnest heed that this happen not to you. Banish every recollection of those old cares of yours: put far away from you every vision of the past, and, as one has said in a certain place, "dash the little children against the stones,"[52] lest if they grow up you yourself be cast into the mire. And defer not to knock at Heaven's door with prayers; let your supplications weary the ears of the heavenly King; day and night lift up your petition with tears and crying, if perchance the Almighty will take compassion upon you and give an end to your sore trouble and distress. These are the things that you must do, these the safeguards you must employ; if you will observe them faithfully the Divine Help will be at hand, as I trust; and the right hand of the Deliverer whom none can resist will succour you. But albeit I have spoken on this one malady what is too short for your needs but too long for the briefness of our time, let us pass now to another matter. One evil still is left, to heal you of which I now will make a last endeavour. _Petrarch._ Even so do, most gentle Father. For though I be not yet wholly set free from my burdens, yet, nevertheless, from great part of them I do feel in truth a blessed release. _S. Augustine._ Ambition still has too much hold on you. You seek too eagerly the praise of men, and to leave behind you an undying name. _Petrarch._ I freely confess it. I cannot beat down that passion in my soul. For it, as yet, I have found no cure. _S. Augustine_. But I greatly fear lest this pursuit of a false immortality of fame may shut for you the way that leads to the true immortality of life. _Petrarch._ That is one of my fears also, but I await your discovering to me the means to save my life; you, of a truth, will do it, who have furnished me with means for the healing of evils greater still. _S. Augustine_. Think not that any of your ills is greater than this one, though I deny not that some may be more vile. But tell me, I pray you, what in your opinion is this thing called glory, that you so ardently covet? _Petrarch._ I know not if you ask me for a definition. But if so, who so capable to give one as yourself? _S. Augustine._ The name of glory is well enough known to you; but to the real thing, if one may judge by your actions, you are a stranger. If you had known what it is you would not long for it so eagerly. Suppose you define glory, with Cicero, as being "the illustrious and world-wide renown of good services rendered to one's fellow citizens, to one's country, or to all mankind"; or as he expresses it elsewhere, "Public opinion uttering its voice about a man in words of praise."[53] You will notice that in both these cases glory is said to be reputation. Now, do you know what this reputation is? _Petrarch._ I cannot say any good description of it occurs to me at the moment; and I shrink from putting forward things I do not understand. I think, therefore, the truer and better course is for me to keep silence. _S. Augustine_. You act like a wise and modest man. In every serious question, and especially when the matter is ambiguous, one should pay much less attention to what one will say than to what one will not say, for the credit of having said well is something much less than the discredit of having said ill. Now I submit to you that reputation is nothing but talk about some one, passing from mouth to mouth of many people. _Petrarch._ I think your definition, or, if you prefer the word, your description, is a good one. _S. Augustine_. It is, then, but a breath, a changing wind; and, what will disgust you more, it is the breath of a crowd. I know to whom I am speaking. I have observed that no man more than you abhors the manners and behaviour of the common herd. Now see what perversity is this! You let yourself be charmed with the applause of those whose conduct you abominate; and may Heaven grant you are only charmed, and that you put not in their power your own everlasting welfare! Why and wherefore, I ask, this perpetual toil, these ceaseless vigils, and this intense application to study? You will answer, perhaps, that you seek to find out what is profitable for life. But you have long since learned what is needful for life and for death. What was now required of you was to try and put in practice what you know, instead of plunging deeper and deeper into laborious inquiries, where new problems are always meeting you, and insoluble mysteries, in which you never reach the end. Add to which the fact that you keep toiling and toiling to satisfy the public; wearying yourself to please the very people who, to you, are the most displeasing; gathering now a flower of poesy, now of history--in a word, employing all your genius of words to tickle the ears of the listening throng. _Petrarch_. I beg your pardon, but I cannot let that pass without saying a word. Never since I was a boy have I pleased myself with elegant extracts and flowerets of literature. For often have I noted what neat and excellent things Cicero has uttered against butchers of books, and especially, also, the phrase of Seneca in which he declares, "It is a disgrace for a man to keep hunting for flowers and prop himself up on familiar quotations, and only stand on what he knows by heart."[54] _S. Augustine._ In saying what I did, I neither accuse you of idleness nor scant memory. What I blame you for is that in your reading you have picked out the more flowery passages for the amusement of your cronies, and, as it were, packed up boxes of pretty things out of a great heap, for the benefit of your friends--which is nothing but pandering to a desire of vainglory; and, moreover, I say that, not being contented with your duty of every day (which, in spite of great expense of time, only promised you some celebrity among your contemporaries), you have let your thoughts run on ages of time and given yourself up to dreams of fame among those who come after. And in pursuit of this end, putting your hand to yet greater tasks, you entered on writing a history from the time of King Romulus to that of the Emperor Titus, an enormous undertaking that would swallow up an immensity of time and labour. Then, without waiting till this was finished, goaded by the pricks of your ambition for glory, you sailed off in your poetical barque towards Africa; and now on the aforesaid books of your _Africa_ you are hard at work, without relinquishing the other. And in this way you devote your whole life to those two absorbing occupations--for I will not stop to mention the countless others that come in also--and throw utterly away what is of most concern and which, when lost, cannot be recovered. You write books on others, but yourself you quite forget. And who knows but what, before either of your works be finished, Death may snatch the pen from your tired hand, and while in your insatiable hunt for glory you hurry on first by one path, then the other, you may find at last that by neither of them have you reached your goal? _Petrarch._ Fears of that kind have sometimes come over me, I confess. And knowing I suffered from grave illness, I was afraid death might not be far off. Nothing then was more bitter to me than the thought of leaving my _Africa_ half finished. Unwilling that another hand should put the finishing touch, I had determined that with my own I would cast it to the flames, for there was none of my friends whom I could trust to do me this service after I was gone. I knew that a request like that was the only one of our Virgil's which the Emperor Cæsar Augustus declined to grant. To make a long story short, this land of Africa, burnt already by that fierce sun to which it is for ever exposed, already three times by the Roman torches devastated far and wide, had all but yet again, by my hands, been made a prey to the flames. But of that we will say no more now, for too painful are the recollections that it brings. _S. Augustine._ What you have said confirms my opinion. The day of reckoning is put off for a short time, but the account remains still to be paid. And what can be more foolish than thus to waste such enormous labour over a thing of uncertain issue? I know what prevents you abandoning the work is simply that you still hope you may complete it. As I see that there will be some difficulty (unless I am mistaken) in getting you to diminish this hope, I propose we try to magnify it and so set it out in words that you will see how disproportionate it is to toils like yours. Suppose, therefore, that you have full abundance of time, leisure, and freedom of mind; let there be no failure of intellect, no languor of body, none of those mischances of fortune which, by checking the first onrush of expression, so often stop the ready writer's pen; let all things go better even than you had dared to wish--still, what considerable work do you expect to achieve? _Petrarch._ Oh, certainly, one of great excellence, quite out of the common and likely to attract attention. _S. Augustine._ I have no wish to seem contradictory: let us suppose it may be a work of great excellence. But if you knew of what greater excellence still is the work which this will hinder, you would abhor what you now desire. For I will go so far as to assert that this work of yours is, to begin with, taking off your attention from cares of a nobler kind; and, greatly excellent as you think it, has no wide scope nor long future before it, circumscribed as it must be by time and space. _Petrarch._ Well do I know that old story bandied about by the philosophers, how they declare that all the earth is but a tiny point, how the soul alone endures for infinite millions of years, how fame cannot fill either the earth or the soul, and other paltry pleas of this sort, by which they try to turn minds aside from the love of glory. But I beg you will produce some more solid arguments than these, if you know any; for experience has shown me that all this is more specious than convincing. I do not think to become as God, or to inhabit eternity, or embrace, heaven and earth. Such glory as belongs to man is enough for me. That is all I sigh after. Mortal myself, it is but mortal blessings I desire. _S. Augustine._ Oh, if that is what you truly mean, how wretched are you! If you have no desire for things immortal, if no regard for what is eternal, then you are indeed wholly of the earth earthy: then all is over for you; no hope at all is left. _Petrarch._ Heaven defend me from such folly! But my conscience is witness, and knows what have been my desires, that never have I ceased to love with burning zeal the things eternal. I said--or if, perchance, I am mistaken, I intended to say--that my wish was to use mortal things for what they were worth, to do no violence to nature by bringing to its good things a limitless and immoderate desire, and so to follow after human fame as knowing that both myself and it will perish. _S. Augustine._ There you speak as a wise man. But when you declare you are willing to rob yourself of the riches that will endure merely for the sake of what you own is a perishing breath of applause--then you are a fool indeed. _Petrarch_. True, I may be postponing those riches, but not relinquishing them altogether. _S. Augustine._ But how dangerous is such delay, remembering that time flies fast and how uncertain our short life is. Let me ask you a question, and I beg you to answer it. Suppose that He who alone can fix our time of life and death were this day to assign you one whole year, and you had the definite certainty of how would you propose to use that year? _Petrarch_. Assuredly I should use great economy of time, and be extremely, careful to employ it on serious things; and I suppose no man alive would be so insolent or foolish as to answer your question in any other way. _S. Augustine._ You have answered rightly. And yet the folly men display in this case is matter of astonishment, not to me only but to all those who have ever written on this subject. To set forth what they feel, they have combined every faculty they possess and employed all their eloquence, and even then the truth itself will leave their utmost efforts far behind. _Petrarch._ I fear I do not understand the motive of so great astonishment. _S. Augustine._ It is because you are covetous of uncertain riches and altogether wasteful of those which are eternal, doing the very contrary of what you ought to do, if you were not quite devoid of wisdom. So this space of a year, though short enough indeed, being promised you by Him who deceives not, neither is deceived, you would partition out and dissipate on any kind of folly, provided you could keep the last hour for the care of your salvation! The horrible and hateful madness of you all is just this, that you waste your time on ridiculous vanities, as if there were enough and to spare, and though you do not in the least know if what you have will be long enough for the supreme necessities of the soul in face of death. The man who has one year of life possesses something certain though short; whereas he who has no such promise and lies under the power of death (whose stroke may fall at any moment), which is the common lot of all men--this man, I say, is not sure of a year, a day; no, not even of one hour. He who has a year to live, if six months shall have slipped away, will still have another half-year left to run; but for you, if you lose the day that now is, who will promise you to-morrow?[55] It is Cicero who says: "It is certain that we must die: what is uncertain is whether it will be to-day; and there is none so young that-he can be sure he will live until the evening."[56] I ask, then, of you, and I ask it likewise of all those who stand gaping after the future and pay no heed to the present, "Who knows if the high gods will add even one morrow to this your little day of life?"[57] _Petrarch_. If I am to answer for myself and for all: No one knows, of a truth. But let us hope for a year at least; on which, if we are still to follow Cicero, even the most aged reckons! _S. Augustine._ Yes; and, as he also adds, not old men only but young ones too are fools in that they cherish false hope, and promise themselves uncertain goods as though they were certain.[58] But let us take for granted (what is quite impossible) that the duration of life will be long and assured: still, do you not find it is the height of madness to squander the best years and the best parts of your existence on pleading only the eyes of others and tickling other men's ears, and to keep the last and worst--the years that are almost good for nothing--that bring nothing but distaste for life and then its end--to keep these, I say, for God and yourself, as though the welfare of your soul were the last thing you cared for? Even supposing the time were certain, is it not reversing the true order to put off the best to the last? _Petrarch._ I do not think my way of looking at it is so unreasonable as you imagine. My principle in that, as concerning the glory which we may hope for here below, it is right for us to seek while we are here below. One may expect to enjoy that other more radiant glory in heaven, when we shall have there arrived, and when one will have no more care or wish for the glory of earth. Therefore, as I think, it is in the true order that mortal men should first care for mortal things; and that to things transitory things eternal should succeed; because to pass from those to these is to go forward in most certain accordance with what is ordained for us, although no way is open for us to pass back again from eternity to time. _S. Augustine._ O man, little in yourself, and of little wisdom! Do you, then, dream that you shall enjoy every pleasure in heaven and earth, and everything will turn out fortunate and prosperous for you always and everywhere? But that delusion has betrayed thousands of men thousands of times, and has sunk into hell a countless host of souls. Thinking to have one foot on earth and one in heaven, they could neither stand here below nor mount on high. Therefore they fell miserably, and the moving breeze swept them suddenly away, some in the flower of their age, and some when they were in midst of their years and all their business. And do you suppose what has befallen so many others may not befall you? Alas! if (which may God forefend!) in the midst of all your plans and projects you should be cut off--what grief, what shame, what remorse (then too late!) that you should have grasped at all and lost all! _Petrarch._ May the Most High in His mercy save me from that misery! _S. Augustine._ Though Divine Mercy may deliver a man from his folly, yet it will not excuse it. Presume not upon this mercy overmuch. For if God abhors those who lose hope, He also laughs at those who in false hope put their trust. I was sorry when I heard fall from your lips that phrase about despising what you called the old story of the philosophers on this matter. Is it, then, an old story, pray, by figures of geometry, to show how small is all the earth, and to prove it but an island of little length and width? Is it an old story to divide the earth into five zones, the largest of which, lying in the centre, is burned by the heat of the sun, and the two utmost, to right and left, are a prey to binding frost and eternal snow, which leave not a corner where man can dwell; but those other two, between the middle and two utmost zones, are inhabited by man? Is it an old story that this habitable part is divided again into two parts, whereof one is placed under your feet, guarded by a vast sea, and the other is left you to inhabit everywhere, or, according to some authorities, is again in two parts subdivided, with but one part habitable and the other surrounded by the winding intricacies of the Northern Ocean, preventing all access to it? As to that part under your feet, called the antipodes, you are aware that for a long time the most learned men have been of two opinions whether it is inhabited or not: for myself, I have set forth my opinion in the book called _The City of God_, which you have doubtless read. Is it also an old story that your habitable part, already so restricted, is yet further diminished to such an extent by seas, marshes, forests, sand and deserts, that the little corner left you, of which you are so proud, is brought down to almost nothing? And, finally, is it an old story to point out to you that on this narrow strip, where you dwell, there are divers kinds of life, different religions which oppose one another, different languages and customs, which render it impossible to make the fame of your name go far? But if these things are to you nought but fables, so, to me, all I had promised myself of your future greatness must be a fable also; for I had thought, hitherto, that no man had more knowledge of these things than you yourself To say nothing of the conceptions of Cicero and Virgil and other systems of knowledge, physical or poetic, of which you seemed to have a competent knowledge, I knew that not long since, in your _Africa,_ you had expressed the very same opinions in these pretty lines-- "The Universe itself is but an isle Confined in narrow bounds, small, and begirt By Ocean's flowing waves."[59] You have added other developments later on, and now that I know you think them all fables, I am astonished you have put them forth with such hardihood. What shall I say now of the brief existence of human fame, the short, short span of time, when you know too well how small and recent even the oldest memory of man is if compared to eternity? I spare to call to your mind those opinions of the men of old, laid up in Plato's _Timæus_ and in the sixth book of Cicero's _Republic,_ where it is foretold what floods and conflagrations shall be coming not seldom on the earth. To many men such things have seemed probable; but they wear a different aspect to those who, like yourself, have come to know the true religion. And besides these, how many other things there are that militate against, I do not say the eternity, but even the survival of one's name. First there is the death of those with whom one has passed one's life; and that forgetfulness which is the common bane of old age: then there is the rising fame, ever growing greater, of new men; which always, by its freshness, is somewhat derogatory to that of those who went before, and seems to mount up higher just in so far as it can depress this other down. Then you must add, also, that persistent envy which ever dogs the steps of those who embark on any glorious enterprise; and the hatred of Truth itself, and the fact that the very life of men of genius is odious to the crowd. Think, too, how fickle is the judgment of the multitude. And alas for the sepulchres of the dead! to shatter which-- "The wild fig's barren branch is strong enough,"[60] as Juvenal has told us. In your own _Africa_ you call this, elegantly enough, "a second death"; and if I may here address to you the same words you have put in the mouth of another-- "The animated bust and storied urn Shall fall, and with them fall thy memory, And thou, my son, thus taste a second death."[61] Lo, then, how excellent, how undying that glory must be which the fall of one poor stone can bring to nought! And, then, consider the perishing of books wherein your name has been written, either by your own hand or another's. Even though that perishing may appear so much more delayed as books outlast monuments, nevertheless it is sooner or later inevitable; for, as is the case with everything else, there are countless natural or fortuitous calamities to which books are ever exposed. And even if they escape all these, they, like us, grow old and die-- "For whatsoever mortal hand has made, With its vain labour, shall be mortal too,"[62] if one may be allowed, for choice, to refute your childish error by your own words. What need to say more? I shall never cease to bring to your recollection lines of your own making which only too truly fit the case. "When your books perish you shall perish too; This is the third death, still to be endured."[63] And now you know what I think about glory. Perhaps I have used more words in expressing it than was needful for you or me; and yet fewer, I believe, than the importance of the subject demands--unless perchance you still think all these things only an old story? _Petrarch_. No indeed. What you have been saying--so far from seeming to me like old stories--has stirred in me a new desire to get rid of my old delusions. For albeit that these things were known to me long ago, and that I have heard them oftentimes repeated, since, as Terence puts it-- "Everything that one can say Has all been said before,"[64] nevertheless the stateliness of phrase, the orderly narration, the authority of him who speaks, cannot but move me deeply. But I have yet a last request to make, which is that you will give me your definite judgment on this point. Is it your wish that I should put all my studies on one side and renounce every ambition, or would you advise some middle course? _S. Augustine._ I will never advise you to live without ambition; but I would always urge you to put virtue before glory. You know that glory is in a sense the shadow of virtue. And therefore, just as it is impossible that your body should not cast a shadow if the sun is shining, so it is impossible also in the light of God Himself that virtues should exist and not make their glory to appear. Whoever, then, would take true glory away must of necessity take away virtue also; and when that is gone man's life is left bare, and only resembles that of the brute beasts that follow headlong their appetite, which to them is their only law. Here, therefore, is the rule for you to live by--follow after virtue and let glory take care of itself; and as for this, as some one said of Cato, the less you seek it the more you will find it. I must once more allow myself to invoke your own witness-- "Thou shalt do well from Honour's self to flee, For then shell Honour follow after thee."[65] Do you not recognise the verse? It is your own. One would surely think that man a fool who at midday should run here and there in the blaze of the sun, wearing himself out to see his shadow and point it out to others; now the man shows no more sense or reason who, amid the anxieties of life, takes huge trouble, first one way, then another, to spread his own glory abroad. What then? Let a man march steadily to the goal set before him, his shadow will follow him step by step: let him so act that he shall make virtue his prize, and lo! glory also shall be found at his side. I speak of that glory which is virtue's true companion; as for that which comes by other means, whether from bodily grace or mere cleverness, in the countless ways men have invented, it does not seem to me worthy of the name. And so, in regard to yourself, while you are wearing your strength out by such great labours in writing books, if you will allow me to say so, you are shooting wide of the mark. For you are spending all your efforts on things that concern others, and neglecting those that are your own; and so, through this vain hope of glory, the time, so precious, though you know it not, is passing away. _Petrarch._ What must I do, then? Abandon my unfinished works? Or would it be better to hasten them on, and, if God gives me grace, put the finishing touch to them? If I were once rid of these cares I would go forward, with a mind more free, to greater things; for hardly could I bear the thought of leaving half completed a work so fine and rich in promise of success. _S. Augustine._ Which foot you mean to hobble on, I do not know. You seem inclined to leave yourself derelict, rather than your books. As for me, I shall do my duty, with what success depends on you; but at least I shall have satisfied my conscience. Throw to the winds those great loads of histories; the deeds of the Romans have been celebrated quite enough by others, and are known by their own fame. Get out of Africa and leave it to its possessors. You will add nothing to the glory of your Scipio or to your own. He can be exalted to no higher pinnacle, but you may bring down his reputation, and with it your own. Therefore leave all this on one side, and now at length take possession of yourself; and to come back to our starting-point, let me urge you to enter upon the meditation of your last end, which comes on step by step without your being aware. Tear off the veil; disperse the shadows; look only on that which is coming; with eyes and mind give all your attention there: let nought else distract you. Heaven, Earth, the Sea--these all suffer change. What can man, the frailest of all creatures, hope for? The seasons fulfil their courses and change; nothing remains as it was. If you think you shall remain, you are deceived. For, Horace beautifully says-- "The losses of the changing Heaven, The changing moons repair; But we, when we have gone below, And our rich land no longer know, And hear no more its rivers flow, Are nought but dust and air."[66] Therefore, as often as you watch the fruits of summer follow the flowers of spring, and the pleasant cool of autumn succeed the summer heat, and winter's snow come after autumn's vintage, say to yourself: "The seasons pass, yet they will come again; but I am going, never again to return." As often as you behold at sunset the shadows of the mountains lengthening on the plain, say to yourself: "Now life is sinking fast; the shadow of death begins to overspread the scene; yonder sun to-morrow will again be rising the same, but this day of mine will never come back." Who shall count the glories of the midnight sky, which, though it be the time that men of evil heart choose for their misdoing, yet is it to men of good heart the holiest of all times? Well, take care you be not less watchful than that admiral of the Trojan fleet;[67] for the seas you sail upon are no more safe than his; rise up at the mid hour of night, and "All the stars, that in the silent sky Roll on their way, observe with careful heed."[68] As you see them hasten to their setting in the west, think how you also are moving with them; and that as for your abiding you have no hope, saving only in Him who knows no change and suffers no decline. Moreover, when you meet with those whom you knew but yesterday as children, and see them now growing up in stature to their manhood, stage by stage, remember how you in like manner, in the same lapse of time, are going down the hill, and at greater speed, by that law in nature under which things that are heavy tend to fall. When your eyes behold some ancient building, let your first thought be, Where are those who wrought it with their hands? and when you see new ones, ask, Where, soon, the builders of them will be also? If you chance to see the trees of some orchard, remember how often it falls out that one plants it and another plucks the fruit; for many a time the saying in the _Georgics_ comes to pass-- "One plants the tree, but eh, the slow-grown shade His grandchild will enjoy."[69] And when you look with pleased wonder at some swiftly flowing stream, then, that I bring no other poet's thought, keep ever in mind this one of your own-- "No river harries with more rapid flight Than Life's swift current."[70] Neither let multitude of days or the artificial divisions of time deceive your judgment; for man's whole existence, let it be never so prolonged, Is but as one day, and that not a day entire. Have oftentimes before your eyes one similitude of Aristotle's, whom I know to be a favourite of yours; and his words I am sure you never read or hear without feeling them deeply. You will find it reported by Cicero in the _Tusculan Orations_, and in words possibly even more clear and impressive than the original. Here is what he says, or very nearly so, for at the moment I have not his book at hand:-- "Aristotle tells us that on the banks of the river Hypanis, which on one side of Europe empties itself into the Euxine Sea, there exists a race of little animals who only live one day. Any one of them that dies at sunrise dies young; he that dies at noon is middle-aged; and should one live till sunset, he dies in old age: and especially is this so about the time of the solstice. If you compare the time of man's life with eternity, it will seem no longer than theirs."[71] So far I give you Cicero; but what he says seems to me so beyond all cavil that now for a long time the saying has passed from the tongue of philosophers into common speech. Every day you hear even ignorant and unlearned men, if they chance to see a little child, make use of some expression like this--"Well, well, it's early morning with him yet"; if they see a man they will say, "Oh, it's high noon with him now," or "He's well in the middle of his day"; if they see one old and broken down they will remark, "Ah! he's getting toward evening and the going down of the sun." Ponder well on these things, my very dear son, and on others akin to them, which will, I doubt not, flock into your thoughts, as these on the spur of the moment have come into mine. And one more thing I beseech you to have in mind: look at the graves of those older, perhaps, than you, but whom nevertheless you have known; look diligently, and then rest assured that the same dwelling-place, the same house, is for you also made ready. Thither are all of us travelling on; that is our last home. You who now, perchance, are proud and think that your springtime has not quite departed, and are for trampling others underfoot, you in turn shall underfoot be trampled. Think over all this; consider it by day and by night; not merely as a man of sober mind and remembering what nature he is of, but as becomes a man of wisdom, and so holding it all fast, as one who remembers it is written "A wise man's life is all one preparation for death."[72] This saying will teach you to think little of what concerns earthly things, and set before your eyes a better path of life on which to enter. You will be asking me what is that kind of life, and by what ways you can approach it? And I shall reply that now you have no need of long advice or counsel. Listen only to that Holy Spirit who is ever calling, and in urgent words saying, "Here is the way to your native country, your true home." You know what He would bring to mind; what paths for your feet, what dangers to avoid. If you would be safe and free obey His voice. There is no need for long deliberations. The nature of your danger calls for action, not words. The enemy is pressing you from behind, and hastening to the charge in front; the walls of the citadel, where you are besieged, already tremble. There is no time for hesitation. Of what use is it to make sweet songs for the ears of others, if you listen not to them yourself? I must draw to an end. Shun the rocks ahead, at all costs; drop anchor in a place of safety; follow the lead which the inspirations of your own soul give you. They may, on the side of what is evil, be evil; but towards that which is good they are themselves of the very best. _Petrarch_. Ah! would that you had told me all this before I had surrendered myself over to these studies! _S. Augustine._ I have told you, many a time and oft. From the moment when I saw you first take up your pen, I foresaw how short life would be, and how uncertain: how certain, too, and how long the toil. I saw the work would be great and the fruit little, and I warned you of all these things. But your ears were filled with the plaudits of the public, which, to my astonishment, took you captive, although you talked as if you despised them. But as we have now been conferring together long enough, I beg that if any of my counsels have seemed good to you, you will not allow them to come to nothing for want of energy or recollection; and if, on the other hand, I have sometimes been too rough, I pray you take it not amiss. _Petrarch_. Indeed I owe you a deep debt of gratitude, as for many other things, so, especially, for this three days' colloquy; for you have cleansed my darkened sight and scattered the thick clouds of error in which I was involved. And how shall I express my thankfulness to Her also, the Spirit of Truth, who, unwearied by our much talking, has waited upon us to the end? Had She turned away her face from us we should have wandered in darkness: your discourse had then contained no sure truth, neither would my understanding have embraced it. And now, as She and you have your dwelling-place in heaven, and I must still abide on earth, and, as you see, am greatly perplexed and troubled, not knowing for how long this must be, I implore you, of your goodness, not to forsake me, in spite of that great distance which separates me from such as you; for without you, O best of fathers, my life would be but one long sadness, and without Her I could not live at all. _S. Augustine._ You may count your prayer already granted, if you will only to yourself be true: for how shall any one be constant to him who is inconstant to himself? _Petrarch._ I will be true to myself, so far as in me lies. I will pull myself together and collect my scattered wits, and make a great endeavour to possess my soul in patience. But even while we speak, a crowd of important affairs, though only of the world, is waiting my attention. _S. Augustine._ For the common herd of men these may be what to them seem more important; but in reality there is nothing of more importance, and nothing ought to be esteemed of so much worth. For, of other trains of thought, you may reckon them to be not essential for the soul, but the end of life will prove that these we have been engaged in are of eternal necessity. _Petrarch._ I confess they are so. And I now return to attend to those other concerns only in order that, when they are discharged, I may come back to these. I am not ignorant that, as you said a few minutes before, it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight path of the way of salvation. But I have not strength to resist that old bent for study altogether. _S. Augustine_. We are falling into our old controversy. Want of will you call want of power. Well, so it must be, if it cannot be otherwise. I pray God that He will go with you where you go, and that He will order your steps, even though they wander, into the way of truth. _Petrarch._ O may it indeed be as you have prayed! May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me; that I may raise up no cloud of dust before my eyes; and, with my mind calmed down and at peace, I may hear the world grow still and silent, and the winds of adversity die away. _Francis Petrarch, Poet, Most illustrious Orator; his Book, which he entitled Secretum; in which a Three days' Discussion concerning Contempt of the World is carried on._ Finis. [1] _De Senectute_, xxiii. [2] _Æneid_, vi. 428-29. [3] "Tarda sit illa dies et nostro serior ævo."--_Met._ xv. 868. [4] This refers to the second Scipio Africanus, and the words alluded to are these: "It is his goodness that I loved, and that is not dead; it lives not alone for me, who have had it ever before my eyes, but it will go down in all its beauty to those who come after. Whenever a man is meditating some great undertaking, or shall be nourishing in his breast great hopes, his shall be the memory, and his the image that such a man shall take for a pattern."--Cicero, _De Amicitiâ_, xxvii. [5] _Æneid,_ i. 328-29. [6] Cicero, _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 18. [7] Quoted from Attilius in Cicero's _Letters to Atticus,_ xiv. [8] Ovid, _Amores_, I. x. 13. [9] _Æneid_, vi. 540-43. [10] _Æneid_, i. 613 [11] Seneca, _De Beneficiis,_ vii. 8. [12] Terence, _Phormio_, 949. [13] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 35 [14] Academica. [15] Quoted from Tusculan Orations, iii. 26. [16] Simone Martini, of Siena. [17] A river in Thessaly. [18] A town in Phocis, near Delphi. [19] Terence, _Eunuch,_ 59-63. [20] Terence, _Eunuch,_ 70-73. [21] _Ibid.,_ 56. [22] _Ibid._ 57, 58. [23] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 35. [24] _De Remediis Amoris,_ I. 162. [25] _Æneid,_ iii. 44. [26] _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 35. [27] _Æneid_, iv. 69-73. [28] Seneca, _Epist._, xxviii. [29] Horace, _Epistles_, Book I., _Epist._, xi. 27 (Conington). [30] Horace, _Epist.,_ Book I., xi. 25-26 (Conington). [31] Seneca's _Epist.,_ lxiv. [32] _Æneid,_ vi. 126-27. [33] _Georgics,_ ii. 136-39. [34] Ildebrandino di Conte, Bishop of Padua, _Epist._ cxi. 25. [35] Petrarch's _Penitential Psalms,_ iii. (translated by George Chapman). [36] Ovid's _De Remediis Amoris_, 579-80. [37] Petrarch's _Epistles,_ i. 7. [38] Quoted in Seneca's treatise, _De Animæ tranquillitate_, xv. [39] Seneca's _Epistles,_ ii. [40] _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 35. [41] The text here is obscure. [42] Suetonius Domitian, xviii. [43] Virgil, _Eclogues,_ i. 29. [44] _Æneid,_ vi. 615-16. [45] _Ibid.,_ ii. 265. [47] Seneca, _Epistles,_ iv. [48] Petrarch's _Africa_, vii. 292. [49] Seneca, _De Natura Quæstiones,_ i. 17. [50] Macrobius _Saturnalia,_ ii 5. [51] Horace, _Epistles_, i 4, 13. [52] PS. cxxxi. 9. [53] Cicero, _Pro Marcello_, viii. [54] Seneca, _Letters_. [55] _De Senectute_, xx. [56] _Ibid.,_ xix. [57] Horace, _Odes,_ iv. 7,17. [58] _De Senectute_, xix. [59] _Africa_, ii. 361, 363. [60] _Satira,_ x. 145. [61] _Africa,_ ii. 481, &c. [62] _Africa_, ii. 455-6. [63] _Ibid._, ii. 464-5. [64] Terence's _Eunuch,_ 41. [65] _Africa_, ii 486. [66] Horace, _Odes_, iv. 7, 13-16. [67] Palinurus. [68] <b>Æneid</b>, iii. 515. [69] _Georgics_, ii. 58. [70] Petrarch's Epist., I. iv. 91-2. [71] _Tusculan Orations_, i. 39. [72] _Tusculan Orations_, i. 30. 
17667	----	Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD. BY LORD LYTTELTON. CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1889. INTRODUCTION. George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire. He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament, became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757 he withdrew from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton first published these "Dialogues of the Dead," which were revised for a fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he published in four volumes a "History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he Lived," a work upon which he had been busy for thirty years. He began it not long after he had published, at the age of twenty-six, his "Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan." If we go farther back we find George Lyttelton, aged twenty-three, beginning his life in literature as a poet, with four eclogues on "The Progress of Love." To the last Lord Lyttelton was poet enough to feel true fellowship with poets of his day. He loved good literature, and his own works show that he knew it. He counted Henry Fielding among his friends; he was a friend and helper to James Thomson, the author of "The Seasons;" and when acting as secretary to the king's son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (who held a little court of his own, in which there was much said about liberty), his friendship brought Thomson and Mallet together in work on a masque for the Prince and Princess, which included the song of "Rule Britannia." Before Lord Lyttelton followed their example, "Dialogues of the Dead" had been written by Lucian, and by Fenelon, and by Fontenelle; and in our time they have been written by Walter Savage Landor. This half-dramatic plan of presenting a man's own thoughts upon the life of man and characters of men, and on the issues of men's characters in shaping life, is a way of essay writing pleasant alike to the writer and the reader. Lord Lyttelton was at his best in it. The form of writing obliged him to work with a lighter touch than he used when he sought to maintain the dignity of history by the style of his "History of Henry II." His calm liberality of mind enters into the discussion of many topics. His truths are old, but there are no real truths of human life and conduct, worth anything at all, that are of yesterday. Human love itself is called "the old, old story;" but do we therefore cease from loving, or from finding such ways as we can of saying that we love. Dr. Johnson was not at his wisest when he found fault with Lord Lyttelton because, in his "Dialogues of the Dead," "that man sat down to write a book, to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him." This was exactly what he wished to do. In the Preface to his revised edition Lord Lyttelton said, "Sometimes a new dress may render an old truth more pleasing to those whom the mere love of novelty betrays into error, as it frequently does not only the wits, but the sages of these days. Indeed, one of the best services that could now be done to mankind by any good writer would be the bringing them back to common sense, from which the desire of shining by extraordinary notions has seduced great numbers, to the no small detriment of morality and of all real knowledge." At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an active politician in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt, who was a friend of Pope's and of the best writers of the day, and who in his occasional verse added at least one line to the household words of English literature when in his warm-hearted Prologue to Thomson's play of _Coriolanus_, produced after its writer's death, he said of that poet what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the world "Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, One line which, dying, he could wish to blot." H. M. DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD. DIALOGUE I. LORD FALKLAND--MR. HAMPDEN. _Lord Falkland_.--Are not you surprised to see me in Elysium, Mr. Hampden? _Mr. Hampden_.--I was going to put the same question to your lordship, for doubtless you thought me a rebel. _Lord Falkland_.--And certainly you thought me an apostate from the Commonwealth, and a supporter of tyranny. _Mr. Hampden_.--I own I did, and I don't wonder at the severity of your thoughts about me. The heat of the times deprived us both of our natural candour. Yet I will confess to you here, that, before I died, I began to see in our party enough to justify your apprehensions that the civil war, which we had entered into from generous motives, from a laudable desire to preserve our free constitution, would end very unhappily, and perhaps, in the issue, destroy that constitution, even by the arms of those who pretended to be most zealous for it. _Lord Falkland_.--And I will as frankly own to you that I saw, in the court and camp of the king, so much to alarm me for the liberty of my country, if our arms were successful, that I dreaded a victory little less than I did a defeat, and had nothing in my mouth but the word peace, which I constantly repeated with passionate fondness, in every council at which I was called to assist. _Mr. Hampden_.--I wished for peace too, as ardently as your lordship, but I saw no hopes of it. The insincerity of the king and the influence of the queen made it impossible to trust to his promises and declarations. Nay, what reliance could we reasonably have upon laws designed to limit and restrain the power of the Crown, after he had violated the Bill of Rights, obtained with such difficulty, and containing so clear an assertion of the privileges which had been in dispute? If his conscience would allow him to break an Act of Parliament, made to determine the bounds of the royal prerogative, because he thought that the royal prerogative could have no bounds, what legal ties could bind a conscience so prejudiced? or what effectual security could his people obtain against the obstinate malignity of such an opinion, but entirely taking from him the power of the sword, and enabling themselves to defend the laws he had passed? _Lord Falkland_.--There is evidently too much truth in what you have said. But by taking from the king the power of the sword, you in reality took all power. It was converting the government into a democracy; and if he had submitted to it, he would only have preserved the name of a king. The sceptre would have been held by those who had the sword; or we must have lived in a state of perpetual anarchy, without any force or balance in the government; a state which could not have lasted long, but would have ended in a republic or in absolute dominion. _Mr. Hampden_.--Your reasoning seems unanswerable. But what could we do? Let Dr. Laud and those other court divines, who directed the king's conscience, and fixed in it such principles as made him unfit to govern a limited monarchy--though with many good qualities, and some great ones--let them, I say, answer for all the mischiefs they brought upon him and the nation. _Lord Falkland_.--They were indeed much to blame; but those principles had gained ground before their times, and seemed the principles of our Church, in opposition to the Jesuits, who had certainly gone too far in the other extreme. _Mr. Hampden_.--It is a disgrace to our Church to have taken up such opinions; and I will venture to prophesy that our clergy in future times must renounce them, or they will be turned against them by those who mean their destruction. Suppose a Popish king on the throne, will the clergy adhere to passive obedience and non-resistance? If they do, they deliver up their religion to Rome; if they do not, their practice will confute their own doctrines. _Lord Falkland_.--Nature, sir, will in the end be sure to set right whatever opinion contradicts her great laws, let who will be the teacher. But, indeed, the more I reflect on those miserable times in which we both lived, the more I esteem it a favour of Providence to us that we were cut off so soon. The most grievous misfortune that can befall a virtuous man is to be in such a state that he can hardly so act as to approve his own conduct. In such a state we both were. We could not easily make a step, either forward or backward, without great hazard of guilt, or at least of dishonour. We were unhappily entangled in connections with men who did not mean so well as ourselves, or did not judge so rightly. If we endeavoured to stop them, they thought us false to the cause; if we went on with them, we ran directly upon rocks, which we saw, but could not avoid. Nor could we take shelter in a philosophical retreat from business. Inaction would in us have been cowardice and desertion. To complete the public calamities, a religious fury, on both sides, mingled itself with the rage of our civil dissensions, more frantic than that, more implacable, more averse to all healing measures. The most intemperate counsels were thought the most pious, and a regard to the laws, if they opposed the suggestions of these fiery zealots, was accounted irreligion. This added new difficulties to what was before but too difficult in itself, the settling of a nation which no longer could put any confidence in its sovereign, nor lay more restraints on the royal authority without destroying the balance of the whole constitution. In those circumstances, the balls that pierced our hearts were directed thither by the hands of our guardian angels, to deliver us from horrors we could not support, and perhaps from a guilt our souls abhorred. _Mr. Hampden_.--Indeed, things were brought to so deplorable a state, that if either of us had seen his party triumphant, he must have lamented that triumph as the ruin of his country. Were I to return into life, the experience I have had would make me very cautious how I kindled the sparks of civil war in England; for I have seen that, when once that devouring fire is lighted, it is not in the power of the head of a party to say to the conflagration, "Thus far shalt thou go, and here shall thy violence stop." _Lord Falkland_.--The conversation we have had, as well as the reflections of my own mind on past events, would, if I were condemned to my body again, teach me great moderation in my judgments of persons who might happen to differ from me in difficult scenes of public action; they would entirely cure me of the spirit of party, and make me think that as in the Church, so also in the State, no evil is more to be feared than a rancorous and enthusiastical zeal. DIALOGUE II. LOUIS LE GRAND--PETER THE GREAT. _Louis_.--Who, sir, could have thought, when you were learning the trade of a shipwright in the dockyards of England and Holland, that you would ever acquire, as I had done, the surname of "Great." _Peter_.--Which of us best deserved that title posterity will decide. But my greatness appeared sufficiently in that very act which seemed to you a debasement. _Louis_.--The dignity of a king does not stoop to such mean employments. For my own part, I was careful never to appear to the eyes of my subjects or foreigners but in all the splendour and majesty of royal power. _Peter_.--Had I remained on the throne of Russia, as my ancestors did, environed with all the pomp of barbarous greatness, I should have been idolised by my people--as much, at least, as you ever were by the French. My despotism was more absolute, their servitude was more humble. But then I could not have reformed their evil customs; have taught them arts, civility, navigation, and war; have exalted them from brutes in human shapes into men. In this was seen the extraordinary force of my genius beyond any comparison with all other kings, that I thought it no degradation or diminution of my greatness to descend from my throne, and go and work in the dockyards of a foreign republic; to serve as a private sailor in my own fleets, and as a common soldier in my own army, till I had raised myself by my merit in all the several steps and degrees of promotion up to the highest command, and had thus induced my nobility to submit to a regular subordination in the sea and land service by a lesson hard to their pride, and which they would not have learnt from any other master or by any other method of instruction. _Louis_.--I am forced to acknowledge that it was a great act. When I thought it a mean one, my judgment was perverted by the prejudices arising from my own education and the ridicule thrown upon it by some of my courtiers, whose minds were too narrow to be able to comprehend the greatness of yours in that situation. _Peter_.--It was an act of more heroism than any ever done by Alexander or Caesar. Nor would I consent to exchange my glory with theirs. They both did great things; but they were at the head of great nations, far superior in valour and military skill to those with whom they contended. I was the king of an ignorant, undisciplined, barbarous people. My enemies were at first so superior to my subjects that ten thousand of them could beat a hundred thousand Russians. They had formidable navies; I had not a ship. The King of Sweden was a prince of the most intrepid courage, assisted by generals of consummate knowledge in war, and served by soldiers so disciplined that they were become the admiration and terror of Europe. Yet I vanquished these soldiers; I drove that prince to take refuge in Turkey; I won battles at sea as well as land; I new- created my people; I gave them arts, science, policy; I enabled them to keep all the powers of the North in awe and dependence, to give kings to Poland, to check and intimidate the Ottoman emperors, to mix with great weight in the affairs of all Europe. What other man has ever done such wonders as these? Read all the records of ancient and modern times, and find, if you can, one fit to be put in comparison with me! _Louis_.--Your glory would indeed have been supreme and unequalled if, in civilising your subjects, you had reformed the brutality of your own manners and the barbarous vices of your nature. But, alas! the legislator and reformer of the Muscovites was drunken and cruel. _Peter_.--My drunkenness I confess; nor will I plead, to excuse it, the example of Alexander. It inflamed the tempers of both, which were by nature too fiery, into furious passions of anger, and produced actions of which our reason, when sober, was ashamed. But the cruelty you upbraid me with may in some degree be excused, as necessary to the work I had to perform. Fear of punishment was in the hearts of my barbarous subjects the only principle of obedience. To make them respect the royal authority I was obliged to arm it with all the terrors of rage. You had a more pliant people to govern--a people whose minds could be ruled, like a fine-managed horse, with an easy and gentle rein. The fear of shame did more with them than the fear of the knout could do with the Russians. The humanity of your character and the ferocity of mine were equally suitable to the nations over which we reigned. But what excuse can you find for the cruel violence you employed against your Protestant subjects? They desired nothing but to live under the protection of laws you yourself had confirmed; and they repaid that protection by the most hearty zeal for your service. Yet these did you force, by the most inhuman severities, either to quit the religion in which they were bred, and which their consciences still retained, or to leave their native land, and endure all the woes of a perpetual exile. If the rules of policy could not hinder you from thus depopulating your kingdom, and transferring to foreign countries its manufactures and commerce, I am surprised that your heart itself did not stop you. It makes one shudder to think that such orders should be sent from the most polished court in Europe, as the most savage Tartars could hardly have executed without remorse and compassion. _Louis_.--It was not my heart, but my religion, that dictated these severities. My confessor told me they alone would atone for all my sins. _Peter_.--Had I believed in my patriarch as you believed in your priest, I should not have been the great monarch that I was. But I mean not to detract from the merit of a prince whose memory is dear to his subjects. They are proud of having obeyed you, which is certainly the highest praise to a king. My people also date their glory from the era of my reign. But there is this capital distinction between us. The pomp and pageantry of state were necessary to your greatness; I was great in myself, great in the energy and powers of my mind, great in the superiority and sovereignty of my soul over all other men. DIALOGUE III. PLATO--FENELON. _Plato_.--Welcome to Elysium, O thou, the most pure, the most gentle, the most refined disciple of philosophy that the world in modern times has produced! Sage Fenelon, welcome!--I need not name myself to you. Our souls by sympathy must know one another. _Fenelon_.--I know you to be Plato, the most amiable of all the disciples of Socrates, and the philosopher of all antiquity whom I most desired to resemble. _Plato_.--Homer and Orpheus are impatient to see you in that region of these happy fields which their shades inhabit. They both acknowledge you to be a great poet, though you have written no verses. And they are now busy in composing for you unfading wreaths of all the finest and sweetest Elysian flowers. But I will lead you from them to the sacred grove of philosophy, on the highest hill of Elysium, where the air is most pure and most serene. I will conduct you to the fountain of wisdom, in which you will see, as in your own writings, the fair image of virtue perpetually reflected. It will raise in you more love than was felt by Narcissus, when he contemplated the beauty of his own face in the unruffled spring. But you shall not pine, as he did, for a shadow. The goddess herself will affectionately meet your embraces and mingle with your soul. _Fenelon_.--I find you retain the allegorical and poetical style, of which you were so fond in many of your writings. Mine also run sometimes into poetry, particularly in my "Telemachus," which I meant to make a kind of epic composition. But I dare not rank myself among the great poets, nor pretend to any equality in oratory with you, the most eloquent of philosophers, on whose lips the Attic bees distilled all their honey. _Plato_.--The French language is not so harmonious as the Greek, yet you have given a sweetness to it which equally charms the ear and heart. When one reads your compositions, one thinks that one hears Apollo's lyre, strung by the hands of the Graces, and tuned by the Muses. The idea of a perfect king, which you have exhibited in your "Telemachus," far excels, in my own judgment, my imaginary "Republic." Your "Dialogues" breathe the pure spirit of virtue, of unaffected good sense, of just criticism, of fine taste. They are in general as superior to your countryman Fontenelle's as reason is to false wit, or truth to affectation. The greatest fault of them, I think, is, that some are too short. _Fenelon_.--It has been objected to them--and I am sensible of it myself--that most of them are too full of commonplace morals. But I wrote them for the instruction of a young prince, and one cannot too forcibly imprint on the minds of those who are born to empire the most simple truths; because, as they grow up, the flattery of a court will try to disguise and conceal from them those truths, and to eradicate from their hearts the love of their duty, if it has not taken there a very deep root. _Plato_.--It is, indeed, the peculiar misfortune of princes, that they are often instructed with great care in the refinements of policy, and not taught the first principles of moral obligations, or taught so superficially that the virtuous man is soon lost in the corrupt politician. But the lessons of virtue you gave your royal pupil are so graced by the charms of your eloquence that the oldest and wisest men may attend to them with pleasure. All your writings are embellished with a sublime and agreeable imagination, which gives elegance to simplicity, and dignity to the most vulgar and obvious truths. I have heard, indeed, that your countrymen are less sensible of the beauty of your genius and style than any of their neighbours. What has so much depraved their taste? _Fenelon_.--That which depraved the taste of the Romans after the ago of Augustus--an immoderate love of wit, of paradox, of refinement. The works of their writers, like the faces of their women, must be painted and adorned with artificial embellishments to attract their regards. And thus the natural beauty of both is lost. But it is no wonder if few of them esteem my "Telemachus," as the maxims I have principally inculcated there are thought by many inconsistent with the grandeur of their monarchy, and with the splendour of a refined and opulent nation. They seem generally to be falling into opinions that the chief end of society is to procure the pleasures of luxury; that a nice and elegant taste of voluptuous enjoyments is the perfection of merit; and that a king, who is gallant, magnificent, liberal, who builds a fine palace, who furnishes it well with good statues and pictures, who encourages the fine arts, and makes them subservient to every modish vice, who has a restless ambition, a perfidious policy, and a spirit of conquest, is better for them than a Numa or a Marcus Aurelius. Whereas to check the excesses of luxury--those excesses, I mean, which enfeeble the spirit of a nation--to ease the people, as much as is possible, of the burden of taxes; to give them the blessings of peace and tranquillity, when they can he obtained without injury or dishonour; to make them frugal, and hardy, and masculine in the temper of their bodies and minds, that they may be the fitter for war whenever it does come upon them; but, above all, to watch diligently over their morals, and discourage whatever may defile or corrupt them--is the great business of government, and ought to be in all circumstances the principal object of a wise legislature. Unquestionably that is the happiest country which has most virtue in it; and to the eye of sober reason the poorest Swiss canton is a much nobler state than the kingdom of France, if it has more liberty, better morals, a more settled tranquillity, more moderation in prosperity, and more firmness in danger. _Plato_.--Your notions are just, and if your country rejects them she will not long hold the rank of the first nation in Europe. Her declension is begun, her ruin approaches; for, omitting all other arguments, can a state be well served when the raising of an opulent fortune in its service, and making a splendid use of that fortune, is a distinction more envied than any which arises from integrity in office or public spirit in government? Can that spirit, which is the parent of national greatness, continue vigorous and diffusive where the desire of wealth, for the sake of a luxury which wealth alone can support, and an ambition aspiring, not to glory, but to profit, are the predominant passions? If it exists in a king or a minister of state, how will either of them find among a people so disposed the necessary instruments to execute his great designs; or, rather, what obstruction will he not find from the continual opposition of private interest to public? But if, on the contrary, a court inclines to tyranny, what a facility will be given by these dispositions to that evil purpose? How will men with minds relaxed by the enervating ease and softness of luxury have vigour to oppose it? Will not most of them lean to servitude, as their natural state, as that in which the extravagant and insatiable cravings of their artificial wants may best be gratified at the charge of a bountiful master or by the spoils of an enslaved and ruined people? When all sense of public virtue is thus destroyed, will not fraud, corruption, and avarice, or the opposite workings of court factions to bring disgrace on each other, ruin armies and fleets without the help of an enemy, and give up the independence of the nation to foreigners, after having betrayed its liberties to a king? All these mischiefs you saw attendant on that luxury, which some modern philosophers account (as I am informed) the highest good to a state! Time will show that their doctrines are pernicious to society, pernicious to government; and that yours, tempered and moderated so as to render them more practicable in the present circumstances of your country, are wise, salutary, and deserving of the general thanks of mankind. But lest you should think, from the praise I have given you, that flattery can find a place in Elysium, allow me to lament, with the tender sorrow of a friend, that a man so superior to all other follies could give into the reveries of a Madame Guyon, a distracted enthusiast. How strange was it to see the two great lights of France, you and the Bishop of Meaux, engaged in a controversy whether a madwoman was a heretic or a saint! _Fenelon_.--I confess my own weakness, and the ridiculousness of the dispute; but did not your warm imagination carry you also into some reveries about divine love, in which you talked unintelligibly, even to yourself? _Plato_.--I felt something more than I was able to express. _Fenelon_.--I had my feelings too, as fine and as lively as yours; but we should both have done better to have avoided those subjects in which sentiment took the place of reason. DIALOGUE IV. MR. ADDISON--DR. SWIFT. _Dr. Swift_.--Surely, Addison, Fortune was exceedingly inclined to play the fool (a humour her ladyship, as well as most other ladies of very great quality, is frequently in) when she made you a minister of state and me a divine! _Addison_.--I must confess we were both of us out of our elements; but you don't mean to insinuate that all would have been right if our destinies had been reversed? _Swift_.--Yes, I do. You would have made an excellent bishop, and I should have governed Great Britain, as I did Ireland, with an absolute sway, while I talked of nothing but liberty, property, and so forth. _Addison_.--You governed the mob of Ireland; but I never understood that you governed the kingdom. A nation and a mob are very different things. _Swift_.--Ay, so you fellows that have no genius for politics may suppose; but there are times when, by seasonably putting himself at the head of the mob, an able man may get to the head of the nation. Nay, there are times when the nation itself is a mob, and ought to be treated as such by a skilful observer. _Addison_.--I don't deny the truth of your proposition; but is there no danger that, from the natural vicissitudes of human affairs, the favourite of the mob should be mobbed in his turn? _Swift_.--Sometimes there may, but I risked it, and it answered my purpose. Ask the lord-lieutenants, who were forced to pay court to me instead of my courting them, whether they did not feel my superiority. And if I could make myself so considerable when I was only a dirty Dean of St. Patrick's, without a seat in either House of Parliament, what should I have done if Fortune had placed me in England, unencumbered with a gown, and in a situation that would have enabled me to make myself heard in the House of Lords or of Commons? _Addison_.--You would undoubtedly have done very marvellous acts! Perhaps you might then have been as zealous a Whig as my Lord Wharton himself; or, if the Whigs had unhappily offended the statesman as they did the doctor, who knows whether you might not have brought in the Pretender? Pray let me ask you one question between you and me: If your great talents had raised you to the office of first minister under that prince, would you have tolerated the Protestant religion or not? _Swift_.--Ha! Mr. Secretary, are you witty upon me? Do you think, because Sunderland took a fancy to make you a great man in the state, that he, or his master, could make you as great in wit as Nature made me? No, no; wit is like grace, it must be given from above. You can no more get that from the king than my lords the bishops can the other. And, though I will own you had some, yet believe me, my good friend, it was no match for mine. I think you have not vanity enough in your nature to pretend to a competition in that point with me. _Addison_.--I have been told by my friends that I was rather too modest, so I will not determine this dispute for myself, but refer it to Mercury, the god of wit, who fortunately happens to be coming this way with a soul he has brought to the Shades. Hail, divine Hermes! A question of precedence in the class of wit and humour, over which you preside, having arisen between me and my countryman, Dr. Swift, we beg leave-- _Mercury_.--Dr. Swift, I rejoice to see you. How does my old lad? How does honest Lemuel Gulliver? Have you been in Lilliput lately, or in the Flying Island, or with your good nurse Glumdalclitch? Pray when did you eat a crust with Lord Peter? Is Jack as mad still as ever? I hear that since you published the history of his case the poor fellow, by more gentle usage, is almost got well. If he had but more food he would be as much in his senses as Brother Martin himself; but Martin, they tell me, has lately spawned a strange brood of Methodists, Moravians, Hutchinsonians, who are madder than ever Jack was in his worst days. It is a great pity you are not alive again to make a new edition of your "Tale of the Tub" for the use of these fellows. Mr. Addison, I beg your pardon; I should have spoken to you sooner, but I was so struck with the sight of my old friend the doctor, that I forgot for a time the respects due to you. _Swift_.--Addison, I think our dispute is decided before the judge has heard the cause. _Addison_.--I own it is in your favour, but-- _Mercury_.--Don't be discouraged, friend Addison. Apollo perhaps would have given a different judgment. I am a wit, and a rogue, and a foe to all dignity. Swift and I naturally like one another. He worships me more than Jupiter, and I honour him more than Homer; but yet, I assure you, I have a great value for you. Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, Will Wimble, the Country Gentleman in the Freeholder, and twenty more characters, drawn with the finest strokes of unaffected wit and humour in your admirable writings, have obtained for you a high place in the class of my authors, though not quite so high a one as the Dean of St. Patrick's. Perhaps you might have got before him if the decency of your nature and the cautiousness of your judgment would have given you leave. But, allowing that in the force and spirit of his wit he has really the advantage, how much does he yield to you in all the elegant graces, in the fine touches of delicate sentiment, in developing the secret springs of the soul, in showing the mild lights and shades of a character, in distinctly marking each line, and every soft gradation of tints, which would escape the common eye? Who ever painted like you the beautiful parts of human nature, and brought them out from under the shade even of the greatest simplicity, or the most ridiculous weaknesses; so that we are forced to admire and feel that we venerate, even while we are laughing? Swift was able to do nothing that approaches to this. He could draw an ill face, or caricature a good one, with a masterly hand; but there was all his power, and, if I am to speak as a god, a worthless power it is. Yours is divine. It tends to exalt human nature. _Swift_.--Pray, good Mercury (if I may have liberty to say a word for myself) do you think that my talent was not highly beneficial to correct human nature? Is whipping of no use to mend naughty boys? _Mercury_.--Men are generally not so patient of whipping as boys, and a rough satirist is seldom known to mend them. Satire, like antimony, if it be used as a medicine, must be rendered less corrosive. Yours is often rank poison. But I will allow that you have done some good in your way, though not half so much as Addison did in his. _Addison_.--Mercury, I am satisfied. It matters little what rank you assign me as a wit, if you give me the precedence as a friend and benefactor to mankind. _Mercury_.--I pass sentence on the writers, not the men, and my decree is this:--When any hero is brought hither who wants to be humbled, let the talk of lowering his arrogance be assigned to Swift. The same good office may be done to a philosopher vain of his wisdom and virtue, or to a bigot puffed up with spiritual pride. The doctor's discipline will soon convince the first, that with all his boasted morality, he is but a Yahoo; and the latter, that to be holy he must necessarily be humble. I would also have him apply his anticosmetic wash to the painted face of female vanity, and his rod, which draws blood at every stroke, to the hard back of insolent folly or petulant wit. But Addison should be employed to comfort those whose delicate minds are dejected with too painful a sense of some infirmities in their nature. To them he should hold his fair and charitable mirror, which would bring to their sight their hidden excellences, and put them in a temper fit for Elysium.--Adieu. Continue to esteem and love each other, as you did in the other world, though you were of opposite parties, and, what is still more wonderful, rival wits. This alone is sufficient to entitle you both to Elysium. DIALOGUE V. ULYSSES--CIRCE.--IN CIRCE'S ISLAND. _Circe_.--You will go then, Ulysses, but tell me, without reserve, what carries you from me? _Ulysses_.--Pardon, goddess, the weakness of human nature. My heart will sigh for my country. It is an attachment which all my admiration of you cannot entirely overcome. _Circe_.--This is not all. I perceive you are afraid to declare your whole mind. But what, Ulysses, do you fear? My terrors are gone. The proudest goddess on earth, when she has favoured a mortal as I have favoured you, has laid her divinity and power at his feet. _Ulysses_.--It may be so while there still remains in her heart the tenderness of love, or in her mind the fear of shame. But you, Circe, are above those vulgar sensations. _Circe_.--I understand your caution; it belongs to your character, and therefore, to remove all diffidence from you, I swear by Styx I will do no manner of harm, either to you or your friends, for anything which you say, however offensive it may be to my love or my pride, but will send you away from my island with all marks of my friendship. Tell me now, truly, what pleasures you hope to enjoy in the barren rock of Ithaca, which can compensate for those you leave in this paradise, exempt from all cares and overflowing with all delights? _Ulysses_.--The pleasures of virtue; the supreme happiness of doing good. Here I do nothing. My mind is in a palsy; all its faculties are benumbed. I long to return into action, that I may worthily employ those talents which I have cultivated from the earliest days of my youth. Toils and cares fright not me; they are the exercise of my soul; they keep it in health and in vigour. Give me again the fields of Troy, rather than these vacant groves. There I could reap the bright harvest of glory; here I am hid like a coward from the eyes of mankind, and begin to appear comtemptible in my own. The image of my former self haunts and seems to upbraid me wheresoever I go. I meet it under the gloom of every shade; it even intrudes itself into your presence and chides me from your arms. O goddess, unless you have power to lay that spirit, unless you can make me forget myself, I cannot be happy here, I shall every day be more wretched. _Circe_.--May not a wise and good man, who has spent all his youth in active life and honourable danger, when he begins to decline, be permitted to retire and enjoy the rest of his days in quiet and pleasure? _Ulysses_.--No retreat can be honourable to a wise and good man but in company with the muses. Here I am deprived of that sacred society. The muses will not inhabit the abodes of voluptuousness and sensual pleasure. How can I study or think while such a number of beasts--and the worst beasts are men turned into beasts--are howling or roaring or grunting all about me? _Circe_.--There may be something in this, but this I know is not all. You suppress the strongest reason that draws you to Ithaca. There is another image besides that of your former self, which appears to you in this island, which follows you in your walks, which more particularly interposes itself between you and me, and chides you from my arms. It is Penelope, Ulysses, I know it is. Don't pretend to deny it. You sigh for Penelope in my bosom itself. And yet she is not an immortal. She is not, as I am, endowed by Nature with the gift of unfading youth. Several years have passed since hers has been faded. I might say, without vanity, that in her best days she was never so handsome as I. But what is she now? _Ulysses_.--You have told me yourself, in a former conversation, when I inquired of you about her, that she is faithful to my bed, and as fond of me now, after twenty years' absence, as at the time when I left her to go to Troy. I left her in the bloom of youth and beauty. How much must her constancy have been tried since that time! How meritorious is her fidelity! Shall I reward her with falsehood? Shall I forget my Penelope, who can't forget me, who has no pleasure so dear to her as my remembrance? _Circe_.--Her love is preserved by the continual hope of your speedy return. Take that hope from her. Let your companions return, and let her know that you have fixed your abode with me, that you have fixed it for ever. Let her know that she is free to dispose as she pleases of her heart and her hand. Send my picture to her, bid her compare it with her own face. If all this does not cure her of the remains of her passion, if you don't hear of her marrying Eurymachus in a twelvemonth, I understand nothing of womankind. _Ulysses_.--O cruel goddess! why will you force me to tell you truths I desire to conceal? If by such unmerited, such barbarous usage I could lose her heart it would break mine. How should I be able to endure the torment of thinking that I had wronged such a wife? What could make me amends for her being no longer mine, for her being another's? Don't frown, Circe, I must own--since you will have me speak--I must own you could not. With all your pride of immortal beauty, with all your magical charms to assist those of Nature, you are not so powerful a charmer as she. You feel desire, and you give it, but you have never felt love, nor can you inspire it. How can I love one who would have degraded me into a beast? Penelope raised me into a hero. Her love ennobled, invigorated, exalted my mind. She bid me go to the siege of Troy, though the parting with me was worse than death to herself. She bid me expose myself there to all the perils of war among the foremost heroes of Greece, though her poor heart sunk and trembled at every thought of those perils, and would have given all its own blood to save a drop of mine. Then there was such a conformity in all our inclinations! When Minerva was teaching me the lessons of wisdom she delighted to be present. She heard, she retained, she gave them back to me softened and sweetened with the peculiar graces of her own mind. When we unbent our thoughts with the charms of poetry, when we read together the poems of Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus, with what taste did she discern every excellence in them! My feelings were dull compared to hers. She seemed herself to be the muse who had inspired those verses, and had tuned their lyres to infuse into the hearts of mankind the love of wisdom and virtue and the fear of the gods. How beneficent was she, how tender to my people! What care did she take to instruct them in all the finer arts, to relieve the necessities of the sick and aged, to superintend the education of children, to do my subjects every good office of kind intercession, to lay before me their wants, to mediate for those who were objects of mercy, to sue for those who deserved the favours of the Crown. And shall I banish myself for ever from such a consort? Shall I give up her society for the brutal joys of a sensual life, keeping indeed the exterior form of a man, but having lost the human soul, or at least all its noble and godlike powers? Oh, Circe, it is impossible, I can't bear the thought. _Circe_.--Begone; don't imagine that I ask you to stay a moment longer. The daughter of the sun is not so mean-spirited as to solicit a mortal to share her happiness with her. It is a happiness which I find you cannot enjoy. I pity and despise you. All you have said seems to me a jargon of sentiments fitter for a silly woman than a great man. Go read, and spin too, if you please, with your wife. I forbid you to remain another day in my island. You shall have a fair wind to carry you from it. After that may every storm that Neptune can raise pursue and overwhelm you. Begone, I say, quit my sight. _Ulysses_.--Great goddess, I obey, but remember your oath. DIALOGUE VI. MERCURY--AN ENGLISH DUELLIST--A NORTH AMERICAN SAVAGE. _The Duellist_.--Mercury, Charon's boat is on the other side of the water. Allow me, before it returns, to have some conversation with the North American savage whom you brought hither with me. I never before saw one of that species. He looks very grim. Pray, sir, what is your name? I understand you speak English. _Savage_.--Yes, I learnt it in my childhood, having been bred for some years among the English of New York. But before I was a man I returned to my valiant countrymen, the Mohawks; and having been villainously cheated by one of yours in the sale of some rum, I never cared to have anything to do with them afterwards. Yet I took up the hatchet for them with the rest of my tribe in the late war against France, and was killed while I was out upon a scalping party. But I died very well satisfied, for my brethren were victorious, and before I was shot I had gloriously scalped seven men and five women and children. In a former war I had performed still greater exploits. My name is the Bloody Bear; it was given me to express my fierceness and valour. _Duellist_.--Bloody Bear, I respect you, and am much your humble servant. My name is Tom Pushwell, very well known at Arthur's. I am a gentleman by my birth, and by profession a gamester and man of honour. I have killed men in fair fighting, in honourable single combat, but don't understand cutting the throats of women and children. _Savage_.--Sir, that is our way of making war. Every nation has its customs. But, by the grimness of your countenance, and that hole in your breast, I presume you were killed, as I was, in some scalping party. How happened it that your enemy did not take off your scalp? _Duellist_.--Sir, I was killed in a duel. A friend of mine had lent me a sum of money. After two or three years, being in great want himself, he asked me to pay him. I thought his demand, which was somewhat peremptory, an affront to my honour, and sent him a challenge. We met in Hyde Park. The fellow could not fence: I was absolutely the adroitest swordsman in England, so I gave him three or four wounds; but at last he ran upon me with such impetuosity, that he put me out of my play, and I could not prevent him from whipping me through the lungs. I died the next day, as a man of honour should, without any snivelling signs of contrition or repentance; and he will follow me soon, for his surgeon has declared his wounds to be mortal. It is said that his wife is dead of grief, and that his family of seven children will be undone by his death. So I am well revenged, and that is a comfort. For my part, I had no wife. I always hated marriage. _Savage_.--Mercury, I won't go in a boat with that fellow. He has murdered his countryman--he has murdered his friend: I say, positively, I won't go in a boat with that fellow. I will swim over the River, I can swim like a duck. _Mercury_.--Swim over the Styx! it must not be done; it is against the laws of Pluto's Empire. You must go in the boat, and be quiet. _Savage_.--Don't tell me of laws, I am a savage. I value no laws. Talk of laws to the Englishman. There are laws in his country, and yet you see he did not regard them, for they could never allow him to kill his fellow-subject, in time of peace, because he asked him to pay a debt. I know indeed, that the English are a barbarous nation, but they can't possibly be so brutal as to make such things lawful. _Mercury_.--You reason well against him. But how comes it that you are so offended with murder; you, who have frequently massacred women in their sleep, and children in the cradle? _Savage_.--I killed none but my enemies. I never killed my own countrymen. I never killed my friend. Here, take my blanket, and let it come over in the boat, but see that the murderer does not sit upon it, or touch it. If he does, I will burn it instantly in the fire I see yonder. Farewell! I am determined to swim over the water. _Mercury_.--By this touch of my wand I deprive thee of all thy strength. Swim now if thou canst. _Savage_.--This is a potent enchanter. Restore me my strength, and I promise to obey thee. _Mercury_.--I restore it: but be orderly, and do as I bid you; otherwise worse will befall you. _Duellist_.--Mercury, leave him to me. I'll tutor him for you. Sirrah, savage, dost thou pretend to be ashamed of my company? Dost thou know I have kept the best company in England? _Savage_.--I know thou art a scoundrel! Not pay thy debts! kill thy friend who lent thee money for asking thee for it! Get out of my sight! I will drive thee into Styx! _Mercury_.--Stop! I command thee. No violence! Talk to him calmly. _Savage_.--I must obey thee. Well, sir, let me know what merit you had to introduce you into good company? What could you do? _Duellist_.--Sir, I gamed, as I told you. Besides, I kept a good table. I eat as well as any man either in England or France. _Savage_.--Eat! Did you ever eat the liver of a Frenchman, or his leg, or his shoulder! There is fine eating! I have eat twenty. My table was always well served. My wife was esteemed the best cook for the dressing of man's flesh in all North America. You will not pretend to compare your eating with mine? _Duellist_.--I danced very finely. _Savage_.--I'll dance with thee for thy ears: I can dance all day long. I can dance the war-dance with more spirit than any man of my nation. Let us see thee begin it. How thou standest like a post! Has Mercury struck thee with his enfeebling rod? or art thou ashamed to let us see how awkward thou art? If he would permit me, I would teach thee to dance in a way that thou hast never yet learnt. But what else canst thou do, thou bragging rascal? _Duellist_.--O heavens! must I bear this? What can I do with this fellow? I have neither sword nor pistol. And his shade seems to be twice as strong as mine. _Mercury_.--You must answer his questions. It was your own desire to have a conversation with him. He is not well bred; but he will tell you some truths which you must necessarily hear, when you come before Rhadamanthus. He asked you what you could do besides eating and dancing. _Duellist_.--I sang very agreeably. _Savage_.--Let me hear you sing your "Death Song" or the "War Whoop." I challenge you to sing. Come, begin. The fellow is mute. Mercury, this is a liar; he has told us nothing but lies. Let me pull out his tongue. _Duellist_.--The lie given me! and, alas, I dare not resent it. What an indelible disgrace to the family of the Pushwells! This indeed is damnation. _Mercury_.--Here, Charon, take these two savages to your care. How far the barbarism of the Mohawk will excuse his horrid acts I leave Minos to judge. But what can be said for the other, for the Englishman? The custom of duelling? A bad excuse at the best! but here it cannot avail. The spirit that urged him to draw his sword against his friend is not that of honour; it is the spirit of the furies, and to them he must go. _Savage_.--If he is to be punished for his wickedness, turn him over to me; I perfectly understand the art of tormenting. Sirrah, I begin my work with this kick on your breech. _Duellist_.--Oh my honour, my honour, to what infamy art thou fallen! DIALOGUE VII. PLINY THE ELDER--PLINY THE YOUNGER. _Pliny the Elder_.--The account that you give me, nephew, of your behaviour amidst the tenors and perils that accompanied the first eruption of Vesuvius does not please me much. There was more of vanity in it than of true magnanimity. Nothing is great that is unnatural and affected. When the earth was shaking beneath you, when the whole heaven was darkened with sulphurous clouds, when all Nature seemed falling into its final destruction, to be reading Livy and making extracts was an absurd affectation. To meet danger with courage is manly, but to be insensible of it is brutal stupidity; and to pretend insensibility where it cannot be supposed is ridiculous falseness. When you afterwards refused to leave your aged mother and save yourself without her, you indeed acted nobly. It was also becoming a Roman to keep up her spirits amidst all the horrors of that tremendous scene by showing yourself undismayed; but the real merit and glory of this part of your behaviour is sunk by the other, which gives an air of ostentation and vanity to the whole. _Pliny the Younger_.--That vulgar minds should consider my attention to my studies in such a conjuncture as unnatural and affected, I should not much wonder; but that you would blame it as such I did not apprehend--you, whom no business could separate from the muses; you, who approached nearer to the fiery storm, and died by the suffocating heat of the vapour. _Pliny the Elder_.--I died in doing my duty. Let me recall to your remembrance all the particulars, and then you shall judge yourself on the difference of your behaviour and mine. I was the Prefect of the Roman fleet, which then lay at Misenum. On the first account I received of the very unusual cloud that appeared in the air I ordered a vessel to carry me out to some distance from the shore that I might the better observe the phenomenon, and endeavour to discover its nature and cause. This I did as a philosopher, and it was a curiosity proper and natural to an inquisitive mind. I offered to take you with me, and surely you should have gone; for Livy might have been read at any other time, and such spectacles are not frequent. When I came out from my house, I found all the inhabitants of Misenum flying to the sea. That I might assist them, and all others who dwelt on the coast, I immediately commanded the whole fleet to put out, and sailed with it all round the Bay of Naples, steering particularly to those parts of the shore where the danger was greatest, and from whence the affrighted people were endeavouring to escape with the most trepidation. Thus I happily preserved some thousands of lives, noting at the same time, with an unshaken composure and freedom of mind, the several phenomena of the eruption. Towards night, as we approached to the foot of Mount Vesuvius, our galleys were covered with ashes, the showers of which grew continually hotter and hotter; then pumice stones and burnt and broken pyrites began to fall on our heads, and we were stopped by the obstacles which the ruins of the volcano had suddenly formed, by falling into the sea and almost filling it up, on that part of the coast. I then commanded my pilot to steer to the villa of my friend Pomponianus, which, you know, was situated in the inmost recess of the bay. The wind was very favourable to carry me thither, but would not allow him to put off from the shore, as he was desirous to have done. We were, therefore, constrained to pass the night in his house. The family watched, and I slept till the heaps of pumice stones, which incessantly fell from the clouds that had by this time been impelled to that side of the bay, rose so high in the area of the apartment I lay in, that if I had stayed any longer I could not have got out; and the earthquakes were so violent as to threaten every moment the fall of the house. We, therefore, thought it more safe to go into the open air, guarding our heads as well as we were able with pillows tied upon them. The wind continuing contrary, and the sea very rough, we all remained on the shore, till the descent of a sulphurous and fiery vapour suddenly oppressed my weak lungs and put an end to my life. In all this I hope that I acted as the duty of my station required, and with true magnanimity. But on this occasion, and in many other parts of your conduct, I must say, my dear nephew, there was a mixture of vanity blended with your virtue which impaired and disgraced it. Without that you would have been one of the worthiest men whom Rome has over produced, for none excelled you in sincere integrity of heart and greatness of sentiments. Why would you lose the substance of glory by seeking the shadow? Your eloquence had, I think, the same fault as your manners; it was generally too affected. You professed to make Cicero your guide and pattern; but when one reads his Panegyric upon Julius Caesar, in his Oration for Marcellus, and yours upon Trajan, the first seems the genuine language of truth and Nature, raised and dignified with all the majesty of the most sublime oratory; the latter appears the harangue of a florid rhetorician, more desirous to shine and to set off his own wit than to extol the great man whose virtues he was praising. _Pliny the Younger_.--I will not question your judgment either of my life or my writings; they might both have been better if I had not been too solicitous to render them perfect. It is, perhaps, some excuse for the affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural. One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, in their own manner, we took up another, which to many appeared more shining, and gave our compositions a more original air; but it is mortifying to me to say much on this subject. Permit me, therefore, to resume the contemplation of that on which our conversation turned before. What a direful calamity was the eruption of Vesuvius, which you have been describing? Don't you remember the beauty of that fine coast, and of the mountain itself, before it was torn with the violence of those internal fires, that forced their way through its surface. The foot of it was covered with cornfields and rich meadows, interspersed with splendid villas and magnificent towns; the sides of it were clothed with the best vines in Italy. How quick, how unexpected, how terrible was the change! All was at once overwhelmed with ashes, cinders, broken rocks, and fiery torrents, presenting to the eye the most dismal scene of horror and desolation! _Pliny the Elder_.--You paint it very truly. But has it never occurred to your philosophical mind that this change is a striking emblem of that which must happen, by the natural course of things, to every rich, luxurious state? While the inhabitants of it are sunk in voluptuousness--while all is smiling around them, and they imagine that no evil, no danger is nigh--the latent seeds of destruction are fermenting within; till, breaking out on a sudden, they lay waste all their opulence, all their boasted delights, and leave them a sad monument of the fatal effects of internal tempests and convulsions. DIALOGUE VIII. FERNANDO CORTEZ--WILLIAM PENN. _Cortez_.--Is it possible, William Penn, that you should seriously compare your glory with mine? The planter of a small colony in North America presume to vie with the conqueror of the great Mexican Empire? _Penn_.--Friend, I pretend to no glory--the Lord preserve me from it. All glory is His; but this I say, that I was His instrument in a more glorious work than that performed by thee--incomparably more glorious. _Cortez_.--Dost thou not know, William Penn, that with less than six hundred Spanish foot, eighteen horse, and a few small pieces of cannon, I fought and defeated innumerable armies of very brave men; dethroned an emperor who had been raised to the throne by his valour, and excelled all his countrymen in the science of war, as much as they excelled all the rest of the West Indian nations? That I made him my prisoner in his own capital; and, after he had been deposed and slain by his subjects, vanquished and took Guatimozin, his successor, and accomplished my conquest of the whole empire of Mexico, which I loyally annexed to the Spanish Crown? Dost thou not know that, in doing these wonderful acts, I showed as much courage as Alexander the Great, as much prudence as Caesar? That by my policy I ranged under my banners the powerful commonwealth of Tlascala, and brought them to assist me in subduing the Mexicans, though with the loss of their own beloved independence? and that, to consummate my glory, when the Governor of Cuba, Velasquez, would have taken my command from me and sacrificed me to his envy and jealousy, I drew from him all his forces and joined them to my own, showing myself as superior to all other Spaniards as I was to the Indians? _Penn_.--I know very well that thou wast as fierce as a lion and as subtle as a serpent. The devil perhaps may place thee as high in his black list of heroes as Alexander or Caesar. It is not my business to interfere with him in settling thy rank. But hark thee, friend Cortez. What right hadst thou, or had the King of Spain himself, to the Mexican Empire? Answer me that, if thou canst. _Cortez_.--The Pope gave it to my master. _Penn_.--The devil offered to give our Lord all the kingdoms of the earth, and I suppose the Pope, as his vicar, gave thy master this; in return for which he fell down and worshipped him, like an idolater as he was. But suppose the high priest of Mexico had taken it into his head to give Spain to Montezuma, would his grant have been good? _Cortez_.--These are questions of casuistry which it is not the business of a soldier to decide. We leave that to gownsmen. But pray, Mr. Penn, what right had you to the province you settled? _Penn_.--An honest right of fair purchase. We gave the native savages some things they wanted, and they in return gave us lands they did not want. All was amicably agreed on, not a drop of blood shed to stain our acquisition. _Cortez_.--I am afraid there was a little fraud in the purchase. Thy followers, William Penn, are said to think cheating in a quiet and sober way no mortal sin. _Penn_.--The saints are always calumniated by the ungodly. But it was a sight which an angel might contemplate with delight to behold the colony I settled! To see us living with the Indians like innocent lambs, and taming the ferocity of their barbarous manners by the gentleness of ours! To see the whole country, which before was an uncultivated wilderness, rendered as fertile and fair as the garden of God! O Fernando Cortez, Fernando Cortez! didst thou leave the great empire of Mexico in that state? No, thou hadst turned those delightful and populous regions into a desert--a desert flooded with blood. Dost thou not remember that most infernal scene when the noble Emperor Guatimozin was stretched out by thy soldiers upon hot burning coals to make him discover into what part of the lake of Mexico he had thrown the royal treasures? Are not his groans ever sounding in the ears of thy conscience? Do not they rend thy hard heart, and strike thee with more horror than the yells of the furies? _Cortez_.--Alas! I was not present when that dire act was done. Had I been there I would have forbidden it. My nature was mild. _Penn_.--Thou wast the captain of that band of robbers who did this horrid deed. The advantage they had drawn from thy counsels and conduct enabled them to commit it; and thy skill saved them afterwards from the vengeance that was due to so enormous a crime. The enraged Mexicans would have properly punished them for it, if they had not had thee for their general, thou lieutenant of Satan. _Cortez_.--The saints I find can rail, William Penn. But how do you hope to preserve this admirable colony which you have settled? Your people, you tell me, live like innocent lambs. Are there no wolves in North America to devour those lambs? But if the Americans should continue in perpetual peace with all your successors there, the French will not. Are the inhabitants of Pennsylvania to make war against them with prayers and preaching? If so, that garden of God which you say you have planted will undoubtedly be their prey, and they will take from you your property, your laws, and your religion. _Penn_.--The Lord's will be done. The Lord will defend us against the rage of our enemies if it be His good pleasure. _Cortez_.--Is this the wisdom of a great legislator? I have heard some of your countrymen compare you to Solon. Did Solon, think you, give laws to a people, and leave those laws and that people at the mercy of every invader? The first business of legislature is to provide a military strength that may defend the whole system. If a house is built in a land of robbers, without a gate to shut or a bolt or bar to secure it, what avails it how well-proportioned or how commodious the architecture of it may be? Is it richly furnished within? the more it will tempt the hands of violence and of rapine to seize its wealth. The world, William Penn, is all a land of robbers. Any state or commonwealth erected therein must be well fenced and secured by good military institutions; or, the happier it is in all other respects, the greater will be its danger, the more speedy its destruction. Perhaps the neighbouring English colonies may for a while protect yours; but that precarious security cannot always preserve you. Your plan of government must be changed, or your colony will be lost. What I have said is also applicable to Great Britain itself. If an increase of its wealth be not accompanied with an increase of its force that wealth will become the prey of some of the neighbouring nations, in which the martial spirit is more prevalent than the commercial. And whatever praise may be due to its civil institutions, if they are not guarded by a wise system of military policy, they will be found of no value, being unable to prevent their own dissolution. _Penn_.--These are suggestions of human wisdom. The doctrines I held were inspired; they came from above. _Cortez_.--It is blasphemy to say that any folly could come from the Fountain of Wisdom. Whatever is inconsistent with the great laws of Nature and with the necessary state of human society cannot possibly have been inspired by God. Self-defence is as necessary to nations as to men. And shall particulars have a right which nations have not? True religion, William Penn, is the perfection of reason; fanaticism is the disgrace, the destruction of reason. _Penn_.--Though what thou sayest should be true, it does not come well from thy mouth. A Papist talk of reason! Go to the Inquisition and tell them of reason and the great laws of Nature. They will broil thee, as thy soldiers broiled the unhappy Guatimozin. Why dost thou turn pale? Is it the name of the Inquisition, or the name of Guatimozin, that troubles and affrights thee? O wretched man! who madest thyself a voluntary instrument to carry into a new-discovered world that hellish tribunal? Tremble and shake when thou thinkest that every murder the Inquisitors have committed, every torture they have inflicted on the innocent Indians, is originally owing to thee. Thou must answer to God for all their inhumanity, for all their injustice. What wouldst thou give to part with the renown of thy conquests, and to have a conscience as pure and undisturbed as mine? _Cortez_.--I feel the force of thy words; they pierce me like daggers. I can never, never be happy, while I retain any memory of the ills I have caused. Yet I thought I did right. I thought I laboured to advance the glory of God and propagate, in the remotest parts of the earth, His holy religion. He will be merciful to well designing and pious error. Thou also wilt have need of that gracious indulgence, though not, I own, so much as I. _Penn_.--Ask thy heart whether ambition was not thy real motive and zeal the pretence? _Cortez_.--Ask thine whether thy zeal had no worldly views and whether thou didst believe all the nonsense of the sect, at the head of which thou wast pleased to become a legislator.--Adieu. Self-examination requires retirement. DIALOGUE IX. MARCUS PORTIUS CATO--MESSALLA CORVINUS. _Cato_.--Oh, Messalla! is it then possible that what some of our countrymen tell me should be true? Is it possible that you could live the courtier of Octavius; that you could accept of employments and honours from him, from the tyrant of your country; you, the brave, the noble-minded, the virtuous Messalla; you, whom I remember, my son-in-law Brutus has frequently extolled as the most promising youth in Rome, tutored by philosophy, trained up in arms, scorning all those soft, effeminate pleasures that reconcile men to an easy and indolent servitude, fit for all the roughest tasks of honour and virtue, fit to live or to die a free man? _Messalla_.--Marcus Cato, I revere both your life and your death; but the last, permit me to tell you, did no good to your country, and the former would have done more if you could have mitigated a little the sternness of your virtue, I will not say of your pride. For my own part, I adhered with constant integrity and unwearied zeal to the Republic, while the Republic existed. I fought for her at Philippi under the only commander, who, if he had conquered, would have conquered for her, not for himself. When he was dead I saw that nothing remained to my country but the choice of a master. I chose the best. _Cato_.--The best! What! a man who had broken all laws, who had violated all trusts, who had led the armies of the Commonwealth against Antony, and then joined with him and that sottish traitor Lepidus, to set up a triumvirate more execrable by far than either of the former; who shed the best blood in Rome by an inhuman proscription, murdered even his own guardian, murdered Cicero, to whose confidence, too improvidently given, he owed all his power? Was this the master you chose? Could you bring your tongue to give him the name of Augustus? Could you stoop to beg consulships and triumphs from him? Oh, shame to virtue! Oh, degeneracy of Rome! To what infamy are her sons, her noblest sons, fallen. The thought of it pains me more than the wound that I died of; it stabs my soul. _Messalla_.--Moderate, Cato, the vehemence of your indignation. There has always been too much passion mixed with your virtue. The enthusiasm you are possessed with is a noble one, but it disturbs your judgment. Hear me with patience, and with the tranquillity that becomes a philosopher. It is true that Octavius had done all you have said; but it is no less true that, in our circumstances, he was the best master Rome could choose. His mind was fitted by nature for empire. His understanding was clear and strong. His passions were cool, and under the absolute command of his reason. His name gave him an authority over the troops and the people which no other Roman could possess in an equal degree. He used that authority to restrain the excesses of both, which it was no longer in the power of the Senate to repress, nor of any other general or magistrate in the state. He restored discipline in our armies, the first means of salvation, without which no legal government could have been formed or supported. He avoided all odious and invidious names. He maintained and respected those which time and long habits had endeared to the Roman people. He permitted a generous liberty of speech. He treated the nobles of Pompey's party as well as those of his father's, if they did not themselves, for factious purposes, keep up the distinction. He formed a plan of government, moderate, decent, respectable, which left the senate its majesty, and some of its power. He restored vigour and spirit to the laws; he made new and good ones for the reformation of manners; he enforced their execution; he governed the empire with lenity, justice, and glory; he humbled the pride of the Parthians; he broke the fierceness of the barbarous nations; he gave to his country, exhausted and languishing with the great loss of blood which she had sustained in the course of so many civil wars, the blessing of peace--a blessing which was become so necessary for her, that without it she could enjoy no other. In doing these things I acknowledge he had my assistance. I am prouder of it, and I think I can justify myself more effectually to my country, than if I had died by my own hand at Philippi. Believe me, Cato, it is better to do some good than to project a great deal. A little practical virtue is of more use to society than the most sublime theory, or the best principles of government ill applied. _Cato_.--Yet I must think it was beneath the character of Messalla to join in supporting a government which, though coloured and mitigated, was still a tyranny. Had you not better have gone into a voluntary exile, where you would not have seen the face of the tyrant, and where you might have quietly practised those private virtues which are all that the gods require from good men in certain situations? _Messalla_.--No; I did much more good by continuing at Rome. Had Augustus required of me anything base, anything servile, I would have gone into exile, I would have died, rather than do it. But he respected my virtue, he respected my dignity; he treated me as well as Agrippa, or as Maecenas, with this distinction alone, that he never employed my sword but against foreign nations, or the old enemies of the republic. _Cato_.--It must, I own, have been a pleasure to be employed against Antony, that monster of vice, who plotted the ruin of liberty, and the raising of himself to sovereign power, amidst the riot of bacchanals, and in the embraces of harlots, who, when he had attained to that power, delivered it up to a lascivious queen, and would have made an Egyptian strumpet the mistress of Rome, if the Battle of Actium had not saved us from that last of misfortunes. _Messalla_.--In that battle I had a considerable share. So I had in encouraging the liberal arts and sciences, which Augustus protected. Under his judicious patronage the muses made Rome their capital seat. It would have pleased you to have known Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, Livy, and many more, whose names will be illustrious to all generations. _Cato_.--I understand you, Messalla. Your Augustus and you, after the ruin of our liberty, made Rome a Greek city, an academy of fine wits, another Athens under the government of Demetrius Phalareus. I had much rather have seen her under Fabricius and Curius, and her other honest old consuls, who could not read. _Messalla_.--Yet to these writers she will owe as much of her glory as she did to those heroes. I could say more, a great deal more, on the happiness of the mild dominion of Augustus. I might even add, that the vast extent of the empire, the factions of the nobility, and the corruption of the people, which no laws under the ordinary magistrates of the state were able to restrain, seemed necessarily to require some change in the government; that Cato himself, had he remained upon earth, could have done us no good, unless he would have yielded to become our prince. But I see you consider me as a deserter from the republic, and an apologist for a tyrant. I, therefore, leave you to the company of those ancient Romans, for whose society you were always much fitter than for that of your contemporaries. Cato should have lived with Fabricius and Curius, not with Pompey and Caesar. DIALOGUE X. CHRISTINA, Queen Of Sweden--Chancellor OXENSTIERN. _Christina_.--You seem to avoid me, Oxenstiern; and, now we are met, you don't pay me the reverence that is due to your queen! Have you forgotten that I was your sovereign? _Oxenstiern_.--I am not your subject here, madam; but you have forgotten that you yourself broke that bond, and freed me from my allegiance, many years before you died, by abdicating the crown, against my advice and the inclination of your people. Reverence here is paid only to virtue. _Christina_.--I see you would mortify me if it were in your power for acting against your advice. But my fame does not depend upon your judgment. All Europe admired the greatness of my mind in resigning a crown to dedicate myself entirely to the love of the sciences and the fine arts; things of which you had no taste in barbarous Sweden, the realm of Goths and Vandals. _Oxenstiern_.--There is hardly any mind too great for a crown, but there are many too little. Are you sure, madam, it was magnanimity that caused you to fly from the government of a kingdom which your ancestors, and particularly your heroic father Gustavus, had ruled with so much glory? _Christina_.--Am I sure of it? Yes; and to confirm my own judgment, I have that of many learned men and _beaux esprits_ of all countries, who have celebrated my action as the perfection of heroism. _Oxenstiern_.--Those _beaux esprits_ judged according to their predominant passion. I have heard young ladies express their admiration of Mark Antony for heroically leaving his fleet at the Battle of Actium to follow his mistress. Your passion for literature had the same effect upon you. But why did not you indulge it in a manner more becoming your birth and rank? Why did not you bring the muses to Sweden, instead of deserting that kingdom to seek them in Rome? For a prince to encourage and protect arts and sciences, and more especially to instruct an illiterate people and inspire them with knowledge, politeness, and fine taste is indeed an act of true greatness. _Christina_.--The Swedes were too gross to be refined by any culture which I could have given to their dull, their half-frozen souls. Wit and genius require the influence of a more southern climate. _Oxenstiern_.--The Swedes too gross! No, madam, not even the Russians are too gross to be refined if they had a prince to instruct them. _Christina_.--It was too tedious a work for the vivacity of my temper to polish bears into men. I should have died of the spleen before I had made any proficiency in it. My desire was to shine among those who were qualified to judge of my talents. At Paris, at Rome I had the glory of showing the French and Italian wits that the North could produce one not inferior to them. They beheld me with wonder. The homage I had received in my palace at Stockholm was paid to my dignity. That which I drew from the French and Roman academies was paid to my talents. How much more glorious, how much more delightful to an elegant and rational mind was the latter than the former! Could you once have felt the joy, the transport of my heart, when I saw the greatest authors and all the celebrated artists in the most learned and civilised countries of Europe bringing their works to me and submitting the merit of them to my decisions; when I saw the philosophers, the rhetoricians, the poets making my judgment the standard of their reputation, you would not wonder that I preferred the empire of wit to any other empire. _Oxenstiern_.--O great Gustavus! my ever-honoured, my adored master! O greatest of kings, greatest in valour, in virtue, in wisdom, with what indignation must thy soul, enthroned in heaven, have looked down on thy unworthy, thy degenerate daughter! With what shame must thou have seen her rambling about from court to court deprived of her royal dignity, debased into a pedant, a witling, a smatterer in sculpture and painting, reduced to beg or buy flattery from each needy rhetorician or hireling poet! I weep to think on this stain, this dishonourable stain, to thy illustrious blood! And yet, would to God! would to God! this was all the pollution it has suffered! _Christina_.--Darest thou, Oxenstiern, impute any blemish to my honour? _Oxenstiern_.--Madam, the world will scarce respect the frailties of queens when they are on their thrones, much less when they have voluntarily degraded themselves to the level of the vulgar. And if scandalous tongues have unjustly aspersed their fame, the way to clear it is not by an assassination. _Christina_.--Oh! that I were alive again, and restored to my throne, that I might punish the insolence of this hoary traitor! But, see! he leaves me, he turns his back upon me with cool contempt! Alas! do I not deserve this scorn? In spite of myself I must confess that I do. O vanity, how short-lived are the pleasures thou bestowest! I was thy votary. Thou wast the god for whom I changed my religion. For thee I forsook my country and my throne. What compensation have I gained for all these sacrifices so lavishly, so imprudently made? Some puffs of incense from authors who thought their flattery due to the rank I had held, or hoped to advance themselves by my recommendation, or, at best, over-rated my passion for literature, and praised me to raise the value of those talents with which they were endowed. But in the esteem of wise men I stand very low, and their esteem alone is the true measure of glory. Nothing, I perceive, can give the mind a lasting joy but the consciousness of having performed our duty in that station which it has pleased the Divine Providence to assign to us. The glory of virtue is solid and eternal. All other will fade away like a thin vapoury cloud, on which the casual glance of some faint beams of light has superficially imprinted their weak and transient colours. DIALOGUE XI. TITUS VESPASIANUS--PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO AFRICANUS. _Titus_.--No, Scipio, I can't give place to you in this. In other respects I acknowledge myself your inferior, though I was Emperor of Rome and you only her consul. I think your triumph over Carthage more glorious than mine over Judaea. But in that I gained over love I must esteem myself superior to you, though your generosity with regard to the fair Celtiberian, your captive, has been celebrated so highly. _Scipio_.--Fame has been, then, unjust to your merit, for little is said of the continence of Titus, but mine has been the favourite topic of eloquence in every age and country. _Titus_.--It has; and in particular your great historian Livy has poured forth all the ornaments of his admirable rhetoric to embellish and dignify that part of your story. I had a great historian too--Cornelius Tacitus; but either from the brevity which he affected in writing, or from the severity of his nature, which never having felt the passion of love, thought the subduing of it too easy a victory to deserve great encomiums, he has bestowed but three lines upon my parting with Berenice, which cost me more pain and greater efforts of mind than the conquest of Jerusalem. _Scipio_.--I wish to hear from yourself the history of that parting, and what could make it so hard and painful to you. _Titus_.--While I served in Palestine under the auspices of my father, Vespasian, I became acquainted with Berenice, sister to King Agrippa, and who was herself a queen in one of those Eastern countries. She was the most beautiful woman in Asia, but she had graces more irresistible still than her beauty. She had all the insinuation and wit of Cleopatra, without her coquetry. I loved her, and was beloved; she loved my person, not my greatness. Her tenderness, her fidelity so inflamed my passion for her that I gave her a promise of marriage. _Scipio_.--What do I hear? A Roman senator promise to marry a queen! _Titus_.--I expected, Scipio, that your ears would be offended with the sound of such a match. But consider that Rome was very different in my time from Rome in yours. The ferocious pride of our ancient republican senators had bent itself to the obsequious complaisance of a court. Berenice made no doubt, and I flattered myself that it would not be inflexible in this point alone. But we thought it necessary to defer the completion of our wishes till the death of my father. On that event the Roman Empire and (what I knew she valued more) my hand became due to her, according to my engagements. _Scipio_.--The Roman Empire due to a Syrian queen! Oh, Rome, how art thou fallen! Accursed be the memory of Octavius Caesar, who by oppressing its liberty so lowered the majesty of the republic, that a brave and virtuous Roman, in whom was vested all the power of that mighty state, could entertain such a thought! But did you find the senate and people so servile, so lost to all sense of their honour and dignity, as to affront the great genius of imperial Rome and the eyes of her tutelary gods, the eyes of Jupiter Capitolinus, with the sight of a queen--an Asiatic queen--on the throne of the Caesars? _Titus_.--I did not. They judged of it as you, Scipio, judge; they detested, they disdained it. In vain did I urge to some particular friends, who represented to me the sense of the Senate and people, that a Messalina, a Poppaea, were a much greater dishonour to the throne of the Caesars than a virtuous foreign princess. Their prejudices were unconquerable; I saw it would be impossible for me to remove them. But I might have used my authority to silence their murmurs. A liberal donative to the soldiers, by whom I was fondly beloved, would have secured their fidelity, and consequently would have forced the Senate and people to yield to my inclination. Berenice knew this, and with tears implored me not to sacrifice her happiness and my own to an unjust prepossession. Shall I own it to you, Publius? My heart not only pitied her, but acknowledged the truth and solidity of her reasons. Yet so much did I abhor the idea of tyranny, so much respect did I pay to the sentiments of my subjects, that I determined to separate myself from her for ever, rather than force either the laws or the prejudices of Rome to submit to my will. _Scipio_.--Give me thy hand, noble Titus. Thou wast worthy of the empire, and Scipio Africanus honours thy virtue. _Titus_.--My virtue can have no greater reward from the approbation of man. But, O Scipio, think what anguish my heart must have felt when I took that resolution, and when I communicated it to my dear, my unhappy Berenice. You saw the struggle of Masinissa, when you forced him to give up his beloved Sophonisba. Mine was a harder conflict. She had abandoned him to marry the King of Numidia. He knew that her ruling passion was ambition, not love. He could not rationally esteem her when she quitted a husband whom she had ruined, who had lost his crown and his liberty in the cause of her country and for her sake, to give her person to him, the capital foe of that unfortunate husband. He must, in spite of his passion, have thought her a perfidious, a detestable woman. But I esteemed Berenice; she deserved my esteem. I was certain she would not have accepted the empire from any other hand; and had I been a private man she would have raised me to her throne. Yet I had the fortitude--I ought, perhaps, to say the hardness of heart--to bid her depart from my sight; depart for ever! What, O Publius, was your conquest over yourself, in giving back to her betrothed lover the Celtiberian captive compared to this? Indeed, that was no conquest. I will not so dishonour the virtue of Scipio as to think he could feel any struggle with himself on that account. A woman engaged to another--engaged by affection as well as vows, let her have been ever so beautiful--could raise in your heart no sentiments but compassion and friendship. To have violated her would have been an act of brutality, which none but another Tarquin could have committed. To have detained her from her husband would have been cruel. But where love is mutual, where the object beloved suffers more in the separation than you do yourself, to part with her is indeed a struggle. It is the hardest sacrifice a good heart can make to its duty. _Scipio_.--I acknowledge that it is, and yield you the palm. But I will own to you, Titus, I never knew much of the tenderness you describe. Hannibal, Carthage, Rome, the saving of my country, the subduing of its rival, these filled my thoughts, and left no room there for those effeminate passions. I do not blame your sensibility; but when I went to the capitol to talk with Jove, I never consulted him about love affairs. _Titus_.--If my soul had been possessed by ambition alone, I might possibly have been a greater man than I was; but I should not have been more virtuous, nor have gained the title I preferred to that of conqueror of Judaea and Emperor of Rome, in being called the delight of humankind. DIALOGUE XII HENRY DUKE OF GUISE--MACHIAVEL. _Guise_.--Avaunt! thou fiend. I abhor thy sight. I look upon thee as the original cause of my death, and of all the calamities brought upon the French nation, in my father's time and my own. _Machiavel_.--I the cause of your death! You surprise me! _Guise_.--Yes. Your pernicious maxims of policy, imported from Florence with Catherine of Medicis, your wicked disciple, produced in France such a government, such dissimulation, such perfidy, such violent, ruthless counsels, as threw that whole kingdom into the utmost confusion, and ended my life, even in the palace of my sovereign, by the swords of assassins. _Machiavel_.--Whoever may have a right to complain of my policy, you, sir, have not. You owed your greatness to it, and your deviating from it was the real cause of your death. If it had not been for the assassination of Admiral Coligni and the massacre of the Huguenots, the strength and power which the conduct of so able a chief would have given to that party, after the death of your father, its most dangerous enemy, would have been fatal to your house; nor could you, even with all the advantage you drew from that great stroke of royal policy, have acquired the authority you afterwards rose to in the kingdom of France; but by pursuing my maxims, by availing yourself of the specious name of religion to serve the secret purposes of your ambition, and by suffering no restraint of fear or conscience, not even the guilt of exciting a civil war, to check the necessary progress of your well-concerted designs. But on the day of the barricades you most imprudently let the king escape out of Paris, when you might have slain or deposed him. This was directly against the great rule of my politics, not to stop short in rebellion or treason till the work is fully completed. And you were justly censured for it by Pope Sixtus Quintus, a more consummate politician, who said, "You ought to have known that when a subject draws his sword against his king he should throw away the scabbard." You likewise deviated from my counsels, by putting yourself in the power of a sovereign you had so much offended. Why would you, against all the cautions I had given, expose your life in a loyal castle to the mercy of that prince? You trusted to his fear, but fear, insulted and desperate, is often cruel. Impute therefore your death not to any fault in my maxims, but to your own folly in not having sufficiently observed them. _Guise_.--If neither I nor that prince had ever practised your maxims in any part of our conduct, he would have reigned many years with honour and peace, and I should have risen by my courage and talents to as high a pitch of greatness as it consisted with the duty of a subject to desire. But your instructions led us on into those crooked paths, out of which there was no retreat without great danger, nor a possibility of advancing without being detested by all mankind, and whoever is so has everything to fear from that detestation. I will give you a proof of this in the fate of a prince, who ought to have been your hero instead of Caesar Borgia, because he was incomparably a greater man, and, of all who ever lived, seems to have acted most steadily according to the rules laid down by you; I mean Richard III., King of England. He stopped at no crime that could be profitable to him; he was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a murderer in cool blood. After the death of his brother he gained the crown by cutting off, without pity, all who stood in his way. He trusted no man any further than helped his own purposes and consisted with his own safety. He liberally rewarded all services done him, but would not let the remembrance of them atone for offences or save any man from destruction who obstructed his views. Nevertheless, though his nature shrunk from no wickedness which could serve his ambition, he possessed and exercised all those virtues which you recommend to the practice of your prince. He was bold and prudent in war, just and strict in the general administration of his government, and particularly careful, by a vigorous execution of the laws, to protect the people against injuries or oppressions from the great. In all his actions and words there constantly appeared the highest concern for the honour of the nation. He was neither greedy of wealth that belonged to other men nor profuse of his own, but knew how to give and where to save. He professed a most edifying sense of religion, pretended great zeal for the reformation of manners, and was really an example of sobriety, chastity, and temperance in the whole course of his life. Nor did he shed any blood, but of those who were such obstacles in his way to dominion as could not possibly be removed by any other means. This was a prince after your heart, yet mark his end. The horror his crimes had excited in the minds of his subjects, and the detestation it produced, were so pernicious to him, that they enabled an exile, who had no right to the crown, and whose abilities were much inferior to his, to invade his realm and destroy him. _Machiavel_.--This example, I own, may seem to be of some weight against the truth of my system. But at the same time it demonstrates that there was nothing so new in the doctrines I published as to make it reasonable to charge me with the disorders and mischiefs which, since my time, any kingdom may have happened to suffer from the ambition of a subject or the tyranny of a prince. Human nature wants no teaching to render it wicked. In courts more especially there has been, from the first institution of monarchies, a policy practised, not less repugnant than mine to the narrow and vulgar laws of humanity and religion. Why should I be singled out as worse than other statesmen? _Guise_.--There have been, it must be owned, in all ages and all states, many wicked politicians; but thou art the first that ever taught the science of tyranny, reduced it to rules, and instructed his disciples how to acquire and secure it by treachery, perjuries, assassinations, proscriptions, and with a particular caution, not to be stopped in the progress of their crimes by any check of the conscience or feeling of the heart, but to push them as far as they shall judge to be necessary to their greatness and safety. It is this which has given thee a pre-eminence in guilt over all other statesmen. _Machiavel_.--If you had read my book with candour you would have perceived that I did not desire to render men either tyrants or rebels, but only showed, if they were so, what conduct, in such circumstances, it would be rational and expedient for them to observe. _Guise_.--When you were a minister of state in Florence, if any chemist or physician had published a treatise, to instruct his countrymen in the art of poisoning, and how to do it with the most certain destruction to others and security to themselves, would you have allowed him to plead in his justification that he did not desire men to poison their neighbours? But, if they would use such evil means of mending their fortunes, there could surely be no harm in letting them know what were the most effectual poisons, and by what methods they might give them without being discovered. Would you have thought it a sufficient apology for him that he had dropped in his preface, or here and there in his book, a sober exhortation against the committing of murder? Without all doubt, as a magistrate concerned for the safety of the people of Florence, you would have punished the wretch with the utmost severity, and taken great care to destroy every copy of so pernicious a book. Yet your own admired work contains a more baneful and more infernal art. It poisons states and kingdoms, and spreads its malignity, like a general pestilence, over the whole world. _Machiavel_.--You must acknowledge at least that my discourses on Livy are full of wise and virtuous maxims and precepts of government. _Guise_.--This, I think, rather aggravates than alleviates your guilt. How could you study and comment upon Livy with so acute and profound an understanding, and afterwards write a book so absolutely repugnant to all the lessons of policy taught by that sage and moral historian? How could you, who had seen the picture of virtue so amiably drawn by his hand, and who seemed yourself to be sensible of all its charms, fall in love with a fury, and set up her dreadful image as an object of worship to princes? _Machiavel_.--I was seduced by vanity. My heart was formed to love virtue. But I wanted to be thought a greater genius in politics than Aristotle or Plato. Vanity, sir, is a passion as strong in authors as ambition in princes, or rather it is the same passion exerting itself differently. I was a Duke of Guise in the republic of letters. _Guise_.--The bad influences of your guilt have reached further than mine, and been more lasting. But, Heaven be praised, your credit is at present much declining in Europe. I have been told by some shades who are lately arrived here, that the ablest statesman of his time, a king, with whose fame the world is filled, has answered your book, and confuted all the principles of it, with a noble scorn and abhorrence. I am also assured, that in England there is a great and good king, whose whole life has been a continued opposition to your evil system; who has hated all cruelty, all fraud, all falseness; whose word has been sacred, whose honour inviolate; who has made the laws of his kingdom the rules of his government, and good faith and a regard for the liberty of mankind the principles of his conduct with respect to foreign powers; who reigns more absolutely now in the hearts of his people, and does greater things by the confidence they place in him, and by the efforts they make from the generous zeal of affection, than any monarch ever did, or ever will do, by all the arts of iniquity which you recommended. DIALOGUE XIII. VIRGIL--HORACE--MERCURY--SCALIGER THE ELDER. _Virgil_.--My dear Horace, your company is my greatest delight, even in the Elysian Fields. No wonder it was so when we lived together in Rome. Never had man so genteel, so agreeable, so easy a wit, or a temper so pliant to the inclinations of others in the intercourse of society. And then such integrity, such fidelity, such generosity in your nature! A soul so free from all envy, so benevolent, so sincere, so placable in its anger, so warm and constant in its affections! You were as necessary to Maecenas as he to Augustus. Your conversation sweetened to him all the cares of his ministry; your gaiety cheered his drooping spirits; and your counsels assisted him when he wanted advice. For you were capable, my dear Horace, of counselling statesmen. Your sagacity, your discretion, your secrecy, your clear judgment in all affairs, recommended you to the confidence, not of Maecenas alone, but of Augustus himself; which you nobly made use of to serve your old friends of the republican party, and to confirm both the minister and the prince in their love of mild and moderate measures, yet with a severe restraint of licentiousness, the most dangerous enemy to the whole commonwealth under any form of government. _Horace_.--To be so praised by Virgil would have put me in Elysium while I was alive. But I know your modesty will not suffer me, in return for these encomiums, to speak of your character. Supposing it as perfect as your poems, you would think, as you did of them, that it wanted correction. _Virgil_.--Don't talk of my modesty. How much greater was yours, when you disclaimed the name of a poet, you whose odes are so noble, so harmonious, so sublime! _Horace_.--I felt myself too inferior to the dignity of that name. _Virgil_.--I think you did like Augustus, when he refused to accept the title of king, but kept all the power with which it was ever attended. Even in your Epistles and Satires, where the poet was concealed, as much as he could be, you may properly be compared to a prince in disguise, or in his hours of familiarity with his intimate friends: the pomp and majesty were let drop, but the greatness remained. _Horace_.--Well, I will not contradict you; and, to say the truth, I should do it with no very good grace, because in some of my Odes I have not spoken so modestly of my own poetry as in my Epistles. But to make you know your pre-eminence over me and all writers of Latin verse, I will carry you to Quintilian, the best of all Roman critics, who will tell you in what rank you ought to be placed. _Virgil_.--I fear his judgment of me was biassed by your commendation. But who is this shade that Mercury is conducting? I never saw one that stalked with so much pride, or had such ridiculous arrogance expressed in his looks! _Horace_.--They come towards us. Hail, Mercury! What is this stranger with you? _Mercury_.--His name is Julius Caesar Scaliger, and he is by profession a critic. _Horace_.--Julius Caesar Scaliger! He was, I presume, a dictator in criticism. _Mercury_.--Yes, and he has exercised his sovereign power over you. _Horace_.--I will not presume to oppose it. I had enough of following Brutus at Philippi. _Mercury_.--Talk to him a little. He'll amuse you. I brought him to you on purpose. _Horace_.--Virgil, do you accost him. I can't do it with proper gravity. I shall laugh in his face. _Virgil_.--Sir, may I ask for what reason you cast your eyes so superciliously upon Horace and me? I don't remember that Augustus ever looked down upon us with such an air of superiority when we were his subjects. _Scaliger_.--He was only a sovereign over your bodies, and owed his power to violence and usurpation. But I have from Nature an absolute dominion over the wit of all authors, who are subjected to me as the greatest of critics or hypercritics. _Virgil_.--Your jurisdiction, great sir, is very extensive. And what judgments have you been pleased to pass upon us? _Scaliger_.--Is it possible you should be ignorant of my decrees? I have placed you, Virgil, above Homer, whom I have shown to be-- _Virgil_.--Hold, sir. No blasphemy against my master. _Horace_.--But what have you said of me? _Scaliger_.--I have said that I had rather have written the little dialogue between you and Lydia than have been made king of Arragon. _Horace_.--If we were in the other world you should give me the kingdom, and take both the ode and the lady in return. But did you always pronounce so favourably for us? _Scaliger_.--Send for my works and read them. Mercury will bring them to you with the first learned ghost that arrives here from Europe. There is instruction for you in them. I tell you of your faults. But it was my whim to commend that little ode, and I never do things by halves. When I give praise, I give it liberally, to show my royal bounty. But I generally blame, to exert all the vigour of my censorian power, and keep my subjects in awe. _Horace_.--You did not confine your sovereignty to poets; you exercised it, no doubt, over all other writers. _Scaliger_.--I was a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, an orator, an historian, a divine without doing the drudgery of any of these, but only censuring those who did, and showing thereby the superiority of my genius over them all. _Horace_.--A short way, indeed, to universal fame! And I suppose you were very peremptory in your decisions? _Scaliger_.--Peremptory! ay. If any man dared to contradict my opinions I called him a dunce, a rascal, a villain, and frightened him out of his wits. _Virgil_.--But what said others to this method of disputation? _Scaliger_.--They generally believed me because of the confidence of my assertions, and thought I could not be so insolent or so angry if I was not absolutely sure of being in the right. Besides, in my controversies, I had a great help from the language in which I wrote. For one can scold and call names with a much better grace in Latin than in French or any tame modern tongue. _Horace_.--Have not I heard that you pretended to derive your descent from the princes of Verona? _Scaliger_.--Pretended! Do you presume to deny it? _Horace_.--Not I, indeed. Genealogy is not my science. If you should claim to descend in a direct line from King Midas I would not dispute it. _Virgil_.--I wonder, Scaliger, that you stooped to so low an ambition. Was it not greater to reign over all Mount Parnassus than over a petty state in Italy? _Scaliger_.--You say well. I was too condescending to the prejudices of vulgar opinion. The ignorant multitude imagine that a prince is a greater man than a critic. Their folly made me desire to claim kindred with the Scalas of Verona. _Horace_.--Pray, Mercury, how do you intend to dispose of this august person? You can't think it proper to let him remain with us. He must be placed with the demigods; he must go to Olympus. _Mercury_.--Be not afraid. He shall not trouble you long. I brought him hither to divert you with the sight of an animal you never had seen, and myself with your surprise. He is the chief of all the modern critics, the most renowned captain of that numerous and dreadful band. Whatever you may think of him, I can seriously assure you that before he went mad he had good parts and great learning. But I will now explain to you the original cause of the absurdities he has uttered. His mind was formed in such a manner that, like some perspective glasses, it either diminished or magnified all objects too much; but, above all others, it magnified the good man to himself. This made him so proud that it turned his brain. Now I have had my sport with him, I think it will be charity to restore him to his senses, or rather to bestow what Nature denied him--a sound judgment. Come hither, Scaliger. By this touch of my Caduceus I give thee power to see things as they are, and, among others, thyself. Look, gentlemen, how his countenance is fallen in a moment! Hear what he says. He is talking to himself. _Scaliger_.--Bless me! with what persons have I been discoursing? With Virgil and Horace! How could I venture to open my lips in their presence? Good Mercury, I beseech you let me retire from a company for which I am very unfit. Let me go and hide my head in the deepest shade of that grove which I see in the valley. After I have performed a penance there, I will crawl on my knees to the feet of those illustrious shades, and beg them to see me burn my impertinent books of criticism in the fiery billows of Phlegethon with my own hands. _Mercury_.--They will both receive thee into favour. This mortification of truly knowing thyself is a sufficient atonement for thy former presumption. DIALOGUE XIV. BOILEAU--POPE. _Boileau_.--Mr. Pope, you have done me great honour. I am told that you made me your model in poetry, and walked on Parnassus in the same paths which I had trod. _Pope_.--We both followed Horace, but in our manner of imitation, and in the turn of our natural genius, there was, I believe, much resemblance. We both were too irritable and too easily hurt by offences, even from the lowest of men. The keen edge of our wit was frequently turned against those whom it was more a shame to contend with than an honour to vanquish. _Boileau_.--Yes. But in general we were the champions of good morals, good sense, and good learning. If our love of these was sometimes heated into anger against those who offended them no less than us, is that anger to be blamed? _Pope_.--It would have been nobler if we had not been parties in the quarrel. Our enemies observe that neither our censure nor our praise was always impartial. _Boileau_.--It might perhaps have been better if in some instances we had not praised or blamed so much. But in panegyric and satire moderation is insipid. _Pope_.--Moderation is a cold unpoetical virtue. Mere historical truth is better written in prose. And, therefore, I think you did judiciously when you threw into the fire your history of Louis le Grand, and trusted his fame to your poems. _Boileau_.--When those poems were published that monarch was the idol of the French nation. If you and I had not known, in our occasional compositions, how to speak to the passions, as well as to the sober reason of mankind, we should not have acquired that despotic authority in the empire of wit which made us so formidable to all the inferior tribe of poets in England and France. Besides, sharp satirists want great patrons. _Pope_.--All the praise which my friends received from me was unbought. In this, at least, I may boast a superiority over the pensioned Boileau. _Boileau_.--A pension in France was an honourable distinction. Had you been a Frenchman you would have ambitiously sought it; had I been an Englishman I should have proudly declined it. If our merit in other respects be not unequal, this difference will not set me much below you in the temple of virtue or of fame. _Pope_.--It is not for me to draw a comparison between our works. But, if I may believe the best critics who have talked to me on the subject, my "Rape of the Lock" is not inferior to your "Lutrin;" and my "Art of Criticism" may well be compared with your "Art of Poetry;" my "Ethic Epistles" are esteemed at least equal to yours; and my "Satires" much better. _Boileau_.--Hold, Mr. Pope. If there is really such a sympathy in our natures as you have supposed, there may be reason to fear that, if we go on in this manner comparing our works, we shall not part in good friendship. _Pope_.--No, no; the mild air of the Elysian Fields has mitigated my temper, as I presume it has yours. But, in truth, our reputations are nearly on a level. Our writings are admired, almost equally (as I hear) for energy and justness of thought. We both of us carried the beauty of our diction, and the harmony of our numbers, to the highest perfection that our languages would admit. Our poems were polished to the utmost degree of correctness, yet without losing their fire, or the agreeable appearance of freedom and ease. We borrowed much from the ancients, though you, I believe, more than I; but our imitations (to use an expression of your own) had still an original air. _Boileau_.--I will confess, sir (to show you that the Elysian climate has had its effects upon me), I will fairly confess, without the least ill humour, that in your "Eloisa to Abelard," your "Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," and some others you wrote in your youth, there is more fire of poetry than in any of mine. You excelled in the pathetic, which I never approached. I will also allow that you hit the manner of Horace and the sly delicacy of his wit more exactly than I, or than any other man who has written since his time. Nor could I, nor did even Lucretius himself, make philosophy so poetical, and embellish it with such charms as you have given to that of Plato, or (to speak more properly) of some of his modern disciples, in your celebrated "Essay on Man." _Pope_.--What do you think of my "Homer?" _Boileau_.--Your "Homer" is the most spirited, the most poetical, the most elegant, and the most pleasing translation that ever was made of any ancient poem, though not so much in the manner of the original, or so exactly agreeable to the sense in all places, as might perhaps be desired. But when I consider the years you spent in this work, and how many excellent original poems you might, with less difficulty, have produced in that time, I can't but regret that your talents were thus employed. A great poet so tied down to a tedious translation is a Columbus chained to an oar. What new regions of fancy, full of treasures yet untouched, might you have explored, if you had been at liberty to have boldly expanded your sails, and steered your own course, under the conduct and direction of your own genius! But I am still more angry with you for your edition of Shakespeare. The office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture? _Pope_.--The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespeare; and, if you knew all his beauties as well as I, you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings. _Boileau_.--You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I can't deny that he did so; but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together in the composition of his pictures as he has frequently done. _Pope_.--The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same play, nay, sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote. _Boileau_.--A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries. _Pope_.--Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of Shakespeare broke forth! What were the English, and what, let me ask you, were the French dramatic performances, in the age when he nourished? The advances he made towards the highest perfection, both of tragedy and comedy, are amazing! In the principal points, in the power of exciting terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience, none yet has excelled him, and very few have equalled. _Boileau_.--Do you think that he was equal in comedy to Moliere? _Pope_.--In comic force I do; but in the fine and delicate strokes of satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to that admirable writer. There is nothing in him to compare with the _Misanthrope_, the _Ecole des Femmes_, or _Tartuffe_. _Boileau_.--This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge. A veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanatics. _Pope_.--He who can read Shakespeare, and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism, has more of reason than taste. _Boileau_.--I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shocking absurdities in his plays--absurdities which no critic of my nation can pardon. _Pope_.--We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties. But you would admire him still more if you could see the chief characters in all his test tragedies represented by an actor who appeared on the stage a little before I left the world. He has shown the English nation more excellencies in Shakespeare than the quickest wits could discern, and has imprinted them on the heart with a livelier feeling than the most sensible natures had ever experienced without his help. _Boileau_.--The variety, spirit, and force of Mr. Garrick's action have been much praised to me by many of his countrymen, whose shades I converse with, and who agree in speaking of him as we do of Baron, our most natural and most admired actor. I have also heard of another, who has now quitted the stage, but who had filled, with great dignity, force, and elevation, some tragic parts, and excelled so much in the comic, that none ever has deserved a higher applause. _Pope_.--Mr. Quin was, indeed, a most perfect comedian. In the part of Falstaff particularly, wherein the utmost force of Shakespeare's humour appears, he attained to such perfection that he was not an actor; he was the man described by Shakespeare; he was Falstaff himself! When I saw him do it the pleasantry of the fat knight appeared to me so bewitching, all his vices were so mirthful, that I could not much wonder at his having seduced a young prince even to rob in his company. _Boileau_.--That character is not well understood by the French; they suppose it belongs, not to comedy, but to farce, whereas the English see in it the finest and highest strokes of wit and humour. Perhaps these different judgments may be accounted for in some measure by the diversity of manners in different countries. But don't you allow, Mr. Pope, that our writers, both of tragedy and comedy, are, upon the whole, more perfect masters of their art than yours? If you deny it, I will appeal to the Athenians, the only judges qualified to decide the dispute. I will refer it to Euripides, Sophocles, and Menander. _Pope_.--I am afraid of those judges, for I see them continually walking hand-in-hand, and engaged in the most friendly conversation with Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. Our dramatic writers seem, in general, not so fond of their company; they sometimes shove rudely by them, and give themselves airs of superiority. They slight their reprimands, and laugh at their precepts--in short, they will be tried by their country alone; and that judicature is partial. _Boileau_.--I will press this question no further. But let me ask you to which of our rival tragedians, Racine and Corneille, do you give the preference? _Pope_.--The sublimest plays of Corneille are, in my judgment, equalled by the _Athalia_ of Racine, and the tender passions are certainly touched by that elegant and most pathetic writer with a much finer hand. I need not add that he is infinitely more correct than Corneille, and more harmonious and noble in his versification. Corneille formed himself entirely upon Lucan, but the master of Racine was Virgil. How much better a taste had the former than the latter in choosing his model! _Boileau_.--My friendship with Racine, and my partiality for his writings, make me hear with great pleasure the preference given to him above Corneille by so judicious a critic. _Pope_.--That he excelled his competitor in the particulars I have mentioned, can't, I think, be denied. But yet the spirit and the majesty of ancient Rome were never so well expressed as by Corneille. Nor has any other French dramatic writer, in the general character of his works, shown such a masculine strength and greatness of thought. Racine is the swan described by ancient poets, which rises to the clouds on downy wings and sings a sweet but a gentle and plaintive note. Corneille is the eagle, which soars to the skies on bold and sounding pinions, and fears not to perch on the sceptre of Jupiter, or to bear in his pounces the lightning of the god. _Boileau_.--I am glad to find, Mr. Pope, that in praising Corneille you run into poetry, which is not the language of sober criticism, though sometimes used by Longinus. _Pope_.--I caught the fire from the idea of Corneille. _Boileau_.--He has bright flashes, yet I think that in his thunder there is often more noise than fire. Don't you find him too declamatory, too turgid, too unnatural, even in his best tragedies? _Pope_.--I own I do; yet the greatness and elevation of his sentiments, and the nervous vigour of his sense, atone, in my opinion, for all his faults. But let me now, in my turn, desire your opinion of our epic poet, Milton. _Boileau_.--Longinus perhaps would prefer him to all other writers, for he surpasses even Homer in the sublime; but other critics who require variety, and agreeableness, and a correct regularity of thought and judgment in an epic poem, who can endure no absurdities, no extravagant fictions, would place him far below Virgil. _Pope_.--His genius was indeed so vast and sublime, that his poem seems beyond the limits of criticism, as his subject is beyond the limits of nature. The bright and excessive blaze of poetical fire, which shines in so many parts of the "Paradise Lost," will hardly permit the dazzled eye to see its faults. _Boileau_.--The taste of your countrymen is much changed since the days of Charles II., when Dryden was thought a greater poet than Milton! _Pope_.--The politics of Milton at that time brought his poetry into disgrace, for it is a rule with the English, they see no good in a man whose politics they dislike; but, as their notions of government are apt to change, men of parts whom they have slighted become their favourite authors, and others who have possessed their warmest admiration are in their turn undervalued. This revolution of favour was experienced by Dryden as well as Milton; he lived to see his writings, together with his politics, quite out of fashion. But even in the days of his highest prosperity, when the generality of the people admired his _Almanzor_, and thought his _Indian Emperor_ the perfection of tragedy, the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Rochester, the two wittiest noblemen our country has produced, attacked his fame, and turned the rants of his heroes, the jargon of his spirits, and the absurdity of his plots into just ridicule. _Boileau_.--You have made him good amends by the praise you have given him in some of your writings. _Pope_.--I owed him that praise as my master in the art of versification, yet I subscribe to the censures which have been passed by other writers on many of his works. They are good critics, but he is still a great poet. You, sir, I am sure, must particularly admire him as an excellent satirist; his "Absalom and Achitophel" is a masterpiece in that way of writing, and his "Mac Flecno" is, I think, inferior to it in nothing but the meanness of the subject. _Boileau_.--Did not you take the model of your "Dunciad" from the latter of those very ingenious satires? _Pope_.--I did; but my work is more extensive than his, and my imagination has taken in it a greater scope. _Boileau_.--Some critics may doubt whether the length of your poem was so properly suited to the meanness of the subject as the brevity of his. Three cantos to expose a dunce crowned with laurel! I have not given above three lines to the author of the "Pucelle." _Pope_.--My intention was to expose, not one author alone, but all the dulness and false taste of the English nation in my times. Could such a design be contracted into a narrower compass? _Boileau_.--We will not dispute on this point, nor whether the hero of your "Dunciad" was really a dunce. But has not Dryden been accused of immorality and profaneness in some of his writings? _Pope_.--He has, with too much reason: and I am sorry to say that all our best comic writers after Shakespeare and Johnson, except Addison and Steele, are as liable as he to that heavy charge. Fletcher is shocking. Etheridge, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar have painted the manners of the times in which they wrote with a masterly hand; but they are too often such manners that a virtuous man, and much more a virtuous woman, must be greatly offended at the representation. _Boileau_.--In this respect our stage is far preferable to yours. It is a school of morality. Vice is exposed to contempt and to hatred. No false colours are laid on to conceal its deformity, but those with which it paints itself are there taken off. _Pope_.--It is a wonderful thing that in France the comic Muse should be the gravest lady in the nation. Of late she is so grave, that one might almost mistake her for her sister Melpomene. Moliere made her indeed a good moral philosopher; but then she philosophised, like Democritus, with a merry, laughing face. Now she weeps over vice instead of showing it to mankind, as I think she generally ought to do, in ridiculous lights. _Boileau_.--Her business is more with folly than with vice, and when she attacks the latter, it should be rather with ridicule than invective. But sometimes she may be allowed to raise her voice, and change her usual smile into a frown of just indignation. _Pope_.--I like her best when she smiles. But did you never reprove your witty friend, La Fontaine, for the vicious levity that appears in many of his tales? He was as guilty of the crime of debauching the Muses as any of our comic poets. _Boileau_.--I own he was, and bewail the prostitution of his genius, as I should that of an innocent and beautiful country girl. He was all nature, all simplicity! yet in that simplicity there was a grace, and unaffected vivacity, with a justness of thought and easy elegance of expression that can hardly be found in any other writer. His manner is quite original, and peculiar to himself, though all the matter of his writings is borrowed from others. _Pope_.--In that manner he has been imitated by my friend Mr. Prior. _Boileau_.--He has, very successfully. Some of Prior's tales have the spirit of La Fontaine's with more judgment, but not, I think, with such an amiable and graceful simplicity. _Pope_.--Prior's harp had more strings than La Fontaine's. He was a fine poet in many different ways: La Fontaine but in one. And, though in some of his tales he imitated that author, his "Alma" was an original, and of singular beauty. _Boileau_.--There is a writer of heroic poetry, who lived before Milton, and whom some of your countrymen place in the highest class of your poets, though he is little known in France. I see him sometimes in company with Homer and Virgil, but oftener with Tasso, Ariosto, and Dante. _Pope_.--I understand you mean Spenser. There is a force and beauty in some of his images and descriptions, equal to any in those writers you have seen him converse with. But he had not the art of properly shading his pictures. He brings the minute and disagreeable parts too much into sight; and mingles too frequently vulgar and mean ideas with noble and sublime. Had he chosen a subject proper for epic poetry, he seems to have had a sufficient elevation and strength in his genius to make him a great epic poet: but the allegory, which is continued throughout the whole work, fatigues the mind, and cannot interest the heart so much as those poems, the chief actors in which are supposed to have really existed. The Syrens and Circe in the "Odyssey" are allegorical persons; but Ulysses, the hero of the poem, was a man renowned in Greece, which makes the account of his adventures affecting and delightful. To be now and then in Fairyland, among imaginary beings, is a pleasing variety, and helps to distinguish the poet from the orator or historian, but to be always there is irksome. _Boileau_.--Is not Spenser likewise blamable for confounding the Christian with the Pagan theology in some parts of his poem? _Pope_.--Yes; he had that fault in common with Dante, with Ariosto, and with Camoens. _Boileau_.--Who is the poet that arrived soon after you in Elysium, whom I saw Spenser lead in and present to Virgil, as the author of a poem resembling the "Georgics"? On his head was a garland of the several kinds of flowers that blow in each season, with evergreens intermixed. _Pope_.--Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected. Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject. _Boileau_.--I should suppose that he wrote tragedies upon the Greek model. For he is often admitted into the grove of Euripides. _Pope_.--He enjoys that distinction both as a tragedian and as a moralist. For not only in his plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety, and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most tender and benevolent heart. _Boileau_.--St. Evremond has brought me acquainted with Waller. I was surprised to find in his writings a politeness and gallantry which the French suppose to be appropriated only to theirs. His genius was a composition which is seldom to be met with, of the sublime and the agreeable. In his comparison between himself and Apollo, as the lover of Daphne, and in that between Amoret and Sacharissa, there is a _finesse_ and delicacy of wit which the most elegant of our writers have never exceeded. Nor had Sarrazin or Voiture the art of praising more genteelly the ladies they admired. But his epistle to Cromwell, and his poem on the death of that extraordinary man, are written with a force and greatness of manner which give him a rank among the poets of the first class. _Pope_.--Mr. Waller was unquestionably a very fine writer. His Muse was as well qualified as the Graces themselves to dress out a Venus; and he could even adorn the brows of a conqueror with fragrant and beautiful wreaths. But he had some puerile and low thoughts, which unaccountably mixed with the elegant and the noble, like schoolboys or a mob admitted into a palace. There was also an intemperance and a luxuriancy in his wit which he did not enough restrain. He wrote little to the understanding, and less to the heart; but he frequently delights the imagination, and sometimes strikes it with flashes of the highest sublime. We had another poet of the age of Charles I., extremely admired by all his contemporaries, in whose works there is still more affectation of wit, a greater redundancy of imagination, a worse taste, and less judgment; but he touched the heart more, and had finer feelings than Waller. I mean Cowley. _Boileau_.--I have been often solicited to admire his writings by his learned friend, Dr. Spratt. He seems to me a great wit, and a very amiable man, but not a good poet. _Pope_.--The spirit of poetry is strong in some of his odes, but in the art of poetry he is always extremely deficient. _Boileau_.--I hear that of late his reputation is much lowered in the opinion of the English. Yet I cannot but think that, if a moderate portion of the superfluities of his wit were given by Apollo to some of their modern bards, who write commonplace morals in very smooth verse, without any absurdity, but without a single new thought, or one enlivening spark of imagination, it would be a great favour to them, and do them more service than all the rules laid down in my "Art of Poetry" and yours of "Criticism." _Pope_.--I am much of your mind. But I left in England some poets whom you, I know, will admire, not only for the harmony and correctness of style, but the spirit and genius you will find in their writings. _Boileau_.--France, too, has produced some very excellent writers since the time of my death. Of one particularly I hear wonders. Fame to him is as kind as if he had been dead a thousand years. She brings his praises to me from all parts of Europe. You know I speak of Voltaire. _Pope_.--I do; the English nation yields to none in admiration of his extensive genius. Other writers excel in some one particular branch of wit or science; but when the King of Prussia drew Voltaire from Paris to Berlin, he had a whole academy of _belles lettres_ in him alone. _Boileau_.--That prince himself has such talents for poetry as no other monarch in any age or country has ever possessed. What an astonishing compass must there be in his mind, what an heroic tranquillity and firmness in his heart, that he can, in the evening, compose an ode or epistle in the most elegant verse, and the next morning fight a battle with the conduct of Caesar or Gustavus Adolphus! _Pope_.--I envy Voltaire so noble a subject both for his verse and his prose. But if that prince will write his own commentaries, he will want no historian. I hope that, in writing them, he will not restrain his pen, as Caesar has done, to a mere account of his wars, but let us see the politician, and the benignant protector of arts and sciences, as well as the warrior, in that picture of himself. Voltaire has shown us that the events of battles and sieges are not the most interesting parts of good history, but that all the improvements and embellishments of human society ought to be carefully and particularly recorded there. _Boileau_.--The progress of arts and knowledge, and the great changes that have happened in the manners of mankind, are objects far more worthy of a leader's attention than the revolutions of fortune. And it is chiefly to Voltaire that we owe this instructive species of history. _Pope_.--He has not only been the father of it among the moderns, but has carried it himself to its utmost perfection. _Boileau_.--Is he not too universal? Can any writer be exact who is so comprehensive? _Pope_.--A traveller round the world cannot inspect every region with such an accurate care as exactly to describe each single part. If the outlines are well marked, and the observations on the principal points are judicious, it is all that can be required. _Boileau_.--I would, however, advise and exhort the French and English youth to take a fuller survey of some particular provinces, and to remember that although, in travels of this sort, a lively imagination is a very agreeable companion, it is not the best guide. To speak without a metaphor, the study of history, both sacred and profane, requires a critical and laborious investigation. The composer of a set of lively and witty remarks on facts ill-examined, or incorrectly delivered, is not an historian. _Pope_.--We cannot, I think, deny that name to the author of the "Life of Charles XII., King of Sweden." _Boileau_.--No, certainly. I esteem it the very best history that this age has produced. As full of spirit as the hero whose actions it relates, it is nevertheless most exact in all matters of importance. The style of it is elegant, perspicuous, unaffected; the disposition and method are excellent; the judgments given by the writer acute and just. _Pope_.--Are you not pleased with that philosophical freedom of thought which discovers itself in all the works of Voltaire, but more particularly in those of an historical nature? _Boileau_.--If it were properly regulated, I should reckon it among their highest perfections. Superstition, and bigotry, and party spirit are as great enemies to the truth and candour of history as malice or adulation. To think freely is therefore a most necessary quality in a perfect historian. But all liberty has its bounds, which, in some of his writings, Voltaire, I fear, has not observed. Would to Heaven he would reflect, while it is yet in his power to correct what is faulty, that all his works will outlive him; that many nations will read them; and that the judgment pronounced here upon the writer himself will be according to the scope and tendency of them, and to the extent of their good or evil effects on the great society of mankind. _Pope_.--It would be well for all Europe if some other wits of your country, who give the tone to this age in all polite literature, had the same serious thoughts you recommend to Voltaire. Witty writings, when directed to serve the good ends of virtue and religion, are like the lights hung out in a _pharos_, to guide the mariners safe through dangerous seas; but the brightness of those that are impious or immoral shines only to betray and lead men to destruction. _Boileau_.--Has England been free from all seductions of this nature? _Pope_.--No. But the French have the art of rendering vice and impiety more agreeable than the English. _Boileau_.--I am not very proud of this superiority in the talents of my countrymen. But as I am told that the good sense of the English is now admired in France, I hope it will soon convince both nations that true wisdom is virtue, and true virtue is religion. _Pope_.--I think it also to be wished that a taste for the frivolous may not continue too prevalent among the French. There is a great difference between gathering flowers at the foot of Parnassus and ascending the arduous heights of the mountain. The palms and laurels grow there, and if any of your countrymen aspire to gain them, they must no longer enervate all the vigour of their minds by this habit of trifling. I would have them be perpetual competitors with the English in manly wit and substantial learning. But let the competition be friendly. There is nothing which so contracts and debases the mind as national envy. True wit, like true virtue, naturally loves its own image in whatever place it is found. DIALOGUE XV. OCTAVIA--PORTIA--ARRIA. _Portia_.--How has it happened, Octavia, that Arria and I, who have a higher rank than you in the Temple of Fame, should have a lower here in Elysium? We are told that the virtues you exerted as a wife were greater than ours. Be so good as to explain to us what were those virtues. It is the privilege of this place that one can bear superiority without mortification. The jealousy of precedence died with the rest of our mortal frailties. Tell us, then, your own story. We will sit down under the shade of this myrtle grove and listen to it with pleasure. _Octavia_.--Noble ladies, the glory of our sex and of Rome, I will not refuse to comply with your desire, though it recalls to my mind some scenes my heart would wish to forget. There can be only one reason why Minos should have given to my conjugal virtues a preference above yours, which is that the trial assigned to them was harder. _Arria_.--How, madam! harder than to die for your husband! We died for ours. _Octavia_.--You did for husbands who loved yon, and were the most virtuous men of the ages they lived in--who trusted you with their lives, their fame, their honour. To outlive such husbands is, in my judgment, a harder effort of virtue than to die for them or with them. But Mark Antony, to whom my brother Octavius, for reasons of state, gave my hand, was indifferent to me, and loved another. Yet he has told me himself I was handsomer than his mistress Cleopatra. Younger I certainly was, and to men that is generally a charm sufficient to turn the scale in one's favour. I had been loved by Marcellus. Antony said he loved me when he pledged to me his faith. Perhaps he did for a time; a new handsome woman might, from his natural inconstancy, make him forget an old attachment. He was but too amiable. His very vices had charms beyond other men's virtues. Such vivacity! such fire! such a towering pride! He seemed made by nature to command, to govern the world; to govern it with such ease that the business of it did not rob him of an hour of pleasure. Nevertheless, while his inclination for me continued, this haughty lord of mankind who could hardly bring his high spirit to treat my brother, his partner in empire, with the necessary respect, was to me as submissive, as obedient to every wish of my heart, as the humblest lover that ever sighed in the vales of Arcadia. Thus he seduced my affection from the manes of Marcellus and fixed it on himself. He fixed it, ladies (I own it with some confusion), more fondly than it had ever been fixed on Marcellus. And when he had done so he scorned me, he forsook me, he returned to Cleopatra. Think who I was--the sister of Caesar, sacrificed to a vile Egyptian queen, the harlot of Julius, the disgrace of her sex! Every outrage was added that could incense me still more. He gave her at sundry times, as public marks of his love, many provinces of the Empire of Rome in the East. He read her love-letters openly in his tribunal itself--even while he was hearing and judging the causes of kings. Nay, he left his tribunal, and one of the best Roman orators pleading before him, to follow her litter, in which she happened to be passing by at that time. But, what was more grievous to me than all these demonstrations of his extravagant passion for that infamous woman, he had the assurance, in a letter to my brother, to call her his wife. Which of you, ladies, could have patiently borne this treatment? _Arria_.--Not I, madam, in truth. Had I been in your place, the dagger with which I pierced my own bosom to show my dear Paetus how easy it was to die, that dagger should I have plunged into Antony's heart, if piety to the gods and a due respect to the purity of my own soul had not stopped my hand. But I verily believe I should have killed myself; not, as I did, out of affection to my husband, but out of shame and indignation at the wrongs I endured. _Portia_.--I must own, Octavia, that to bear such usage was harder to a woman than to swallow fire. _Octavia_.--Yet I did bear it, madam, without even a complaint which could hurt or offend my husband. Nay, more, at his return from his Parthian expedition, which his impatience to bear a long absence from Cleopatra had made unfortunate and inglorious, I went to meet him in Syria, and carried with me rich presents of clothes and money for his troops, a great number of horses, and two thousand chosen soldiers, equipped and armed like my brother's Praetorian bands. He sent to stop me at Athens because his mistress was then with him. I obeyed his orders; but I wrote to him, by one of his most faithful friends, a letter full of resignation, and such a tenderness for him as I imagined might have power to touch his heart. My envoy served me so well, he set my fidelity in so fair a light, and gave such reasons to Antony why he ought to see and receive me with kindness, that Cleopatra was alarmed. All her arts were employed to prevent him from seeing me, and to draw him again into Egypt. Those arts prevailed. He sent me back into Italy, and gave himself up more absolutely than ever to the witchcraft of that Circe. He added Africa to the States he had bestowed on her before, and declared Caesario, her spurious son by Julius Caesar, heir to all her dominions, except Phoenicia and Cilicia, which with the Upper Syria he gave to Ptolemy, his second son by her; and at the same time declared his eldest son by her, whom he had espoused to the Princess of Media, heir to that kingdom and King of Armenia; nay, and of the whole Parthian Empire which he meant to conquer for him. The children I had brought him he entirely neglected as if they had been bastards. I wept. I lamented the wretched captivity he was in; but I never reproached him. My brother, exasperated at so many indignities, commanded me to quit the house of my husband at Rome and come into his. I refused to obey him. I remained in Antony's house; I persisted to take care of his children by Fulvia, the same tender care as of my own. I gave my protection to all his friends at Rome. I implored my brother not to make my jealousy or my wrongs the cause of a civil war. But the injuries done to Rome by Antony's conduct could not possibly be forgiven. When he found he should draw the Roman arms on himself, he sent orders to me to leave his house. I did so, but carried with me all his children by Fulvia, except Antyllus, the eldest, who was then with him in Egypt. After his death and Cleopatra's, I took her children by him, and bred them up with my own. _Arria_.--Is it possible, madam? the children of Cleopatra? _Octavia_.--Yes, the children of my rival. I married her daughter to Juba, King of Mauritania, the most accomplished and the handsomest prince in the world. _Arria_.--Tell me, Octavia, did not your pride and resentment entirely cure you of your passion for Antony, as soon as you saw him go back to Cleopatra? And was not your whole conduct afterwards the effect of cool reason, undisturbed by the agitations of jealous and tortured love? _Octavia_.--You probe my heart very deeply. That I had some help from resentment and the natural pride of my sex, I will not deny. But I was not become indifferent to my husband. I loved the Antony who had been my lover, more than I was angry with the Antony who forsook me and loved another woman. Had he left Cleopatra and returned to me again with all his former affection, I really believe I should have loved him as well as before. _Arria_.--If the merit of a wife is to be measured by her sufferings, your heart was unquestionably the most perfect model of conjugal virtue. The wound I gave mine was but a scratch in comparison to many you felt. Yet I don't know whether it would be any benefit to the world that there should be in it many Octavias. Too good subjects are apt to make bad kings. _Portia_.--True, Arria; the wives of Brutus and Cecinna Paetus may be allowed to have spirits a little rebellious. Octavia was educated in the Court of her brother. Subjection and patience were much better taught there than in our houses, where the Roman liberty made its last abode. And though I will not dispute the judgment of Minos, I can't help thinking that the affection of a wife to her husband is more or less respectable in proportion to the character of that husband. If I could have had for Antony the same friendship as I had for Brutus, I should have despised myself. _Octavia_.--My fondness for Antony was ill-placed; but my perseverance in the performance of all the duties of a wife, notwithstanding his ill-usage, a perseverance made more difficult by the very excess of my love, appeared to Minos the highest and most meritorious effort of female resolution against the seductions of the most dangerous enemy to our virtue, offended pride. DIALOGUE XVI. LOUISE DE COLIGNI, PRINCESS OF ORANGE--FRANCES WALSINGHAM, COUNTESS OF ESSEX AND OF CLANRICARDE; BEFORE, LADY SIDNEY. _Princess of Orange_.--Our destinies, madam, had a great and surprising conformity. I was the daughter of Admiral Coligni, you of Secretary Walsingham, two persons who were the most consummate statesmen and ablest supports of the Protestant religion in France, and in England. I was married to Teligni, the finest gentleman of our party, the most admired for his valour, his virtue, and his learning: you to Sir Philip Sidney, who enjoyed the same pre-eminence among the English. Both these husbands were cut off, in the flower of youth and of glory, by violent deaths, and we both married again with still greater men; I with William Prince of Orange, the founder of the Dutch Commonwealth; you with Devereux Earl of Essex, the favourite of Elizabeth and of the whole English nation. But, alas! to complete the resemblance of our fates, we both saw those second husbands, who had raised us so high, destroyed in the full meridian of their glory and greatness: mine by the pistol of an assassin; yours still more unhappily, by the axe, as a traitor. _Countess of Clanricarde_.--There was indeed in some principal events of our lives the conformity you observe. But your destiny, though it raised you higher than me, was more unhappy than mine. For my father lived honourably, and died in peace: yours was assassinated in his old age. How, madam, did you support or recover your spirits under so rainy misfortunes? _Princess of Orange_.--The Prince of Orange left an infant son to my care. The educating of him to be worthy of so illustrious a father, to be the heir of his virtue as well as of his greatness, and the affairs of the commonwealth, in which I interested myself for his sake, so filled my mind, that they in some measure took from me the sense of my grief, which nothing but such a great and important scene of business, such a necessary talk of private and public duty, could have ever relieved. But let me inquire in my turn, how did your heart find a balm to alleviate the anguish of the wounds it had suffered? What employed your widowed hours after the death of your Essex? _Countess of Clanricarde_.--Madam, I did not long continue a widow: I married again. _Princess of Orange_.--Married again! With what prince, what king did you marry? The widow of Sir Philip Sidney and of my Lord Essex could not descend from them to a subject of less illustrious fame; and where could you find one that was comparable to either? _Countess of Clanricarde_.--I did not seek for one, madam: the heroism of the former, and the ambition of the latter, had made me very unhappy. I desired a quiet life and the joys of wedded love, with an agreeable, virtuous, well-born, unambitious, unenterprising husband. All this I found in the Earl of Clanricarde: and believe me, madam, I enjoyed more solid felicity in Ireland with him, than I ever had possessed with my two former husbands, in the pride of their glory, when England and all Europe resounded with their praise. _Princess of Orange_.--Can it be possible that the daughter of Walsingham, and the wife of Sidney and Essex, should have sentiments so inferior to the minds from which she sprang, and to which she was matched? Believe me, madam, there was no hour of the many years I lived after the death of the Prince of Orange, in which I would have exchanged the pride and joy I continually had in hearing his praise, and seeing the monuments of his glory in the free commonwealth his wisdom had founded, for any other delights the world could give. The cares that I shared with him, while he remained upon earth, were a happiness to my mind, because they exalted its powers. The remembrance of them was dear to me after I had lost him. I thought his great soul, though removed to a higher sphere, would look down upon mine with some tenderness of affection, as its fellow-labourer in the heroic and divine work of delivering and freeing his country. But to be divorced from that soul! to be no longer his wife! to be the comfort of an inferior, inglorious husband! I had much rather have died a thousand deaths, than that my heart should one moment have conceived such a thought. _Countess of Clanricarde_.--Your Highness must not judge of all hearts by your own. The ruling passion of that was apparently ambition. My inclinations were not so noble as yours, but better suited, perhaps, to the nature of woman. I loved Sir Philip Sidney, I loved the Earl of Essex, rather as amiable men than as heroes and statesmen. They were so taken up with their wars and state-affairs, that my tenderness for them was too often neglected. The Earl of Clanricarde was constantly and wholly mine. He was brave, but had not that spirit of chivalry with which Sir Philip Sidney was absolutely possessed. He had, in a high degree, the esteem of Elizabeth, but did not aspire to her love; nor did he wish to be the rival of Carr or of Villiers in the affection of James. Such, madam, was the man on whom my last choice bestowed my hand, and whose kindness compensated for all my misfortunes. Providence has assigned to different tempers different comforts. To you it gave the education of a prince, the government of a state, the pride of being called the wife of a hero; to me a good-living husband, quiet, opulence, nobility, and a fair reputation, though not in a degree so exalted as yours. If our whole sex were to choose between your consolations and mine, your Highness, I think, would find very few of your taste. But I respect the sublimity of your ideas. Now that we have no bodies they appear less unnatural than I should have thought them in the other world. _Princess of Orange_.--Adieu, madam. Our souls are of a different order, and were not made to sympathise or converse with each other. DIALOGUE XVII. MARCUS BRUTUS--POMPONIUS ATTICUS. _Brutus_.--Well, Atticus, I find that, notwithstanding your friendship for Cicero and for me, you survived us both many years, with the same cheerful spirit you had always possessed, and, by prudently wedding your daughter to Agrippa, secured the favour of Octavius Caesar, and even contracted a close alliance with him by your granddaughter's marriage with Tiberius Nero. _Atticus_.--You know, Brutus, my philosophy was the Epicurean. I loved my friends, and I served them in their wants and distresses with great generosity; but I did not think myself obliged to die when they died, or not to make others as occasions should offer. _Brutus_.--You did, I acknowledge, serve your friends, as far as you could, without bringing yourself, on their account, into any great danger or disturbance of mind: but that you loved them I much doubt. If you loved Cicero, how could you love Antony? If you loved me, how could you love Octavius? If you loved Octavius, how could you avoid taking part against Antony in their last civil war? Affection cannot be so strangely divided, and with so much equality, among men of such opposite characters, and who were such irreconcilable enemies to each other. _Atticus_.--From my earliest youth I possessed the singular talent of ingratiating myself with the heads of different parties, and yet not engaging with any of them so far as to disturb my own quiet. My family was connected with the Marian party; and, though I retired to Athens that I might not be unwillingly involved in the troubles which that turbulent faction had begun to excite, yet when young Marius was declared an enemy by the Senate, I sent him a sum of money to support him in his exile. Nor did this hinder me from making my court so well to Sylla, upon his coming to Athens, that I obtained from him the highest marks of his favour. Nevertheless, when he pressed me to go with him to Rome, I declined it, being as unwilling to fight for him against the Marian party, as for them against him. He admired my conduct; and at his departure from Athens, ordered all the presents made to him during his abode in that city to be carried to me. I remind you of this only to show that moderation in all contentions of this kind had been always my principle; and that in the instances you mentioned I did not act from any levity or inconstancy in my nature, but from a regular consistent plan of conduct, which my reason convinced me was the wisest I could follow. _Brutus_.--I remember indeed that you observed the same neutrality between Pompey and Julius Caesar. _Atticus_.--I did so--and that I might be able to do it with dignity, and without the reproach of ingratitude, I never would accept any office or honour from either of those great men; nor from Cicero, though my sister had married his brother; nor from you, Marcus Brutus, whose friendship I thought the greatest honour of my life. _Brutus_.--Are there no obligations to a good heart, Pomponius, but honours and offices? Or could you, by refusing to encumber yourself with these, dissolve all other ties? But, setting aside any considerations of private affection or esteem, how was you able to reconcile your conduct with that which is the ruling principle in the heart of every virtuous man, and more especially a virtuous Roman, the love of the public? _Atticus_.--The times I lived in were so bad, and the conflict of parties had so little to do in reality with the love of the public, that I thought my virtue much safer and purer by avoiding than mixing in the fray. _Brutus_.--Possibly, in the dispute between Marius and Sylla, and even in that between Pompey and Caesar, a virtuous man might see so much to blame on both sides, and so much to fear, whichever faction should overcome the other, as to be justified in not engaging with either. But let me say, without vanity, in the war which I waged against Antony and Octavius you could have nothing to blame, for I know you approved the principle upon which I killed Julius Caesar. Nor had you anything to fear if our arms had succeeded, for you know that my intentions were upright and pure; nor was it doubtful that Cassius was as much determined as I to restore the Republic. How could you, then, with any sense of virtue in your heart, maintain an indifference and neutrality between the deliverers and the tyrants of your country? _Atticus_.--My answer to this will necessarily require explanations, which my respect to the manes of Brutus makes me wish to avoid. _Brutus_.--In the other world I loved truth, and was desirous that all might speak it with freedom; but here even the tender ears of a tyrant are compelled to endure it. If I committed any faults, or erred in my judgment, the calamities I have suffered are a punishment for it. Tell me then, truly, and without fear of offending, what you think were my failings. _Atticus_.--You said that the principle upon which you killed Julius Caesar had my approbation. This I do not deny; but did I ever declare, or give you reason to believe, that I thought it a prudent or well-timed act? I had quite other thoughts. Nothing ever seemed to me worse judged or worse timed; and these, Brutus, were my reasons. Caesar was just setting out to make war on the Parthians. This was an enterprise of no little difficulty and no little danger; but his unbounded ambition, and that restless spirit which never would suffer him to take any repose, did not intend to stop there. You know very well (for he hid nothing from you) that he had formed a vast plan of marching, after he had conquered the whole Parthian Empire, along the coast of the Caspian Sea and the sides of Mount Caucasus into Scythia, in order to subdue all the countries that border on Germany, and Germany itself; from whence he proposed to return to Rome by Gaul. Consider now, I beseech you, how much time the execution of this project required. In some of his battles with so many fierce and warlike nations, the bravest of all the barbarians, he might have been slain; but, if he had not, disease, or age itself, might have ended his life before he could have completed such an immense undertaking. He was, when you killed him, in his fifty-sixth year, and of an infirm constitution. Except his bastard by Cleopatra, he had no son; nor was his power so absolute or so quietly settled that he could have a thought of bequeathing the Empire, like a private inheritance, to his sister's grandson, Octavius. While he was absent there was no reason to fear any violence or maladministration in Italy or in Rome. Cicero would have had the chief authority in the Senate. The praetorship of the city had been conferred upon you by the favour of Caesar, and your known credit with him, added to the high reputation of your virtues and abilities, gave you a weight in all business which none of his party left behind him in Italy would have been able to oppose. What a fair prospect was here of good order, peace, and liberty at home, while abroad the Roman name would have been rendered more glorious, the disgrace of Crassus revenged, and the Empire extended beyond the utmost ambition of our forefathers by the greatest general that ever led the armies of Rome, or, perhaps, of any other nation! What did it signify whether in Asia, and among the barbarians, that general bore the name of King or Dictator? Nothing could be more puerile in you and your friends than to start so much at the proposition of his taking that name in Italy itself, when you had suffered him to enjoy all the power of royalty, and much more than any King of Rome had possessed from Romulus down to Tarquin. _Brutus_.--We considered that name as the last insult offered to our liberty and our laws; it was an ensign of tyranny, hung out with a vain and arrogant purpose of rendering the servitude of Rome more apparent. We, therefore, determined to punish the tyrant, and restore our country to freedom. _Atticus_.--You punished the tyrant, but you did not restore your country to freedom. By sparing Antony, against the opinion of Cassius, you suffered the tyranny to remain. He was Consul, and, from the moment that Caesar was dead, the chief power of the State was in his hands. The soldiers adored him for his liberality, valour, and military frankness. His eloquence was more persuasive from appearing unstudied. The nobility of his house, which descended from Hercules, would naturally inflame his heart with ambition. The whole course of his life had evidently shown that his thoughts were high and aspiring, and that he had little respect for the liberty of his country. He had been the second man in Caesar's party; by saving him you gave a new head to that party, which could no longer subsist without your ruin. Many who would have wished the restoration of liberty, if Caesar had died a natural death, were so incensed at his murder that, merely for the sake of punishing that, they were willing to confer all power upon Antony and make him absolute master of the Republic. This was particularly true with respect to the veterans who had served under Caesar, and he saw it so plainly that he presently availed himself of their dispositions. You and Cassius were obliged to fly out of Italy, and Cicero, who was unwilling to take the same part, could find no expedient to save himself and the Senate but the wretched one of supporting and raising very high another Caesar, the adopted son and heir of him you had slain, to oppose Antony and to divide the Caesarean party. But even while he did this he perpetually offended that party and made them his enemies by harangues in the Senate, which breathed the very spirit of the old Pompeian faction, and made him appear to Octavius and all the friends of the dead Dictator no less guilty of his death than those who had killed him. What could this end in but that which you and your friends had most to fear, a reunion of the whole Caesarean party and of their principal leaders, however discordant the one with the other, to destroy the Pompeians? For my own part, I foresaw it long before the event, and therefore kept myself wholly clear of those proceedings. You think I ought to have joined you and Cassius at Philippi, because I knew your good intentions, and that, if you succeeded, you designed to restore the commonwealth. I am persuaded you did both agree in that point, but you differed in so many others, there was such a dissimilitude in your tempers and characters, that the union between you could not have lasted long, and your dissension would have had most fatal effects with regard both to the settlement and to the administration of the Republic. Besides, the whole mass of it was in such a fermentation, and so corrupted, that I am convinced new disorders would soon have arisen. If you had applied gentle remedies, to which your nature inclined, those remedies would have failed; if Cassius had induced you to act with severity, your government would have been stigmatised with the name of a tyranny more detestable than that against which you conspired, and Caesar's clemency would have been the perpetual topic of every factious oration to the people, and of every seditious discourse to the soldiers. Thus you would have soon been plunged in the miseries of another civil war, or perhaps assassinated in the Senate, as Julius was by you. Nothing could give the Roman Empire a lasting tranquillity but such a prudent plan of a mitigated imperial power as was afterwards formed by Octavius, when he had ably and happily delivered himself from all opposition and partnership in the government. Those quiet times I lived to see, and I must say they were the best I ever had seen, far better than those under the turbulent aristocracy for which you contended. And let me boast a little of my own prudence, which, through so many storms, could steer me safe into that port. Had it only given me safety, without reputation, I should not think that I ought to value myself upon it. But in all these revolutions my honour remained as unimpaired as my fortune. I so conducted myself that I lost no esteem in being Antony's friend after having been Cicero's, or in my alliance with Agrippa and Augustus Caesar after my friendship with you. Nor did either Caesar or Antony blame my inaction in the quarrels between them; but, on the contrary, they both seemed to respect me the more for the neutrality I observed. My obligations to the one and alliance with the other made it improper for me to act against either, and my constant tenor of life had procured me an exemption from all civil wars by a kind of prescription. _Brutus_.--If man were born to no higher purpose than to wear out a long life in ease and prosperity, with the general esteem of the world, your wisdom was evidently as much superior to mine as my life was shorter and more unhappy than yours. Nay, I verily believe it exceeded the prudence of any other man that ever existed, considering in what difficult circumstances you were placed, and with how many violent shocks and sudden changes of fortune you were obliged to contend. But here the most virtuous and public-spirited conduct is found to have been the most prudent. The motives of our actions, not the success, give us here renown. And could I return to that life from whence I am escaped, I would not change my character to imitate yours; I would again be Brutus rather than Atticus. Even without the sweet hope of an eternal reward in a more perfect state, which is the strongest and most immovable support to the good under every misfortune, I swear by the gods I would not give up the noble feelings of my heart, that elevation of mind which accompanies active and suffering virtue, for your seventy-seven years of constant tranquillity, with all the praise you obtained from the learned men whom you patronised or the great men whom you courted. DIALOGUE XVIII. WILLIAM III., KING OF ENGLAND--JOHN DE WITT, PENSIONER, OF HOLLAND. _William_.--Though I had no cause to love you, yet, believe me, I sincerely lament your fate. Who could have thought that De Witt, the most popular Minister that ever served a commonwealth, should fall a sacrifice to popular fury! Such admirable talents, such virtues as you were endowed with, so clear, so cool, so comprehensive a head, a heart so untainted with any kind of vice, despising money, despising pleasure, despising the vain ostentation of greatness, such application to business, such ability in it, such courage, such firmness, and so perfect a knowledge of the nation you governed, seemed to assure you of a fixed and stable support in the public affection. But nothing can be durable that depends on the passions of the people. _De Witt_.--It is very generous in your Majesty, not only to compassionate the fate of a man whose political principles made him an enemy to your greatness, but to ascribe it to the caprice and inconstancy of the people, as if there had been nothing very blamable in his conduct. I feel the magnanimity of this discourse from your Majesty, and it confirms what I have heard of all your behaviour after my death. But I must frankly confess that, although the rage of the populace was carried much too far when they tore me and my unfortunate brother to pieces, yet I certainly had deserved to lose their affection by relying too much on the uncertain and dangerous friendship of France, and by weakening the military strength of the State, to serve little purposes of my own power, and secure to myself the interested affection of the burgomasters or others who had credit and weight in the faction the favour of which I courted. This had almost subjected my country to France, if you, great prince, had not been set at the head of the falling Republic, and had not exerted such extraordinary virtues and abilities to raise and support it, as surpassed even the heroism and prudence of William, our first Stadtholder, and equalled yon to the most illustrious patriots of Greece or Rome. _William_.--This praise from your mouth is glorious to me indeed! What can so much exalt the character of a prince as to have his actions approved by a zealous Republican and the enemy of his house? _De Witt_.--If I did not approve them I should show myself the enemy of the Republic. You never sought to tyrannise over it; you loved, you defended, you preserved its freedom. Thebes was not more indebted to Epaminondas or Pelopidas for its independence and glory than the United Provinces were to you. How wonderful was it to see a youth, who had scarce attained to the twenty-second year of his age, whose spirit had been depressed and kept down by a jealous and hostile faction, rising at once to the conduct of a most arduous and perilous war, stopping an enemy victorious, triumphant, who had penetrated into the heart of his country, driving him back and recovering from him all he had conquered: to see this done with an army in which a little before there was neither discipline, courage, nor sense of honour! Ancient history has no exploit superior to it; and it will ennoble the modern whenever a Livy or a Plutarch shall arise to do justice to it, and set the hero who performed it in a true light. _William_.--Say, rather, when time shall have worn out that malignity and rancour of party which in free States is so apt to oppose itself to the sentiments of gratitude and esteem for their servants and benefactors. _De Witt_.--How magnanimous was your reply, how much in the spirit of true ancient virtue, when being asked, in the greatest extremity of our danger, "How you intended to live after Holland was lost?" you said, "You would live on the lands you had left in Germany, and had rather pass your life in hunting there than sell your country or liberty to France at any rate!" How nobly did you think when, being offered your patrimonial lordships and lands in the county of Burgundy, or the full value of them from France, by the mediation of England in the treaty of peace, your answer was, "That to gain one good town more for the Spaniards in Flanders you would be content to lose them all!" No wonder, after this, that you were able to combine all Europe in a league against the power of France; that you were the centre of union, and the directing soul of that wise, that generous confederacy formed by your labours; that you could steadily support and keep it together, in spite of repeated misfortunes; that even after defeats you were as formidable to Louis as other generals after victories; and that in the end you became the deliverer of Europe, as you had before been of Holland. _William_.--I had, in truth, no other object, no other passion at heart throughout my whole life but to maintain the independence and freedom of Europe against the ambition of France. It was this desire which formed the whole plan of my policy, which animated all my counsels, both as Prince of Orange and King of England. _De Witt_.--This desire was the most noble (I speak it with shame) that could warm the heart of a prince whose ancestors had opposed and in a great measure destroyed the power of Spain when that nation aspired to the monarchy of Europe. France, sir, in your days had an equal ambition and more strength to support her vast designs than Spain under the government of Philip II. That ambition you restrained, that strength you resisted. I, alas! was seduced by her perfidious Court, and by the necessity of affairs in that system of policy which I had adopted, to ask her assistance, to rely on her favour, and to make the commonwealth, whose counsels I directed, subservient to her greatness. Permit me, sir, to explain to you the motives of my conduct. If all the Princes of Orange had acted like you, I should never have been the enemy of your house. But Prince Maurice of Nassau desired to oppress the liberty of that State which his virtuous father had freed at the expense of his life, and which he himself had defended against the arms of the House of Austria with the highest reputation of military abilities. Under a pretence of religion (the most execrable cover of a wicked design) he put to death, as a criminal, that upright Minister, Barneveldt, his father's best friend, because, he refused to concur with him in treason against the State. He likewise imprisoned several other good men and lovers of their country, confiscated their estates, and ruined their families. Yet, after he had done these cruel acts of injustice with a view to make himself sovereign of the Dutch Commonwealth, he found they had drawn such a general odium upon him that, not daring to accomplish his iniquitous purpose, he stopped short of the tyranny to which he had sacrificed his honour and virtue; a disappointment so mortifying and so painful to his mind that it probably hastened his death. _William_.--Would to Heaven he had died before the meeting of that infamous Synod of Dort, by which he not only dishonoured himself and his family, but the Protestant religion itself! Forgive this interruption--my grief forced me to it--I desire you to proceed. _De Witt_.--The brother of Maurice, Prince Henry, who succeeded to his dignities in the Republic, acted with more moderation. But the son of that good prince, your Majesty's father (I am sorry to speak what I know you hear with pain), resumed, in the pride and fire of his youth, the ambitious designs of his uncle. He failed in his undertaking, and soon afterwards died, but left in the hearts of the whole Republican party an incurable jealousy and dread of his family. Full of these prejudices, and zealous for liberty, I thought it my duty as Pensionary of Holland to prevent for ever, if I could, your restoration to the power your ancestors had enjoyed, which I sincerely believed would be inconsistent with the safety and freedom of my country. _William_.--Let me stop you a moment here. When my great-grandfather formed the plan of the Dutch Commonwealth, he made the power of a Stadtholder one of the principal springs in his system of government. How could you imagine that it would ever go well when deprived of this spring, so necessary to adjust and balance its motions? A constitution originally formed with no mixture of regal power may long be maintained in all its vigour and energy without such a power; but if any degree of monarchy was mixed from the beginning in the principles of it, the forcing that out must necessarily disorder and weaken the whole fabric. This was particularly the case in our Republic. The negative voice of every small town in the provincial States, the tedious slowness of our forms and deliberations, the facility with which foreign Ministers may seduce or purchase the opinions of so many persons as have a right to concur in all our resolutions, make it impossible for the Government, even in the quietest times, to be well carried on without the authority and influence of a Stadtholder, which are the only remedy our constitution has provided for those evils. _De Witt_.--I acknowledge they are; but I and my party thought no evil so great as that remedy, and therefore we sought for other more pleasing resources. One of these, upon which we most confidently depended, was the friendship of France. I flattered myself that the interest of the French would secure to me their favour, as your relation to the Crown of England might naturally raise in them a jealousy of your power. I hoped they would encourage the trade and commerce of the Dutch in opposition to the English, the ancient enemies of their Crown, and let us enjoy all the benefits of a perpetual peace, unless we made war upon England, or England upon us, in either of which cases it was reasonable to presume we should have their assistance. The French Minister at the Hague, who served his Court but too well, so confirmed me in these notions, that I had no apprehensions of the mine which was forming under my feet. _William_.--You found your authority strengthened by a plan so agreeable to your party, and this contributed more to deceive your sagacity than all the art of D'Estrades. _De Witt_.--My policy seemed to me entirely suitable to the lasting security of my own power, of the liberty of my country, and of its maritime greatness; for I made it my care to keep up a very powerful navy, well commanded and officered, for the defence of all these against the English; but, as I feared nothing from France, or any Power on the Continent, I neglected the army, or rather I destroyed it, by enervating all its strength, by disbanding old troops and veteran officers attached to the House of Orange, and putting in their place a trading militia, commanded by officers who had neither experience nor courage, and who owed their promotions to no other merit but their relation to or interest with some leading men in the several oligarchies of which the Government in all the Dutch towns is composed. Nevertheless, on the invasion of Flanders by the French, I was forced to depart from my close connection with France, and to concur with England and Sweden in the Triple Alliance, which Sir William Temple proposed, in order to check her ambition; but as I entered into that measure from necessity, not from choice, I did not pursue it. I neglected to improve our union with England, or to secure that with Sweden; I avoided any conjunction of counsels with Spain; I formed no alliance with the Emperor or the Germans; I corrupted our army more and more; till a sudden, unnatural confederacy, struck up, against all the maxims of policy, by the Court of England with France, for the conquest of the Seven Provinces, brought these at once to the very brink of destruction, and made me a victim to the fury of a populace too justly provoked. _William_.--I must say that your plan was in reality nothing more than to procure for the Dutch a licence to trade under the good pleasure and gracious protection of France. But any State that so entirely depends on another is only a province, and its liberty is a servitude graced with a sweet but empty name. You should have reflected that to a monarch so ambitious and so vain as Louis le Grand the idea of a conquest which seemed almost certain, and the desire of humbling a haughty Republic, were temptations irresistible. His bigotry likewise would concur in recommending to him an enterprise which he might think would put heresy under his feet. And if you knew either the character of Charles II. or the principles of his government, you ought not to have supposed his union with France for the ruin of Holland an impossible or even improbable event. It is hardly excusable in a statesman to be greatly surprised that the inclinations of princes should prevail upon them to act, in many particulars, without any regard to the political maxims and interests of their kingdoms. _De Witt_.--I am ashamed of my error; but the chief cause of it was that, though I thought very ill, I did not think quite so ill of Charles II. and his Ministry as they deserved. I imagined, too, that his Parliament would restrain him from engaging in such a war, or compel him to engage in our defence if France should attack us. These, I acknowledge, are excuses, not justifications. When the French marched into Holland and found it in a condition so unable to resist them, my fame as a Minister irrecoverably sank; for, not to appear a traitor, I was obliged to confess myself a dupe. But what praise is sufficient for the wisdom and virtue you showed in so firmly rejecting the offers which, I have been informed, were made to you, both by England and France, when first you appeared in arms at the head of your country, to give you the sovereignty of the Seven Provinces by the assistance and under the protection of the two Crowns! Believe me, great prince, had I been living in those times, and had known the generous answers you made to those offers (which were repeated more than once during the course of the war), not the most ancient and devoted servant to your family would have been more your friend than I. But who could reasonably hope for such moderation, and such a right sense of glory, in the mind of a young man descended from kings, whose mother was daughter to Charles I., and whose father had left him the seducing example of a very different conduct? Happy, indeed, was the English nation to have such a prince, so nearly allied to their Crown both in blood and by marriage, whom they might call to be their deliverer when bigotry and despotism, the two greatest enemies to human society, had almost overthrown their whole constitution in Church and State! _William_.--They might have been happy, but were not. As soon as I had accomplished their deliverance for them, many of them became my most implacable enemies, and even wished to restore the unforgiving prince whom they had so unanimously and so justly expelled from his kingdom. Such levity seems incredible. I could not myself have imagined it possible, in a nation famed for good sense, if I had not had proofs of it beyond contradiction. They seemed as much to forget what they called me over for as that they had called me over. The security of their religion, the maintenance of their liberty, were no longer their care. All was to yield to the incomprehensible doctrine of right divine and passive obedience. Thus the Tories grew Jacobites, after having renounced both that doctrine and King James, by their opposition to him, by their invitation of me, and by every Act of the Parliament which gave me the Crown. But the most troublesome of my enemies were a set of Republicans, who violently opposed all my measures, and joined with the Jacobites in disturbing my government, only because it was not a commonwealth. _De Witt_.--They who were Republicans under your government in the Kingdom of England did not love liberty, but aspired to dominion, and wished to throw the nation into a total confusion, that it might give them a chance of working out from that anarchy a better state for themselves. _William_.--Your observation is just. A proud man thinks himself a lover of liberty when he is only impatient of a power in government above his own, and were he a king, or the first Minister of a king, would be a tyrant. Nevertheless I will own to you, with the candour which becomes a virtuous prince, that there were in England some Whigs, and even some of the most sober and moderate Tories, who, with very honest intentions, and sometimes with good judgments, proposed new securities to the liberty of the nation, against the prerogative or influence of the Crown and the corruption of Ministers in future times. To some of these I gave way, being convinced they were right, but others I resisted for fear of weakening too much the royal authority, and breaking that balance in which consists the perfection of a mixed form of government. I should not, perhaps, have resisted so many if I had not seen in the House of Commons a disposition to rise in their demands on the Crown had they found it more yielding. The difficulties of my government, upon the whole, were so great that I once had determined, from mere disgust and resentment, to give back to the nation, assembled in Parliament, the crown they had placed on my head, and retire to Holland, where I found more affection and gratitude in the people. But I was stopped by the earnest supplications of my friends and by an unwillingness to undo the great work I had done, especially as I knew that, if England should return into the hands of King James, it would be impossible in that crisis to preserve the rest of Europe from the dominion of France. _De Witt_.--Heaven be praised that your Majesty did not persevere in so fatal a resolution! The United Provinces would have been ruined by it together with England. But I cannot enough express my astonishment that you should have met with such treatment as could suggest such a thought. The English must surely be a people incapable either of liberty or subjection. _William_.--There were, I must acknowledge, some faults in my temper and some in my government, which are an excuse for my subjects with regard to the uneasiness and disquiet they gave me. My taciturnity, which suited the genius of the Dutch, offended theirs. They love an affable prince; it was chiefly his affability that made them so fond of Charles II. Their frankness and good-humour could not brook the reserve and coldness of my nature. Then the excess of my favour to some of the Dutch, whom I had brought over with me, excited a national jealousy in the English and hurt their pride. My government also appeared, at last, too unsteady, too fluctuating between the Whigs and the Tories, which almost deprived me of the confidence and affection of both parties. I trusted too much to the integrity and the purity of my intentions, without using those arts that are necessary to allay the ferment of factions and allure men to their duty by soothing their passions. Upon the whole I am sensible that I better understood how to govern the Dutch than the English or the Scotch, and should probably have been thought a greater man if I had not been King of Great Britain. _De Witt_.--It is a shame to the English that gratitude and affection for such merit as yours were not able to overcome any little disgusts arising from your temper, and enthrone their deliverer in the hearts of his people. But will your Majesty give me leave to ask you one question? Is it true, as I have heard, that many of them disliked your alliances on the Continent and spoke of your war with France as a Dutch measure, in which you sacrificed England to Holland? _William_.--The cry of the nation at first was strong for the war, but before the end of it the Tories began publicly to talk the language you mention. And no wonder they did, for, as they then had a desire to set up again the maxims of government which had prevailed in the reign of their beloved Charles II., they could not but represent opposition to France, and vigorous measures taken to restrain her ambition, as unnecessary for England, because they well knew that the counsels of that king had been utterly averse to such measures; that his whole policy made him a friend to France; that he was governed by a French mistress, and even bribed by French money to give that Court his assistance, or at least his acquiescence, in all their designs. _De Witt_.--A King of England whose Cabinet is governed by France, and who becomes a vile pensioner to a French King, degrades himself from his royalty, and ought to be considered as an enemy to the nation. Indeed the whole policy of Charles II., when he was not forced off from his natural bias by the necessity he lay under of soothing his Parliament, was a constant, designed, systematical opposition to the interest of his people. His brother, though more sensible to the honour of England, was by his Popery and desire of arbitrary power constrained to lean upon France, and do nothing to obstruct her designs on the Continent or lessen her greatness. It was therefore necessary to place the British Crown on your head, not only with a view to preserve the religious and civil rights of the people from internal oppressions, but to rescue the whole State from that servile dependence on its natural enemy, which must unquestionably have ended in its destruction. What folly was it to revile your measures abroad, as sacrificing the interest of your British dominions to connections with the Continent, and principally with Holland! Had Great Britain no interest to hinder the French from being masters of all the Austrian Netherlands, and forcing the Seven United Provinces, her strongest barrier on the Continent against the power of that nation, to submit with the rest to their yoke? Would her trade, would her coasts, would her capital itself have been safe after so mighty an increase of shipping and sailors as France would have gained by those conquests? And what could have prevented them, but the war which you waged and the alliances which you formed? Could the Dutch and the Germans, unaided by Great Britain, have attempted to make head against a Power which, even with her assistance, strong and spirited as it was, they could hardly resist? And after the check which had been given to the encroachments of France by the efforts of the first grand alliance, did not a new and greater danger make it necessary to recur to another such league? Was not the union of France and Spain under one monarch, or even under one family, the most alarming contingency that ever had threatened the liberty of Europe? _William_.--I thought so, and I am sure I did not err in my judgment. But folly is blind, and faction wilfully shuts her eyes against the most evident truths that cross her designs, as she believes any lies, however palpable and absurd, that she thinks will assist them. _De Witt_.--The only objection which seems to have any real weight against your system of policy, with regard to the maintenance of a balance of power in Europe, is the enormous expense that must necessarily attend it; an expense which I am afraid neither England nor Holland will be able to bear without extreme inconvenience. _William_.--I will answer that objection by asking a question. If, when you were Pensionary of Holland, intelligence had been brought that the dykes were ready to break and the sea was coming in to overwhelm and to drown us, what would you have said to one of the deputies who, when you were proposing the proper repairs to stop the inundation, should have objected to the charge as too heavy on the Province? This was the case in a political sense with both England and Holland. The fences raised to keep out superstition and tyranny were all giving way; those dreadful evils were threatening, with their whole accumulated force, to break in upon us and overwhelm our ecclesiastical and civil constitutions. In such circumstances to object to a necessary expense is folly and madness. _De Witt_.--It is certain, sir, that the utmost abilities of a nation can never be so well employed as in the unwearied, pertinacious defence of their religion and freedom. When these are lost, there remains nothing that is worth the concern of a good or wise man. Nor do I think it consistent with the prudence of government not to guard against future dangers, as well as present; which precaution must be often in some degree expensive. I acknowledge, too, that the resources of a commercial country, which supports its trade, even in war, by invincible fleets, and takes care not to hurt it in the methods of imposing or collecting its taxes, are immense, and inconceivable till the trial is made; especially where the Government, which demands the supplies, is agreeable to the people. But yet an unlimited and continued expense will in the end be destructive. What matters it whether a State is mortally wounded by the hand of a foreign enemy, or dies by a consumption of its own vital strength? Such a consumption will come upon Holland sooner than upon England, because the latter has a greater radical force; but, great as it is, that force at last will be so diminished and exhausted by perpetual drains, that it may fail all at once, and those efforts, which may seem most surprisingly vigorous, will be in reality the convulsions of death. I don't apply this to your Majesty's government; but I speak with a view to what may happen hereafter from the extensive ideas of negotiation and war which you have established: they have been salutary to your kingdom; but they will, I fear, be pernicious in future times, if in pursuing great plans great Ministers do not act with a sobriety, prudence, and attention to frugality, which very seldom are joined with an extraordinary vigour and boldness of counsels. DIALOGUE XIX. M. APICIUS--DARTENEUF. _Darteneuf_.--Alas! poor Apicius, I pity thee from my heart for not having lived in my age and in my country. How many good dishes, unknown at Rome in thy days, have I feasted upon in England! _Apicius_.--Keep your pity for yourself. How many good dishes have I feasted upon in Rome which England does not produce, or of which the knowledge has been lost, with other treasures of antiquity, in these degenerate days! The fat paps of a sow, the livers of scari, the brains of phoenicopters, and the tripotanum, which consisted of three excellent sorts of fish, for which you English have no names, the lupus marinus, the myxo, and the muraena. _Darteneuf_.--I thought the muraena had been our lamprey. We have delicate ones in the Severn. _Apicius_.--No; the muraena, so respected by the ancient Roman senators, was a salt-water fish, and kept by our nobles in ponds, into which the sea was admitted. _Darteneuf_.--Why, then, I dare say our Severn lampreys are better. Did you ever eat any of them stewed or potted? _Apicius_.--I was never in Britain. Your country then was too barbarous for me to go thither. I should have been afraid that the Britons would have eaten me. _Darteneuf_.--I am sorry for you, very sorry; for if you never were in Britain you never ate the best oysters. _Apicius_.--Pardon me, sir, your Sandwich oysters were brought to Rome in my time. _Darteneuf_.--They could not be fresh; they were good for nothing there. You should have come to Sandwich to eat them. It is a shame for you that you did not. An epicure talk of danger when he is in search of a dainty! Did not Leander swim over the Hellespont in a tempest to get to his mistress? And what is a wench to a barrel of exquisite oysters? _Apicius_.--Nay; I am sure you can't blame me for any want of alertness in seeking fine fishes. I sailed to the coast of Africa, from Minturnae in Campania, only to taste of one species, which I heard was larger there than it was on our coast; and finding that I had received a false information, I returned immediately, without even deigning to land. _Darteneuf_.--There was some sense in that. But why did not you also make a voyage to Sandwich? Had you once tasted those oysters in their highest perfection, you would never have come back; you would have eaten till you burst. _Apicius_.--I wish I had. It would have been better than poisoning myself, as I did at Rome, because I found, upon the balance of my accounts, I had only the pitiful sum of fourscore thousand pounds left, which would not afford me a table to keep me from starving. _Darteneuf_.--A sum of fourscore thousand pounds not keep you from starving! Would I had had it! I should have been twenty years in spending it, with the best table in London. _Apicius_.--Alas, poor man! This shows that you English have no idea of the luxury that reigned in our tables. Before I died I had spent in my kitchen 807,291 pounds 13s. 4d. _Darteneuf_.--I don't believe a word of it. There is certainly an error in the account. _Apicius_.--Why, the establishment of Lucullus for his suppers in the Apollo--I mean for every supper he sat down to in the room which he called by that name--was 5,000 drachms, which is in your money 1,614 pounds 11s. 8d. _Darteneuf_.--Would I had supped with him there! But are you sure there is no blunder in these calculations? _Apicius_.--Ask your learned men that. I reckon as they tell me. But you may think that these feasts were made only by great men, by triumphant generals, like Lucullus, who had plundered all Asia to help him in his housekeeping. What will you say when I tell you that the player AEsopus had one dish that cost him 6,000 sestertia--that is, 4,843 pounds 10s. English? _Darteneuf_.--What will I say? Why, that I pity my worthy friend Mr. Gibber, and that, if I had known this when alive, I should have hanged myself for vexation that I did not live in those days. _Apicius_.--Well you might, well you might. You don't know what eating is. You never could know it. Nothing less than the wealth of the Roman Empire is sufficient to enable a man of taste to keep a good table. Our players were infinitely richer than your princes. _Darteneuf_.--Oh that I had but lived in the blessed reign of Caligula, or of Vitellius, or of Heliogabalus, and had been admitted to the honour of dining with their slaves! _Apicius_.--Ay, there you touch me. I am miserable that I died before their good times. They carried the glories of their table much farther than the best eaters of the age in which I lived. Vitellius spent in feasting, within the compass of one year, what would amount in your money to above 7,200,000 pounds. He told me so himself in a conversation I had with him not long ago. And the two others you mentioned did not fall very short of his royal magnificence. _Darteneuf_.--These, indeed, were great princes. But what most affects me is the luxury of that upstart fellow AEsopus. Pray, of what ingredients might the dish he paid so much for consist? _Apicius_.--Chiefly of singing birds. It was that which so greatly enhanced the price. _Darteneuf_.--Of singing birds! Choke him! I never ate but one, which I stole out of its cage from a lady of my acquaintance, and all London was in an uproar, as if I had stolen and roasted an only child. But, upon recollection, I doubt whether I have really so much cause to envy AEsopus. For the singing bird which I ate was not so good as a wheat-ear or becafigue. And therefore I suspect that all the luxury you have bragged of was nothing but vanity. It was like the foolish extravagance of the son of AEsopus, who dissolved pearls in vinegar and drank them at supper. I will stake my credit that a haunch of good buck venison and my favourite ham pie were much better dishes than any at the table of Vitellius himself. It does not appear that you ancients ever had any good soups, without which a man of taste cannot possibly dine. The rabbits in Italy are detestable. But what is better than the wing of one of our English wild rabbits? I have been told you had no turkeys. The mutton in Italy is ill-flavoured. And as for your boars roasted whole, they were only fit to be served up at a corporation feast or election dinner. A small barbecued hog is worth a hundred of them. And a good collar of Canterbury or Shrewsbury brawn is a much better dish. _Apicius_.--If you had some meats that we wanted, yet our cookery must have been greatly superior to yours. Our cooks were so excellent that they could give to hog's flesh the taste of all other meats. _Darteneuf_.--I should never have endured their imitations. You might as easily have imposed on a good connoisseur in painting the copy of a fine picture for the original. Our cooks, on the contrary, give to all other meats, and even to some kinds of fish, a rich flavour of bacon without destroying that which makes the distinction of one from another. It does not appear to me that essence of hams was ever known to the ancients. We have a hundred ragouts, the composition of which surpasses all description. Had yours been as good, you could not have lain indolently lolling upon couches while you were eating. They would have made you sit up and mind your business. Then you had a strange custom of hearing things read to you while you were at supper. This demonstrates that you were not so well entertained as we are with our meat. When I was at table, I neither heard, nor saw, nor spoke; I only tasted. But the worst of all is that, in the utmost perfection of your luxury, you had no wine to be named with claret, Burgundy, champagne, old hock, or Tokay. You boasted much of your Falernum, but I have tasted the Lachrymae Christi and other wines of that coast, not one of which would I have drunk above a glass or two of if you would have given me the Kingdom of Naples. I have read that you boiled your wines and mixed water with them, which is sufficient evidence that in themselves they were not fit to drink. _Apicius_.--I am afraid you do really excel us in wines; not to mention your beer, your cider, and your perry, of all which I have heard great fame from your countrymen, and their report has been confirmed by the testimony of their neighbours who have travelled into England. Wonderful things have been also said to me of an English liquor called punch. _Darteneuf_.--Ay, to have died without tasting that is miserable indeed! There is rum punch and arrack punch! It is difficult to say which is best, but Jupiter would have given his nectar for either of them, upon my word and honour. _Apicius_.--The thought of them puts me into a fever with thirst. _Darteneuf_.--Those incomparable liquors are brought to us from the East and West Indies, of the first of which you knew little, and of the latter nothing. This alone is sufficient to determine the dispute. What a new world of good things for eating and drinking has Columbus opened to us! Think of that, and despair. _Apicius_.--I cannot indeed but exceedingly lament my ill fate that America was not discovered before I was born. It tortures me when I hear of chocolate, pineapples, and a number of other fine fruits, or delicious meats, produced there which I have never tasted. _Darteneuf_.--The single advantage of having sugar to sweeten everything with, instead of honey, which you, for want of the other, were obliged to make use of, is inestimable. _Apicius_.--I confess your superiority in that important article. But what grieves me most is that I never ate a turtle. They tell me that it is absolutely the best of all foods. _Darteneuf_.--Yes, I have heard the Americans say so, but I never ate any; for in my time they were not brought over to England. _Apicius_.--Never ate any turtle! How couldst thou dare to accuse me of not going to Sandwich to eat oysters, and didst not thyself take a trip to America to riot on turtles? But know, wretched man, I am credibly informed that they are now as plentiful in England as sturgeons. There are turtle-boats that go regularly to London and Bristol from the West Indies. I have just received this information from a fat alderman, who died in London last week of a surfeit he got at a turtle feast in that city. _Darteneuf_.--What does he say? Does he affirm to you that turtle is better than venison? _Apicius_.--He says, there was a haunch of the fattest venison untouched, while every mouth was employed on the turtle alone. _Darteneuf_.--Alas! how imperfect is human felicity! I lived in an age when the noble science of eating was supposed to have been carried to its highest perfection in England and France. And yet a turtle feast is a novelty to me! Would it be impossible, do you think, to obtain leave from Pluto of going back for one day to my own table at London just to taste of that food? I would promise to kill myself by the quantity of it I would eat before the next morning. _Apicius_.--You have forgot you have no body. That which you had has long been rotten, and you can never return to the earth with another, unless Pythagoras should send you thither to animate a hog. But comfort yourself that, as you have eaten dainties which I never tasted, so the next age will eat some unknown to this. New discoveries will be made, and new delicacies brought from other parts of the world. But see; who comes hither? I think it is Mercury. _Mercury_.--Gentlemen, I must tell you that I have stood near you invisible, and heard your discourse--a privilege which, you know, we deities use as often as we please. Attend, therefore, to what I shall communicate to you, relating to the subject upon which you have been talking. I know two men, one of whom lived in ancient, and the other in modern times, who had much more pleasure in eating than either of you through the whole course of your lives. _Apicius_.--One of these happy epicures, I presume, was a Sybarite, and the other a French gentleman settled in the West Indies. _Mercury_.--No; one was a Spartan soldier, and the other an English farmer. I see you both look astonished. But what I tell you is truth. Labour and hunger gave a relish to the black broth of the former, and the salt beef of the latter, beyond what you ever found in the tripotanums or ham pies, that vainly stimulated your forced and languid appetites, which perpetual indolence weakened, and constant luxury overcharged. _Darteneuf_.--This, Apicius, is more mortifying than not to have shared a turtle feast. _Apicius_.--I wish, Mercury, you had taught me your art of cookery in my lifetime; but it is a sad thing not to know what good living is till after one is dead. DIALOGUE XX. ALEXANDER THE GREAT--CHARLES XII., KING OF SWEDEN. _Alexander_.--Your Majesty seems in great wrath! Who has offended you? _Charles_.--The offence is to you as much as me. Here is a fellow admitted into Elysium who has affronted us both--an English poet, one Pope. He has called us two madmen! _Alexander_.--I have been unlucky in poets. No prince ever was fonder of the Muses than I, or has received from them a more ungrateful return. When I was alive, I declared that I envied Achilles because he had a Homer to celebrate his exploits; and I most bountifully rewarded Choerilus, a pretender to poetry, for writing verses on mine. But my liberality, instead of doing me honour, has since drawn upon me the ridicule of Horace, a witty Roman poet; and Lucan, another versifier of the same nation, has loaded my memory with the harshest invectives. _Charles_.--I know nothing of these; but I know that in my time a pert French satirist, one Boileau, made so free with your character, that I tore his book for having abused my favourite hero. And now this saucy Englishman has libelled us both. But I have a proposal to make to you for the reparation of our honour. If you will join with me, we will turn all these insolent scribblers out of Elysium, and throw them down headlong to the bottom of Tartarus, in spite of Pluto and all his guards. _Alexander_.--This is just such a scheme as that you formed at Bender, to maintain yourself there, with the aid of three hundred Swedes, against the whole force of the Ottoman Empire. And I must say that such follies gave the English poet too much cause to call you a madman. _Charles_.--If my heroism was madness, yours, I presume, was not wisdom. _Alexander_.--There was a vast difference between your conduct and mine. Let poets or declaimers say what they will, history shows that I was not only the bravest soldier, but one of the ablest commanders the world has ever seen. Whereas you, by imprudently leading your army into vast and barren deserts at the approach of the winter, exposed it to perish in its march for want of subsistence, lost your artillery, lost a great number of your soldiers, and was forced to fight with the Muscovites under such disadvantages as made it almost impossible for you to conquer. _Charles_.--I will not dispute your superiority as a general. It is not for me, a mere mortal, to contend with the son of Jupiter Ammon. _Alexander_.--I suppose you think my pretending that Jupiter was my father as much entitles me to the name of a madman as your extravagant behaviour at Bender does you. But you are greatly mistaken. It was not my vanity, but my policy, which set up that pretension. When I proposed to undertake the conquest of Asia, it was necessary for me to appear to the people something more than a man. They had been used to the idea of demi-god heroes. I therefore claimed an equal descent with Osiris and Sesostris, with Bacchus and Hercules, the former conquerors of the East. The opinion of my divinity assisted my arms and subdued all nations before me, from the Granicus to the Ganges. But though I called myself the son of Jupiter, and kept up the veneration that name inspired, by a courage which seemed more than human, and by the sublime magnanimity of all my behaviour, I did not forget that I was the son of Philip. I used the policy of my father and the wise lessons of Aristotle, whom he had made my preceptor, in the conduct of all my great designs. It was the son of Philip who planted Greek colonies in Asia as far as the Indies; who formed projects of trade more extensive than his empire itself; who laid the foundations of them in the midst of his wars; who built Alexandria, to be the centre and staple of commerce between Europe, Asia, and Africa, who sent Nearchus to navigate the unknown Indian seas, and intended to have gone himself from those seas to the Pillars of Hercules--that is, to have explored the passage round Africa, the discovery of which has since been so glorious to Vasco de Gama. It was the son of Philip who, after subduing the Persians, governed them with such lenity, such justice, and such wisdom, that they loved him even more than ever they had loved their natural kings; and who, by intermarriages and all methods that could best establish a coalition between the conquerors and the conquered, united them into one people. But what, sir, did you do to advance the trade of your subjects, to procure any benefit to those you had vanquished, or to convert any enemy into a friend? _Charles_.--When I might easily have made myself King of Poland, and was advised to do so by Count Piper, my favourite Minister, I generously gave that kingdom to Stanislas, as you had given a great part of you conquests in India to Porus, besides his own dominions, which you restored to him entire after you had beaten his army and taken him captive. _Alexander_.--I gave him the government of those countries under me and as my lieutenant, which was the best method of preserving my power in conquests where I could not leave garrisons sufficient to maintain them. The same policy was afterwards practised by the Romans, who of all conquerors, except me, were the greatest politicians. But neither was I nor were they so extravagant as to conquer only for others, or dethrone kings with no view but merely to have the pleasure of bestowing their crowns on some of their subjects without any advantage to ourselves. Nevertheless, I will own that my expedition to India was an exploit of the son of Jupiter, not of the son of Philip. I had done better if I had stayed to give more consistency to my Persian and Grecian Empires, instead of attempting new conquests and at such a distance so soon. Yet even this war was of use to hinder my troops from being corrupted by the effeminacy of Asia, and to keep up that universal awe of my name which in those countries was the great support of my power. _Charles_.--In the unwearied activity with which I proceeded from one enterprise to another, I dare call myself your equal. Nay, I may pretend to a higher glory than you, because you only went on from victory to victory; but the greatest losses were not able to diminish my ardour or stop the efforts of my daring and invincible spirit. _Alexander_.--You showed in adversity much more magnanimity than you did in prosperity. How unworthy of a prince who imitated me was your behaviour to the king your arms had vanquished! The compelling Augustus to write himself a letter of congratulation to one of his vassals whom you had placed in his throne, was the very reverse of my treatment of Porus and Darius. It was an ungenerous insult upon his ill-fortune. It was the triumph of a little and a low mind. The visit you made him immediately after that insult was a further contempt, offensive to him, and both useless and dangerous to yourself. _Charles_.--I feared no danger from it. I knew he durst not use the power I gave him to hurt me. _Alexander_.--If his resentment in that instant had prevailed over his fear, as it was likely to do, you would have perished deservedly by your insolence and presumption. For my part, intrepid as I was in all dangers which I thought it was necessary or proper for me to meet, I never put myself one moment in the power of an enemy whom I had offended. But you had the rashness of folly as well as of heroism. A false opinion conceived of your enemy's weakness proved at last your undoing. When, in answer to some reasonable propositions of peace sent to you by the Czar, you said, "You would come and treat with him at Moscow," he replied very justly, "That you affected to act like Alexander, but should not find in him a Darius." And, doubtless, you ought to have been better acquainted with the character of that prince. Had Persia been governed by a Peter Alexowitz when I made war against it, I should have acted more cautiously, and not have counted so much on the superiority of my troops in valour and discipline over an army commanded by a king who was so capable of instructing them in all they wanted. _Charles_.--The battle of Narva, won by eight thousand Swedes against fourscore thousand Muscovites, seemed to authorise my contempt of the nation and their prince. _Alexander_.--It happened that their prince was not present in that battle. But he had not as yet had the time which was necessary to instruct his barbarous soldiers. You gave him that time, and he made so good a use of it that you found at Pultowa the Muscovites become a different nation. If you had followed the blow you gave them at Narva, and marched directly to Moscow, you might have destroyed their Hercules in his cradle. But you suffered him to grow till his strength was mature, and then acted as if he had been still in his childhood. _Charles_.--I must confess you excelled me in conduct, in policy, and in true magnanimity. But my liberality was not inferior to yours; and neither you nor any mortal ever surpassed me in the enthusiasm of courage. I was also free from those vices which sullied your character. I never was drunk; I killed no friend in the riot of a feast; I fired no palace at the instigation of a harlot. _Alexander_.--It may perhaps be admitted, as some excuse for my drunkenness, that the Persians esteemed it an excellence in their kings to be able to drink a great quantity of wine, and the Macedonians were far from thinking it a dishonour. But you were as frantic and as cruel when sober as I was when drunk. You were sober when you resolved to continue in Turkey against the will of your host, the Grand Signor. You were sober when you commanded the unfortunate Patkull, whose only crime was his having maintained the liberties of his country, and who bore the sacred character of an ambassador, to be broken alive on the wheel, against the laws of nations, and those of humanity, more inviolable still to a generous mind. You were likewise sober when you wrote to the Senate of Sweden, who, upon a report of your death, endeavoured to take some care of your kingdom, that you would send them one of your boots, and from that they should receive their orders if they pretended to meddle in government--an insult much worse than any the Macedonians complained of from me when I was most heated with wine and with adulation. As for my chastity, it was not so perfect as yours, though on some occasions I obtained great praise for my continence; but, perhaps, if you had been not quite so insensible to the charms of the fair sex, it would have mitigated and softened the fierceness, the pride, and the obstinacy of your nature. _Charles_.--It would have softened me into a woman, or, what I think still more contemptible, the slave of a woman. But you seem to insinuate that you never were cruel or frantic unless when you were drunk. This I absolutely deny. You were not drunk when you crucified Hephaestion's physician for not curing a man who killed himself by his intemperance in his sickness, nor when you sacrificed to the manes of that favourite officer the whole nation of the Cusseans--men, women, and children--who were entirely innocent of his death--because you had read in Homer that Achilles had immolated some Trojan captives on the tomb of Patroclus. I could mention other proofs that your passions inflamed you as much as wine, but these are sufficient. _Alexander_.--I can't deny that my passions were sometimes so violent as to deprive me for a while of the use of my reason; especially when the pride of such amazing successes, the servitude of the Persians, and barbarian flattery had intoxicated my mind. To bear at my age, with continual moderation, such fortune as mine, was hardly in human nature. As for you, there was an excess and intemperance in your virtues which turned them all into vices. And one virtue you wanted, which in a prince is very commendable and beneficial to the public--I mean, the love of science and of the elegant arts. Under my care and patronage they were carried in Greece to their utmost perfection. Aristotle, Apelles, and Lysippus were among the glories of my reign. Yours was illustrated only by battles. Upon the whole, though, from some resemblance between us I should naturally be inclined to decide in your favour, yet I must give the priority in renown to your enemy, Peter Alexowitz. That great monarch raised his country; you ruined yours. He was a legislator; you were a tyrant. DIALOGUE XXI. CARDINAL XIMENES--CARDINAL WOLSEY. _Wolsey_.--You seem to look on me, Ximenes, with an air of superiority, as if I was not your equal. Have you forgotten that I was the favourite and first Minister of a great King of England? that I was at once Lord High Chancellor, Bishop of Durham, Bishop of Winchester, Archbishop of York, and Cardinal Legate? On what other subject were ever accumulated so many dignities, such honours, such power? _Ximenes_.--In order to prove yourself my equal, you are pleased to tell me what you had, not what you did. But it is not the having great offices, it is the doing great things, that makes a great Minister. I know that for some years you governed the mind of King Henry VIII., and consequently his kingdom, with the most absolute sway. Let me ask you, then, What were the acts of your reign? _Wolsey_.--My acts were those of a very skilful courtier and able politician. I managed a temper which nature had made the most difficult to manage of any perhaps that ever existed, with such consummate address that all its passions were rendered entirely subservient to my inclinations. In foreign affairs I turned the arms of my master or disposed of his friendship, whichever way my own interest happened to direct. It was not with him, but with me, that treaties were made by the Emperor or by France; and none were concluded during my Ministry that did not contain some Article in my favour, besides secret assurances of aiding my ambition or resentment, which were the real springs of all my negotiations. At home I brought the pride of the English nobility, which had resisted the greatest of the Plantagenets, to bow submissively to the son of a butcher of Ipswich. And, as my power was royal, my state and magnificence were suitable to it; my buildings, my furniture, my household, my equipage, my liberalities, and my charities were above the rank of a subject. _Ximenes_.--From all you have said I understand that you gained great advantages for yourself in the course of your Ministry--too great, indeed, for a good man to desire, or a wise man to accept. But what did you do for your sovereign and for the State? You make me no answer. What I did is well known. I was not content with forcing the arrogance of the Spanish nobility to stoop to my power, but used that power to free the people from their oppressions. In you they respected the royal authority; I made them respect the majesty of the laws. I also relieved my countrymen, the commons of Castile, from a most grievous burden, by an alteration in the method of collecting their taxes. After the death of Isabella I preserved the tranquillity of Aragon and Castile by procuring the regency of the latter for Ferdinand, a wise and valiant prince, though he had not been my friend during the life of the queen. And when after his decease I was raised to the regency by the general esteem and affection of the Castilians, I administered the government with great courage, firmness, and prudence; with the most perfect disinterestedness in regard to myself, and most zealous concern for the public. I suppressed all the factions which threatened to disturb the peace of that kingdom in the minority and the absence of the young king; and prevented the discontents of the commons of Castile, too justly incensed against the Flemish Ministers, who governed their prince and rapaciously pillaged their country, from breaking out during my life into open rebellion, as they did, most unhappily, soon after my death. These were my civil acts; but, to complete the renown of my administration, I added to it the palm of military glory. At my own charges, and myself commanding the army, I conquered Oran from the Moors, and annexed it, with its territory, to the Spanish dominions. _Wolsey_.--My soul was as elevated and noble as yours, my understanding as strong, and more refined; but the difference of our conduct arose from the difference of our objects. To raise your reputation and secure your power in Castile, by making that kingdom as happy and as great as you could, was your object. Mine was to procure the Triple Crown for myself by the assistance of my sovereign and of the greatest foreign Powers. Each of us took the means that were evidently most proper to the accomplishment of his ends. _Ximenes_.--Can you confess such a principle of your conduct without a blush? But you will at least be ashamed that you failed in your purpose, and were the dupe of the Powers with whom you negotiated, after having dishonoured the character of your master in order to serve your own ambition. I accomplished my desire with glory to my sovereign and advantage to my country. Besides this difference, there was a great one in the methods by which we acquired our power. We both owed it, indeed, to the favour of princes; but I gained Isabella's by the opinion she had of my piety and integrity. You gained Henry's by a complaisance and course of life which were a reproach to your character and sacred orders. _Wolsey_.--I did not, as you, Ximenes, did, carry with me to Court the austerity of a monk; nor, if I had done so, could I possibly have gained any influence there. Isabella and Henry were different characters, and their favour was to be sought in different ways. By making myself agreeable to the latter, I so governed his passions, unruly as they were, that while I lived they did not produce any of those dreadful effects which after my death were caused by them in his family and kingdom. _Ximenes_.--If Henry VIII., your master, had been King of Castile, I would never have been drawn by him out of my cloister. A man of virtue and spirit will not be prevailed with to go into a Court where he cannot rise without baseness. _Wolsey_.--The inflexibility of your mind had like to have ruined you in some of your measures; and the bigotry which you had derived from your long abode in a cloister, and retained when a Minister, was very near depriving the Crown of Castile of the new-conquered kingdom of Granada by the revolt of the Moors in that city, whom you had prematurely forced to change their religion. Do you not remember how angry King Ferdinand was with you on that account? _Ximenes_.--I do, and must acknowledge that my zeal was too intemperate in all that proceeding. _Wolsey_.--My worst complaisances to King Henry VIII. were far less hurtful to England than the unjust and inhuman Court of Inquisition, which you established in Granada to watch over the faith of your unwilling converts, has been to Spain. _Ximenes_.--I only revived and settled in Granada an ancient tribunal, instituted first by one of our saints against the Albigenses, and gave it greater powers. The mischiefs which have attended it cannot be denied; but if any force may be used for the maintenance of religion (and the Church of Rome has, you know, declared authoritatively that it may) none could be so effectual to answer the purpose. _Wolsey_.--This is an argument rather against the opinion of the Church than for the Inquisition. I will only say I think myself very happy that my administration was stained with no action of cruelty, not even cruelty sanctified by the name of religion. My temper indeed, which influenced my conduct more than my principles, was much milder than yours. To the proud I was proud, but to my friends and inferiors benevolent and humane. Had I succeeded in the great object of my ambition, had I acquired the Popedom, I should have governed the Church with more moderation and better sense than probably you would have done if you had exchanged the See of Toledo for that of Rome. My good-nature, my policy, my taste for magnificence, my love of the fine arts, of wit, and of learning, would have made me the delight of all the Italians, and have given me a rank among the greatest princes. Whereas in you the sour bigot and rigid monk would too much have prevailed over the prince and the statesman. _Ximenes_.--What either of us would have been in that situation does not appear; but, if you are compared to me as a Minister, you are vastly inferior. The only circumstance in which you can justly pretend to any equality is the encouragement you gave to learning and your munificence in promoting it, which was indeed very great. Your two colleges founded at Ipswich and Oxford may vie with my University at Alcala de Henara. But in our generosity there was this difference--all my revenues were spent in well-placed liberalities, in acts of charity, piety, and virtue; whereas a great part of your enormous wealth was squandered away in luxury and vain ostentation. With regard to all other points, my superiority is apparent. You were only a favourite; I was the friend and the father of the people. You served yourself; I served the State. The conclusion of our lives was also much more honourable to me than you. _Wolsey_.--Did not you die, as I did, in disgrace with your master? _Ximenes_.--That disgrace was brought upon me by a faction of foreigners, to whose power, as a good Spaniard, I would not submit. A Minister who falls a victim to such an opposition rises by his fall. Yours was not graced by any public cause, any merit to the nation. Your spirit, therefore, sank under it; you bore it with meanness. Mine was unbroken, superior to my enemies, superior to fortune, and I died, as I had lived, with undiminished dignity and greatness of mind. DIALOGUE XXII. LUCIAN--RABELAIS. _Lucian_.--Friend Rabelais, well met--our souls are very good company for one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers. We laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom. I was, indeed, more correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a greater fertility of imagination. My "True History" is much inferior, in fancy and invention, in force of wit and keenness of satire, to your "History of the Acts of Gargantua and Pantagruel." _Rabelais_.--You do me great honour; but I may say, without vanity, that both those compositions entitle the authors of them to a very distinguished place among memoir-writers, travellers, and even historians, ancient and modern. _Lucian_.--Doubtless they do; but will you pardon me if I ask you one question? Why did you choose to write such absolute nonsense as you have in some places of your illustrious work? _Rabelais_.--I was forced to compound my physic for the mind with a large dose of nonsense in order to make it go down. To own the truth to you, if I had not so frequently put on the fool's-cap, the freedoms I took in other places with cowls, with Red Hats, and the Triple Crown itself, would have brought me into great danger. Not only my book, but I myself, should, in all probability, have been condemned to the flames; and martyrdom was an honour to which I never aspired. I therefore counterfeited folly, like Junius Brutus, from the wisest of all principles--that of self-preservation. You, Lucian, had no need to use so much caution. Your heathen priests desired only a sacrifice now and then from an Epicurean as a mark of conformity, and kindly allowed him to make as free as he pleased, in conversation or writings, with the whole tribe of gods and goddesses--from the thundering Jupiter and the scolding Juno, down to the dog Anubis and the fragrant dame Cloacina. _Lucian_.--Say rather that our Government allowed us that liberty; for I assure you our priests were by no means pleased with it--at least, they were not in my time. _Rabelais_.--The wiser men they; for, in spite of the conformity required by the laws and enforced by the magistrate, that ridicule brought the system of pagan theology into contempt, not only with the philosophical part of mankind, but even with the vulgar. _Lucian_.--It did so, and the ablest defenders of paganism were forced to give up the poetical fables and allegorise the whole. _Rabelais_.--An excellent way of drawing sense out of absurdity, and grave instructions from lewdness. There is a great modern wit, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who in his treatise entitled "The Wisdom of the Ancients" has done more for you that way than all your own priests. _Lucian_.--He has indeed shown himself an admirable chemist, and made a fine transmutation of folly into wisdom. But all the later Platonists took the same method of defending our faith when it was attacked by the Christians; and certainly a more judicious one could not be found. Our fables say that in one of their wars with the Titans the gods were defeated, and forced to turn themselves into beasts in order to escape from the conquerors. Just the reverse happened here, for by this happy art our beastly divinities were turned again into rational beings. _Rabelais_.--Give me a good commentator, with a subtle, refining, philosophical head, and you shall have the edification of seeing him draw the most sublime allegories and the most venerable mystic truths from my history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don't despair of being proved, to the entire satisfaction of some future ape, to have been, without exception, the profoundest divine and metaphysician that ever yet held a pen. _Lucian_.--I shall rejoice to see you advanced to that honour. But in the meantime I may take the liberty to consider you as one of our class. There you sit very high. _Rabelais_.--I am afraid there is another, and a modern author too, whom you would bid to sit above me, and but just below yourself--I mean Dr. Swift. _Lucian_.--It was not necessary for him to throw so much nonsense into his history of Lemuel Gulliver as you did into that of your two illustrious heroes; and his style is far more correct than yours. His wit never descended, as yours frequently did, into the lowest of taverns, nor ever wore the meanest garb of the vulgar. _Rabelais_.--If the garb which it wore was not as mean, I am certain it was sometimes as dirty as mine. _Lucian_.--It was not always nicely clean; yet, in comparison with you, he was decent and elegant. But whether there was not in your compositions more fire, and a more comic spirit, I will not determine. _Rabelais_.--If you will not determine it, e'en let it remain a matter in dispute, as I have left the great question, Whether Panurge should marry or not? I would as soon undertake to measure the difference between the height and bulk of the giant Gargantua and his Brobdignagian Majesty, as the difference of merit between my writings and Swift's. If any man takes a fancy to like my book, let him freely enjoy the entertainment it gives him, and drink to my memory in a bumper. If another likes Gulliver, let him toast Dr. Swift. Were I upon earth I would pledge him in a bumper, supposing the wine to be good. If a third likes neither of us, let him silently pass the bottle and be quiet. _Lucian_.--But what if he will not be quiet? A critic is an unquiet creature. _Rabelais_.--Why, then he will disturb himself, not me. _Lucian_.--You are a greater philosopher than I thought you. I knew you paid no respect to Popes or kings, but to pay none to critics is, in an author, a magnanimity beyond all example. _Rabelais_.--My life was a farce; my death was a farce; and would you have me make my book a serious affair? As for you, though in general you are only a joker, yet sometimes you must be ranked among grave authors. You have written sage and learned dissertations on history and other weighty matters. The critics have therefore an undoubted right to maul you; they find you in their province. But if any of them dare to come into mine, I will order Gargantua to swallow them up, as he did the six pilgrims, in the next salad he eats. _Lucian_.--Have I not heard that you wrote a very good serious book on the aphorisms of Hippocrates? _Rabelais_.--Upon my faith I had forgot it. I am so used to my fool's coat that I don't know myself in my solemn doctor's gown. But your information was right; that book was indeed a very respectable work. Yet nobody reads it; and if I had writ nothing else, I should have been reckoned, at best, a lackey to Hippocrates, whereas the historian of Panurge is an eminent writer. Plain good sense, like a dish of solid beef or mutton, is proper only for peasants; but a ragout of folly, well dressed with a sharp sauce of wit, is fit to be served up at an emperor's table. _Lucian_.--You are an admirable pleasant fellow. Let me embrace you. How Apollo and the Muses may rank you on Parnassus I am not very certain; but, if I were Master of the Ceremonies on Mount Olympus, you should be placed, with a full bowl of nectar before you, at the right hand of Momus. _Rabelais_.--I wish you were; but I fear the inhabitants of those sublime regions will like your company no better than mine. Indeed, how Momus himself could get a seat at that table I can't well comprehend. It has been usual, I confess, in some of our Courts upon earth, to have a privileged jester, called the king's fool. But in the Court of Heaven one should not have supposed such an officer as Jupiter's fool. Your allegorical theology in this point is very abstruse. _Lucian_.--I think our priests admitted Momus into our heaven, as the Indians are said to worship the devil, through fear. They had a mind to keep fair with him. For we may talk of the giants as much as we please, but to our gods there is no enemy so formidable as he. Ridicule is the terror of all false religion. Nothing but truth can stand its lash. _Rabelais_.--Truth, advantageously set in a good and fair light, can stand any attacks; but those of Ridicule are so teasing and so fallacious that I have seen them put her ladyship very much out of humour. _Lucian_.--Ay, friend Rabelais, and sometimes out of countenance too. But Truth and Wit in confederacy will strike Momus dumb. United they are invincible, and such a union is necessary upon certain occasions. False Reasoning is most effectually exposed by Plain Sense; but Wit is the best opponent to False Ridicule, as Just Ridicule is to all the absurdities which dare to assume the venerable names of Philosophy or Religion. Had we made such a proper use of our agreeable talents; had we employed our ridicule to strip the foolish faces of Superstition, Fanaticism, and Dogmatical Pride of the serious and solemn masks with which they are covered, at the same time exerting all the sharpness of our wit to combat the flippancy and pertness of those who argue only by jests against reason and evidence in points of the highest and most serious concern, we should have much better merited the esteem of mankind. DIALOGUE XXIII. PERICLES--COSMO DE MEDICIS, THE FIRST OF THAT NAME. _Pericles_.--In what I have heard of your character and your fortune, illustrious Cosmo, I find a most remarkable resemblance with mine. We both lived in republics where the sovereign power was in the people; and by mere civil arts, but more especially by our eloquence, attained, without any force, to such a degree of authority that we ruled those tumultuous and stormy democracies with an absolute sway, turned the tempests which agitated them upon the heads of our enemies, and after having long and prosperously conducted the greatest affairs in war and peace, died revered and lamented by all our fellow-citizens. _Cosmo_.--We have indeed an equal right to value ourselves on that noblest of empires, the empire we gained over the minds of our countrymen. Force or caprice may give power, but nothing can give a lasting authority except wisdom and virtue. By these we obtained, by these we preserved, in our respective countries, a dominion unstained by usurpation or blood--a dominion conferred on us by the public esteem and the public affection. We were in reality sovereigns, while we lived with the simplicity of private men; and Athens and Florence believed themselves to be free, though they obeyed all our dictates. This is more than was done by Philip of Macedon, or Sylla, or Caesar. It is the perfection of policy to tame the fierce spirit of popular liberty, not by blows or by chains, but by soothing it into a voluntary obedience, and bringing it to lick the hand that restrains it. _Pericles_.--The task can never be easy, but the difficulty was still greater to me than to you. For I had a lion to tame, from whose intractable fury the greatest men of my country, and of the whole world, with all their wisdom and virtue, could not save themselves. Themistocles and Aristides were examples of terror that might well have deterred me from the administration of public affairs at Athens. Another impediment in my way was the power of Cimon, who for his goodness, his liberality, and the lustre of his victories over the Persians was much beloved by the people, and at the same time, by being thought to favour aristocracy, had all the noble and rich citizens devoted to his party. It seemed impossible to shake so well established a greatness. Yet by the charms and force of my eloquence, which exceeded that of all orators contemporary with me; by the integrity of my life, my moderation, and my prudence; but, above all, by my artful management of the people, whose power I increased that I might render it the basis and support of my own, I gained such an ascendant over all my opponents that, having first procured the banishment of Cimon by ostracism, and then of Thucydides, another formidable antagonist set up by the nobles against my authority, I became the unrivalled chief, or rather the monarch, of the Athenian Republic, without ever putting to death, in above forty years that my administration continued, one of my fellow-citizens; a circumstance which I declared, when I lay on my death-bed, to be, in my own judgment, more honourable to me than all my prosperity in the government of the State, or the nine trophies erected for so many victories obtained by my conduct. _Cosmo_.--I had also the same happiness to boast of at my death. And some additions were made to the territories of Florence under my government; but I myself was no soldier, and the Commonwealth I directed was never either so warlike or so powerful as Athens. I must, therefore, not pretend to vie with you in the lustre of military glory; and I will moreover acknowledge that, to govern a people whose spirit and pride were exalted by the wonderful victories of Marathon, Mycale, Salamis, and Plataea, was much more difficult than to rule the Florentines and the Tuscans. The liberty of the Athenians was in your time more imperious, more haughty, more insolent, than the despotism of the King of Persia. How great, then, must have been your ability and address that could so absolutely reduce it under your power! Yet the temper of my countrymen was not easy to govern, for it was exceedingly factious. The history of Florence is little else, for several ages, than an account of conspiracies against the State. In my youth I myself suffered much by the dissensions which then embroiled the Republic. I was imprisoned and banished, but after the course of some years my enemies, in their turn, were driven into exile. I was brought back in triumph, and from that time till my death, which was above thirty years, I governed the Florentines, not by arms or evil arts of tyrannical power, but with a legal authority, which I exercised so discreetly as to gain the esteem of all the neighbouring potentates, and such a constant affection of all my fellow-citizens that an inscription, which gave me the title of Father of my Country, was engraved on my monument by an unanimous decree of the whole Commonwealth. _Pericles_.--Your end was incomparably more happy than mine. For you died rather of age than any violent illness, and left the Florentines in a state of peace and prosperity procured for them by your counsels. But I died of the plague, after having seen it almost depopulate Athens, and left my country engaged in a most dangerous war, to which my advice and the power of my eloquence had excited the people. The misfortune of the pestilence, with the inconveniences they suffered on account of the war, so irritated their minds, that not long before my death they condemned me to a fine. _Cosmo_.--It is wonderful that, when once their anger was raised, it went no further against you! A favourite of the people, when disgraced, is in still greater danger than a favourite of a king. _Pericles_.--Your surprise will increase at hearing that very soon afterwards they chose me their general, and conferred on me again the principal direction of all their affairs. Had I lived I should have so conducted the war as to have ended it with advantage and honour to my country. For, having secured to her the sovereignty of the sea by the defeat of the Samians, before I let her engage with the power of Sparta, I knew that our enemies would be at length wearied out and compelled to sue for a peace, because the city, from the strength of its fortifications and the great army within it, being on the land side impregnable to the Spartans, and drawing continual supplies from the sea, suffered not much by their ravages of the country about it, from whence I had before removed all the inhabitants; whereas their allies were undone by the descents we made on their coasts. _Cosmo_.--You seem to have understood beyond all other men what advantages are to be drawn from a maritime power, and how to make it the surest foundation of empire. _Pennies_.--I followed the plan, traced out by Themistocles, the ablest politician that Greece had ever produced. Nor did I begin the Peloponnesian War (as some have supposed) only to make myself necessary, and stop an inquiry into my public accounts. I really thought that the Republic of Athens could no longer defer a contest with Sparta, without giving up to that State the precedence in the direction of Greece and her own independence. To keep off for some time even a necessary war, with a probable hope of making it more advantageously at a favourable opportunity, is an act of true wisdom; but not to make it, when you see that your enemy will be strengthened, and your own advantages lost or considerably lessened, by the delay, is a most pernicious imprudence. With relation to my accounts, I had nothing to fear. I had not embezzled one drachma of public money, nor added one to my own paternal estate; and the people had placed so entire a confidence in me that they had allowed me, against the usual forms of their government, to dispose of large sums for secret service, without account. When, therefore, I advised the Peloponnesian War, I neither acted from private views, nor with the inconsiderate temerity of a restless ambition, but as became a wise statesman, who, having weighed all the dangers that may attend a great enterprise, and seeing a reasonable hope of good success, makes it his option to fight for dominion and glory, rather than sacrifice both to the uncertain possession of an insecure peace. _Cosmo_.--How were you sure of inducing so volatile a people to persevere in so steady a system of conduct as that which you had laid down--a system attended with much inconvenience and loss to particulars, while it presented but little to strike or inflame the imagination of the public? Bold and arduous enterprises, great battles, much bloodshed, and a speedy decision, are what the multitude desire in every war; but your plan of operation was the reverse of all this, and the execution of it required the temper of the Thebans rather than of the Athenians. _Pericles_.--I found, indeed, many symptoms of their impatience, but I was able to restrain it by the authority I had gained; for during my whole Ministry I never had stooped to court their favour by any unworthy means, never flattered them in their follies, nor complied with their passions against their true interests and my own better judgment; but used the power of my eloquence to keep them in the bounds of a wise moderation, to raise their spirits when too low, and show them their danger when they grew too presumptuous, the good effects of which conduct they had happily experienced in all their affairs. Whereas those who succeeded to me in the government, by their incapacity, their corruption, and their servile complaisance to the humour of the people, presently lost all the fruits of my virtue and prudence. Xerxes himself, I am convinced, did not suffer more by the flattery of his courtiers than the Athenians, after my decease, by that of their orators and Ministers of State. _Cosmo_.--Those orators could not gain the favour of the people by any other methods. Your arts were more noble--they were the arts of a statesman and of a prince. Your magnificent buildings (which in beauty of architecture surpassed any the world had ever seen), the statues of Phidias, the paintings of Zeuxis, the protection you gave to knowledge, genius, and abilities of every kind, added as much to the glory of Athens as to your popularity. And in this I may boast of an equal merit to Florence. For I embellished that city and the whole country about it with excellent buildings; I protected all arts; and, though I was not myself so eloquent or so learned as you, I no less encouraged those who were eminent in my time for their eloquence or their learning. Marcilius Ficinus, the second father of the Platonic philosophy, lived in my house, and conversed with me as intimately as Anaxagoras with you. Nor did I ever forget and suffer him so to want the necessaries of life as you did Anaxagoras, who had like to have perished by that unfriendly neglect; but to secure him at all times from any distress in his circumstances, and enable him to pursue his sublime speculations unmolested by low cares, I gave him an estate adjacent to one of my favourite villas. I also drew to Florence Argiropolo, the most learned Greek of those times, that, under my patronage, he might teach the Florentine youth the language and sciences of his country. But with regard to our buildings, there is this remarkable difference--yours were all raised at the expense of the public, mine at my own. _Pericles_.--My estate would bear no profuseness, nor allow me to exert the generosity of my nature. Your wealth exceeded that of any particular, or indeed of any prince who lived in your days. The vast commerce which, after the example of your ancestors, you continued to carry on in all parts of the world, even while you presided at the helm of the State, enabled you to do those splendid acts which rendered your name so illustrious. But I was constrained to make the public treasure the fund of my bounties; and I thought I could not possibly dispose of it better in time of peace than in finding employment for that part of the people which must else have been idle and useless to the community, introducing into Greece all the elegant arts, and adorning my country with works that are an honour to human nature; for, while I attended the most to these civil and peaceful occupations, I did not neglect to provide, with timely care, against war, nor suffer the nation to sink into luxury and effeminate softness. I kept our fleets in continual exercise, maintained a great number of seamen in constant pay, and disciplined well our land forces. Nor did I ever cease to recommend to all the Athenians, both by precepts and example, frugality, temperance, magnanimity, fortitude, and whatever could most effectually contribute to strengthen their bodies and minds. _Cosmo_.--Yet I have heard you condemned for rendering the people less sober and modest, by giving them a share of the conquered lands, and paying them wages for their necessary attendance in the public assemblies and other civil functions; but more especially for the vast and superfluous expense you entailed on the State in the theatrical spectacles with which you entertained them at the cost of the public. _Pericles_.--Perhaps I may have been too lavish in some of those bounties. Yet in a popular State it is necessary that the people should be amused, and should so far partake of the opulence of the public as not to suffer any want, which would render their minds too low and sordid for their political duties. In my time the revenues of Athens were sufficient to bear this charge; but afterwards, when we had lost the greatest part of our empire, it became, I must confess, too heavy a burden, and the continuance of it proved one cause of our ruin. _Cosmo_.--It is a most dangerous thing to load the State with largesses of that nature, or indeed with any unnecessary but popular charges, because to reduce them is almost impossible, though the circumstances of the public should necessarily demand a reduction. But did not you likewise, in order to advance your own greatness, throw into the hands of the people of Athens more power than the institutions of Solon had entrusted them with, and more than was consistent with the good of the State? _Pericles_.--We are now in the regions where Truth presides, and I dare not offend her by playing the orator in defence of my conduct. I must therefore acknowledge that, by weakening the power of the court of Areopagus, I tore up that anchor which Solon had wisely fixed to keep his Republic firm against the storms and fluctuations of popular factions. This alteration, which fundamentally injured the whole State, I made with a view to serve my own ambition, the only passion in my nature which I could not contain within the limits of virtue. For I knew that my eloquence would subject the people to me, and make them the willing instruments of all my desires; whereas the Areopagus had in it an authority and a dignity which I could not control. Thus by diminishing the counterpoise our Constitution had settled to moderate the excess of popular power, I augmented my own. But since my death I have been often reproached by the Shades of some of the most virtuous and wisest Athenians, who have fallen victims to the caprice or fury of the people, with having been the first cause of the injustice they suffered, and of all the mischiefs perpetually brought on my country by rash undertakings, bad conduct, and fluctuating councils. They say, I delivered up the State to the government of indiscreet or venal orators, and to the passions of a misguided, infatuated multitude, who thought their freedom consisted in encouraging calumnies against the best servants of the Commonwealth, and conferring power upon those who had no other merit than falling in with and soothing a popular folly. It is useless for me to plead that, during my life, none of these mischiefs were felt; that I employed my rhetoric to promote none but good and wise measures; that I was as free from any taint of avarice or corruption as Aristides himself. They reply that I am answerable for all the great evils occasioned afterwards by the want of that salutary restraint on the natural levity and extravagance of a democracy, which I had taken away. Socrates calls me the patron of Anytus, and Solon himself frowns upon me whenever we meet. _Cosmo_.--Solon has reason to do so; for tell me, Pericles, what opinion would you have of the architect you employed in your buildings if he had made them to last no longer than during the term of your life? _Pericles_.--The answer to your question will turn to your own condemnation. Your excessive liberalities to the indigent citizens, and the great sums you lent to all the noble families, did in reality buy the Republic of Florence, and gave your family such a power as enabled them to convert it from a popular State into an absolute monarchy. _Cosmo_.--The Florentines were so infested with discord and faction, and their commonwealth was so void of military virtue, that they could not have long been exempt from a more ignominious subjection to some foreign Power if those internal dissensions, with the confusion and anarchy they produced, had continued. But the Athenians had performed very glorious exploits, had obtained a great empire, and were become one of the noblest States in the world, before you altered the balance of their government. And after that alteration they declined very fast, till they lost all their greatness. _Pericles_.--Their constitution had originally a foul blemish in it--I mean, the ban of ostracism, which alone would have been sufficient to undo any State. For there is nothing of such important use to a nation as that men who most excel in wisdom and virtue should be encouraged to undertake the business of government. But this detestable custom deterred such men from serving the public, or, if they ventured to do so, turned even their own wisdom and virtue against them; so that in Athens it was safer to be infamous than renowned. We are told indeed, by the advocates for this strange institution, that it was not a punishment, but meant as a guard to the equality and liberty of the State; for which reason they deem it an honour done to the persons against whom it was used; as if words could change the real nature of things, and make a banishment of ten years, inflicted on a good citizen by the suffrages of his countrymen, no evil to him, or no offence against justice and the natural right every freeman may claim--that he shall not be expelled from any society of which he is a member without having first been proved guilty of some criminal action. _Cosmo_.--The ostracism was indeed a most unpardonable fault in the Athenian constitution. It placed envy in the seat of justice, and gave to private malice and public ingratitude a legal right to do wrong. Other nations are blamed for tolerating vice, but the Athenians alone would not tolerate virtue. _Pericles_.--The friends to the ostracism say that too eminent virtue destroys that equality which is the safeguard of freedom. _Cosmo_.--No State is well modelled if it cannot preserve itself from the danger of tyranny without a grievous violation of natural justice; nor would a friend to true freedom, which consists in being governed not by men but by laws, desire to live in a country where a Cleon bore rule, and where an Aristides was not suffered to remain. But, instead of remedying this evil, you made it worse. You rendered the people more intractable, more adverse to virtue, less subject to the laws, and more to impressions from mischievous demagogues, than they had been before your time. _Pericles_.--In truth, I did so; and therefore my place in Elysium, notwithstanding the integrity of my whole public conduct, and the great virtues I excited, is much below the rank of those who have governed commonwealths or limited monarchies, not merely with a concern for their present advantage, but also with a prudent regard to that balance of power on which their permanent happiness must necessarily depend. DIALOGUE XXIV. LOCKE--BAYLE. _Bayle_.--Yes, we both were philosophers; but my philosophy was the deepest. You dogmatised; I doubted. _Locke_.--Do you make doubting a proof of depth in philosophy? It may be a good beginning of it, but it is a bad end. _Bayle_.--No; the more profound our searches are into the nature of things, the more uncertainty we shall find; and the most subtle minds see objections and difficulties in every system which are overlooked or undiscoverable by ordinary understandings. _Locke_.--It would be better, then, to be no philosopher, and to continue in the vulgar herd of mankind, that one may have the convenience of thinking that one knows something. I find that the eyes which Nature has given me see many things very clearly, though some are out of their reach, or discerned but dimly. What opinion ought I to have of a physician who should offer me an eye-water, the use of which would at first so sharpen my sight as to carry it farther than ordinary vision, but would in the end put them out? Your philosophy, Monsieur Bayle, is to the eyes of the mind what I have supposed the doctor's nostrum to be to those of the body. It actually brought your own excellent understanding, which was by nature quick-sighted, and rendered more so by art and a subtlety of logic peculiar to yourself--it brought, I say, your very acute understanding to see nothing clearly, and enveloped all the great truths of reason and religion in mists of doubt. _Bayle_.--I own it did; but your comparison is not just. I did not see well before I used my philosophic eye-water. I only supposed I saw well; but I was in an error, with all the rest of mankind. The blindness was real; the perceptions were imaginary. I cured myself first of those false imaginations, and then I laudably endeavoured to cure other men. _Locke_.--A great cure, indeed! and don't you think that, in return for the service you did them, they ought to erect you a statue? _Bayle_.--Yes; it is good for human nature to know its own weakness. When we arrogantly presume on a strength we have not, we are always in great danger of hurting ourselves--or, at least, of deserving ridicule and contempt by vain and idle efforts. _Locke_.--I agree with you that human nature should know its own weakness; but it should also feel its strength, and try to improve it. This was my employment as a philosopher. I endeavoured to discover the real powers of the mind; to see what it could do, and what it could not; to restrain it from efforts beyond its ability, but to teach it how to advance as far as the faculties given to it by Nature, with the utmost exertion and most proper culture of them, would allow it to go. In the vast ocean of philosophy I had the line and the plummet always in my hands. Many of its depths I found myself unable to fathom; but by caution in sounding, and the careful observations I made in the course of my voyage, I found out some truths of so much use to mankind that they acknowledge me to have been their benefactor. _Bayle_.--Their ignorance makes them think so. Some other philosopher will come hereafter, and show those truths to be falsehoods. He will pretend to discover other truths of equal importance. A later sage will arise, perhaps among men now barbarous and unlearned, whose sagacious discoveries will discredit the opinions of his admired predecessor. In philosophy, as in Nature, all changes its form, and one thing exists by the destruction of another. _Locke_.--Opinions taken up without a patient investigation, depending on terms not accurately defined, and principles begged without proof, like theories to explain the phenomena of Nature built on suppositions instead of experiments, must perpetually change and destroy one another. But some opinions there are, even in matters not obvious to the common sense of mankind, which the mind has received on such rational grounds of assent that they are as immovable as the pillars of heaven, or (to speak philosophically) as the great laws of Nature, by which, under God, the universe is sustained. Can you seriously think that because the hypothesis of your countryman Descartes, which was nothing but an ingenious, well-imagined romance, has been lately exploded, the system of Newton, which is built on experiments and geometry--the two most certain methods of discovering truth--will ever fail? Or that, because the whims of fanatics and the divinity of the schoolmen cannot now be supported, the doctrines of that religion which I, the declared enemy of all enthusiasm and false reasoning, firmly believed and maintained, will ever be shaken? _Bayle_.--If you had asked Descartes, while he was in the height of his vogue, whether his system would be ever confuted by any other philosopher's, as that of Aristotle had been by his, what answer do you suppose he would have returned? _Locke_.--Come, come, Monsieur Bayle, you yourself know the difference between the foundations on which the credit of those systems and that of Newton is placed. Your scepticism is more affected than real. You found it a shorter way to a great reputation (the only wish of your heart) to object than to defend, to pull down than to set up. And your talents were admirable for that kind of work. Then your huddling together in a critical dictionary a pleasant tale, or obscene jest, and a grave argument against the Christian religion, a witty confutation of some absurd author, and an artful sophism to impeach some respectable truth, was particularly commodious to all our young smarts and smatterers in freethinking. But what mischief have you not done to human society! You have endeavoured, and with some degree of success, to shake those foundations on which the whole moral world and the great fabric of social happiness entirely rest. How could you, as a philosopher, in the sober hours of reflection, answer for this to your conscience, even supposing you had doubts of the truth of a system which gives to virtue its sweetest hopes, to impenitent vice its greatest fears, and to true penitence its best consolations; which restrains even the least approaches to guilt, and yet makes those allowances for the infirmities of our nature which the stoic pride denied to it, but which its real imperfection and the goodness of its infinitely benevolent Creator so evidently require? _Bayle_.--The mind is free, and it loves to exert its freedom. Any restraint upon it is a violence done to its nature, and a tyranny against which it has a right to rebel. _Locke_.--The mind, though free, has a governor within itself, which may and ought to limit the exercise of its freedom. That governor is reason. _Bayle_.--Yes; but reason, like other governors, has a policy more dependent upon uncertain caprice than upon any fixed laws. And if that reason which rules my mind or yours has happened to set up a favourite notion, it not only submits implicitly to it, but desires that the same respect should be paid to it by all the rest of mankind. Now I hold that any man may lawfully oppose this desire in another; and that if he is wise, he will do his utmost endeavours to check it in himself. _Locke_.--Is there not also a weakness of a contrary nature to this you are now ridiculing? Do we not often take a pleasure to show our own power and gratify our own pride by degrading notions set up by other men and generally respected? _Bayle_.--I believe we do; and by this means it often happens that if one man builds and consecrates a temple to folly, another pulls it down. _Locke_.--Do you think it beneficial to human society to have all temples pulled down? _Bayle_.--I cannot say that I do. _Locke_.--Yet I find not in your writings any mark of distinction to show us which you mean to save. _Bayle_.--A true philosopher, like an impartial historian, must be of no sect. _Locke_.--Is there no medium between the blind zeal of a sectary and a total indifference to all religion? _Bayle_.--With regard to morality I was not indifferent. _Locke_.--How could you, then, be indifferent with regard to the sanctions religion gives to morality? How could you publish what tends so directly and apparently to weaken in mankind the belief of those sanctions? Was not this sacrificing the great interests of virtue to the little motives of vanity? _Bayle_.--A man may act indiscreetly, but he cannot do wrong, by declaring that which, on a full discussion of the question, he sincerely thinks to be true. _Locke_.--An enthusiast who advances doctrines prejudicial to society, or opposes any that are useful to it, has the strength of opinion and the heat of a disturbed imagination to plead in alleviation of his fault; but your cool head and sound judgment can have no such excuse. I know very well there are passages in all your works, and those not a few, where you talk like a rigid moralist. I have also heard that your character was irreproachably good; but when, in the most laboured parts of your writings, you sap the surest foundations of all moral duties, what avails it that in others, or in the conduct of your life, you have appeared to respect them? How many who have stronger passions than you had, and are desirous to get rid of the curb that restrains them, will lay hold of your scepticism to set themselves loose from all obligations of virtue! What a misfortune is it to have made such a use of such talents! It would have been better for you and for mankind if you had been one of the dullest of Dutch theologians, or the most credulous monk in a Portuguese convent. The riches of the mind, like those of Fortune, may be employed so perversely as to become a nuisance and pest instead of an ornament and support to society. _Bayle_.--You are very severe upon me. But do you count it no merit, no service to mankind, to deliver them from the frauds and fetters of priestcraft, from the deliriums of fanaticism, and from the terrors and follies of superstition? Consider how much mischief these have done to the world! Even in the last age what massacres, what civil wars, what convulsions of government, what confusion in society, did they produce! Nay, in that we both lived in, though much more enlightened than the former, did I not see them occasion a violent persecution in my own country? And can you blame me for striking at the root of these evils. _Locke_.--The root of these evils, you well know, was false religion; but you struck at the true. Heaven and hell are not more different than the system of faith I defended and that which produced the horrors of which you speak. Why would you so fallaciously confound them together in some of your writings, that it requires much more judgment, and a more diligent attention than ordinary readers have, to separate them again, and to make the proper distinctions? This, indeed, is the great art of the most celebrated freethinkers. They recommend themselves to warm and ingenuous minds by lively strokes of wit, and by arguments really strong, against superstition, enthusiasm, and priestcraft; but at the same time they insidiously throw the colours of these upon the fair face of true religion, and dress her out in their garb, with a malignant intention to render her odious or despicable to those who have not penetration enough to discern the impious fraud. Some of them may have thus deceived themselves as well as others. Yet it is certain no book that ever was written by the most acute of these gentlemen is so repugnant to priestcraft, to spiritual tyranny, to all absurd superstitions, to all that can tend to disturb or injure society, as that Gospel they so much affect to despise. _Bayle_.--Mankind is so made that, when they have been over-heated, they cannot be brought to a proper temper again till they have been over-cooled. My scepticism might be necessary to abate the fever and frenzy of false religion. _Locke_.--A wise prescription, indeed, to bring on a paralytical state of the mind (for such a scepticism as yours is a palsy which deprives the mind of all vigour, and deadens its natural and vital powers) in order to take off a fever which temperance and the milk of the Evangelical doctrines would probably cure. _Bayle_.--I acknowledge that those medicines have a great power. But few doctors apply them untainted with the mixture of some harsher drugs or some unsafe and ridiculous nostrums of their own. _Locke_.--What you now say is too true. God has given us a most excellent physic for the soul in all its diseases, but bad and interested physicians, or ignorant and conceited quacks, administer it so ill to the rest of mankind that much of the benefit of it is unhappily lost. DIALOGUE XXV. ARCHIBALD, EARL OF DOUGLAS, DUKE OF TOURAINE--JOHN, DUKE OF ARGYLE AND GREENWICH, FIELD-MARSHAL OF HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S FORCES. _Argyle_.--Yes, noble Douglas, it grieves me that you and your son, together with the brave Earl of Buchan, should have employed so much valour and have thrown away your lives in fighting the battles of that State which, from its situation and interests, is the perpetual and most dangerous enemy to Great Britain. A British nobleman serving France appears to me as unfortunate and as much out of his proper sphere as a Grecian commander engaged in the service of Persia would have appeared to Aristides or Agesilaus. _Douglas_.--In serving France I served Scotland. The French were the natural allies to the Scotch, and by supporting their Crown I enabled my countrymen to maintain their independence against the English. _Argyle_.--The French, indeed, from the unhappy state of our country, were ancient allies to the Scotch, but that they ever were our natural allies I deny. Their alliance was proper and necessary for us, because we were then in an unnatural state, disunited from England. While that disunion continued, our monarchy was compelled to lean upon France for assistance and support. The French power and policy kept us, I acknowledge, independent of the English, but dependent on them; and this dependence exposed us to many grievous calamities by drawing on our country the formidable arms of the English whenever it happened that the French and they had a quarrel. The succours they afforded us were distant and uncertain. Our enemy was at hand, superior to us in strength, though not in valour. Our borders were ravaged; our kings were slain or led captive; we lost all the advantage of being the inhabitants of a great island; we had no commerce, no peace, no security, no degree of maritime power. Scotland was a back-door through which the French, with our help, made their inroads into England; if they conquered, we obtained little benefit from it; but if they were defeated, we were always the devoted victims on whom the conquerors severely wreaked their resentment. _Douglas_.--The English suffered as much in those wars as we. How terribly were their borders laid waste and depopulated by our sharp incursions! How often have the swords of my ancestors been stained with the best blood of that nation! Were not our victories at Bannockburn and at Otterburn as glorious as any that, with all the advantage of numbers, they have ever obtained over us? _Argyle_.--They were; but yet they did us no lasting good. They left us still dependent on the protection of France. They left us a poor, a feeble, a distressed, though a most valiant nation. They irritated England, but could not subdue it, nor hinder our feeling such effects of its enmity as gave us no reason to rejoice in our triumphs. How much more happily, in the auspicious reign of that queen who formed the Union, was my sword employed in humbling the foes of Great Britain! With how superior a dignity did I appear in the combined British senate, maintaining the interests of the whole united people of England and Scotland against all foreign powers who attempted to disturb our general happiness or to invade our common rights! _Douglas_.--Your eloquence and your valour had unquestionably a much nobler and more spacious field to exercise themselves in than any of those who defended the interests of only a part of the island. _Argyle_.--Whenever I read any account of the wars between the Scotch and the English, I think I am reading a melancholy history of civil dissensions. Whichever side is defeated, their loss appears to me a loss to the whole and an advantage to some foreign enemy of Great Britain. But the strength of that island is made complete by the Union, and what a great English poet has justly said in one instance is now true in all:-- "The Hotspur and the Douglas, both together, Are confident against the world in arms." Who can resist the English and Scotch valour combined? When separated and opposed, they balanced each other; united, they will hold the balance of Europe. If all the Scotch blood that has been shed for the French in unnatural wars against England had been poured out to oppose the ambition of France, in conjunction with the English--if all the English blood that has been spilt as unfortunately in useless wars against Scotland had been preserved, France would long ago have been rendered incapable of disturbing our peace, and Great Britain would have been the most powerful of nations. _Douglas_.--There is truth in all you have said. But yet when I reflect on the insidious ambition of King Edward I., on the ungenerous arts he so treacherously employed to gain, or rather to steal, the sovereignty of our kingdom, and the detestable cruelty he showed to Wallace, our brave champion and martyr, my soul is up in arms against the insolence of the English, and I adore the memory of those patriots who died in asserting the independence of our Crown and the liberty of our nation. _Argyle_.--Had I lived in those days I should have joined with those patriots, and been the foremost to maintain so noble a cause. The Scotch were not made to be subject to the English. Their souls are too great for such a timid submission. But they may unite and incorporate with a nation they would not obey. Their scorn of a foreign yoke, their strong and generous love of independence and freedom, make their union with England more natural and more proper. Had the spirit of the Scotch been servile or base, it could never have coalesced with that of the English. _Douglas_.--It is true that the minds of both nations are congenial and filled with the same noble virtues, the same impatience of servitude, the same magnanimity, courage, and prudence, the same genius for policy, for navigation and commerce, for sciences and arts. Yet, notwithstanding this happy conformity, when I consider how long they were enemies to each other, what an hereditary hatred and jealousy had subsisted for many ages between them, what private passions, what prejudices, what contrary interests must have necessarily obstructed every step of the treaty, and how hard it was to overcome the strong opposition of national pride, I stand astonished that it was possible to unite the two kingdoms upon any conditions, and much more that it could be done with such equal regard and amicable fairness to both. _Argyle_.--It was indeed a most arduous and difficult undertaking. The success of it must, I think, be thankfully ascribed, not only to the great firmness and prudence of those who had the management of it, but to the gracious assistance of Providence for the preservation of the reformed religion amongst us, which, in that conjuncture, if the union had not been made, would have been ruined in Scotland and much endangered in England. The same good Providence has watched over and protected it since, in a most signal manner, against the attempts of an infatuated party in Scotland and the arts of France, who by her emissaries laboured to destroy it as soon as formed; because she justly foresaw that the continuance of it would be destructive to all her vast designs against the liberty of Europe. I myself had the honour to have a principal share in subduing one rebellion designed to subvert it, and since my death it has been, I hope, established for ever, not only by the defeat of another rebellion, which came upon us in the midst of a dangerous war with France, but by measures prudently taken in order to prevent such disturbances for the future. The ministers of the Crown have proposed and the British legislature has enacted a wise system of laws, the object of which is to reform and to civilise the Highlands of Scotland; to deliver the people there from the arbitrary power and oppression of their chieftains; to carry the royal justice and royal protection into the wildest parts of their mountains; to hinder their natural valour from being abused and perverted to the detriment of their country; and to introduce among them arts, agriculture, commerce, tranquillity, with all the improvements of social and polished life. _Douglas_.--By what you now tell me you give me the highest idea of the great prince, your master, who, after having been provoked by such a wicked rebellion, instead of enslaving the people of the Highlands, or laying the hand of power more heavily upon them (which is the usual consequence of unsuccessful revolts), has conferred on them the inestimable blessings of liberty, justice, and good order. To act thus is indeed to perfect the union and make all the inhabitants of Great Britain acknowledge, with gratitude and with joy, that they are subjects of the same well-regulated kingdom, and governed with the same impartial affection by the sovereign and father of the whole commonwealth. _Argyle_.--The laws I have mentioned and the humane benevolent policy of His Majesty's Government have already produced very salutary effects in that part of the kingdom, and, if steadily pursued, will produce many more. But no words can recount to you the infinite benefits which have attended the union in the northern counties of England and the southern of Scotland. _Douglas_.--The fruits of it must be, doubtless, most sensible there, where the perpetual enmity between the two nations had occasioned the greatest disorder and desolation. _Argyle_.--Oh, Douglas, could you revive and return into Scotland what a delightful alteration would you see in that country. All those great tracts of land, which in your time lay untilled on account of the inroads of the bordering English, or the feuds and discords that raged with perpetual violence within our own distracted kingdom, you would now behold cultivated and smiling with plenty. Instead of the castles, which every baron was compelled to erect for the defence of his family, and where he lived in the barbarism of Gothic pride, among miserable vassals oppressed by the abuse of his feudal powers, your eyes would be charmed with elegant country houses, adorned with fine plantations and beautiful gardens, while happy villages or gay towns are rising about them and enlivening the prospect with every image of rural wealth. On our coasts trading cities, full of new manufactures, and continually increasing the extent of their commerce. In our ports and harbours innumerable merchant ships, richly loaded, and protected from all enemies by the matchless fleet of Great Britain. But of all improvements the greatest is in the minds of the Scotch. These have profited, even more than their lands, by the culture which the settled peace and tranquillity produced by the union have happily given to them, and they have discovered such talents in all branches of literature as might render the English jealous of being excelled by their genius, if there could remain a competition, when there remains no distinction between the two nations. _Douglas_.--There may be emulation without jealousy, and the efforts, which that emulation will excite, may render our island superior in the fame of wit and good learning to Italy or to Greece; a superiority, which I have learnt in the Elysian fields to prefer even to that which is acquired by arms. But one doubt still remains with me concerning the union. I have been informed that no more than sixteen of our peers, except those who have English peerages (which some of the noblest have not), now sit in the House of Lords as representatives of the rest. Does not this in a great measure diminish those peers who are not elected? And have you not found the election of the sixteen too dependent on the favour of a court? _Argyle_.--It was impossible that the English could ever consent in the Treaty of Union, to admit a greater number to have places and votes in the Upper House of Parliament, but all the Scotch peerage is virtually there by representation. And those who are not elected have every dignity and right of the peerage, except the privilege of sitting in the House of Lords and some others depending thereon. _Douglas_.--They have so; but when parliaments enjoy such a share in the government of a country as ours do at this time, to be personally there is a privilege and a dignity of the highest importance. _Argyle_.--I wish it had been possible to impart it to all. But your reason will tell you it was not. And consider, my lord, that, till the Revolution in 1688, the power vested by our Government in the Lords of the Articles had made our parliaments much more subject to the influence of the Crown than our elections are now. As, by the manner in which they were constituted, those lords were no less devoted to the king than his own privy council, and as no proposition could then be presented in Parliament if rejected by them, they gave him a negative before debate. This, indeed, was abolished upon the accession of King William III., with many other oppressive and despotical powers, which had rendered our nobles abject slaves to the Crown, while they were allowed to be tyrants over the people. But if King James or his son had been restored, the government he had exercised would have been re-established, and nothing but the union of the two kingdoms could have effectually prevented that restoration. We likewise owe to the union the subsequent abolition of the Scotch privy council, which had been the most grievous engine of tyranny, and that salutary law which declared that no crimes should be high treason or misprision of treason in Scotland but such as were so in England, and gave us the English methods of trial in cases of that nature; whereas before there were so many species of treasons, the construction of them was so uncertain, and the trials were so arbitrary, that no man could be safe from suffering as a traitor. By the same Act of Parliament we also received a communication of that noble privilege of the English, exemption from torture--a privilege which, though essential both to humanity and to justice, no other nation in Europe, not even the freest republics, can boast of possessing. Shall we, then, take offence at some inevitable circumstances, which may be objected to, on our part, in the Treaty of Union, when it has delivered us from slavery, and all the worst evils that a state can suffer? It might be easily shown that, in his political and civil condition, every baron in Scotland is much happier now, and much more independent, than the highest was under that constitution of government which continued in Scotland even after the expulsion of King James II. The greatest enemies to the union are the friends of that king in whose reign, and in his brother's, the kingdom of Scotland was subjected to a despotism as arbitrary as that of France, and more tyrannically administered. _Douglas_.--All I have heard of those reigns makes me blush with indignation at the servility of our nobles, who could endure them so long. What, then, was become of that undaunted Scotch spirit, which had dared to resist the Plantagenets in the height of their power and pride? Could the descendants of those who had disdained to be subjects of Edward I. submit to be slaves of Charles II. or James? _Argyle_.--They seemed in general to have lost every characteristic of their natural temper, except a desire to abuse the royal authority for the gratification of their private resentments in family quarrels. _Douglas_.--Your grandfather, my lord, has the glory of not deserving this censure. _Argyle_.--I am proud that his spirit, and the principles he professed, drew upon him the injustice and fury of those times. But there needs no other proof than the nature and the manner of his condemnation to show what a wretched state our nobility then were in, and what an inestimable advantage it is to them that they are now to be tried as peers of Great Britain, and have the benefit of those laws which imparted to us the equity and the freedom of the English Constitution. Upon the whole, as much as wealth is preferable to poverty, liberty to oppression, and national strength to national weakness, so much has Scotland incontestably gained by the union. England, too, has secured by it every public blessing which was before enjoyed by her, and has greatly augmented her strength. The martial spirit of the Scotch, their hardy bodies, their acute and vigorous minds, their industry, their activity, are now employed to the benefit of the whole island. He is now a bad Scotchman who is not a good Englishman, and he is a bad Englishman who is not a good Scotchman. Mutual intercourse, mutual interests, mutual benefits, must naturally be productive of mutual affection. And when that is established, when our hearts are sincerely united, many great things, which some remains of jealousy and distrust, or narrow local partialities, may hitherto have obstructed, will be done for the good of the whole United Kingdom. How much may the revenues of Great Britain be increased by the further increase of population, of industry, and of commerce in Scotland! What a mighty addition to the stock of national wealth will arise from the improvement of our most northern counties, which are infinitely capable of being improved! The briars and thorns are in a great measure grubbed up; the flowers and fruits may soon be planted. And what more pleasing, or what more glorious employment can any government have, than to attend to the cultivating of such a plantation? _Douglas_.--The prospect you open to me of happiness to my country appears so fair, that it makes me amends for the pain with which I reflect on the times wherein I lived, and indeed on our whole history for several ages. _Argyle_.--That history does, in truth, present to the mind a long series of the most direful objects, assassinations, rebellions, anarchy, tyranny, and religion itself, either cruel, or gloomy and unsocial. An historian who would paint it in its true colours must take the pencil of Guercino or Salvator Rosa. But the most agreeable imagination can hardly figure to itself a more pleasing scene of private and public felicity than will naturally result from the union, if all the prejudices against it, and all distinctions that may tend on either side to keep up an idea of separate interests, or to revive a sharp remembrance of national animosities, can be removed. _Douglas_.--If they can be removed! I think it impossible they can be retained. To resist the union is indeed to rebel against Nature. She has joined the two countries, has fenced them both with the sea against the invasion of all other nations, but has laid them entirely open the one to the other. Accursed be he who endeavours to divide them. What God has joined let no man put asunder. DIALOGUE XXVI. CADMUS--HERCULES. _Hercules_.--Do you pretend to sit as high on Olympus as Hercules? Did you kill the Nemean lion, the Erymanthian boar, the Lernean serpent, and Stymphalian birds? Did you destroy tyrants and robbers? You value yourself greatly on subduing one serpent; I did as much as that while I lay in my cradle. _Cadmus_.--It is not on account of the serpent I boast myself a greater benefactor to Greece than you. Actions should be valued by their utility rather than their eclat. I taught Greece the art of writing, to which laws owe their precision and permanency. You subdued monsters; I civilised men. It is from untamed passions, not from wild beasts, that the greatest evils arise to human society. By wisdom, by art, by the united strength of civil community, men have been enabled to subdue the whole race of lions, bears, and serpents, and what is more, to bind in laws and wholesome regulations the ferocious violence and dangerous treachery of the human disposition. Had lions been destroyed only in single combat, men had had but a bad time of it; and what but laws could awe the men who killed the lions? The genuine glory, the proper distinction of the rational species, arises from the perfection of the mental powers. Courage is apt to be fierce, and strength is often exerted in acts of oppression. But wisdom is the associate of justice. It assists her to form equal laws, to pursue right measures, to correct power, protect weakness, and to unite individuals in a common interest and general welfare. Heroes may kill tyrants, but it is wisdom and laws that prevent tyranny and oppression. The operations of policy far surpass the labours of Hercules, preventing many evils which valour and might cannot even redress. You heroes consider nothing but glory, and hardly regard whether the conquests which raise your fame are really beneficial to your country. Unhappy are the people who are governed by valour not directed by prudence, and not mitigated by the gentle arts! _Hercules_.--I do not expect to find an admirer of my strenuous life in the man who taught his countrymen to sit still and read, and to lose the hours of youth and action in idle speculation and the sport of words. _Cadmus_.--An ambition to have a place in the registers of fame is the Eurystheus which imposes heroic labours on mankind. The muses incite to action as well as entertain the hours of repose; and I think you should honour them for presenting to heroes such a noble recreation as may prevent their taking up the distaff when they lay down the club. _Hercules_.--Wits as well as heroes can take up the distaff. What think you of their thin-spun systems of philosophy, or lascivious poems, or Milesian fables? Nay, what is still worse, are there not panegyrics on tyrants, and books that blaspheme the gods and perplex the natural sense of right and wrong? I believe if Eurystheus was to set me to work again he would find me a worse task than any he imposed; he would make me read through a great library; and I would serve it as I did the hydra, I would burn as I went on, that one chimera might not rise from another to plague mankind. I should have valued myself more on clearing the library than on cleansing the Augean stables. _Cadmus_.--It is in those libraries only that the memory of your labours exists. The heroes of Marathon, the patriots of Thermopylae, owe their immortality to me. All the wise institutions of lawgivers and all the doctrines of sages had perished in the ear, like a dream related, if letters had not preserved them. Oh Hercules! it is not for the man who preferred virtue to pleasure to be an enemy to the muses. Let Sardanapalus and the silken sons of luxury, who have wasted life in inglorious ease, despise the records of action which bear no honourable testimony to their lives. But true merit, heroic virtue, each genuine offspring of immortal Jove, should honour the sacred source of lasting fame. _Hercules_.--Indeed, if writers employed themselves only in recording the acts of great men, much might be said in their favour. But why do they trouble people with their meditations? Can it signify to the world what an idle man has been thinking? _Cadmus_.--Yes, it may. The most important and extensive advantages mankind enjoy are greatly owing to men who have never quitted their closets. To them mankind is obliged for the facility and security of navigation. The invention of the compass has opened to them new worlds. The knowledge of the mechanical powers has enabled them to construct such wonderful machines as perform what the united labour of millions by the severest drudgery could not accomplish. Agriculture, too, the most useful of arts, has received its share of improvement from the same source. Poetry likewise is of excellent use to enable the memory to retain with more ease, and to imprint with more energy upon the heart, precepts of virtue and virtuous actions. Since we left the world, from the little root of a few letters, science has spread its branches over all nature, and raised its head to the heavens. Some philosophers have entered so far into the counsels of divine wisdom as to explain much of the great operations of nature. The dimensions and distances of the planets, the causes of their revolutions, the path of comets, and the ebbing and flowing of tides are understood and explained. Can anything raise the glory of the human species more than to see a little creature, inhabiting a small spot, amidst innumerable worlds, taking a survey of the universe, comprehending its arrangement, and entering into the scheme of that wonderful connection and correspondence of things so remote, and which it seems the utmost exertion of Omnipotence to have established? What a volume of wisdom, what a noble theology do these discoveries open to us! While some superior geniuses have soared to these sublime subjects, other sagacious and diligent minds have been inquiring into the most minute works of the Infinite Artificer; the same care, the same providence is exerted through the whole, and we should learn from it that to true wisdom utility and fitness appear perfection, and whatever is beneficial is noble. _Hercules_.--I approve of science as far as it is assistant to action. I like the improvement of navigation and the discovery of the greater part of the globe, because it opens a wider field for the master spirits of the world to bustle in. _Cadmus_.--There spoke the soul of Hercules. But if learned men are to be esteemed for the assistance they give to active minds in their schemes, they are not less to be valued for their endeavours to give them a right direction and moderate their too great ardour. The study of history will teach the warrior and the legislator by what means armies have been victorious and states have become powerful; and in the private citizen they will inculcate the love of liberty and order. The writings of sages point out a private path of virtue, and show that the best empire is self-government, and subduing our passions the noblest of conquests. _Hercules_.--The true spirit of heroism acts by a sort of inspiration, and wants neither the experience of history nor the doctrines of philosophers to direct it. But do not arts and sciences render men effeminate, luxurious, and inactive? and can you deny that wit and learning are often made subservient to very bad purposes? _Cadmus_.--I will own that there are some natures so happily formed they hardly want the assistance of a master, and the rules of art, to give them force or grace in everything they do. But these heaven-inspired geniuses are few. As learning flourishes only where ease, plenty, and mild government subsist, in so rich a soil, and under so soft a climate, the weeds of luxury will spring up among the flowers of art; but the spontaneous weeds would grow more rank, if they were allowed the undisturbed possession of the field. Letters keep a frugal, temperate nation from growing ferocious, a rich one from becoming entirely sensual and debauched. Every gift of the gods is sometimes abused; but wit and fine talents by a natural law gravitate towards virtue; accidents may drive them out of their proper direction; but such accidents are a sort of prodigies, and, like other prodigies, it is an alarming omen, and of dire portent to the times. For if virtue cannot keep to her allegiance those men, who in their hearts confess her divine right, and know the value of her laws, on whose fidelity and obedience can she depend? May such geniuses never descend to flatter vice, encourage folly, or propagate irreligion; but exert all their powers in the service of virtue, and celebrate the noble choice of those, who, like you, preferred her to pleasure. DIALOGUE XXVII. MERCURY--AND A MODERN FINE LADY. _Mrs. Modish_.--Indeed, Mr. Mercury, I cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon you now. I am engaged, absolutely engaged. _Mercury_.--I know you have an amiable, affectionate husband, and several fine children; but you need not be told, that neither conjugal attachments, maternal affections, nor even the care of a kingdom's welfare or a nation's glory, can excuse a person who has received a summons to the realms of death. If the grim messenger was not as peremptory as unwelcome, Charon would not get a passenger (except now and then a hypochondriacal Englishman) once in a century. You must be content to leave your husband and family, and pass the Styx. _Mrs. Modish_.--I did not mean to insist on any engagement with my husband and children; I never thought myself engaged to them. I had no engagements but such as were common to women of my rank. Look on my chimney-piece, and you will see I was engaged to the play on Mondays, balls on Tuesdays, the opera on Saturdays, and to card assemblies the rest of the week, for two months to come; and it would be the rudest thing in the world not to keep my appointments. If you will stay for me till the summer season, I will wait on you with all my heart. Perhaps the Elysian fields may be less detestable than the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh? I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have a full season. _Mercury_.--Surely you could not like to drink the waters of oblivion, who have made pleasure the business, end, and aim of your life! It is good to drown cares, but who would wash away the remembrance of a life of gaiety and pleasure. _Mrs. Modish_.--Diversion was indeed the business of my life, but as to pleasure, I have enjoyed none since the novelty of my amusements was gone off. Can one be pleased with seeing the same thing over and over again? Late hours and fatigue gave me the vapours, spoiled the natural cheerfulness of my temper, and even in youth wore away my youthful vivacity. _Mercury_.--If this way of life did not give you pleasure, why did you continue in it? I suppose you did not think it was very meritorious? _Mrs. Modish_.--I was too much engaged to think at all: so far indeed my manner of life was agreeable enough. My friends always told me diversions were necessary, and my doctor assured me dissipation was good for my spirits; my husband insisted that it was not, and you know that one loves to oblige one's friends, comply with one's doctor, and contradict one's husband; and besides I was ambitious to be thought _du bon ton_. _Mercury_.--_Bon ton_! what is that, madam? Pray define it. _Mrs. Modish_.--Oh sir, excuse me, it is one of the privileges of the _bon ton_ never to define, or be defined. It is the child and the parent of jargon. It is--I can never tell you what it is: but I will try to tell you what it is not. In conversation it is not wit; in manners it is not politeness; in behaviour it is not address; but it is a little like them all. It can only belong to people of a certain rank, who live in a certain manner, with certain persons, who have not certain virtues, and who have certain vices, and who inhabit a certain part of the town. Like a place by courtesy, it gets a higher rank than the person can claim, but which those who have a legal title to precedency dare not dispute, for fear of being thought not to understand the rules of politeness. Now, sir, I have told you as much as I know of it, though I have admired and aimed at it all my life. _Mercury_.--Then, madam, you have wasted your time, faded your beauty, and destroyed your health, for the laudable purposes of contradicting your husband, and being this something and this nothing called the _bon ton_. _Mrs. Modish_.--What would you have had me do? _Mercury_.--I will follow your mode of instructing. I will tell you what I would not have had you do. I would not have had you sacrifice your time, your reason, and your duties, to fashion and folly. I would not have had you neglect your husband's happiness and your children's education. _Mrs. Modish_.--As to the education of my daughters, I spared no expense; they had a dancing-master, music-master, and drawing-mister, and a French governess to teach them behaviour and the French language. _Mercury_.--So their religion, sentiments, and manners were to be learnt from a dancing-master, music-master, and a chambermaid! Perhaps they might prepare them to catch the _bon ton_. Your daughters must have been so educated as to fit them to be wives without conjugal affection, and mothers without maternal care. I am sorry for the sort of life they are commencing, and for that which you have just concluded. Minos is a sour old gentleman, without the least smattering of the _bon ton_, and I am in a fright for you. The best thing I can advise you is to do in this world as you did in the other, keep happiness in your view, but never take the road that leads to it. Remain on this side Styx, wander about without end or aim, look into the Elysian fields, but never attempt to enter into them, lest Minos should push you into Tartarus; for duties neglected may bring on a sentence not much less severe than crimes committed. DIALOGUE XXVIII. PLUTARCH--CHARON--AND A MODERN BOOKSELLER. _Charon_.--Here is a fellow who is very unwilling to land in our territories. He says he is rich, has a great deal of business in the other world, and must needs return to it; he is so troublesome and obstreperous I know not what to do with him. Take him under your care, therefore, good Plutarch; you will easily awe him into order and decency by the superiority an author has over a bookseller. _Bookseller_.--Am I got into a world so absolutely the reverse of that I left, that here authors domineer over booksellers? Dear Charon, let me go back, and I will pay any price for my passage; but, if I must stay, leave me not with any of those who are styled classical authors. As to you, Plutarch, I have a particular animosity against you for having almost occasioned my ruin. When I first set up shop, understanding but little of business, I unadvisedly bought an edition of your "Lives," a pack of old Greeks and Romans, which cost me a great sum of money. I could never get off above twenty sets of them. I sold a few to the Universities, and some to Eton and Westminster, for it is reckoned a pretty book for boys and undergraduates; but, unless a man has the luck to light on a pedant, he shall not sell a set of them in twenty years. _Plutarch_.--From the merit of the subjects, I had hoped another reception for my works. I will own, indeed, that I am not always perfectly accurate in every circumstance, nor do I give so exact and circumstantial a detail of the actions of my heroes as may be expected from a biographer who has confined himself to one or two characters. A zeal to preserve the memory of great men, and to extend the influence of such noble examples, made me undertake more than I could accomplish in the first degree of perfection; but surely the characters of my illustrious men are not so imperfectly sketched that they will not stand forth to all ages as patterns of virtue and incitements to glory. My reflections are allowed to be deep and sagacious; and what can be more useful to a reader than a wise man's judgment on a great man's conduct? In my writings you will find no rash censures, no undeserved encomiums, no mean compliance with popular opinions, no vain ostentation of critical skill, nor any affected finesse. In my "Parallels," which used to be admired as pieces of excellent judgment, I compare with perfect impartiality one great man with another, and each with the rule of justice. If, indeed, latter ages have produced greater men and better writers, my heroes and my works ought to give place to them. As the world has now the advantage of much better rules of morality than the unassisted reason of poor Pagans could form, I do not wonder that those vices, which appeared to us as mere blemishes in great characters, should seem most horrid deformities in the purer eyes of the present age--a delicacy I do not blame, but admire and commend. And I must censure you for endeavouring, if you could publish better examples, to obtrude on your countrymen such as were defective. I rejoice at the preference which they give to perfect and unalloyed virtue; and as I shall ever retain a high veneration for the illustrious men of every age, I should be glad if you would give me some account of those persons who in wisdom, justice, valour, patriotism, have eclipsed my Solon, Numa, Camillus, and other boasts of Greece or Rome. _Bookseller_.--Why, Master Plutarch, you are talking Greek indeed. That work which repaired the loss I sustained by the costly edition of your books was "The Lives of the Highwaymen;" but I should never have grown rich if it had not been by publishing "The Lives of Men that Never Lived." You must know that, though in all times it was possible to have a great deal of learning and very little wisdom, yet it is only by a modern improvement in the art of writing that a man may read all his life and have no learning or knowledge at all, which begins to be an advantage of the greatest importance. There is as natural a war between your men of science and fools as between the cranes and the pigmies of old. Most of our young men having deserted to the fools, the party of the learned is near being beaten out of the field; and I hope in a little while they will not dare to peep out of their forts and fastnesses at Oxford and Cambridge. There let them stay and study old musty moralists till one falls in love with the Greek, another with the Roman virtue; but our men of the world should read our new books, which teach them to have no virtue at all. No book is fit for a gentleman's reading which is not void of facts and of doctrines, that he may not grow a pedant in his morals or conversation. I look upon history (I mean real history) to be one of the worst kinds of study. Whatever has happened may happen again, and a well-bred man may unwarily mention a parallel instance he had met with in history and be betrayed into the awkwardness of introducing into his discourse a Greek, a Roman, or even a Gothic name; but when a gentleman has spent his time in reading adventures that never occurred, exploits that never were achieved, and events that not only never did, but never can happen, it is impossible that in life or in discourse he should ever apply them. A secret history, in which there is no secret and no history, cannot tempt indiscretion to blab or vanity to quote; and by this means modern conversation flows gentle and easy, unencumbered with matter and unburdened of instruction. As the present studies throw no weight or gravity into discourse and manners, the women are not afraid to read our books, which not only dispose to gallantry and coquetry, but give rules for them. Caesar's "Commentaries," and the "Account of Xenophon's Expedition," are not more studied by military commanders than our novels are by the fair--to a different purpose, indeed; for their military maxims teach to conquer, ours to yield. Those inflame the vain and idle love of glory: these inculcate a noble contempt of reputation. The women have greater obligations to our writers than the men. By the commerce of the world men might learn much of what they get from books; but the poor women, who in their early youth are confined and restrained, if it were not for the friendly assistance of books, would remain long in an insipid purity of mind, with a discouraging reserve of behaviour. _Plutarch_.--As to your men who have quitted the study of virtue for the study of vice, useful truth for absurd fancy, and real history for monstrous fiction, I have neither regard nor compassion for them; but I am concerned for the women who are betrayed into these dangerous studies; and I wish for their sakes I had expatiated more on the character of Lucretia and some other heroines. _Bookseller_.--I tell you, our women do not read in order to live or to die like Lucretia. If you would inform us that a _billet-doux_ was found in her cabinet after her death, or give a hint as if Tarquin really saw her in the arms of a slave, and that she killed herself not to suffer the shame of a discovery, such anecdotes would sell very well. Or if, even by tradition, but better still, if by papers in the Portian family, you could show some probability that Portia died of dram drinking, you would oblige the world very much; for you must know, that next to new-invented characters, we are fond of new lights upon ancient characters; I mean such lights as show a reputed honest man to have been a concealed knave, an illustrious hero a pitiful coward, &c. Nay, we are so fond of these kinds of information as to be pleased sometimes to see a character cleared from a vice or crime it has been charged with, provided the person concerned be actually dead. But in this case the evidence must be authentic, and amount to a demonstration; in the other, a detection is not necessary; a slight suspicion will do, if it concerns a really good and great character. _Plutarch_.--I am the more surprised at what you say of the taste of your contemporaries, as I met with a Frenchman who assured me that less than a century ago he had written a much admired "Life of Cyrus," under the name of Artamenes, in which he ascribed to him far greater actions than those recorded of him by Xenophon and Herodotus; and that many of the great heroes of history had been treated in the same manner; that empires were gained and battles decided by the valour of a single man, imagination bestowing what nature has denied, and the system of human affairs rendered impossible. _Bookseller_.--I assure you those books were very useful to the authors and their booksellers; and for whose benefit besides should a man write? These romances were very fashionable and had a great sale: they fell in luckily with the humour of the age. _Plutarch_.--Monsieur Scuderi tells me they were written in the times of vigour and spirit, in the evening of the gallant days of chivalry, which, though then declining, had left in the hearts of men a warm glow of courage and heroism; and they were to be called to books as to battle, by the sound of the trumpet. He says, too, that if writers had not accommodated themselves to the prejudices of the age, and written of bloody battles and desperate encounters, their works would have been esteemed too effeminate an amusement for gentlemen. Histories of chivalry, instead of enervating, tend to invigorate the mind, and endeavour to raise human nature above the condition which is naturally prescribed to it; but as strict justice, patriotic motives, prudent counsels, and a dispassionate choice of what upon the whole is fittest and best, do not direct these heroes of romance, they cannot serve for instruction and example, like the great characters of true history. It has ever been my opinion, that only the clear and steady light of truth can guide men to virtue, and that the lesson which is impracticable must be unuseful. Whoever shall design to regulate his conduct by these visionary characters will be in the condition of superstitious people, who choose rather to act by intimations they receive in the dreams of the night, than by the sober counsels of morning meditation. Yet I confess it has been the practice of many nations to incite men to virtue by relating the deeds of fabulous heroes: but surely it is the custom only of yours to incite them to vice by the history of fabulous scoundrels. Men of fine imagination have soared into the regions of fancy to bring back Astrea; you go thither in search of Pandora. Oh disgrace to letters! Oh shame to the muses! _Bookseller_.--You express great indignation at our present race of writers; but believe me the fault lies chiefly on the side of the readers. As Monsieur Scuderi observed to you, authors must comply with the manners and disposition of those who are to read them. There must be a certain sympathy between the book and the reader to create a good liking. Would you present a modern fine gentleman, who is negligently lolling in an easy chair, with the labours of Hercules for his recreation? or make him climb the Alps with Hannibal when he is expiring with the fatigue of last night's ball? Our readers must be amused, flattered, soothed; such adventures must be offered to them as they would like to have a share in. _Plutarch_.--It should be the first object of writers to correct the vices and follies of the age. I will allow as much compliance with the mode of the times as will make truth and good morals agreeable. Your love of fictitious characters might be turned to good purpose if those presented to the public were to be formed on the rules of religion and morality. It must be confessed that history, being employed only about illustrious persons, public events, and celebrated actions, does not supply us with such instances of domestic merit as one could wish. Our heroes are great in the field and the senate, and act well in great scenes on the theatre of the world; but the idea of a man, who in the silent retired path of life never deviates into vice, who considers no spectator but the Omniscient Being, and solicits no applause but His approbation, is the noblest model that can be exhibited to mankind, and would be of the most general use. Examples of domestic virtue would be more particularly useful to women than those of great heroines. The virtues of women are blasted by the breath of public fame, as flowers that grow on an eminence are faded by the sun and wind which expand them. But true female praise, like the music of the spheres, arises from a gentle, a constant, and an equal progress in the path marked out for them by their great Creator; and, like the heavenly harmony, it is not adapted to the gross ear of mortals, but is reserved for the delight of higher beings, by whose wise laws they were ordained to give a silent light and shed a mild, benignant influence on the world. _Bookseller_.--We have had some English and French writers who aimed at what you suggest. In the supposed character of Clarissa (said a clergyman to me a few days before I left the world) one finds the dignity of heroism tempered by the meekness and humility of religion, a perfect purity of mind, and sanctity of manners. In that of Sir Charles Grandison, a noble pattern of every private virtue, with sentiments so exalted as to render him equal to every public duty. _Plutarch_.--Are both these characters by the same author? _Bookseller_.--Ay, Master Plutarch, and what will surprise you more, this author has printed for me. _Plutarch_.--By what you say, it is pity he should print any work but his own. Are there no other authors who write in this manner? _Bookseller_.--Yes, we have another writer of these imaginary histories; one who has not long since descended to these regions. His name is Fielding, and his works, as I have heard the best judges say, have a true spirit of comedy and an exact representation of nature, with fine moral touches. He has not, indeed, given lessons of pure and consummate virtue, but he has exposed vice and meanness with all the powers of ridicule; and we have some other good wits who have exerted their talents to the purposes you approve. Monsieur de Marivaux, and some other French writers, have also proceeded much upon the same plan with a spirit and elegance which give their works no mean rank among the _belles lettres_. I will own that, when there is wit and entertainment enough in a book to make it sell, it is not the worse for good morals. _Charon_.--I think, Plutarch, you have made this gentleman a little more humble, and now I will carry him the rest of his journey. But he is too frivolous an animal to present to wise Minos. I wish Mercury were here; he would damn him for his dulness. I have a good mind to carry him to the Danaides, and leave him to pour water into their vessels which, like his late readers, are destined to eternal emptiness. Or shall I chain him to the rock, side to side by Prometheus, not for having attempted to steal celestial fire, in order to animate human forms, but for having endeavoured to extinguish that which Jupiter had imparted? Or shall we constitute him _friseur_ to Tisiphone, and make him curl up her locks with his satires and libels? _Plutarch_.--Minos does not esteem anything frivolous that affects the morals of mankind. He punishes authors as guilty of every fault they have countenanced and every crime they have encouraged, and denounces heavy vengeance for the injuries which virtue or the virtuous have suffered in consequence of their writings. DIALOGUE XXIX. PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO AFRICANUS--CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR. _Scipio_.--Alas, Caesar! how unhappily did you end a life made illustrious by the greatest exploits in war and most various civil talents! _Caesar_.--Can Scipio wonder at the ingratitude of Rome to her generals? Did not he reproach her with it in the epitaph he ordered to be inscribed upon his tomb at Liternum, that mean village in Campania, to which she had driven the conqueror of Hannibal and of Carthage? I also, after subduing her most dangerous enemies, the Helvetians, the Gauls, and the Germans, after raising her name to the highest pitch of glory, should have been deprived of my province, reduced to live as a private man under the power of my enemies and the enviers of my greatness; nay, brought to a trial and condemned by the judgment of a faction, if I had not led my victorious troops to Rome, and by their assistance, after all my offers of peace had been iniquitously rejected, made myself master of a State which knew so ill how to recompense superior merit. Resentment of this, together with the secret machinations of envy, produced not long afterwards a conspiracy of senators, and even of some whom I had most obliged and loved, against my life, which they basely took away by assassination. _Scipio_.--You say you led your victorious troops to Rome. How were they your troops? I thought the Roman armies had belonged to the Republic, not to their generals. _Caesar_.--They did so in your time. But before I came to command them, Marius and Sylla had taught them that they belonged to their generals. And I taught the senate that a veteran army, affectionately attached to its leader, could give him all the treasures and honours of the State without asking their leave. _Scipio_.--Just gods! did I then deliver my country from the invading Carthaginian, did I exalt it by my victories above all other nations, that it might become a richer prey to its own rebel soldiers and their ambitious commanders? _Caesar_.--How could it be otherwise? Was it possible that the conquerors of Europe, Asia, and Africa could tamely submit to descend from their triumphal chariots and become subject to the authority of praetors and consuls elected by a populace corrupted by bribes, or enslaved to a confederacy of factious nobles, who, without regard to merit, considered all the offices and dignities of the State as hereditary possessions belonging to their families? _Scipio_.--If I thought it no dishonour, after triumphing over Hannibal, to lay down my fasces and obey, as all my ancestors had done before me, the magistrates of the republic, such a conduct would not have dishonoured either Marius, or Sylla, or Caesar. But you all dishonoured yourselves when, instead of virtuous Romans, superior to your fellow-citizens in merit and glory, but equal to them in a due subjection to the laws, you became the enemies, the invaders, and the tyrants of your country. _Caesar_.--Was I the enemy of my country in giving it a ruler fit to support all the majesty and weight of its empire? Did I invade it when I marched to deliver the people from the usurped dominion and insolence of a few senators? Was I a tyrant because I would not crouch under Pompey, and let him be thought my superior when I felt he was not my equal? _Scipio_.--Pompey had given you a noble example of moderation in twice dismissing the armies, at the head of which he had performed such illustrious actions, and returning a private citizen into the bosom of his country. _Caesar_.--His moderation was a cheat. He believed that the authority his victories had gained him would make him effectually master of the commonwealth without the help of those armies. But finding it difficult to subdue the united opposition of Crassus and me, he leagued himself with us, and in consequence of that league we three governed the empire. But, after the death of Crassus, my glorious achievements in subduing the Gauls raised such a jealousy in him that he could no longer endure me as a partner in his power, nor could I submit to degrade myself into his subject. _Scipio_.--Am I then to understand that the civil war you engaged in was really a mere contest whether you or Pompey should remain sole lord of Rome? _Caesar_.--Not so, for I offered, in my letters to the senate, to lay down my arms if Pompey at the same time would lay down his, and leave the republic in freedom. Nor did I resolve to draw the sword till not only the senate, overpowered by the fear of Pompey and his troops, had rejected these offers, but two tribunes of the people, for legally and justly interposing their authority in my behalf, had been forced to fly from Rome disguised in the habit of slaves, and take refuge in my camp for the safety of their persons. My camp was therefore the asylum of persecuted liberty, and my army fought to avenge the violation of the rights and majesty of the people as much as to defend the dignity of their general unjustly oppressed. _Scipio_.--You would therefore have me think that you contended for the equality and liberty of the Romans against the tyranny of Pompey and his lawless adherents. In such a war I, myself, if I had lived in your times, would have willingly been your lieutenant. Tell me then, on the issue of this honourable enterprise, when you had subdued all your foes and had no opposition remaining to obstruct your intentions, did you establish that liberty for which you fought? Did you restore the republic to what it was in my time? _Caesar_.--I took the necessary measures to secure to myself the fruits of my victories, and gave a head to the empire, which could neither subsist without one nor find another so well suited to the greatness of the body. _Scipio_.--There the true character of Caesar was seen unmasked. You had managed so skilfully in the measures which preceded the civil war, your offers were so specious, and there appeared so much violence in the conduct of your enemies that, if you had fallen in that war, posterity might have doubted whether you were not a victim to the interests of your country. But your success, and the despotism you afterwards exorcised, took off those disguises and showed clearly that the aim of all your actions was tyranny. _Caesar_.--Let us not deceive ourselves with sounds and names. That great minds should aspire to sovereign power is a fixed law of Nature. It is an injury to mankind if the highest abilities are not placed in the highest stations. Had you, Scipio, been kept down by the republican jealousy of Cato, the censor Hannibal would have never been recalled out of Italy nor defeated in Africa. And if I had not been treacherously murdered by the daggers of Brutus and Cassius, my sword would have avenged the defeat of Crassus and added the empire of Parthia to that of Rome. Nor was my government tyrannical. It was mild, humane, and bounteous. The world would have been happy under it and wished its continuance, but my death broke the pillars of the public tranquillity and brought upon the whole empire a direful scene of calamity and confusion. _Scipio_.--You say that great minds will naturally aspire to sovereign power. But, if they are good as well as great, they will regulate their ambition by the laws of their country. The laws of Rome permitted me to aspire to the conduct of the war against Carthage; but they did not permit you to turn her arms against herself, and subject her to your will. The breach of one law of liberty is a greater evil to a nation than the loss of a province; and, in my opinion, the conquest of the whole world would not be enough to compensate for the total loss of their freedom. _Caesar_.--You talk finely, Africanus; but ask yourself, whether the height and dignity of your mind--that noble pride which accompanies the magnanimity of a hero--could always stoop to a nice conformity with the laws of your country? Is there a law of liberty more essential, more sacred, than that which obliges every member of a free community to submit himself to a trial, upon a legal charge brought against him for a public misdemeanour? In what manner did you answer a regular accusation from a tribune of the people, who charged you with embezzling the money of the State? You told your judges that on that day you had vanquished Hannibal and Carthage, and bade them follow you to the temples to give thanks to the gods. Nor could you ever be brought to stand a legal trial, or justify those accounts, which you had torn in the senate when they were questioned there by two magistrates in the name of the Roman people. Was this acting like the subject of a free State? Had your victory procured you an exemption from justice? Had it given into your hands the money of the republic without account? If it had, you were king of Rome. Pharsalia, Thapsus, and Munda could do no more for me. _Scipio_.--I did not question the right of bringing me to a trial, but I disdained to plead in vindication of a character so unspotted as mine. My whole life had been an answer to that infamous charge. _Caesar_.--It may be so; and, for my part, I admire the magnanimity of your behaviour. But I should condemn it as repugnant and destructive to liberty, if I did not pay more respect to the dignity of a great general, than to the forms of a democracy or the rights of a tribune. _Scipio_.--You are endeavouring to confound my cause with yours; but they are exceedingly different. You apprehended a sentence of condemnation against you for some part of your conduct, and, to prevent it, made an impious war on your country, and reduced her to servitude. I trusted the justification of my affronted innocence to the opinion of my judges, scorning to plead for myself against a charge unsupported by any other proof than bare suspicions and surmises. But I made no resistance; I kindled no civil war; I left Rome undisturbed in the enjoyment of her liberty. Had the malice of my accusers been ever so violent, had it threatened my destruction, I should have chosen much rather to turn my sword against my own bosom than against that of my country. _Caesar_.--You beg the question in supposing that I really hurt my country by giving her a master. When Cato advised the senate to make Pompey sole consul, he did it upon this principle, that any kind of government is preferable to anarchy. The truth of this, I presume, no man of sense will contest; and the anarchy, which that zealous defender of liberty so much apprehended, would have continued in Rome, if that power, which the urgent necessity of the State conferred upon me, had not removed it. _Scipio_.--Pompey and you had brought that anarchy on the State in order to serve your own ends. It was owing to the corruption, the factions, and the violence which you had encouraged from an opinion that the senate would be forced to submit to an absolute power in your hands, as a remedy against those intolerable evils. But Cato judged well in thinking it eligible to make Pompey sole consul rather than you dictator, because experience had shown that Pompey respected the forms of the Roman constitution; and though he sought, by bad means as well as good, to obtain the highest magistracies and the most honourable commands, yet he laid them down again, and contented himself with remaining superior in credit to any other citizen. _Caesar_.--If all the difference between my ambition and Pompey's was only, as you represent it, in a greater or less respect for the forms of the constitution, I think it was hardly becoming such a patriot as Cato to take part in our quarrel, much less to kill himself rather than yield to my power. _Scipio_.--It is easier to revive the spirit of liberty in a government where the forms of it remain unchanged, than where they have been totally disregarded and abolished. But I readily own that the balance of the Roman constitution had been destroyed by the excessive and illegal authority which the people were induced to confer upon Pompey, before any extraordinary honours or commands had been demanded by you. And that is, I think, your best excuse. _Caesar_.--Yes, surely. The favourers of the Manilian law had an ill grace in desiring to limit the commissions I obtained from the people, according to the rigour of certain absolute republican laws, no more regarded in my time than the Sybilline oracles or the pious institutions of Numa. _Scipio_.--It was the misfortune of your time that they were not regarded. A virtuous man would not take from a deluded people such favours as they ought not to bestow. I have a right to say this because I chid the Roman people, when, overheated by gratitude for the services I had done them, they desired to make me perpetual consul and dictator. Hear this, and blush. What I refused to accept, you snatched by force. _Caesar_.--Tiberius Gracchus reproached you with the inconsistency of your conduct, when, after refusing these offers, you so little respected the tribunitian authority. But thus it must happen. We are naturally fond of the idea of liberty till we come to suffer by it, or find it an impediment to some predominant passion; and then we wish to control it, as you did most despotically, by refusing to submit to the justice of the State. _Scipio_.--I have answered before to that charge. Tiberius Gracchus himself, though my personal enemy, thought it became him to stop the proceedings against me, not for my sake, but for the honour of my country, whose dignity suffered with mine. Nevertheless I acknowledge my conduct in that business was not absolutely blameless. The generous pride of virtue was too strong in my mind. It made me forget I was creating a dangerous precedent in declining to plead to a legal accusation brought against me by a magistrate invested with the majesty of the whole Roman people. It made me unjustly accuse my country of ingratitude when she had shown herself grateful, even beyond the true bounds of policy and justice, by not inflicting upon me any penalty for so irregular a proceeding. But, at the same time, what a proof did I give of moderation and respect for her liberty, when my utmost resentment could impel me to nothing more violent than a voluntary retreat and quiet banishment of myself from the city of Rome! Scipio Africanus offended, and living a private man in a country-house at Liternum, was an example of more use to secure the equality of the Roman commonwealth than all the power of its tribunes. _Caesar_.--I had rather have been thrown down the Tarpeian Rock than have retired, as you did, to the obscurity of a village, after acting the first part on the greatest theatre of the world. _Scipio_.--A usurper exalted on the highest throne of the universe is not so glorious as I was in that obscure retirement. I hear, indeed, that you, Caesar, have been deified by the flattery of some of your successors. But the impartial judgment of history has consecrated my name, and ranks me in the first class of heroes and patriots; whereas, the highest praise her records, even under the dominion usurped by your family, have given to you, is, that your courage and talents were equal to the object your ambition aspired to, the empire of the world; and that you exercised a sovereignty unjustly acquired with a magnanimous clemency. But it would have been better for your country, and better for mankind, if you had never existed. DIALOGUE XXX. PLATO--DIOGENES. _Diogenes_.--Plato, stand off. A true philosopher as I was, is no company for a courtier of the tyrant of Syracuse. I would avoid you as one infected with the most noisome of plagues--the plague of slavery. _Plato_.--He who can mistake a brutal pride and savage indecency of manners for freedom may naturally think that the being in a court (however virtuous one's conduct, however free one's language there) is slavery. But I was taught by my great master, the incomparable Socrates, that the business of true philosophy is to consult and promote the happiness of society. She must not, therefore, be confined to a tub or a cell. Her sphere is in senates or the cabinets of kings. While your sect is employed in snarling at the great or buffooning with the vulgar, she is counselling those who govern nations, infusing into their minds humanity, justice, temperance, and the love of true glory, resisting their passions when they transport them beyond the bounds of virtue, and fortifying their reason by the antidotes she administers against the poison of flattery. _Diogenes_.--You mean to have me understand that you went to the court of the Younger Dionysius to give him antidotes against the poison of flattery. But I say he sent for you only to sweeten the cup, by mixing it more agreeably, and rendering the flavour more delicate. His vanity was too nice for the nauseous common draught; but your seasoning gave it a relish which made it go down most delightfully, and intoxicated him more than ever. Oh, there is no flatterer half so dangerous to a prince as a fawning philosopher! _Plato_.--If you call it fawning that I did not treat him with such unmannerly rudeness as you did Alexander the Great when he visited you at Athens, I have nothing to say. But, in truth, I made my company agreeable to him, not for any mean ends which regarded only myself, but that I might be useful both to him and to his people. I endeavoured to give a right turn to his vanity; and know, Diogenes, that whosoever will serve mankind, but more especially princes, must compound with their weaknesses, and take as much pains to gain them over to virtue, by an honest and prudent complaisance, as others do to seduce them from it by a criminal adulation. _Diogenes_.--A little of my sagacity would have shown you that if this was your purpose your labour was lost in that court. Why did not you go and preach chastity to Lais? A philosopher in a brothel, reading lectures on the beauty of continence and decency, is not a more ridiculous animal than a philosopher in the cabinet, or at the table of a tyrant, descanting on liberty and public spirit! What effect had the lessons of your famous disciple Aristotle upon Alexander the Great, a prince far more capable of receiving instruction than the Younger Dionysius? Did they hinder him from killing his best friend, Clitus, for speaking to him with freedom, or from fancying himself a god because he was adored by the wretched slaves he had vanquished? When I desired him not to stand between me and the sun, I humbled his pride more, and consequently did him more good, than Aristotle had done by all his formal precepts. _Plato_.--Yet he owed to those precepts that, notwithstanding his excesses, he appeared not unworthy of the empire of the world. Had the tutor of his youth gone with him into Asia and continued always at his ear, the authority of that wise and virtuous man might have been able to stop him, even in the riot of conquest, from giving way to those passions which dishonoured his character. _Diogenes_.--If he had gone into Asia, and had not flattered the king as obsequiously as Haephestion, he would, like Callisthenes, whom he sent thither as his deputy, have been put to death for high treason. The man who will not flatter must live independent, as I did, and prefer a tub to a palace. _Plato_.--Do you pretend, Diogenes, that because you were never in a court, you never flattered? How did you gain the affection of the people of Athens but by soothing their ruling passion--the desire of hearing their superiors abused? Your cynic railing was to them the most acceptable flattery. This you well understood, and made your court to the vulgar, always envious and malignant, by trying to lower all dignity and confound all order. You made your court, I say, as servilely, and with as much offence to virtue, as the basest flatterer ever did to the most corrupted prince. But true philosophy will disdain to act either of these parts. Neither in the assemblies of the people, nor in the cabinets of kings, will she obtain favour by fomenting any bad dispositions. If her endeavours to do good prove unsuccessful, she will retire with honour, as an honest physician departs from the house of a patient whose distemper he finds incurable, or who refuses to take the remedies he prescribes. But if she succeeds--if, like the music of Orpheus, her sweet persuasions can mitigate the ferocity of the multitude and tame their minds to a due obedience of laws and reverence of magistrates; or if she can form a Timoleon or a Numa Pompilius to the government of a state--how meritorious is the work! One king--nay, one minister or counsellor of state--imbued with her precepts is of more value than all the speculative, retired philosophers or cynical revilers of princes and magistrates that ever lived upon earth. _Diogenes_.--Don't tell me of the music of Orpheus, and of his taming wild beasts. A wild beast brought to crouch and lick the hand of a master, is a much viler animal than he was in his natural state of ferocity. You seem to think that the business of philosophy is to polish men into slaves; but I say, it is to teach them to assert, with an untamed and generous spirit, their independence and freedom. You profess to instruct those who want to ride their fellow-creatures, how to do it with an easy and gentle rein; but I would have them thrown off, and trampled under the feet of all their deluded or insulted equals, on whose backs they have mounted. Which of us two is the truest friend to mankind? _Plato_.--According to your notions all government is destructive to liberty; but I think that no liberty can subsist without government. A state of society is the natural state of mankind. They are impelled to it by their wants, their infirmities, their affections. The laws of society are rules of life and action necessary to secure their happiness in that state. Government is the due enforcing of those laws. That government is the best which does this post effectually, and most equally; and that people is the freest which is most submissively obedient to such a government. _Diogenes_.--Show me the government which makes no other use of its power than duly to enforce the laws of society, and I will own it is entitled to the most absolute submission from all its subjects. _Plato_.--I cannot show you perfection in human institutions. It is far more easy to blame them than it is to amend them, much may be wrong in the best: but a good man respects the laws and the magistrates of his country. _Diogenes_.--As for the laws of my country, I did so far respect them as not to philosophise to the prejudice of the first and greatest principle of nature and of wisdom, self-preservation. Though I loved to prate about high matters as well as Socrates, I did not choose to drink hemlock after his example. But you might as well have bid me love an ugly woman, because she was dressed up in the gown of Lais, as respect a fool or a knave, because he was attired in the robe of a magistrate. _Plato_.--All I desired of you was, not to amuse yourself and the populace by throwing dirt upon the robe of a magistrate, merely because he wore that robe, and you did not. _Diogenes_.--A philosopher cannot better display his wisdom than by throwing contempt on that pageantry which the ignorant multitude gaze at with a senseless veneration. _Plato_.--He who tries to make the multitude venerate nothing is more senseless than they. Wise men have endeavoured to excite an awful reverence in the minds of the vulgar for external ceremonies and forms, in order to secure their obedience to religion and government, of which these are the symbols. Can a philosopher desire to defeat that good purpose? _Diogenes_.--Yes, if he sees it abused to support the evil purposes of superstition and tyranny. _Plato_.--May not the abuse be corrected without losing the benefit? Is there no difference between reformation and destruction. _Diogenes_.--Half-measures do nothing. He who desires to reform must not be afraid to pull down. _Plato_.--I know that you and your sect are for pulling down everything that is above your own level. Pride and envy are the motives that set you all to work. Nor can one wonder that passions, the influence of which is so general, should give you many disciples and many admirers. _Diogenes_.--When you have established your Republic, if you will admit me into it I promise you to be there a most respectful subject. _Plato_.--I am conscious, Diogenes, that my Republic was imaginary, and could never be established. But they show as little knowledge of what is practicable in politics as I did in that book, who suppose that the liberty of any civil society can be maintained by the destruction of order and decency or promoted by the petulance of unbridled defamation. _Diogenes_.--I never knew any government angry at defamation, when it fell on those who disliked or obstructed its measures. But I well remember that the thirty tyrants at Athens called opposition to them the destruction of order and decency. _Plato_.--Things are not altered by names. _Diogenes_.--No, but names have a strange power to impose on weak understandings. If, when you were in Egypt, you had laughed at the worship of an onion, the priests would have called you an atheist, and the people would have stoned you. But I presume that, to have the honour of being initiated into the mysteries of that reverend hierarchy, you bowed as low to it as any of their devout disciples. Unfortunately my neck was not so pliant, and therefore I was never initiated into the mysteries either of religion or government, but was feared or hated by all who thought it their interest to make them be respected. _Plato_.--Your vanity found its account in that fear and that hatred. The high priest of a deity or the ruler of a state is much less distinguished from the vulgar herd of mankind than the scoffer at all religion and the despiser of all dominion. But let us end our dispute. I feel my folly in continuing to argue with one who in reasoning does not seek to come at truth, but merely to show his wit. Adieu, Diogenes; I am going to converse with the shades of Pythagoras, Solon, and Bias. You may jest with Aristophanes or rail with Thersites. DIALOGUE XXXI. ARISTIDES--PHOCION--DEMOSTHENES. _Aristides_.--How could it happen that Athens, after having recovered an equality with Sparta, should be forced to submit to the dominion of Macedon when she had two such great men as Phocion and Demosthenes at the head of her State? _Phocion_.--It happened because our opinions of her interests in foreign affairs were totally different; which made us act with a constant and pernicious opposition the one to the other. _Aristides_.--I wish to hear from you both (if you will indulge my curiosity) on what principles you could form such contrary judgments concerning points of such moment to the safety of your country, which you equally loved. _Demosthenes_.--My principles were the same with yours, Aristides. I laboured to maintain the independence of Athens against the encroaching ambition of Macedon, as you had maintained it against that of Persia. I saw that our own strength was unequal to the enterprise; but what we could not do alone I thought might be done by a union of the principal states of Greece--such a union as had been formed by you and Themistocles in opposition to the Persians. To effect this was the great, the constant aim of my policy; and, though traversed in it by many whom the gold of Macedon had corrupted, and by Phocion, whom alone, of all the enemies to my system, I must acquit of corruption, I so far succeeded, that I brought into the field of Chaeronea an army equal to Philip's. The event was unfortunate; but Aristides will not judge of the merits of a statesman by the accidents of war. _Phocion_.--Do not imagine, Aristides, that I was less desirous than Demosthenes to preserve the independence and liberty of my country. But, before I engaged the Athenians in a war not absolutely necessary, I thought it proper to consider what the event of a battle would probably be. That which I feared came to pass: the Macedonians were victorious, and Athens was ruined. _Demosthenes_.--Would Athens not have been ruined if no battle had been fought? Could you, Phocion, think it safety to have our freedom depend on the moderation of Philip? And what had we else to protect us, if no confederacy had been formed to resist his ambition? _Phocion_.--I saw no wisdom in accelerating the downfall of my country by a rash activity in provoking the resentment of an enemy, whose arms, I foretold, would in the issue prove superior, not only to ours, but to those of any confederacy we were able to form. My maxim was, that a state which cannot make itself stronger than any of its neighbours, should live in friendship with that power which is the strongest. But the more apparent it was that our strength was inferior to that of Macedon, the more you laboured to induce us, by all the vehemence of your oratory, to take such measures as tended to render Philip our enemy, and exasperate him more against us than any other nation. This I thought a rash conduct. It was not by orations that the dangerous war you had kindled could finally be determined; nor did your triumphs over me in an assembly of the people intimidate any Macedonian in the field of Chaeronea, or stop you yourself from flying out of that field. _Demosthenes_.--My flight from thence, I must own, was ignominious to me; but it affects not the question we are agitating now, whether the counsels I gave to the people of Athens, as a statesman and a public minister, were right or wrong. When first I excited them to make war against Philip, the victories gained by Chabrias, in which you, Phocion, had a share (particularly that of Naxos, which completely restored to us the empire of the sea), had enabled us to maintain, not only our own liberty, but that of all Greece, in the defence of which we had formerly acquired so much glory, and which our ancestors thought so important to the safety and independence of Athens. Philip's power was but beginning, and supported itself more by craft than force. I saw, and I warned my countrymen in due time, how impolitic it would be to suffer his machinations to be carried on with success, and his strength to increase by continual acquisitions, without resistance. I exposed the weakness of that narrow, that short-sighted policy, which looked no farther than to our own immediate borders, and imagined that whatsoever lay out of those bounds was foreign to our interests, and unworthy of our care. The force of my remonstrances roused the Athenians to a more vigilant conduct. Then it was that the orators whom Philip had corrupted loudly inveighed against me, as alarming the people with imaginary dangers, and drawing them into quarrels in which they had really no concern. This language, and the fair professions of Philip, who was perfectly skilled in the royal art of dissembling, were often so prevalent, that many favourable opportunities of defeating his designs were unhappily lost. Yet sometimes, by the spirit with which I animated the Athenians and other neighbouring states, I stopped the progress of his arms, and opposed to him such obstacles as cost him much time and much labour to remove. You yourself, Phocion, at the head of fleets and armies sent against him by decrees which I had proposed, vanquished his troops in Eubaea, and saved from him Byzantium, with other cities of our allies on the coasts of the Hellespont, from which you drove him with shame. _Phocion_.--The proper use of those advantages was to secure a peace to Athens, which they inclined him to keep. His ambition was checked, but his forces were not so much diminished as to render it safe to provoke him to further hostilities. _Demosthenes_.--His courage and policy were indeed so superior to ours that, notwithstanding his defeats, he was soon in a condition to pursue the great plan of conquest and dominion which he had formed long before, and from which he never desisted. Thus, through indolence on our side and activity on his, things were brought to such a crisis that I saw no hope of delivering all Greece from his yoke, but by confederating against him the Athenians and the Thebans, which league I effected. Was it not better to fight for the independence of our country in conjunction with Thebes than alone? Would a battle lost in Boeotia be so fatal to Athens as one lost in our own territory and under our own walls? _Phocion_.--You may remember that when you were eagerly urging this argument I desired you to consider, not where we should fight, but how we should be conquerors; for, if we were vanquished, all sorts of evils and dangers would be instantly at our gates. _Aristides_.--Did not you tell me, Demosthenes, when you began to speak upon this subject, that you brought into the field of Chaeronea an army equal to Philip's? _Demosthenes_.--I did, and believe that Phocion will not contradict me. _Aristides_.--But, though equal in number, it was, perhaps, much inferior to the Macedonians in valour and military discipline. _Demosthenes_.--The courage shown by our army excited the admiration of Philip himself, and their discipline was inferior to none in Greece. _Aristides_.--What then occasioned their defeat? _Demosthenes_.--The bad conduct of their generals. _Aristides_.--Why was the command not given to Phocion, whose abilities had been proved on so many other occasions? Was it offered to him, and did he refuse to accept it? You are silent, Demosthenes. I understand your silence. You are unwilling to tell me that, having the power, by your influence over the people, to confer the command on what Athenian you pleased, you were induced, by the spirit of party, to lay aside a great general who had been always successful, who had the chief confidence of your troops and of your allies, in order to give it to men zealous indeed for your measures and full of military ardour, but of little capacity or experience in the conduct of a war. You cannot plead that, if Phocion had led your troops against Philip, there was any danger of his basely betraying his trust. Phocion could not be a traitor. You had seen him serve the Republic and conquer for it in wars, the undertaking of which he had strenuously opposed, in wars with Philip. How could you then be so negligent of the safety of your country as not to employ him in this, the most dangerous of all she ever had waged? If Chares and Lysicles, the two generals you chose to conduct it, had commanded the Grecian forces at Marathon and Plataea we should have lost those battles. All the men whom you sent to fight the Macedonians under such leaders were victims to the animosity between you and Phocion, which made you deprive them of the necessary benefit of his wise direction. This I think the worst blemish of your administration. In other parts of your conduct I not only acquit but greatly applaud and admire you. With the sagacity of a most consummate statesman you penetrated the deepest designs of Philip, you saw all the dangers which threatened Greece from that quarter while they were yet at a distance, you exhorted your countrymen to make a timely provision for their future security, you spread the alarm through all the neighbouring states, you combined the most powerful in a confederacy with Athens, you carried the war out of Attica, which (let Phocion say what he will) was safer than meeting it there, you brought it, after all that had been done by the enemy to strengthen himself and weaken us, after the loss of Amphipolis, Olynthus, and Potidaea, the outguards of Athens, you brought it, I say, to the decision of a battle with equal forces. When this could be effected there was evidently nothing so desperate in our circumstances as to justify an inaction which might probably make them worse, but could not make them better. Phocion thinks that a state which cannot itself be the strongest should live in friendship with that power which is the strongest. But in my opinion such friendship is no better than servitude. It is more advisable to endeavour to supply what is wanting in our own strength by a conjunction with others who are equally in danger. This method of preventing the ruin of our country was tried by Demosthenes. Nor yet did he neglect, by all practicable means, to augment at the same time our internal resources. I have heard that when he found the Public Treasure exhausted he replenished it, with very great peril to himself, by bringing into it money appropriated before to the entertainment of the people, against the express prohibition of a popular law, which made it death to propose the application thereof to any other use. This was virtue, this was true and genuine patriotism. He owed all his importance and power in the State to the favour of the people; yet, in order to serve the State, he did not fear, at the evident hazard of his life, to offend their darling passion and appeal against it to their reason. _Phocion_.--For this action I praise him. It was, indeed, far more dangerous for a minister at Athens to violate that absurd and extravagant law than any of those of Solon. But though he restored our finances, he could not restore our lost virtue; he could not give that firm health, that vigour to the State, which is the result of pure morals, of strict order and civil discipline, of integrity in the old, and obedience in the young. I therefore dreaded a conflict with the solid strength of Macedon, where corruption had yet made but a very small progress, and was happy that Demosthenes did not oblige me, against my own inclination, to be the general of such a people in such war. _Aristides_.--I fear that your just contempt of the greater number of those who composed the democracy so disgusted you with this mode and form of government, that you were as averse to serve under it as others with less ability and virtue than you were desirous of obtruding themselves into its service. But though such a reluctance proceeds from a very noble cause, and seems agreeable to the dignity of a great mind in bad times, yet it is a fault against the highest of moral obligations--the love of our country. For, how unworthy soever individuals may be, the public is always respectable, always dear to the virtuous. _Phocion_.--True; but no obligation can lie upon a citizen to seek a public charge when he foresees that his obtaining of it will be useless to his country. Would you have had me solicit the command of an army which I believed would be beaten? _Aristides_.--It is not permitted to a State to despair of its safety till its utmost efforts have been made without success. If you had commanded the army at Chaeronea you might possibly have changed the event of the day; but, if you had not, you would have died more honourably there than in a prison at Athens, betrayed by a vain confidence in the insecure friendship of a perfidious Macedonian. DIALOGUE XXXII. MARCUS AURELIUS PHILOSOPHUS--SERVIUS TULLIUS. _Servius Tullius_.--Yes, Marcus, though I own you to have been the first of mankind in virtue and goodness--though, while you governed, Philosophy sat on the throne and diffused the benign influences of her administration over the whole Roman Empire--yet as a king I might, perhaps, pretend to a merit even superior to yours. _Marcus Aurelius_.--That philosophy you ascribe to me has taught me to feel my own defects, and to venerate the virtues of other men. Tell me, therefore, in what consisted the superiority of your merit as a king. _Servius Tullius_.--It consisted in this--that I gave my people freedom. I diminished, I limited the kingly power, when it was placed in my hands. I need not tell you that the plan of government instituted by me was adopted by the Romans when they had driven out Tarquin, the destroyer of their liberty; and gave its form to that republic, composed of a due mixture of the regal, aristocratical, and democratical powers, the strength and wisdom of which subdued the world. Thus all the glory of that great people, who for many ages excelled the rest of mankind in the arts of war and of policy, belongs originally to me. _Marcus Aurelius_.--There is much truth in what you say. But would not the Romans have done better if, after the expulsion of Tarquin, they had vested the regal power in a limited monarch, instead of placing it in two annual elective magistrates with the title of consuls? This was a great deviation from your plan of government, and, I think, an unwise one. For a divided royalty is a solecism--an absurdity in politics. Nor was the regal power committed to the administration of consuls continued in their hands long enough to enable them to finish any difficult war or other act of great moment. From hence arose a necessity of prolonging their commands beyond the legal term; of shortening the interval prescribed by the laws between the elections to those offices; and of granting extraordinary commissions and powers, by all which the Republic was in the end destroyed. _Servius Tullius_.--The revolution which ensued upon the death of Lucretia was made with so much anger that it is no wonder the Romans abolished in their fury the name of king, and desired to weaken a power the exercise of which had been so grievous, though the doing this was attended with all the inconveniences you have justly observed. But, if anger acted too violently in reforming abuses, philosophy might have wisely corrected that error. Marcus Aurelius might have new-modelled the constitution of Rome. He might have made it a limited monarchy, leaving to the emperors all the power that was necessary to govern a wide-extended empire, and to the Senate and people all the liberty that could be consistent with order and obedience to government--a liberty purged of faction and guarded against anarchy. _Marcus Aurelius_.--I should have been happy indeed if it had been in my power to do such good to my country. But the gods themselves cannot force their blessings on men who by their vices are become incapable to receive them. Liberty, like power, is only good for those who possess it when it is under the constant direction of virtue. No laws can have force enough to hinder it from degenerating into faction and anarchy, where the morals of a nation are depraved; and continued habits of vice will eradicate the very love of it out of the hearts of a people. A Marcus Brutus in my time could not have drawn to his standard a single legion of Romans. But, further, it is certain that the spirit of liberty is absolutely incompatible with the spirit of conquest. To keep great conquered nations in subjection and obedience, great standing armies are necessary. The generals of those armies will not long remain subjects; and whoever acquires dominion by the sword must rule by the sword. If he does not destroy liberty, liberty will destroy him. _Servius Tullius_.--Do you then justify Augustus for the change he made in the Roman government? _Marcus Aurelius_.--I do not, for Augustus had no lawful authority to make that change. His power was usurpation and breach of trust. But the government which he seized with a violent hand came to me by a lawful and established rule of succession. _Servius Tullius_.--Can any length of establishment make despotism lawful? Is not liberty an inherent, inalienable right of mankind? _Marcus Aurelius_.--They have an inherent right to be governed by laws, not by arbitrary will. But forms of government may, and must, be occasionally changed, with the consent of the people. When I reigned over them the Romans were governed by laws. _Servius Tullius_.--Yes, because your moderation and the precepts of that philosophy in which your youth had been tutored inclined you to make the laws the rules of your government and the bounds of your power. But if you had desired to govern otherwise, had they power to restrain you? _Marcus Aurelius_.--They had not. The imperial authority in my time had no limitations. _Servius Tullius_.--Rome therefore was in reality as much enslaved under you as under your son; and you left him the power of tyrannising over it by hereditary right? _Marcus Aurelius_.--I did; and the conclusion of that tyranny was his murder. _Servius Tullius_.--Unhappy father! unhappy king! what a detestable thing is absolute monarchy when even the virtues of Marcus Aurelius could not hinder it from being destructive to his family and pernicious to his country any longer than the period of his own life. But how happy is that kingdom in which a limited monarch presides over a state so justly poised that it guards itself from such evils, and has no need to take refuge in arbitrary power against the dangers of anarchy, which is almost as bad a resource as it would be for a ship to run itself on a rock in order to escape from the agitation of a tempest. 
28763	----	file was produced from scans of public domain material produced by Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.) Imaginary Interviews W.D. Howells [Illustration: See page 130 AT THE OPERA] IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS W.D. HOWELLS ILLUSTRATED HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1910 Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS Published October, 1910 _Printed in the United States of America_ CONTENTS IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS CHAP. PAGE I. THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 1 II. A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH 13 III. SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 22 IV. THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE 32 V. INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 44 VI. THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 57 VII. UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 67 VIII. HAVING JUST GOT HOME 77 IX. NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 87 X. CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 97 XI. WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 107 XII. THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK 117 XIII. THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES 127 XIV. THE MAGAZINE MUSE 137 XV. COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 146 XVI. QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 156 XVII. A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 166 XVIII. A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE 176 XIX. A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY 184 XX. PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 194 XXI. AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 204 XXII. THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM 216 XXIII. READING FOR A GRANDFATHER 226 XXIV. SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 236 XXV. A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK 244 OTHER ESSAYS CHAP. PAGE I. AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY 255 II. PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES 264 III. DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER 274 IV. THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH 283 V. THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM 296 VI. THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 306 VII. THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 316 VIII. THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA 326 IX. TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING 338 X. A DAY AT BRONX PARK 350 ILLUSTRATIONS AT THE OPERA _Frontispiece_ FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET _Facing_ p. 88 FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS " 94 CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE " 120 THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK " 156 BROADWAY AT NIGHT " 256 ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS " 260 ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK " 352 IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS I THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION It is not generally known that after forty-two years of constant use the aged and honored movable which now again finds itself put back in its old place in the rear of _Harper's Magazine_ was stored in the warehouse of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial robes--for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair, except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought and deep-felt tribute to its last occupant--stood with bowed face and uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis. It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses that the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal editor went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in one of those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and bric-à-brac are guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not taught him, he would have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old hearts that are still young for his _Dream Life_ and his _Reveries of a Bachelor_, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had "a way of throwing" himself back in the Easy Chair, "and indulging in an easy and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit-chat with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift of the town talk, while it relieved greatly the monotony of his office hours." Not "bent on choosing mere gossip," he promised to be "on the watch for such topics or incidents as" seemed really important and suggestive, and to set them "down with all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which make every-day talk so much better than every-day writing." While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory and practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence. "How long have I been here?" it asked, like one wakened from a deep sleep. "About eight years," said the unreal editor. "Ah, I remember," the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its old red back, it demanded, "What is that?" "Some bits of holly and mistletoe." "Yes," the Easy Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple make themselves miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them.... Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance?' There!" the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, "that was Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy-- 'not too good For human nature's daily food'-- the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience and the undying hopefulness! Do you think," the Easy Chair said, with a searching severity one would not have expected of it, "that you are fit to take his place?" In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with the effect of not having heard it. "I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?" The Easy Chair responded, dryly, "You forget Aldrich." "If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or will," retorted the unreal editor. "But he wrote you for only two months. I well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to make his readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who invented you, and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the rest." "For a while," said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, "they wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me. He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in a time 'When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,' and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers, the famous paper on Brook Farm, 'Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.' He expected the world to be made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found it. He was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the Bottomless Pit--" "And I also believe in alleviations," the unreal editor interrupted. "I love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would be abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do everything. Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the compromises, _en attendant_ the millennium. Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift. He who came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every Christmas Day comes to remind us, was the brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of men, did not He warn us against hastily putting new wine into old bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle must grow; it cannot be made; and in the mean time let us keep our latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism, or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism. That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why that should be changed. The conditions are not changed." There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal editor broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, "I suppose that there is not much change in Christmas, at any rate?" "No," said the unreal editor; "it goes on pretty much as it used. The Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the Timminses?" "I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. "They are not the architects of their own personalities." "Ah, take care, take care!" cried the unreal editor. "You will be saying next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and pernicious; and you know what _that_ comes to!" "No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair retorted. "The Timminses are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful." "And just now you were making excuses for them!" "I said they were not the architects of their own personalities; but, nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free to leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be the moralist's business to teach them to think so." "And that was what Curtis gladly made his business," the unreal editor somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all, but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that beautiful tribute to the high soul they were praising came to the unreal editor's lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: "'His love of goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair and good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he strove to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may add," the unreal editor broke off, "that he did not hurry the unripe grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would first have waited till there were automobiles enough to supply their place." The Easy Chair caught at the word. "Automobiles?" it echoed. "Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored," said the unreal editor, and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion, and how already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city avenues. He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject. "Well," it said at last, "this isn't such a bad time to live in, after all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now, what good can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you preach on that hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden the heart of the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make your first appearance in the Easy Chair?" To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In his heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation of the divine law which renders all things sensible by their opposites, he thought of the other kinds of Christmas which can never weary or disgust: the Christmas of the little children and the simple-hearted and the poor; and suddenly he addressed himself to the Easy Chair with unexpected and surprising courage. "Why should that be so very difficult?" he demanded. "If you look at it rightly, Christmas is always full of inspiration; and songs as well as sermons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The trouble with us is that we think it is for the pleasure of opulent and elderly people, for whom there can be no pleasures, but only habits. They are used to having everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased to be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all manner of Christmas conventions. But for the young to whom these things are new, and for the poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is yours forever. It is not difficult; it is very simple; for even if years and riches come upon you in a literal way, you can by a little trying keep yourself young and poor in spirit. Then you can always rejoice with the innocent and riot with the destitute. "I once knew a father," the unreal editor continued, "a most doting and devoted father, who, when he bent over the beds of his children to bid them good-night, and found them 'high sorrowful and cloyed,' as the little ones are apt to be after a hard day's pleasure, used to bid them 'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following Thanksgiving that they succeeded in thinking about Christmas with anything like the entire cheerfulness expected of them." "I don't see any application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor in our lives." "That is because you have not allowed me to conclude," the unreal editor protested, when the Easy Chair cut in with, "There is nothing I would so willingly allow you to do," and "laughed and shook" as if it had been "Rabelais's easy chair." The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the untimely attempt at wit. "The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children was largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in their way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by no means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking about Christmas with reference to one's self instead of others." "Isn't that rather banal?" the Easy Chair asked. "Not at all banal," said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to do the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave himself a few moments to recover his temper, and then he went on: "If Christmas means anything at all, it means anything but one's own pleasure. Up to the first Christmas Day the whole world had supposed that it could be happy selfishly, and its children still suppose so. But there is really no such thing as selfish, as personal happiness." "Tolstoy," the Easy Chair noted. "Yes, Tolstoy," the unreal editor retorted. "He more than any other has brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and body in the world. "It is well to realize this at all times, but it is peculiarly fit to do so at Christmas-time, for it is in this truth that the worship of Christ begins. Now, too, is the best time to give the Divine Word form in deed, to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less. 'Now is the time, now is the time, Now is the hour of golden prime' for asking one's self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly beyond the need of help. "To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the light of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest mercy." The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having made his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are also editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly, unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent asked in whisper, "What do you want done with it, sir?" "Oh," said the unreal editor, "send it back to Franklin Square"; and then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, "Don't wake it." There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear of the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff of dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple personality in which his several selves conversed with one another, and came and went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether his imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in the flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which haunted him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he became satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly treated them. II A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH On one of those fine days which the April of the other year meanly grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where the Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the vision of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. "Era la stagione nella quale la rivestita terra, più che tutto l' altro anno, si mostra bella," he said, without other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of magazines and newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could for himself on the window-sill. "What is that?" he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew perfectly well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature's joy by a show of savage ignorance. "It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the very soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time and tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of another period or climate. What would you find to thrill you in, 'It was the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product." As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly. "I understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring? What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end of winter, when people are glad of any change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of summer! It would not be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of its crude, formless beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of happiness, secure and established, would be insulted by its haphazard promises made only to be broken. 'Rather,' the outraged mortal would say, 'the last tender hours of autumn, the first deathful-thrilling snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering flake-like through the dim air--rather these than the recurrence of those impulses and pauses, those kisses frozen on the lips, those tender rays turning to the lash of sleet across the face of nature. No, the only advantage spring can claim over her sister seasons is her novelty, the only reason she can offer for being the spoiled child of the poets is that nobody but the poets could keep on fancying that there was any longer the least originality in her novelty." The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of the Easy Chair made for taking breath, but he was not suffered to do so. "Every atom of originality has been drained from the novelty of spring 'in the process of the suns,' and science is rapidly depriving her even of novelty. What was once supposed to be the spring grass has been found to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing back into the withered blades. As for the spring lamb which used to crop the spring grass, it is now out of the cold-storage where the spring chicken and the new-laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is said that there are no birds in last year's nests, but probably a careful examination would discover a plentiful hatch of nestlings which have hibernated in the habitations popularly supposed to be deserted the June before this. Early spring vegetables are in market throughout the twelvemonth, and spring flowers abound at the florists' in December and January. There is no reason why spring should not be absorbed into winter and summer by some such partition as took place politically in the case of Poland. Like that unhappy kingdom, she has abused her independence and become a molestation and discomfort to the annual meteorology. As a season she is distinctly a failure, being neither one thing nor the other, neither hot nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her winds were once supposed to be very siccative, and peculiarly useful in drying the plaster in new houses; but now the contractors put in radiators as soon as the walls are up, and the work is done much better. As for the germinative force of her suns, in these days of intensive farming, when electricity is applied to the work once done by them, they can claim to have no virtue beyond the suns of July or August, which most seeds find effective enough. If spring were absorbed into summer, the heat of that season would be qualified, and its gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, which would be prolonged into the winter. The rigors of winter would be much abated, and the partition of spring among the other seasons would perform the mystic office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our climate, besides ridding us of a time of most tedious and annoying suspense. And what should we lose by it?" The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair directly, but only to be murmuring to himself, "Youth." "Youth! Youth!" the Easy Chair repeated in exasperation. "And what is youth?" "The best thing in the world." "For whom is it the best thing?" This question seemed to give the poet pause. "Well," he said, finally, with a not very forcible smile, "for itself." "Ah, there you are!" he of the Easy Chair exclaimed; but he could not help a forgiving laugh. "In a way you are right. The world belongs to youth, and so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth is a very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, especially like the spring we have just been having, to our cost. It is the only period of life, as spring is the only season of the year, that has too much time on its hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age does, as winter does; it keeps doing something all the while. The things it does are apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the end something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns and snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May, at least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers, which the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in the park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden out of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the young girls are wearing, drips from the trees. You can say it is all very painty, the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the picture because of this little mannerism of the painter. To be sure, you miss the sheeted snows and the dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors, flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning?" In making this appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing very little of what you have been saying. "Yes," the poet replied with a long breath, "you are right about that dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when we are so glad to have the spring come." "I don't know about winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the decline of life, where he sings, 'There is beauty in extreme old age; There's a fascination frantic In a ruin that's romantic' Or, at least no one else has said so much for 'that time of life,' which another librettist has stigmatized as 'Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'" "Yes, I know," the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on which he had cast himself loose. "But I believe a great deal more could be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from the 'Mikado,' and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't know but I prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws for Polonius, and there is something almost caressing in the notion of 'the lean and slippered pantaloon.' The worst of it is that we old fellows look so plain to one another; I dare say young people don't find us so bad. I can remember from my own youth that I thought old men, and especially old women, rather attractive. I am not sure that we elders realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to the eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often quite bald." "Yes, and so is an egg," the Easy Chair retorted, "but there is not the same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which has evolved from it--eagle or nightingale, parrot or Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of 'the Ionian father of the rest: A million wrinkles carved his silver skin, A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.' But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion--fairer than the evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man, even of Methuselah?" "Yes," the poet sighed. "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!" "No, I would rather not!" he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply. "Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a desirable thing." "But I have given it up," the poet meekly replied. "The great thing would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a year we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. Not merely younger, but _young_--the genuine article. A tree can do that, and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three hundred, or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more importantly, a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that respect." "My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there will be no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can walk about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. And other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way. Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back their gift, and you know very well they cannot." "Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not temperature," the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea. "I have noticed this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on the map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since I saw you, and I found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there as here in New York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, but quite as far as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth there were bits of railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north. At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I could not make out the slightest difference." "With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?" "I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly." "Then," the Easy Chair said, "I would rather my winter were turned into summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any change of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of that time of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the passions burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that they do not bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you have some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me tired." "Yes, I see what you mean," the poet assented. "But you cannot have the seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you can have autumn." "Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad enough, but I would not go through spring again for any--In winter you can get away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture, or a cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape the rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace? No, my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year. The trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of time, but the men could not. Even the women----" At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the Easy Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the question to her. "Young?" she said. "Why, you and I are _always_ young, silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are beginning to sing in the ditches already." III SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair, who "Change and pass and come again," looked in upon it, after some months' absence, with the effect of having aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest avatar; he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having, at former interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a reformer, a moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer, of a psychologist grown gray in divining the character of others from his own consciousness. "Have you ever noticed," he began, "that the first things we get stiff in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature, through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly upright." "Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly. "It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran observer replied. "Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight off physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this, but I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against stiffening tastes." "I don't see how," the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to explanation than to express dissent. "I will teach you how," he said, "if you will allow me to make it a personal matter, and use you in illustration." "Why not use yourself?" "Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In æsthetic matters--and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing with these--the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites. All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius, because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The conceit of having recognized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial of its existence save in the instances recognized. This conceit does not admit the possibility of error or omission in the search, and it does not allow that the diseased oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing qualities and its peculiar flavors; so that the attitude of aging youth, in the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward all new bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, books." The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair seized the occasion to remark: "Yes, there is something in what you say. But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly an infectious disease----" "Ah, but it _is_ infectious," the veteran observer exclaimed, rousing himself, "infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it so. He wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigidity to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance----" "No, we would rather not," the Easy Chair interposed. "But you must make the sacrifice," the veteran observer persisted. "You will allow that you are extremely opinionated?" "Not at all." "Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of your æsthetic beliefs?" "Something like that, yes." "And you cannot deny that in times past you have tried your best to make others think with you?" "It was our duty." "Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you, the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your favorite authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was a fad for making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that you didn't put forth some such schedule." "We had the notion of doing something of the kind," the Easy Chair confessed, "but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole catalogue. Among the novelists----" "No, don't begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies there, and would like to burn you along with the romances which I've no doubt you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why don't you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account, and give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?" "Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our minds are not turned to it by examples." "Ah," our visitor said, "I see that you are afraid to confess yourself the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid that if you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes to buying them in the most expensive binding, and the masses to taking them out of all the public libraries." "There is something in what you say," the Easy Chair confessed. "Our popular failure as a critic is notorious; it cannot be denied. The stamp of our disapproval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a currency that was not less than torrential. The flood of romantic novels which passed over the land, and which is still to be traced in the tatters of the rag-doll heroes and heroines caught in the memories of readers along its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our adverse criticism. No, we could not in conscience compile and publish a list of The Hundred Worst Books; it would be contrary, for the reasons you give, to public morals." "And don't you think," the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety that betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for him, "and don't you think that it would also bring to you the unpleasant consciousness of having stiffened in your tastes?" "It might up to a certain point," we consented. "But we should prefer to call it confirmed in our convictions. Wherever we have liked or disliked in literature it has been upon grounds hardly distinguishable from moral grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth to nature is the eighth of the seven deadly sins; a false school in literature is a seminary of crime. We are speaking largely, of course----" "It certainly sounds rather tall," our friend sarcastically noted, "and it sounds very familiar." "Yes," we went on, "all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations, in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time one hesitates, and possibly ends by asking the stranger in, especially if he is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: 'You know I don't think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least, and if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right direction, there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week. But you must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.' Ten to one the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his way--the wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one's tastes; that one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases." "Such as?" the observer insinuated. "Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely the case may be that of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A signal proof of their continued suppleness came but the other day when we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English novelist, Mr. Percy White, and it was the more signal because we perceived that he had formed himself upon a method of Thackeray's, which recalled that master, as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trollope recall a manner of him. But it is Thackeray's most artistic method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we have fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and Dickens, we are confident of being able to bear up under the heaviest-handed satire of _Vanity Fair_. As for _The Luck of Barry Lyndon_ and _The Yellowplush Papers_, and such like, they have never ceased to have their prime delight for us. But their proportion is quite large enough to survive from any author for any reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that authors survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here and there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes are of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes. We could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still read, and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no longer read the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth of the truly great upon his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel excellences in them. It was only the other day that we picked up Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, and realized in it, from a chance page or two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This was something quite new to us in it. We had known the terrible pathos of the story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless, freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new." Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. "And what is all this you have been saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of what may be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after the end of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such danger? Or was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied something like that." We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. "No, not exactly that. The truth is we have been very much interested by your notion--if it was yours, which is not altogether probable--and we have been turning its light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one's self as the stuff for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem. There is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions." "And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine?" the veteran observer asked, with superiority. "That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never so tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that time of life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden, to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste--or taken a new lease of an old one--for reading history, which had been dormant all through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology----" At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and that we were talking to ourselves. IV THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from the magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the rejected from a function involving neither power nor responsibility. "Ah!" we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the hands of our friend. "What is it he won't take _now_?" "Wait till I get my second wind," the victim of unrequited literature answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the occupant had risen; and he sighed, pensively, "I felt so sure I had got him this time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure to find rest in it that restored him to animation. "It is a little thing," he murmured, "on the decline of the vaudeville." "The decline of the vaudeville?" we repeated, wrinkling our forehead in grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, "Do you think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?" "Why, bless my soul!" the rejected one cried, starting somewhat violently forward, "what is your magazine itself but vaudeville, with your contributors all doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or travel, or sketches of life, or articles of popular science and sociological interest, and I don't know what all! What are your illustrations but the moving pictures of the kalatechnoscope! Why," he said, with inspiration, "what are you yourself but a species of Chaser that comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground for the next month's performance by tiring out the lingering readers?" "You don't think," we suggested, "you're being rather unpleasant?" Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to see him restored to so much cheerfulness, at any rate. "I think the notion is a pretty good fit, though if you don't like to wear it I don't insist. Why should you object to being likened to those poor fellows who come last on the programme at the vaudeville? Very often they are as good as the others, and sometimes, when I have determined to get my five hours' enjoyment to the last moment before six o'clock, I have had my reward in something unexpectedly delightful in the work of the Chasers. I have got into close human relations with them, I and the half-dozen brave spirits who have stuck it out with me, while the ushers went impatiently about, clacking the seats back, and picking up the programmes and lost articles under them. I have had the same sense of kindly comradery with you, and now and then my patience has been rewarded by you, just as it has been by the Chasers at the vaudeville, and I've said so to people. I've said: 'You're wrong to put down the magazine the way most of you do before you get to those departments at the end. Sometimes there are quite good things in them.'" "Really," said the unreal editor, "you seem to have had these remarks left over from your visit to the real editor. We advise you to go back and repeat them. They may cause him to revise his opinion of your contribution." "It's no use my going back. I read finality in his eye before I left him, and I feel that no compliment, the most fulsome, would move him. Don't turn me out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. You are the first act on the bill for me. I read the magazine like a Chinese book--from the back. I always begin with the Easy Chair." "Ah, now you are talking," we said, and we thought it no more than human to ask, "What is it you have been saying about the vaudeville, anyway?" The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. "I will just read--" "No, no!" we interposed. "Tell us about it--give us the general drift. We never can follow anything read to us." The other looked incredulous, but he was not master of the situation, and he resigned himself to the secondary pleasure of sketching the paper he would so much rather have read. "Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville-goer I have always been?" We nodded. "We know how you are always trying to get us to neglect the masterpieces of our undying modern dramatists, on the legitimate stage, and go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you delight in." "Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an inveterate vaudeville-goer, for the simple reason that I find better acting in the vaudeville, and better drama, on the whole, than you ever get, or you generally get, on your legitimate stage. I don't know why it is so very legitimate. I have no doubt but the vaudeville, or continuous variety performance, is the older, the more authentic form of histrionic art. Before the Greek dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit playwrights, or the exquisitely conventionalized Chinese and Japanese and Javanese were heard of, it is probable that there were companies of vaudeville artists going about the country and doing the turns that they had invented themselves, and getting and giving the joy that comes of voluntary and original work, just as they are now. And in the palmiest days of the Greek tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course, variety shows all over Athens and Rome where you could have got twice the amusement for half the money that you would at the regular theatres. While the openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom Euripides and Terence had cast for their parts were going through rôles they would never have chosen themselves, the wilding heirs of art at the vaudeville were giving things of their own imagination, which they had worked up from some vague inspiration into a sketch of artistic effect. No manager had foisted upon them his ideals of 'what the people wanted,' none had shaped their performance according to his own notion of histrionics. They had each come to him with his or her little specialty, that would play fifteen or twenty minutes, and had, after trying it before him, had it rejected or accepted in its entirety. Then, author and actor in one, they had each made his or her appeal to the public." "There were no hers on the stage in those days," we interposed. "No matter," the rejected contributor retorted. "There are now, and that is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door, and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat in the best place I can get, away from interposing posts and persons, and settle down to a long afternoon's delight, I like to fancy myself a far-fetched phantom of the past, who used to do the same thing at Thebes or Nineveh as many thousand years ago as you please. I like to think that I too am an unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will be such as shaped smiles immemorially gone to dust." We made our reflection that this passage was probably out of the rejected contribution, but we did not say anything, and our visitor went on. "And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for my fifty cents! There were twelve stunts on the bill, not counting the kalatechnoscope, and I got in before the first was over, so that I had the immediate advantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly swinging himself between two chairs which had their outer legs balanced on the tops of caraffes full of water, and making no more of the feat than if it were a walk in the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I respected that man! What study had gone to the perfection of that act, and the others that he equally made nothing of! He was simply billed as 'Equilibrist,' when his name ought to have been blazoned in letters a foot high if they were in any wise to match his merit. He was followed by 'Twin Sisters,' who, as 'Refined Singers and Dancers,' appeared in sweeping confections of white silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading white hats, and long-fringed white parasols heaped with artificial roses, and sang a little tropical romance, whose burden was 'Under the bámboo-trée,' brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced this romance with languid undulations, and before you could tell how or why, they had disappeared and reappeared in short green skirts, and then shorter white skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their costumes, but always, I am bound to say, of the refinement promised. I can't tell you in what their refinement consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as I am sure of the humor of the two brothers who next appeared as 'Singing and Dancing Comedians' of the coon type. I know that they sang and they danced, and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with the help of the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue of the stage in vaudeville. They were not so good as the next people, a jealous husband and a pretty wife, who seized every occasion in the slight drama of 'The Singing Lesson,' and turned it to account in giving their favorite airs. I like to have a husband disguise himself as a German maestro, and musically make out why his wife is so zealous in studying with him, and I do not mind in the least having the sketch close without reason: it leaves something to my imagination. Two of 'America's Leading Banjoists' charmed me next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. If one does not one's self rejoice in its plunking, there are others who do, and that is enough for my altruistic spirit. Besides, it is America's leading instrument, and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism which is never really dormant in us. Its close association with color in our civilization seemed to render it the fitting prelude of the next act, which consisted of 'Monologue and Songs' by a divine creature in lampblack, a shirt-waist worn outside his trousers, and an exaggerated development of stomach. What did he say, what did he sing? I don't know; I only know that it rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the conscience, and appeased the hungerings of ambition. Just to sit there and listen to that unalloyed nonsense was better than to 'sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,' or to be the object of a votive dinner, or to be forgiven one's sins; there is no such complete purgation of care as one gets from the real Afro-American when he is unreal, and lures one completely away from life, while professing to give his impressions of it. You, with your brute preferences for literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you would say I ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little passage of drama, which followed, and I don't know but I did. It was nothing but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at once sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,' and she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it to sleep with 'By low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls to sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I do not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat with pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words of his to Guildenstern: 'You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... 'S blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' Guildenstern ought to have said: 'Much, my lord! Here is an actor who has been summering in the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than the dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of drama as artless as a child would fancy, and yet it swells your heart and makes you cry. Your mystery? You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only fakes and frauds who do not understand the soul. The simplest willow whistle is an instrument more complex than man.' That is what I should have said in Guildenstern's place if I had had Hamlet with me there at the vaudeville show. "In the pretty language of the playbill," the contributor went on, "this piece was called 'A Pastoral Playlet,' and I should have been willing to see 'Mandy Hawkins' over again, instead of the 'Seals and Sea Lions,' next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately lifted on them. Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself holding my breath, and helping them along too strenuously for my comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; their mere flumping about the stage makes me unhappy; but they are not so bad, after all, as trained dogs. They were followed by three 'Artistic European Acrobats,' who compensated and consoled me for the seals, by the exquisite ease with which they wrought the impossibilities of their art, in the familiar sack-coats and top-coats of every day. I really prefer tights and spangles, but I will not refuse impossibilities simply because they are performed, as our diplomats are instructed to appear at European courts, in the ordinary dress of a gentleman; it may even add a poignancy to the pleasure I own so reluctantly. "There came another pair of 'Singers and Dancers,' and then a 'Trick Cyclist,' but really I cannot stand trick cycling, now that plain cycling, glory be! has so nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began to make his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round the stage in that posture, I went away. But I had had enough without counting him, though I left the kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and shimmering unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, such as I could have got at no legitimate theatre in town, and I came away opulently content." We reflected awhile before we remarked: "Then I don't see what you have to complain of or to write of. Where does the decline of the vaudeville come in?" "Oh," the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, "I forgot that. It's still so good, when compared with the mechanical drama of the legitimate theatre, that I don't know whether I can make out a case against it now. But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. I think the change began insidiously to steal upon the variety show with the increasing predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out, when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days' beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the 'playlets' began following one another in unbroken succession, I did not know what to do. Almost before I was aware of their purpose three of the leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave plays that took up the whole afternoon; and though they professed to intersperse the acts with what they called 'big vaudeville,' I could not be deceived, and I simply stopped going. When I want to see a four-act play, I will go to the legitimate theatre, and see something that I can smell, too. The influence of the vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and refining that its audiences cannot stand either the impurity or the imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now the vaudeville itself is beginning to decline in quality as well as quantity." "Not toward immodesty?" "No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual superiority of the continuous performance is beginning to suffer contamination from the plays where there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now of the tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the variety houses. The comic musician is of the rarest occurrence; during the whole season I have as yet heard no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. The acrobats still abound, but it is three long years since I looked upon a coon act with real Afro-Americans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a small wad of paper in the air with one hand. It is true that the conquest of the vaudeville houses by the full-fledged drama has revived the old-fashioned stock companies in many cases, and has so far worked for good, but it is a doubtful advantage when compared with the loss of the direct inspiration of the artists who created and performed their stunts." "Delightful word!" we dreamily noted. "How did it originate?" "Oh, I don't know. It's probably a perversion of stint, a task or part, which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does it matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist's own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves it. He seems never to be tired of it, even when it is bad, and when nobody in the house lends him a hand with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to go, and he with it. It has to go when it is good, after it has had its day, though I don't see why it should go; for my part there are stunts I could see endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as much of any play?" "Gilbert and Sullivan's operas," we suggested. "That is true. But without the music? And even with the music, the public won't have them any longer. I would like to see the stunt fully developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but never-ending as the race itself." "You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get," we said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book again. "But about the decline of vaudeville?" "Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments, but the enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to the whims and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of men; for it appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of art, but instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is lost upon the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the legitimate theatres--" "Then what you wish," we concluded, "is to elevate the vaudeville." The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something between a groan and a growl. "You mean to kill it." V INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA Whether pleasure of the first experience is more truly pleasure than that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion. When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case, the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to count with, and in the other, the case of age, there will be the personal disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat untranslatably, _Weltschmerz_. This was peculiarly the appanage of youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding, distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and transmitted his inherited burden of _Weltschmerz_ to his posterity. The old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies they have personally committed and know they will commit again, but for pure gloom--gloom positive, absolute, all but palpable--you must go to youth. That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision. The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never be the true measures. * * * * * The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with us the night we saw "L'Elisir d'Amore," and that it was in his personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have fancied personal only to ourselves. He began to take the affair out of our keeping from the first moment, when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy street, we found our way through the distracted vestibule of the opera-house into the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the presence of the glowing spectacle of the stage. "Ah, this is the real thing," he whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we could have done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the introduction of Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian village piazza. "It is a village at the foot of the Alps probably," he said, "and if not, no matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: as the chorus of peasants and soldiers, of men and women who impartially accompany the orchestra in the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals who vie with one another in recitative and aria; as the heroine who holds them both in a passion of suspense while she weaves the enchantment of her trills and runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the divinely impossible thing which defies nature and triumphs over prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss Gothic matter? The thing is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded in there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, through all those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs and sidewalk ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was in Venice, forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar that was both impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy, slippery steps by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness of the tide was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps, and it gurgled and chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to another; and when I got to my box--a box was two florins, but I could afford it--I looked down on just this scene, over a pit full of Austrian officers and soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling in the other boxes and half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of the Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with its oppression and tobacco, for the officers smoked between the acts. It was only the more intensely Italian for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and when I see those impossible people on the stage, and hear them sing, I breathe an atmosphere that is like the ether beyond the pull of our planet, and is as far from all its laws and limitations." * * * * * Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of his phrase. "It's astonishing," he said, "how little art needs in order to give the effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no sense of life. The realists," he went on, "were only half right." "Isn't it better to be half right than wrong altogether?" we interposed. "I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I find in very defective art of all kinds that mere _look_ of the real thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the other year, about the vaudeville shows--? "Hush!" we entreated. "Don't bring those low associations into this high presence." "Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the region of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which were graced with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I might have believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from life had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them out of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less precious would have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened the soul. I realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had required any 'stunt' which embodied them to be altogether composed of touches of truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little radium; the captured sunshine burns with the fires that heat the summers of the farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous substance as if it were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need, but all we can endure in any one example of art." "You are lucky if you get so much," we said, "even at a vaudeville show." "Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course, it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and gives that delightful caper 'Which signifies indifference, indifference, Which signifies indifference,' and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks into the lyrical lament 'Neppur mi guarda!' she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old, worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?" "We never bet," we virtuously replied. "We are principled against it in all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead." "Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so indiscriminate," the reader thoughtfully observed. "But aren't you," we asked, "getting rather far away from the question whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the pleasure of inexperience--whether later operas don't give more joy than the first?" "Was that the question?" he returned. "I thought it was whether Italian opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land." "Well, make it that," we responded, tolerantly. "Oh no," he met us half-way. "But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and Naples, or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so little. It's the most universal form of art." "Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?" Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: "I think it is more immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas. 'Cavalleria Rusticana' was as much at home with us in its first year as 'L'Elisir d'Amore' is now in its sixtieth or seventieth." "But it isn't," we protested, "denationalized. What can be more intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?" "You're right," the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest, in dealing with the writer. "It is the operatic audience, not the opera, which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land, listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past." * * * * * The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and murmured and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease to depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority to our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these is the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill its mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one another in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively the scene is intensely responsive to the New York spirit, and objectively it is most expressive of the American character in that certain surface effect of thin brilliancy which remains with the spectator the most memorable expression of its physiognomy. No doubt something like this was in the reader's mind when he resumed, with a sigh: "It's rather pathetic how much more magnificently Italian opera has always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It had to emigrate in order to better its fortunes; it could soon be better seen if not heard outside of Italy than in its native country. It was only where it could be purely conventional as well as ideal that it could achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard fight for its primacy among the amusements that flatter the pride as well as charm the sense. You remember how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator wrote to him in scorn of the affected taste of 'the town' when the town in London first began to forsake the theatre and to go to the opera?" "Yes, they were very severe on the town for pretending to a pleasure imparted in a language it could not understand a word of. They had all the reason on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is independent of reason, and the town felt that for its own part it could dispense with reason, too. The town can always do that. It would not go seriously or constantly to English opera, though ever so much invited to do so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. Isn't it strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a fashion, while Italian opera remains a passion? We had it at its best, didn't we, in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which were the most charming things in the world; but they charmed only for a while, and it may be doubted whether they ever greatly charmed the town. The manager of the Metropolitan replaces German with Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but could he find his account in it if he put on 'The Mikado' instead of 'L'Elisir d'Amore'? If he did so, the town would not be here. Why?" The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, but perhaps he was not; other readers may judge from his reply, which, when it came, was this: "There seems to be something eternally as well as universally pleasing in Italian opera; but what the thing is, or how much of a thing it is, I wouldn't undertake to say. Possibly the fault of English opera is its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous mood or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest deals with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it needn't be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn't obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more than it is obliged to convince. It's the most absolute thing in the world; and from its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that delightful where Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a shrug and a waft of his left hand to the house, went off in order to come back and give his aria with more effect? That was a touch of naturalness not in the scheme of the opera." "Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it." "Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve; you're only desired to enjoy!" "Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of actuality, and it jarred." "Perhaps you're right," the reader sighed, but he added: "It was charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have done just as Caruso did." At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry. They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the quality of "the town" which had gone to Italian opera from the first. In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been lighted by the smoky torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its electric autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the difference was not enough to break the tradition. There was something in the aspect of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each, which struck the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any American crowd, but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, for the general reader is much more than generally a woman, and she may not like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending by supposing that the fact can be true only of the most elect socially, but in any case the fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than the women. They were not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we may use a comparative hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress. How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted as ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast average of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and perhaps, in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or perhaps the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value of those rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups. The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true level, when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him, made himself heard in a musing suspiration: "There was something missing. Can you think what it was?" "Yes, certainly; there was no ballet." "Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You remember," the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage, and have the great planetary splendor of the _prima ballerina_ come swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing vertical in the act. Why couldn't we have had that to-night? Yes, we have been cruelly wronged." "But you don't give the true measure of our injury. You forget that supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a shimmer of kisses, and catches the _prima ballerina_ at the waist, and tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house. Think of our having been defrauded of that!" "Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded." The reader was silent for a while, and then he said: "I wonder if anybody except the choreographic composer ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were you ever able to follow it?" "Certainly not. It is bad enough following the opera. All that one wishes to do in one case is to look, just as in the other case all one wishes to do is to listen. We would as lief try to think out the full meaning of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as to mix our joy in the opera or the ballet with any severe question of their purport." VI THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS The satirical reader introduced himself with a gleam in his eye which kindled apprehension in the unreal editor's breast, and perhaps roused in him a certain guilty self-consciousness. "I didn't know," the reader said, "that you were such a well-appointed _arbiter elegantiarum_." "Meaning our little discourse last month on the proper form of addressing letters?" the editor boldly grappled with the insinuation. "Oh yes; etiquette is part of our function. We merely hadn't got round to the matter before. You liked our remarks?" "Very much," our visitor said, with the fine irony characteristic of him. "All the more because I hadn't expected that sort of thing of you. What I have expected of you hitherto was something more of the major morality." "But the large-sized morals did not enter into that scheme. We deal at times with the minor morality, too, if the occasion demands, as we have suggested. You should not have been surprised to find politeness, as well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. Naturally, of course, we prefer the larger-sized morals as questions for discussion. Had you one of the larger-sized questions of morality to present?" "I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of manners." "For example." "The experience of one of those transatlantic celebrities who seem to be rather multiplying upon us of late, and who come here with a proclamation of their worship of American women ready to present, as if in print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and who then proceed to find fault with our civilization on every other point, almost before they drive up to their hotels." "But isn't that rather an old story?" "I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests us; we are never free from that longing for a flattered appearance in the eyes of others which we so seldom achieve. This last, or next to last, celebrity--in the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succession--seems to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some dairymaids in the milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I didn't understand the situation very clearly. The lady must have been a lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with dairymaids in it; but in any case the fact is that when the lady entered with the celebrity the maids remained seated, where they were grouped together, instead of rising and standing in the presence of their superiors, as they would have done in the hemisphere that the celebrity came from." "Well, what came of it?" "Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did not rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that this was the American ideal." "In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or Bohemian dairymaids," we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused us from our muse with a sharp "What?" we explained, "Of course they were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not be dairymaids." "True," our friend assented, "but all the same you admit that they were behaving from an American ideal?" "Yes." "Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity doesn't like it--on very high grounds." "The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work to those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the inferiors?" "No, the politeness due from one class to another." "Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is very interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going into the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed or nodded to them or said, 'Good-day, young ladies'?" "No, that is not of record." "Their human quality, their human equality, being altogether out of the question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should they have recognized the human quality of their visitors?" Our satirical reader was silent, and we went on. "There is something very droll in all that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even outraged, by the ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, over and above the extortionate charge of the house, and who gathered up your quarter or half-dollar and slipped it into his pocket without a word, or even an inarticulate murmur, of thanks?" "Often. Outraged is no word for it." "Yes," we assented, feeling our way delicately. "Has it ever happened that in the exceptional case where the waiter has said, 'Thank you very much,' or the like, you have responded with a cordial, 'You're welcome,' or, 'Not at all'?" "Certainly not." "Why not?" "Because--because--those are terms of politeness between--" Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively supplied the word, "Equals? There are always difficulties between unequals. But try this, some day, and see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter. It isn't infallible, but the chances are he will feel that you have treated him like a man, and will do or say something to show his feeling: he will give a twitch to your under-coat when he has helped you on with your top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We have even tried saying 'You are welcome' to a beggar. It's astonishing how they like it. By-the-way, have you the habit of looking at your waiter when he comes to take your order; or do you let him stand facing you, without giving him a glance above the lower button of his poor, greasy waistcoat?" "No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism of the establishment." "That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. We ourselves used to act upon it, but often, when we found him long in bringing our order, we were at a loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready some time during the evening; and occasionally we have blown up the wrong waiter, who did not fail to bring us to shame for our error." "They do look so confoundedly alike," our visitor said, thoughtfully. "We others look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they studied us as little as we study them, if they ignored us as contemptuously as we do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, the next man would be as likely as we to get our dinner." "They are paid to study us," our visitor urged. "Ah, _paid_! The intercourse of unequals is a commercial transaction, but when the inferiors propose to make it purely so the superiors object: they want something to boot, something thrown in, some show of respect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those dairymaids did not consider that they were paid to stand up when their employer and the visiting celebrity came into the milk-room, and so, unless they were civilly recognized--we don't say they weren't in this case--they thought they would do some of the ignoring, too. It is surprising how much the superiors think they ought to get for their money from the inferiors in that commercial transaction. For instance, they think they buy the right to call their inferiors by their first names, but they don't think they sell a similar right with regard to themselves. They call them Mary and John, but they would be surprised and hurt if the butler and waitress addressed them as Mary and John. Yet there is no _reason_ for their surprise. Do you remember in that entrancing and edifying comedy of 'Arms and the Man'--Mr. Bernard Shaw's very best, as we think--the wild Bulgarian maid calls the daughter of the house by her Christian name? 'But you mustn't do that,' the mother of the house instructs her. 'Why not?' the girl demands. '_She calls me Louka._'" "Capital!" our friend agreed. "But, of course, Shaw doesn't mean it." "You never can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall look where you stand." Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. "Aren't you taking the matter a little too seriously?" "Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to be more serious than we were about addressing letters properly. This is the larger-sized morality, the real No. 11 sort, and you don't like it, though you said you expected it of us." "Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn't expected it. But if you're in earnest you must admit that the lower classes with us are abominably rude. Now, I have the fancy--perhaps from living on the Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the habit--of saying good-morning to the maid or the butler when I come down. But they never seem to like it, and I can't get a good-morning back unless I dig it out of them. I don't want them to treat me as a superior; I only ask to be treated as an equal." "We have heard something like that before, but we doubt it. What you really want is to have your condescension recognized; they _feel_ that, if they don't _know_ it. Besides, their manners have been formed by people who don't ask good-morning from them; they are so used to being treated as if they were not there that they cannot realize they _are_ there. We have heard city people complain of the wane of civility among country people when they went to them in the summer to get the good of their country air. They say that the natives no longer salute them in meeting, but we never heard that this happened when they first saluted the natives. Try passing the time of day with the next farmer you meet on a load of wood, and you will find that the old-fashioned civility is still to be had for the asking. But it won't be offered without the asking; the American who thinks from your dress and address that you don't regard him as an equal will not treat you as one at the risk of a snub; and he is right. As for domestics--or servants, as we insolently call them--their manners are formed on their masters', and are often very bad. But they are not always bad. We, too, have had that fancy of yours for saying good-morning when we come down; it doesn't always work, but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours has tried some such civility at others' houses: at his host's house when the door was opened to him, arriving for dinner, and he was gloomily offered a tiny envelope with the name of the lady he was to take out. At first it surprised, but when it was imagined to be well meant it was apparently liked; in extreme cases it led to note of the weather; the second or third time at the same house it established something that would have passed, with the hopeful spectator, for a human relation. Of course, you can't carry this sort of thing too far. You can be kind, but you must not give the notion that you do not know your place." "Ah! You draw the line," our friend exulted. "I thought so. But where?" "At the point where you might have the impression that you respected butlers, when you merely loved your fellow-men. You see the difference?" "But isn't loving your fellow-men enough? Why should you respect butlers?" "To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn't you? What is it in domestic employ that degrades, that makes us stigmatize it as 'service'? As soon as you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must often have seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for chauffeurs, who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental attitude of the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject deference. But there have been some really heroic, some almost seraphic, efforts to readjust the terms of a relation that seems to have something essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life now passed forever, when the daughter of one family 'lived out' in another, she ate with the family and shared alike with them. She was their help, but she became their hindrance when she insisted upon the primitive custom after 'waiting at table' had passed the stage when the dishes were all set down, and the commensals 'did their own stretching.' Heroes and seraphs did their utmost to sweeten and soften the situation, but the unkind tendency could not be stayed. The daughter of the neighbor who 'lived out' became 'the hired girl,' and then she became the waitress, especially when she was of neighbors beyond seas; and then the game was up. Those who thought humanely of the predicament and wished to live humanely in it tried one thing and tried another. That great soul of H.D.L., one of the noblest and wisest of our economic reformers, now gone to the account which any might envy him, had a usage which he practised with all guests who came to his table. Before they sat down he or his wife said, looking at the maid who was to serve the dinner, 'This is our friend, Miss Murphy'; and then the guests were obliged in some sort to join the host and hostess in recognizing the human quality of the attendant. It was going rather far, but we never heard that any harm came of it. Some thought it rather odd, but most people thought it rather nice." "And you advocate the general adoption of such a custom?" our friend asked, getting back to the sarcasm of his opening note. "Suppose a larger dinner, a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters? That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, which only the more advanced were invited to; but it wouldn't work with the average retarded society woman or clubman." "What good thing works with _them_?" we retorted, spiritedly. "But no, the custom would not be readily adopted even among enlightened thinkers. We do not insist upon it; the men and the maids might object; they might not like knowing the kind of people who are sometimes asked to quite good houses. To be sure, they are not obliged to recognize them out of the house." "But what," our friend asked, "has all this got to do with the question of 'the decent respect' due from domestics, as you prefer to call them, to their employers?" "As in that case of the dairymaids which we began with? But why was any show of respect due from them? Was it nominated in the bond that for their four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when their 'mistress' and her 'company' entered the room? Why, in fine, should any human being respect another, seeing what human beings generally are? We may love one another, but _respect_! No, those maids might, and probably did, love their mistress; but they felt that they could show their love as well sitting down as standing up. They would not stand up to show their love for one another." "Then you think there is some love lost between the master and man or mistress and maid nowadays," our beaten antagonist feebly sneered. "The masters and mistresses may not, but the men and maids may, have whole treasures of affection ready to lavish at the first sign of a desire for it; they do not say so, for they are not very articulate. In the mean time the masters and mistresses want more than they have paid for. They want honor as well as obedience, respect as well as love, the sort of thing that money used to buy when it was worth more than it is now. Well, they won't get it. They will get it less and less as time goes on. Whatever the good new times may bring, they won't bring back the hypocritical servility of the good old times. They--" We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had faded back into the millions of readers whom we are always addressing in print. VII UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no conception of his frequency, and who was able to supply from his imagination the welcome which his host did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. sent in the delusion that the editor of the Chair was the editor of the magazine. "I have got a subject for you," he said. "Have you ever heard," we retorted, "of carrying coals to Newcastle? What made you think we wanted a subject?" "Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your disquisitions. I should think you would feel the want yourself. Your readers all feel it for you." "Well, we can tell you," we said, "that there could be no greater mistake. We are turning away subjects from these premises every day. They come here, hat in hand, from morning till night, asking to be treated; and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, begging for the merest pittance of a notice, for the slightest allusion, for the most cursory mention. Do you know that there are at least two hundred thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers, morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of monarchies because they always gave women more recognition, more honor, than republics?" "No, I haven't," our visitor said. "Well, it happened," we affirmed. "But every nook and cranny of our brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a moment's consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must have felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance." From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to nurse one of his knees between his clasped hands. "But if," he asked, "you had been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?" "There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that," we replied. "We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and titles and the splendor of court life." "Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your metaphors?" our visitor asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country. "In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded mixing his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to keep his motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would have remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same time this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position taken by that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly acknowledged that there was a great deal to be said for it, and that republics had hitherto been remiss in not officially acknowledging the social primacy of woman, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a back seat in public affairs. We should then have appealed to our thoughtful readers to give the matter their most earnest attention, and with the conservatism of all serious inquirers we should have urged them to beware of bestowing the suffrage on a class of the community disposed so boldly to own its love of the splendors of the state. Would it be sage, would it be safe, to indulge with democratic equality a sex which already had its eyes on the flattering inequality of monarchy? Perhaps at this point we should digress a little and mention Montesquieu, whose delightful _Spirit of Laws_ we have lately been reading. We should remind the reader, who would like to think he had read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes between the principles on which the three sorts of government are founded: civic virtue being the base of a republic, honor the ruling motive in the subjects of a monarchy, and fear the dominant passion in the slaves of a despotism. Then we should ask whether men were prepared to intrust the reins of government to women when they had received this timely intimation that women were more eager to arrive splendidly than to bring the car of state in safety to the goal. How long would it be, we should poignantly demand, before in passing from the love of civic virtue to the ambition of honor, we should sink in the dread of power?" Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed by the treatment of the subject here outlined as we had been intending and expecting he should be. He asked, after a moment, "Don't you think that would be rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter?" "Oh," we returned, "we have light methods of treating the weightiest questions. There is the semi-ironical vein, for instance, which you must have noticed a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better suited to the occasion." "Yes?" our visitor suggested. "Yes," we repeated. "In that vein we should question at the start whether any such praise of monarchy had been spoken, and then we should suppose it had, and begin playfully to consider what the honors and distinctions were that women had enjoyed under monarchy. We should make a merit at the start of throwing up the sponge for republics. We should own they had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women justice. We should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of woman in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the Athenian women were not only not in politics, but were not even in society, except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and we should freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspiration of the men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well as in the field. We should recognize the sort of middle station women held in the Roman republic, where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental seclusion of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in competitive athletics like the Spartan daughters. We should note that if a Spartan mother had the habit of bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Roman mother expressed a finer sense of her importance in the state when she intimated that it was enough for her to be the parent of the Gracchi. But we should not insist upon our point, which, after all, would not prove that the decorative quality of women in public life was recognized in Rome as it always has been in monarchies, and we should recur to the fact that this was the point which had been made against all republics. Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have to own that Venice, with her ducal figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de Pompadour, following one another in brilliant succession, and sharing not only the glory but the authority of the line of princes whose affections they ruled. Of course, we should have to use an ironical gravity in concealing their real quality and the character of the courts where they flourished; and in comparing the womanless obscurity of the English Commonwealth with the feminine effulgence of the Restoration, we should seek a greater effect in our true aim by concealing the name and nature of the ladies who illustrated the court of Charles II." "And what would your true aim be?" our visitor pressed, with an unseemly eagerness which we chose to snub by ignoring it. "As for the position of women in despotisms," we continued, "we should confess that it seemed to be as ignobly subordinate as that of women in republics. They were scarcely more conspicuous than the Citizenesses who succeeded in the twilight of the One and Indivisible the marquises and comtesses and duchesses of the Ancien Régime, unless they happened, as they sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without going back to the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at the characters of Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with a look askance at the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial majesty of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would concern us no more than the great, good Victoria of England, for they were the heads of monarchies and not of despotisms; but we should subtly insinuate that the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere adorned by ladies of the distinction so common as hardly to be distinction in the annals of kings and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew. "At this point we should digress a little, but we should pursue our inquiry in the same satirical tenor. We hope we are not of those moralists who assume a merit in denouncing the international marriages which have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and some to think favorably of a monarchy as affording greater scope for their social genius. But we should ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting such a psychological study, how it was that, while American girls married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, almost none, if any, of their brothers married the sisters or daughters of such noblemen. It could not be that they were not equally rich and therefore equally acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter of conscience not to marry ladies of title? Were our men, then, more patriotic than our women? Were men naturally more republican than women? "This question would bring us to the pass where we should more or less drop the mocking mask. We should picture a state of things in which we had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real sovereign and a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition. With a sudden severity we should ask where, since they could not all be of the highest rank, our women would consent to strike the procession of precedence? How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the deference due their sex, with that pride of womanhood which our republican chivalry has cherished in them, they would like, when they went to court, to stand, for hours perhaps, while a strong young man, or a fat old man, or a robust man in the prime of life, remained seated in the midst of them? Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst scenes of trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the highest social function in the land, with not even a hanging-strap to support their weariness, their weakness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? Would the glory of being part of a spectacle testifying in our time to the meanness and rudeness of the past be a compensation for the aching legs and breaking backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes of a court dress?" "That would be a telling stroke," our visitor said, "but wouldn't it be a stroke retold? It doesn't seem to me very new." "No matter," we said. "The question is not what a thing is, but how it is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have answered." "And is that all you could make of it?" "By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, so no subject is ever exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little; that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it; but we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of their husbands and fathers, or the brothers of one another, toward the state. We should make them observe that the actual citizen was not immediately concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; that parties and constituencies were not made up of one's fellow-aristocrats, but were mostly composed of plebeians very jealous of any show of distinction, and that, in spite of the displeasures of political association with them, there was no present disposition in American men to escape to monarchy from them. We cannot, we should remind them, all be of good family; that takes time, or has taken it; and without good family the chances of social eminence, or even prominence, are small at courts. Distinction is more evenly distributed in a democracy like ours; everybody has a chance at it. To be sure, it is not the shining honor bestowed by kings, but when we remember how often the royal hand needs washing we must feel that the honor from it may have the shimmer of putrescence. This is, of course, the extreme view of the case; and the condition of the royal hand is seldom scrutinized by those who receive or those who witness the honor bestowed. But the honor won from one's fellow-citizens is something worth having, though it is not expressed in a ribbon or a title. Such honor, it seems probable, will soon be the reward of civic virtue in women as well as men, and we hope women will not misprize it. The great end to be achieved for them by the suffrage is self-government, but with this goes the government of others, and that is very pleasant. The head of our state may be a woman, chosen at no far-distant election; and though it now seems droll to think of a woman being president, it will come in due time to seem no more so than for a woman to be a queen or an empress. At any rate, we must habituate our minds to the idea; we must realize it with the hope it implies that no woman will then care socially to outshine her sister; at the most she will be emulous of her in civic virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of republics. We understand that this is already the case in New Zealand and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the effect of suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed, because there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving principle in a monarchy. And now," we turned lightly to our visitor, "what is the topic you wish us to treat?" "Oh," he said, rising, "you have put it quite out of my head; I've been so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in your treatment of the theme your irony ends?" "Where yours begins," we neatly responded. VIII HAVING JUST GOT HOME The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not, of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority, so involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top-hat, which was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost the whiteness of its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves appeared most in a certain consciousness of novel impressions, which presently escaped from him in the critical tone of his remarks. "Well," we said, with our accustomed subtlety, "how do you find your fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months' absence?" "Don't ask me yet," he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. "I am trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in time. But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions." "You find some relief from the summer's accumulation of sky-scrapers amid the aching void of our manners?" we suggested. "Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won't find the English objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But you are all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the bottomless pit with us." "You think we get worse?" "I don't say that, exactly. How could we?" "It might be difficult." "I will tell you what," he said, after a moment's muse. "There does not seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their home civility; but their children, their grandchildren, pick up our impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry pistols instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing." "Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since your return?" we inquired, caustically. "I have been careful not to give offence." "Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the minors of foreign extraction?" "I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I am only saying that I have found our manners merely worse quantitatively, or in the proportion of our increasing population. But this prompt succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old Americans is truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed--" "Oh, you landed at Boston!" we exclaimed, as if this accounted for everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. "If you had landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered in the same degree?" We added, inconsequently enough, "We always supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining of." "And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no doubt national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I found much alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had forgotten. I moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the most characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be no doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race-suicidal stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our expression of our most national mood has acquired a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of all degrees, unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you remember _The House with the Green Shutters_--I can never think of the book without a pang of personal grief for the too-early death of the author--how the bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis of that. It is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin as that of those terrible villagers: it comes from that perfect, that familiar understanding, that penetrating reciprocal intelligence, of people who have lived intimately in one another's lives, as people in small communities do. We are a small community thrown up large, as they say of photographs; we are not so much a nation as a family; we each of us know just what any other, or all others, of us intend to the finest shade of meaning, by the lightest hint." "Ah!" we breathed, quite as if we were a character in a novel which had inspired the author with a new phrase. "Now you are becoming interesting. Should you mind giving a few instances?" "Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the friendly ironies began for us as soon as we were out of the more single-minded keeping of the ship's stewards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and, after extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had delivered us over to the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times carried the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they helped put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government. I do not suppose that an exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly fulfilled." "Aren't you rather straining to make out a case? We have heard of travellers who had a very different experience." "At New York, yes, where we are infected with the foreign singleness more than at Boston. Perhaps a still livelier illustration of our ironical temperament was given me once before when I brought some things into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which the officers joined me for a moment in trying to make out were more than two hundred years old; but failing, jocosely levied thirty per cent. ad valorem on them; and then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per cent. on a medallion of myself done by an American sculptor, who had forgotten to verify an invoice of it before the American consul at the port of shipment." "It seems to us," we suggested, "that this was a piece of dead earnest." "The fact was earnest," our friend maintained, "but the spirit in which it was realized was that of a brotherly persuasion that I would see the affair in its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a joke that cost me thirty dollars." "Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction." "Possibly," our friend said, after a moment's muse, "I am letting my sense of another incident color the general event too widely. But before I come to that I wish to allege some proofs of the national irony which I received on two occasions when landing in New York. On the first of these occasions the commissioner who came aboard the steamer, to take the sworn declaration of the passengers that they were not smugglers, recognized my name as that of a well-known financier who had been abroad for a much-needed rest, and personally welcomed me home in such terms that I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties levied on others. When we landed I found that this good friend had looked out for me to the extent of getting me the first inspector, and he had guarded my integrity to the extent of committing me to a statement in severalty of the things my family had bought abroad, so that I had to pay twenty-eight dollars on my daughter's excess of the hundred dollars allowed free, although my wife was bringing in only seventy-five dollars' value, and I less than fifty." "You mean that you had meant to lump the imports and escape the tax altogether?" we asked. "Something like that." "And the officer's idea of caressing irony was to let you think you could escape equally well by being perfectly candid?" "Something like that." "And what was the other occasion?" "Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs officer, and he said it would be all right, and then furnished me an inspector who opened every piece of my baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked." We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned appreciatively. "And what was that supreme instance of caressing irony which you experienced in Boston?" we pursued. "Ah, _there_ is something I don't think you can question. But I didn't experience it; I merely observed it. We were coming down the stairs to take our hack at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady who was coming down with us found the footing a little insecure. The man in charge bade her be careful, and then she turned upon him in severe reproof, and scolded him well. She told him that he ought to have those stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be killed one of these days. 'Well, ma'am,' he said, 'I shouldn't like that. I was in a railroad accident once. But I tell you what you do. The next time you come over here, you just telephone me, and I'll have these steps fixed. Or, I'll tell you: you just write me a letter and let me know exactly how you want 'em fixed, and I'll see to it myself.'" "That was charming," we had to own, "and it was of an irony truly caressing, as you say. Do you think it was exactly respectful?" "It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as much as any of us, or as the humorist himself." "Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked her," we assented. "But tell us, Croesus," we continued, in the form of Socratic dialogue, "did you find at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say is apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens? We have been in the habit of going to Boston when we wished to refresh our impression that we had a native country; when we wished to find ourselves in the midst of the good old American faces, which were sometimes rather arraigning in their expression, but not too severe for the welfare of a person imaginably demoralized by a New York sojourn." Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. "I don't think you could do that now with any great hope of success. I should say that the predominant face in Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands of the Irish. And with reason, if the Irish are in the majority." "In New York it has long been the same without the reason," we dreamily suggested. "In Boston," our friend went on, without regarding us, "the Catholics outvote the Protestants, and not because they vote oftener, but because there are more of them." "And the heavens do not fall?" "It is not a question of that; it is a question of whether the Irish are as amiable and civil as the Americans, now they are on top." "We always supposed they were one of the most amiable and civil of the human races. Surely you found them so?" "I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the courage to test the fact. I would not have liked to try a joke with one of them as I would at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces did not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and I may have misread them." "Oh, probably not," we lightly mocked. "They were taking it out of you for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the Black Cromwell." "Oh, very likely," our friend said, in acceptance of our irony, because he liked irony so much. "But, all the same, I thought it a pity, as I think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have spoiled them by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude as the Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty." "There is something in what you say," we agreed, "if you will allow us to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional evil." "Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers, with the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact, so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a great stir in its day. Do you know it?--_Home as Found?_" "We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general censure?" "Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them, and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans who have not been away. The author's unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit. Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now: I mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his _Howadji in Syria_ and his _Nile Notes of a Howadji_." "We must read it," we said, with the readiness of one who never intends to read the book referred to. "What you say of it is certainly very suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence and deference in which the Hajii were once held?" "Well, they may have overworked their superiority." "Or?" we prompted. "The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point where we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously." "And that is?" "There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter to criticise than to be criticised." "And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your countrymen in the present interview?" Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the crown, and blew a speck of dust from it. "One reasons to a conclusion," he said, "not from it." IX NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got it. "Well," he said, "have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to 'pour the day' on mine? Or hadn't you any meaning in what you said? I've sometimes suspected it." The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that you stand and deliver, though we were aware of a large, vague wisdom in our words. But we perceived that our friend had no intention of helping us out, and on the whole we thought it best to temporize. "In the first place," we said, "we should like to know what impression New York made on you when you arrived here, if there was any room left on your soul-surface after the image of Boston had been imprinted there." No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, even when he is trying to corner a fellow-man. This principle of human nature perhaps accounts for the frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite of the proverb; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleasures of autobiography, and while they are reminded of this and that the suspects escape the detectives. Our friend gladly paused to reply: "I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it was wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like it? On some accounts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is enough; but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after arriving from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for something suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no question of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first glimpse of Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central Station. But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, and found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and found it sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London only in not being like any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude. So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New York is oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to Londoners. Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and in New York one might call it--" He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the greater convenience of mentally visioning. "What?" we impatiently prompted. "I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?" "We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?" "I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the other measures of the city's extent." [Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET] "This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West Side?" "I don't, altogether," our friend replied. "Especially I don't leave out the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But there is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about the fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all soaring beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the summit of a very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself arrested before a shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart of New York.' It was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron--heaps, heights, pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms, gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire which remains among the ruins after a great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of scrap-iron--heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal." "You strain for a phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediæval Florence, mediæval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it." "And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were levelled, that Florence became fair and Siena superb. I should not object to a New York of demolished sky-scrapers. They would make fine ruins; I would like to see them as ruins. In fact, now I think of it, 'The Heart of New York' reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder I didn't think of that before. But if you want sublimity, the distinguishing quality of New York, as I feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must take that stretch of Fifth Avenue from a motor-bus top." "But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky-scrapers!" we lamented the man's inconsistency. "Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other block. There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 'tempestuous petticoats' of the women, has sunk back into a measurable inconspicuity, so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with the prospect and no longer form the barbarous architectural chaos of lower New York. I don't object to their being mainly business houses and hotels; I think that it is much more respectable than being palaces or war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my motor-bus, I thrill with their grandeur and glow with their condescension. Yes, they condescend; and although their tall white flanks climb in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, and amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, or to dwarf the adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of New York, poor old Trinity looks driven into the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded back from them." "Come!" we said. "This is beginning to be something like." "In November," our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of praise, "there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines of Keats: 'His soul shall know the sadness of her night, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'" We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. "Explain, O Howadji!" "I would rather not, as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London 'block,' but there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don't ask me to explain! I would rather not!" he said, and we submitted. He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point. "Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year's absence, in this novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population, and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet." Our friend laughed in self-derision, as he went on. "I remember when we first began to have the electric trolleys--" "Trams, we believe you call them," we insinuated. "Not when I'm on this side," he retorted, and he resumed: "I used to be afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I particularly took my life in my hand, and my 'courage in both hands.' Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from the wet: they are like gentle eddies--soft, clear, slow tides--where one may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray's Frenchmen were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is astonishing how they have multiplied--they have multiplied even beyond the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the norm, and the horse-cab is the--the--the----" He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed "Abnorm?" "_Say_ abnorm! It is hideous, but I don't know that it is wrong. Where was I?" "You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue. We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New York,' with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities?" [Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS] "The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the party-colored 'buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at every crossing--I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark in its pristine--I think pristine is the word; it used to be--glory. But even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. _I_ knew Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull. There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always holiday--" "Enough of streets!" we cried, impatiently. "Now, what of men? What of that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the 'sledded Polack,' the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely outnumber us?" Our friend smiled thoughtfully. "Why, that is very curious! Do you know that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its old supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that sublimity! I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by the courts amenable to our wise State law against _felo de se_, but in the modern Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed its old-time sovereignty. I don't say that there are not other faces, other tongues than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from it! But I do say it is a sense of the American face, the American tongue, which prevails. Once more, after long exile in the streets of our own metropolis, you find yourself in an American city. Your native features, your native accents, have returned in such force from abroad, or have thronged here in such multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St. Louises, and San Franciscos of the West, that you feel as much at home in Fifth Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysées, or on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very curious." "Perhaps," we suggested, after a moment's reflection, "it isn't true." X CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH "One of my surprises on Getting Back," the more or less imaginary interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to the Easy Chair, "is the cheapness of the means of living in New York." At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. "Stay not a moment, Howadji," we exclaimed, "in removing our deep-seated prepossession that New York is the most expensive place on the planet." But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse, from which he broke at last to say: "I have long been touched by the pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make this town their summer resort?" We intimated that want of penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. "They put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the solstice' they find invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I have fled from." "Very well," we said, dryly, "you have established the fact that the Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began by boasting?" "Ah, I was coming back to that," the Howadji said, with a glow of inspiration. "I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I'm not sure they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as there. Except for the 'monuments,' in which we include all ancient and modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer avails. The daughters know the far better time they will have at home, and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and in our civilization this, you know, is very far. But it was always held a prime reason and convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and even London, were so much cheaper than New York that it was a waste of money to stay at home." "Well, wasn't it?" we impatiently demanded. "I will not say, for I needn't, as yet. There were always at the same time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals as we lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is really relevant is the question whether New York isn't cheaper now." "We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you began by saying that New York _is_ cheaper." "I can't believe I was so crude," the Howadji returned, with a fine annoyance. "That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped to without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact much more delicately, and I don't know but what by your haste you have shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I'll own that the great stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter, with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house is more expensive and more difficult to 'run,' but even with the cost of the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach that of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to be said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor of it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be; it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send them up. I won't prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork, poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer's on demand; and they will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris, less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston's favor for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford. Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with the refuse of the mills--the Mills of the Gods--abounding in our city and its dependencies. "I don't know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices in their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean the restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but those modester places which consult the means of the careful middle class to which I belong. As you know, I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I have a room there, and that is my address----" "We know," we derisively murmured. "So few of our visitors can afford it." "I can't afford it myself," our friend said. "But I save a little by breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week's product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from Europe think first class, I get a 'combination' breakfast of fresh eggs, fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong or Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris or Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?" "A franc fifty," we remembered. "And in London for the same with eggs you paid one and six, didn't you?" "Very likely," we assented. "Well, then, you begin to see. There are several good restaurants quite near that good hotel where I get the same combination breakfast for the same price; and if I go to one of those shining halls which you find in a score of places, up and down Broadway and the side streets, I get it for twenty-five cents. But though those shining halls glare at you with roofs and walls of stainless tile and glass, and tables of polished marble, their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the general demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea for any money; I can only get Oolong; otherwise I must take a cup of their excellent coffee. If I wander from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything in the old American range of dishes for five or ten cents a portion, and the quality and quantity are both all I can ask. As I have learned upon inquiry, the great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and good butter: I like to cut from the thick slice of butter under the perfect cube of ice, better than to have my butter pawed into balls or cut into shavings, as they serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer having a small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-à-vis on the chair opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. In those shining halls I am elbowed by three others at my polished marble table; but if there were more room I should never object to the company. It is the good, kind, cleanly, comely American average, which is the best company in the world, with a more than occasional fine head, and faces delicately sculptured by thought and study. I address myself fearlessly to the old and young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I might get from the self-respectful maids or matrons who resort to the shining halls, severally or collectively, if I ventured upon the same freedom with them. I must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely as I do for the most part, but sometimes I have had to make my tacit criticisms; and I am glad that I forbore one night with a friendly young man at my elbow, who had just got his order of butter-cakes--" "Butter-cakes?" we queried. "That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product of the griddle, which they serve very hot, and open to close again upon a large lump of butter. For two of those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should not have needed to break my fast the next morning. But he fearlessly consumed it, and while he ate he confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our shining hall and its guests he laughed and said he came regularly, and he always saw people there who were registered at his hotel: they found it good and they found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York abounds in tables d'hôte of a cheapness unapproached in the European capitals?" We said we had heard so; at the same time we tried to look as if we always dined somewhere in society, but Heaven knows whether we succeeded. "The combination breakfast is a form of table d'hôte; and at a very attractive restaurant in a good place I have seen such a breakfast--fruit, cereal, eggs, rolls, and coffee--offered for fifteen cents. I have never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those who do not I should still hold worthy of esteem if they ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I have also seen placarded a 'business men's lunch' for fifteen cents, which also I have not tried; I am not a business man. I make bold to say, however, that I often go for my lunch or my dinner to a certain Italian place on a good avenue, which I will not locate more definitely lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and sixty cents, '_vino compreso_.' The material is excellent, and the treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not deny a Merry Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though often fair and young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look as kind and harmless as the circle which I used to frequent farther down-town at a fifty-cent French table d'hôte, but with a _bouillabaisse_ added which I should not, but for my actual experiences, have expected to buy for any money. But there are plenty of Italian and French tables d'hôte for the same price all over town. If you venture outside of the Latin race, you pay dearer and you fare worse, unless you go to those shining halls which I have been praising. If you go to a German place, you get grosser dishes and uncouth manners for more money; I do not know why that amiable race should be so dear and rude in its feeding-places, but that is my experience." "You wander, you wander!" we exclaimed. "Why should we care for your impressions of German cooking and waiting, unless they go to prove or disprove that living in New York is cheaper than in the European capitals?" "Perhaps I was going to say that even those Germans are not so dear as they are in the fatherland, though rude. They do not tend much if at all to tables d'hôte, but the Italians and the French who do, serve you a better meal for a lower price than you would get in Paris, or Rome, or Naples. There the prevalent ideal is five francs, with neither wine nor coffee included. I'll allow that the cheap table d'hôte is mainly the affair of single men and women, and does not merit the consideration I've given it. If it helps a young couple to do with one maid, or with none, instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living. Service is costly and it is greedy, and except in large households its diet is the same as the family's, so that anything which reduces it is a great saving. But the table d'hôte which is cheap for one or two is not cheap for more, and it is not available if there are children. Housing and raw-provisioning and serving are the main questions, and in Europe the first and last are apparently much less expensive. Marketing is undoubtedly cheaper with us, and if you count in what you get with the newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the rent is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its elementary bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the apartment to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be supplied with hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the rest of it." "But," we said, "you are showing that we are more comfortably housed than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative cheapness." "I was coming to that even in the matter of housing--" "It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least another month." "But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to Europe by that time?" "Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more." XI WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of _Home as Found_, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was up, and he began without a moment's delay: "But of course the lion in the way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap; furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist." "Don't be so breathless," we interposed. "You will only be allowed to talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might as well take your ease." "That is true," the Howadji reflected. "But I am full of my subject, and I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get more in, by talking fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on, "has been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative housing which you may have heard of." We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on. "The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of land was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which would carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or no cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted plan worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving studio which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward division, and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of one æsthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and now there are eight or ten of these co-operative studio apartment-houses in different parts of the town." "With the same fortunate experience for the owners?" we queried, with suppressed sarcasm. "Not exactly," our friend assented to our intention. "The successive groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods, with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is what happens with other beautiful things that the æsthetic invent. It has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius of the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial villas equipped with men and maid servants, horses, carriages, motors, yachts; and if the original settlers remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a broken spirit, and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, and at Bar Harbor; even at Newport itself; the co-operative housing of New York is making a like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the æsthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the sole occupancy of the owners. But the cost of their housing then is such that it puts them out of the range of our inquiry as their riches has already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. It still remains for any impecunious group to buy the cheaper lots, and build simpler houses on the old studio principle, with rents enough to pay the cost of operation, and leave the owners merely the interest and taxes, with the eventual payment of these also by the tenants. Some of the studio apartments are equipped with restaurants, and the dwellers need only do such light housekeeping as ladies may attempt without disgrace, or too much fatigue." "Or distraction from their duties to society," we suggested. "It depends upon what you mean by society; it's a very general and inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions, and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated, travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general health. They employ æsthetically the beautiful alleviations with which science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming, that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself." "But you do forbear," we interposed; "and do you imagine that their example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?" "No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to the performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of Europe." We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend, and we objected: "But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?" "In the first place, they don't; and, if they do, what do the one-girl or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the matter of that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom I speak have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen the picture which people worth while are talking of; they know through that best society which likes a cup of their tea all the æsthetic gossip of the day; they are part of the intellectual movement, that part which neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; they help to make up the polite public whose opinions are the court of final appeal." "They strike us," we said, stubbornly, "as rather romantic." "Ah, there you are! Well, they _are_ romantic--romantic like a gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare fictions which never had any color of truth in this country. They are trying to imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of the European ideal which form the society-page's contribution to the history of our contemporary civilization." We were so far moved as to say, "We think we see what you mean," and our friend went on. "Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial change the tea-room is working in our morals and manners? There are many interesting phases of its progress among us, and not the least interesting of these is its being so largely the enterprise of ladies who must not only save money, but must earn money, in order to live, not cheaply, but at all. Their fearlessness in going to work has often the charm of a patrician past, for many of them are Southern women who have come to New York to repair their broken fortunes. The tea-room has offered itself as a graceful means to this end, and they have accepted its conditions, which are mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery, with those personal and racial touches in which Southern women are so expert. But there are tea-rooms managed by Western women, if I may judge from the accents involuntarily overheard in their talk at the telephone. The tea of the tea-room means lunch, too, and in some places breakfast and dinner, or rather supper, on much the plan of the several Women's Exchanges; but these are mostly of New England inspiration and operation, and their cooking has a Northern quality. They, as well as the tea-rooms, leave something to be desired in cheapness, though they might be dearer; in some you get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no better brew for twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and when at the noon hour they overflow with conversation, still there is a prevailing sense of quiet, finely qualified by the feminine invention and influence. Mere men are allowed to frequent these places, not only under the protection of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and when one sees them gently sipping their Souchong or Oolong, and respectfully munching their toasted muffins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with tender gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking their elbows at deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls of cheese and shredded fish and crackers to which their drink freed them, while it enslaved them to the witchery of those lurid ladies contributed by art to the evil attractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies depicted with so little on, except in the Paris salon. The New York tea-rooms are not yet nearly so frequent as in London, but I think they are on the average cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are dearer. They really cheapen the midday meal to many who would otherwise make it at hotels and restaurants, and, so far as they contribute to the spread of the afternoon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of living: many guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must once have been asked to lunch." "But," we suggested, "isn't that cheapness at the cost of shabbiness, which no one can really afford?" "No, I don't think so. Whatever lightens hospitality of its cumbrousness makes for civilization, which is really more compatible with a refined frugality than with an unbridled luxury. If every à-la-carte restaurant, in the hotels and out of them, could be replaced by tea-rooms, and for the elaborate lunches and dinners of private life the informality and simplicity of the afternoon tea were substituted, we should all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser; and I should not be obliged to protract this contention for the superior cheapness of New York." "But, wait!" we said. "There is something just occurs to us. If you proved New York the cheapest great city in the world, wouldn't it tend to increase our population even beyond the present figure, which you once found so deplorable?" "No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We should increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as now in spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same for civilization as if we shrank to the size of Boston." "You will have to explain a little, Howadji," we said, "if you expect us to understand your very interesting position." "Why, you know," he answered, with easy superiority, "that now our great influx is of opulent strangers who have made a good deal of money, and of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. The last we needn't take account of; they are common to all cities in all ages; but the first are as new as any phenomenon can be in a world of such tiresome tautologies as ours. They come up from our industrial provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the commercial metropolis; they throw down their purses as the heroes of old threw down their gantlets for a gage of battle, and they challenge the local champions of extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not want a seasonable or a beautiful thing; they want a costly thing. If, for instance, they are offered a house or an apartment at a rental of ten or fifteen thousand, they will not have it; they require a rental of fifteen or twenty thousand, so that it may be known, 'back home,' that they are spending that much for rent in New York, and the provincial imagination taxed to proportion the cost of their living otherwise to such a sum. You may say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny that it is also stupid." "Stupid, no; but barbaric, yes," we formulated the case. "It is splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are splendid." "But you must allow that nothing could be more mischievous. When next we go with our modest incomes against these landlords, they suppose that we too want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would easily be satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a thousand. The poor fellows' fancy is crazed by those prodigals, and we must all suffer for their madness. The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the price of provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole population demands food and raiment within the general means, however much it must exceed its means in the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set the pace for such expenditures, no matter how much they lavish on their backs and--" "Forbear!" we cried. "Turning from the danger we have saved you from, you will say, we suppose, that New York would be the cheapest of the great cities if it were not for the cost of shelter." "Something like that," he assented. "But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved by co-operative, or composite, housing?" "Something like that," he said again, but there was a note of misgiving in his voice. "What is the 'out'?" we asked. "There is no 'out,'" he said, with a deep, evasive sigh. XII THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him newly returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will recall as having so brashly offered his impressions of the national complexion and temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair. "Well," we said, "do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract? People usually do after they have been at home as long as you." "But I do not," he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on the heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy curves and hollows. "I wish to modify by adding the effect of further observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I saw you I have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from there." We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice. "To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic." "You call that adding?" we satirized. He ignored the poor sneer. "My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of that custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister continent in summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to those New-Englanders of the future dominantly represented by the Irish. At the time of my second visit the exiles had returned, and there were the faces again that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me and held me guilty till I had proved myself innocent." "Do you think," we suggested, "that you would find this sort of indictment in them if you had a better conscience?" "Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially in England; but I have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence, at Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical." "Then why," we asked, not very relevantly, "don't you go and live in Boston?" "It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my shortcomings less in New York." "You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy here, instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind which you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our inferiority, since you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being continually reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can we reduce ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one, and by narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian verticality, and go as deep and as high?" "No," our friend said. "Good as they are, we can only be better by being different. We have our own message to the future, which we must deliver as soon as we understand it." "Is it in Esperanto?" "It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is wonderful how that strongly persistent past still characterizes the present in every development. Even those Irish faces which I wouldn't have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it; and when the Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be with no laughing Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that first challenged the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble to their foundations." "It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren't you?" we suggested. "Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly into the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind thing." "Could you be a little more explicit?" "I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from the newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of truth, and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well as good works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of turning out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is little doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of Boston has had almost the felicity of Goldsmith--it has touched nothing which it has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature has purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the made land in Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows what the universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only the suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston without some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming union of pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks is a garden of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no doubt at the city's suggestion, and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since the moon entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed through the channel of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water from the springs in the deep bosom of the country. The Beacon Street houses back upon a steadfast expanse as fresh as the constant floods of the Great Lakes." [Illustration: CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE] "And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake Superior to Boston eyes. What do they call their dam? The Charlesea?" "You may be sure they will call it something tasteful and fit," our friend responded, in rejection of our feeble mockery. "Charlesea would not be bad. But what I wish to make you observe is that all which has yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done from the unexhausted instinct of it in the cold heart of Puritanism, where it 'burns frore and does the effect of fire.' As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies have had no part in advancing the city. The first have been content with voting themselves into office, and the last with owning their masters out-of-doors; for the Irish are the lords, and the Italians are the landlords. But when these two gifted races, with their divinely implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply conscienced taste of the Puritans, what mayn't we expect Boston to be?" "And what mayn't we expect New York to be on the same terms, or, say, when the Celtic and Pelasgic and Hebraic and Slavic elements join with the old Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right also native? Come! Why shouldn't we have a larger Boston here?" "Because we are _too_ large," our friend retorted, undauntedly. "When graft subtly crept among the nobler motives which created the park system of Boston the city could turn for help to the State and get it; but could our city get help from our State? Our city is too big to profit by that help; our State too small to render it. The commonwealth of Massachusetts is creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing to emparadise the shores of the Hudson?" "All the better for us, perhaps," we stubbornly, but not very sincerely, contended, "if we have to do our good works ourselves." "Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain undone if we don't do them? The city of New York is so great that it swings the State of New York. The virtues that are in each do not complement one another, as the virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where shall you find, in our house or in our grounds, the city and the State joining to an effect of beauty? When you come to New York, what you see of grandeur is the work of commercialism; what you see of grandeur in Boston is the work of civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the homes of business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity to the public pleasure and use. No," our friend concluded with irritating triumph, "we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of the civic spirit. Athens could be beautiful--Florence, Venice, Genoa were--but Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful palaces, temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could only huddle the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses and Greek chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads of violet hair, in one monstrous visage. No," he exulted, in this mortifying image of our future ugliness, "when a city passes a certain limit of space and population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the most lovable of the mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one cannot quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth and grace which lend themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is fast becoming of the size of Paris, but if I have not misread her future she will be careful not to pass it, and become as New York is." We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable dismay: "But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: "Do you think that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost opportunity? We should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the female form." He was silent still, and we gathered courage to press on. "As it is, we are not altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are not more beautiful buildings in New York now than there are in Boston; and as for statues, where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of our Saint-Gaudens Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?" "The Shaw monument blots them all out," our friend relentlessly answered. "But these are merely details. Our civic good things are accidental. Boston's are intentional. That is the great, the vital difference." It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last appeal. "And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness, when we have got a sky-scraper-line?" It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and, in fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, "I would rather not think." We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence invited us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the image we had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another point. "Well," we said, "in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we suppose that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in authors as well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet Emerson or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive and in the flesh?" "No," our friend admitted, "not at every corner. But what I did meet was the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the earth. The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists are worse--they have come to New York; they have not even waited to die. But whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York, they have left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that has known them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York--our dear, immense, slattern mother--who feels anything of the character of her great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in them? Who remembers even such great editors as Greeley or James Gordon Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant magic, what black art, is it that reduces us all to one level of forgottenness when we are gone, and even before we are gone? Have those high souls left their inspiration here, for common men to breathe the breath of finer and nobler life from? I won't abuse the millionaires who are now our only great figures; even the millionaires are gone when they go. They die, and they leave no sign, quite as if they were so many painters and poets. You can recall some of their names, but not easily. No, if New York has any hold upon the present from the past, it isn't in the mystical persistence of such spirits among us." "Well," we retorted, hardily, "we have no need of them. It is the high souls of the future which influence us." Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might be something in what we said. "Will you explain?" he asked. "Some other time," we consented. XIII THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES One of those recurrent selves who frequent the habitat of the Easy Chair, with every effect of exterior identities, looked in and said, before he sat down, and much before he was asked to sit down, "Are you one of those critics of smart or swell society (or whatever it's called now) who despise it because they can't get into it, or one of those censors who won't go into it because they despise it?" "Your question," we replied, "seems to be rather offensive, but we don't know that it's voluntarily so, and it's certainly interesting. On your part, will you say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to accost us with this inquiry?" Before he could answer, we hastened to add: "By-the-way, what a fine, old-fashioned, gentlemanly word _accost_ is! People used to accost one another a great deal in polite literature. 'Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigorous stare, he thus accosted her.' Or, 'Embarrassed by his fixed and penetrating regard, she timidly accosted him.' It seems to us that we remember a great many passages like these. Why has the word gone out? It was admirably fitted for such junctures, and it was so polished by use that it slipped from the pen without any effort of the brain, and--" "I have no time for idle discussions of a mere literary nature," our other self returned. "I am very full of the subject which I have sprung upon you, and which I see you are trying to shirk." "Not at all," we smilingly retorted. "We will answer you according to your folly without the least reluctance. We are not in smart or swell society because we cannot get in; but at the same time we would not get in if we could, because we despise it too much. We wonder," we continued, speculatively, "why we always suspect the society satirist of suffering from a social snub? It doesn't in the least follow. Was Pope, when he invited his S'in' John to 'leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings' goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? Was Mr. Benson when he came over here from London excluded from the shining first circles of New York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with such brilliant fidelity in _The Relentless City_, and was he wreaking an unworthy resentment in portraying our richly moneyed, blue-blooded society to the life? How are manners ever to be corrected with a smile if the smile is always suspected of being an agonized grin, the contortion of the features by the throes of a mortified spirit? Was George William Curtis in his amusing but unsparing _Potiphar Papers_--" "Ah, now you are shouting!" our other self exclaimed. "Your slang is rather antiquated," we returned, with grave severity. "But just what do you mean by it in this instance?" "I mean that manners are never corrected with a smile, whether of compassion or of derision. The manners that are bad, that are silly, that are vulgar, that are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to generation. Even the good manners don't seem to decay: simplicity, sincerity, kindness, don't really go out, any more than the other things, and fortunately the other things are confined only to a small group in every civilization, to the black sheep of the great, whity-brown or golden-fleeced human family." "What has all this vague optimism to do with the _Potiphar Papers_ and smart society and George William Curtis?" we brought the intruder sharply to book. "A great deal, especially the part relating to the continuity of bad manners. I've just been reading an extremely clever little book by a new writer, called _New York Society on Parade_, which so far as its basal facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of 'Our Best Society' and the other _Potiphar Papers_. The temperament varies from book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than George William Curtis; his book is more compact, more directly and distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the hopes of society reform which could be more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do you remember when 'Our Best Society' came out in the eldest _Putnam's Magazine_, that phoenix of monthlies which has since twice risen from its ashes? Don't pretend that our common memory doesn't run back to the year 1853! We have so many things in common that I can't let you disgrace the firm by any such vain assumption of extreme youth!" "Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great spirits, now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature flesh. We remember that paper on 'Our Best Society' vividly, and we recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten Thousand of New York imparted to the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do you mean to say that the Four Hundred of this day are no better than the Ten Thousand of that? Has nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious reduction in quantity?" "On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and concentrated, if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don't see why we should doubt him. Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little study? It takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the likeness of our best society in its three most characteristic aspects; full-face at dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty commercial or financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in whatever symbolizes the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt at dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a longing for fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while ritually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society. Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The motives, the _personnel_, almost the _matériel_, the incidents, are the same. I should think it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from his actual observation, to find how essentially his study is the same with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is more of nature in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr. Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish face is the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian satirist all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning the 'gay' New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if we had really gone from bad to worse, not qualitatively--we couldn't--but quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men, more women, but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853." "You keep saying the same thing with 'damnable iterance,'" we remarked. "Don't you suppose that outside of New York there is now a vast society, as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, harmlessly? Is there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia, where 'the heart that is humble may look for' disinterested pleasure in the high-society functions of the day or night? Does New York set the pace for all these places, and are dinners given there as here, not for the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of the hostesses? Do the inhabitants of those simple sojourns go to the opera to be seen and not to hear? Do they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the german's leaders, or to see their elders and fatters getting all the beautiful and costly favors while their own young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted by because they give no balls where those cruel captains can hope to shine in the van? It seems to us that in our own far prime--now well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity--life was ordered kindlier; that dinners and opera-parties and dances were given 'To bless and never to ban.'" "Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life moved," our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. "You know we were a country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the distant epoch painted in the _Potiphar Papers_ the motives of New York society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth and rank and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent innocence played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior. If Curtis once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked, greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it." "And yet," we mused aloud, "this is the sort of thing which the 'unthinking multitude' who criticise, or at least review, books are always lamenting that our fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the death of our poor fiction!" "Well, I don't know," our counterpart responded. "If our fiction took it on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and society girls and _grandes dames_. But that remains to be seen. In the mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr. Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is 'satire with no pity in it,' but there's here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at the ball, his few words wring the heart. 'These poor victims of their sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can do is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home in humiliation for the present and despair for the future.'" "Do such cruel things really happen in our best society?" we palpitated, in an anguish of sympathy. "Such things and worse," our other self responded, "as when in the german the fair débutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr. Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of the sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the _Potiphar Papers_. It's the difference between the Mid-Victorian and the Early Edwardian point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the page of Curtis there is 'The tender grace of a day that is dead' and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances of fashion. 'The girls and women are of a higher average of beauty than any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are generally well built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,' Mr. Pulitzer assures us." "Well, oughtn't that to console?" we defied our other self. "Come! It's a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when the waiters are so often disappointed 'remittance men' of good English family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn't ask everything." "No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in Curtis's less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke and booze throughout the night with the host in his 'library,' but the dancing youth don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's supper, and people don't throw things from their plates under the table." "Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change for the better in our best society, that there is no hope for it?" "Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best society be as it now imagines itself. I don't suppose that in all that gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society." "Very well, then," we said, with considerable resolution, "we must change the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four hundred made up of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, scientists, musicians, actors, and ministers, with their wives, daughters, and sisters, who will walk to one another's dinners, or at worst go by trolley, and occupy the cheaper seats at the opera, and dance in small and early assemblages, and live in seven-room-with-bath flats. Money must not count at all in the choice of these elect and beautiful natures. The question is, how shall we get the dense, unenlightened masses to regard them as the best society; how teach the reporters to run after them, and the press to chronicle their entertainments, engagements, marriages, divorces, voyages to and from Europe, and the other facts which now so dazzle the common fancy when it finds them recorded in the society intelligence of the newspapers?" "Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once advocated the restriction of the suffrage and had been asked how he was going to get the consent of the majority whose votes he meant to take away--'yes, that is the devil of it.'" We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, "Don't you think that a beginning could be made by those real élite we have decided on refusing to let associate with what now calls itself our best society?" "But hasn't our _soi-disant_ best society already made that beginning for its betters by excluding them?" our other self responded. "There is something in what you say," we reluctantly assented, "but by no means everything. The beginning you speak of has been made at the wrong end. The true beginning of society reform must be made by the moral, æsthetic, and intellectual superiors of fashionable society as we now have it. The _grandes dames_ must be somehow persuaded that to be really swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the thing is, they must search _Who's Who in New York_ for men and women of the most brilliant promise and performance and invite them. They must not search the banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices for their dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms, the dramatic agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted young artists, assignment men, interviewers, actors, and preachers, and apply to the labor-unions for the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must look up the most beautiful and intelligent girl-students of all the arts and sciences, and department stores for cultivated and attractive salesladies. Then, when all such people have received cards to dinners or dances, it will only remain for them to have previous engagements, and the true beginning is made. Come! You can't say the thing is impossible." "Not impossible, no," our complementary self replied. "But difficult." XIV THE MAGAZINE MUSE Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than the other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the Muse as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was a far more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the elder and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces of verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude of the magazines, which in those times would have won general recognition if not reputation for the authors; they would have been remembered from month to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers from the two or three periodicals then published, and, if they were not enabled to retire upon their incomes, they would have been in the enjoyment of a general attention beyond anything money can buy at the present day. This conclusion was the handsomer in the two poets, because they had nothing to gain and something to lose by it if their opinion should ever become known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, and perhaps even inferiority, which people do not make, unless they are obliged to it, in any case. But these poets were generous even beyond their unenvious tribe, and the younger, with a rashness which his years measurably excused, set about verifying his conviction in a practical way, perhaps the only practical way. He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines published; and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness of the sea on which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration? His publishers sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals in all kinds, which, when he had begged them to confine it to the literary kind, the æsthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater number of these, he found, were published in New York, but two were from Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and one even from Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That is to say, in this city there are issued every month about forty-five magazines devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence, not always connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few cases twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such sums for themselves. The cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether, as they lie closed on the dealer's counter, though when you open them you find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp, wood-pulpy sort, and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest present their literature on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest; and as it is not always money which buys literary value, especially from the beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees. He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification of the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, the friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young poets on their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and from himself as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. All the magazines before him were for the month of January, and though it was possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion from their extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there was a chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which would trim the balance and give them at least the average poetic value. At this point, however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, was never so willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, and it cannot be denied that there was some girding up of the loins for him before the grapple with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at their weakest point, might they not be too much for him? He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, _clarum et venerabile nomen_, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of two stanzas, the author had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift's versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater, or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, with some straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with imaginative observation. The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at least hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he finally pursued them he was more interested in certain psychological conditions of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a mounting aversion to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He could dispatch a dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; but he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of trying to cheat himself in it, of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of contents, which naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over an index, and seek to miss rather than find the word "poem" repeated after a title, and when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was sinful, he was duly punished for it, in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward midnight, rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. But his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at the bottom of the page, and he perceived, on close inspection, that these were all poems, and that there were eighteen of them. He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take accurate count as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his guess was reasonably correct. From this review it appeared that the greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month, while several published but one, and several five or seven or four. Another remarkable fact was that the one or two in the more self-denying were as bad as the whole five or seven or nine or eighteen of those which had more freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another singular feature of the inquiry was that one woman had a poem in five or six of the magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good poem, so that no editor would have been justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these names were a warrant of quality, but not always of the author's best quality. The authorship was rather equally divided between the sexes, and the poets were both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be. When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered apparently a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his notes and went with them to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm had prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and discussed the points evolved. "Then what is your conclusion?" the elder of the two demanded. "Do you still think I was right, or have you come to a different opinion?" "Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a different opinion? You would easily forgive me, but what would all those hundred poets whom I thought not so promising as you believed do to my next book? Especially what would the poetesses?" "There is something in that. But you need not be explicit. If you differ with me, you can generalize. What, on the whole, was the impression you got? Had none of the pieces what we call distinction, for want of a better word or a clearer idea?" "I understand. No, I should say, not one; though here and there one nearly had it--so nearly that I held my breath from not being quite sure. But, on the other hand, I should say that there was a good deal of excellence, if you know what that means." "I can imagine," the elder poet said. "It is another subterfuge. What do you really intend?" "Why, that the level was pretty high. Never so high as the sky, but sometimes as high as the sky-scraper. There was an occasional tallness, the effect, I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or the feeling warranted. And some of the things had a great deal of naturalness." "Come! That isn't so bad." "But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes affectation. This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to have some pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity was a pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being untrammelled. But there is such a thing as being informal, and there is such a thing as being unmannerly." "Yes?" "I think that in the endeavor to escape from convention our poets have lost the wish for elegance, which was a prime charm of the Golden Age. Technically, as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too much, and the people of the Golden Age never let themselves loose. There is too much Nature in them, which is to say, not enough; for, after all, in her little æsthetic attempts, Nature is very modest." The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. "Now you are wandering. Explain again." "Why, when you and I were young--you were always and always will be young--" "None of that!" "It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful of the form as the most formal of our poetic forebears, and that we would not let the smallest irregularity escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We cut out the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep the wording within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty in our work so much that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; the grain we left was where we had used the file to produce it." "Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn't so?" "Well, what do you say to such a word as 'dankening,' which occurred in a very good landscape?" "One such word in a hundred poems?" "One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of the sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that, when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh courage. "Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry, of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the later generation any good to equal them with ours." "There is something in what you say." The elder poet was silent for a time. Then he asked, "Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?" His junior counted up, and reported, "About twenty-four." "Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year. That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907. Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name as many yourself?" "Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present decade." "Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?" The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a cross-examined witness, "Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer." XV COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there are certain things that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at the notion of his being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility of the elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently not so rustic as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot with the rest of some express train that never stopped there. "It _is_ splendid, John," the woman said, holding by the man's arm while she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach with her eager eyes. "I guess it's all of that," the man consented, sadly. "I presume we sha'n't ever go in one," she suggested. "Not likely," he owned, in the same discouraged tone. They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep, hopeless aspiration, "Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!" The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no sign. The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, wishing for something more from them which should give their souls away, but they remained silently standing there, and he did not somehow feel authorized to make them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it must be open, and that the friendly porter somewhere within would not mind letting them look through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, and the woman was trying to embolden the man to the hardy venture. In the end they did not attempt it, but they turned away with another sigh from the woman which found its echo in the eavesdropper's heart. Doubtless if they had penetrated that splendid interior without having paid for seats, it would, in some fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would have corrupted them; they would have wished after that always to travel in such cars, when clearly they could not afford it; very possibly it might have led to their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still his bosom's ache, but he could never quite forget that gentle pair with their unrequited longing, and the other day they came almost the first thing into his mind when he read that a great German steamship company had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman cars from the port of arrival to the mercantile metropolis which was the real end of their ships' voyages. He thought, whimsically, perversely, how little difference it would make to that pair, how little to those measureless most whose journeys shall end in heaven, where Pullman passengers, or even passengers by the ordinary European first-class cars, may be only too glad to meet them. He gave a looser rein to his thoughts and considered how very little the ordinary necessities of life, such as Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric radiators and non-storage chickens and unsalted butter concern the great mass of the saints, who would find them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined coveting them; and then from this wild revery he fell to asking himself whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better. To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment of two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from Calais to Paris. It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable precaution spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as first-class passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, every soul in his first-class compartment had telegraphed ahead, and when they arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream, and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble servant of the Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag. At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not, for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars; or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers? No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in Germany, and in Italy--poor, dear Italy!--they are worse still. That is because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad as heart could wish--the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one still went by diligence or _vettura_. The only absolutely _good_ railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express-- "But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor: Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops. But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir. No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn, where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till it is put back into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows, with their high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the English cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and assemblies of the past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent over trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors of flowers that withered a hundred years ago. But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle pair with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep our hunger for the table d'hôte of the dining-car; when we buy a room in the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of public land in northwestern Canada. There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely own, has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life for the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would now want to take a bicycle, or even a "bicycle built for two." These things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splendors of life. Soon the last word in them takes on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them "with sick and scornful looks averse," and listens for the "airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be the next word--the word that follows the last, the woman's word. XVI QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their native independence to something like the condition of those pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the Government's dole of beef-cattle. The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the 'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man?" [Illustration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK] "I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them." "Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century. There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds, didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman, before the extension of the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian." "I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the second friend mused aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. "They had so many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not to 'enter on my list of friends the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,' and 'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'" "Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good." "What do you mean," the second of the friends demanded, "by coming back to their ground?" "Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as ignore Him----" "I see," the second answered, sadly. "But aren't you throwing up the sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend, 'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to follow." "Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed. But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I certainly always do." "What, always?" "Well, nearly always." The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any longer without the risk of not being followed." The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life." "No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from 'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,' it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology." "Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D. C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to do and tried to do.'" The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or don't try hard enough." The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength; wickedness is weakness." "That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though." "No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?" "Well, your Stoics--" "_My_ Stoics?" "_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a duty coming they stepped out and did it." "It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?" "That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented the Christian ideal of duty." "And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the beginning." The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go so far as that." The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed together again. The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady, greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with his paws. "No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues. You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any." "There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the boat-house with a basketful." "But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get. That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call character-building. Get along!" The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible. "I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity included kindness to animals." "I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged." The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had to ask, "Where were we?" "Cultivating force of character in squirrels." "I thought we had got by that." "Then we had come round to ourselves again." "Something like that," the first friend reluctantly allowed. "What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that's what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves." "Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn't pamper their egotism in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to overgrow." "That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other ways for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?" "Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect, a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote for him." "But you voted for him?" The first friend nodded. "Which man was it?" "What's the use? He was beaten-- 'That is all you know or need to know.'" "Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him," the second friend mused. "How patient the Creator must be with the result of His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's enough to make one go in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?" "And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with other interests and obligations?" "Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way." "And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a vivid thought suddenly occurs, "how it would work if one went and did exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?" "That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or, rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered." "You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?" "No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. 'Thou shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown off or put on, as the case may be." "How very hideous!" the second friend exclaimed. "It's like an emanation from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been abolished." "And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil, we know what to do with them." "And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?" "Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom of such things yet. Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it literally." "That's very interesting," the second friend said. "Then it's your idea that no one really prefers to do wrong?" "Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority. No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any purely voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call them, do wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the last state of sinners was insanity." "Dreadful!" "But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that inner voice, we are æsthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them." The second friend drew a long breath. "Then I don't see why there are so many." "Well," the first friend suggested, "there seems to be a difficulty. Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good." "I don't see how you make that out." "Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very imperfect." "And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing our duty?" "Well, we sha'n't by not doing it." XVII A WASTED OPPORTUNITY The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to greater circumstance in him. He said: "It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance or design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence, I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother, and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was Brown, Jones, or Robinson." "We dare say you have your self-justification," we put in at this point, "but you must own that it doesn't appear in what you are saying. As a good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you would certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door. His being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with his merit or want of it." "Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there was something in his case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday." "He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have done if he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered into it with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite new two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe the dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to cases of dire need, you know." "No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to give copper." "Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But here was an instance which involved a more extended application of alms. 'You know,' I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental arithmetic, 'there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for twenty-five cents; I don't remember whether they throw in breakfast or not.' I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved by the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake, if not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, 'I think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch, including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked making it pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the question entirely to him, and he said nothing. "In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My overcoat,' he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and that I had no prescience of the blizzard--what the papers fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)--which was to begin the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At the same time, I gave him a quarter." "That was magnificent, but it was not political economy," we commented. "You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not need it on shipboard." "Well, do you know," our friend said, "I really did tell him something like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made me ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the cattle." "It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," we said. "You can't draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down." "I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with their poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 'Here!' and I pulled open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full of English coins, which I had been left stranded with on several returns from Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of them; and as I always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I will never go to Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do with those coins. I now took out the largest and handsomest of them: 'Do you know what that is?' 'Yes,' he said; 'it's two shillings and sixpence--what we call a half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith in him; I saw that he must be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary; very likely our name was the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart. 'Here!' I said, and I handed him the coin; it did not seem so bad as giving him more American money. 'They can change that on the ship for you. I guess you can manage now till Monday,' and my confidence in Providence diffused such a genial warmth through my steam-heated apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat. I wish I could forget about it now." We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned his excess of beneficence. "Oh, you mustn't mind giving him so much money. We can't always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as close as we ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!" Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In fact, he seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming: "He appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for he got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to make him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested me somehow beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality; in fact, his personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that asserted any claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about the'--I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I boldly outed with--'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not exactly, but--it came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable offence. "I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he said, sadly enough, and he went out." Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to improve the occasion in his behalf. "Well, there you lost a great opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great opportunity." Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting, and blazed out--we have no milder word for it--blazed out in a sort of fiery torrent which made us recoil: "Yes, I lost that great opportunity, and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years' labor it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor, it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because it had defrauded him of the money he had earned." "But, our dear friend!" we entreated, "don't you realize that this theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?" "And you don't think two years' prison, two years' slavery, was sanative enough without the denial of his just compensation?" We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe, or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say: "Suppose he had a wife and children--he may have had several of both, for all I know--dependent on him, would it have been particularly sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?" "We cannot answer these sophistries," we were exasperated into replying. "All that we can say is that anything else--anything like what you call justice to the criminal, the prisoner--would disrupt society," and we felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in this way the ideas of rejected contributors. A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?" Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. "He didn't sail, exactly, at least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted from him at my own door--the outside of it. It appears that the authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith, and that he refused to do so--not having the money, for one reason. I did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State in the practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the place where he went to have his half-crown changed into American money they would only give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured by an acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In fact, a half-crown is worth a little more." "Well, what can you expect of money-changers?" we returned, consolingly. "And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary now?" "Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled, as the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of cattle-steamers, where they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the herdsmen; I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them." We laughed sardonically. "And do you believe he is really going?" Our friend sighed heavily. "Well, I don't believe he's coming back. I only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don't think it will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will wish to call upon me for more." We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, "And you still think he had been in the penitentiary?" "I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't." "Well, then," we retorted bitterly, again like a character in fiction, "you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this time, but an æsthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway." Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, "It was rather a break." "You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in jail don't turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think of the material you have lost." We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when we reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay, we could not endure it. "Well, good-day," we said, coldly; "we are going down this way." Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself with a mocking laugh. "Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he said." XVIII A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair's, sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least, fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him. "Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because, you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story; and I've just read it." "Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to recall which story it was. "Well?" "Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you, don't you?" "By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story." By this time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered. "Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you know yourself that it couldn't be called virile." "No?" he returned. "What is virile?" "Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you into the air, and trample you under foot." "Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I'm a gentleman, even when I'm writing a novel." "Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said, severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran Novelist to shuffle. "You can't be virile and at the same time remember that you are a gentleman. Lots of _women_ write virile books." "Ladies?" the novelist asked. "Don't I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the reader's attention you must let yourself go, whether you're a gentleman or a lady. Of course," she relented, "your book's very idyllic, and delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, "do you think an honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to cover?" The novelist sighed. "I'm sure I don't know. They seem to say it--in the passages quoted in the advertisements--of all the books published. Except mine," he added, sadly. "Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece relented again. "I didn't intend to wound your feelings, uncle." "Oh, you haven't. I suppose I _am_ a little too easy-going at times." "Yes, that is it. One can't say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: 'Have you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't wait to find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It's going like the wind, and you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!' Now that," his great-niece ended, fondly, "is what I should like every critic to say of your book, uncle." The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more spiritedly, "I don't believe _I_ should, my dear." "Then you _must_; that's all. But that's a small thing. What I really wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a stylist." "Stylist?" "Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram in your book from beginning to end. That's the reason the critics don't quote any brilliant sentences from it, and the publishers can't advertise it properly. It makes me mad to find the girls repeating other authors' sayings, and I never catch a word from a book of yours, though you've been writing more than a century." "Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just what do you mean by style?" "Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you _can_ have _passion_. Why don't you?" "Don't I? I thought--" "Not a speck of it--not a single speck! It's rather a delicate point, and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once, but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion. Isn't there? Think!" The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--" "Uncle!" "--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass them?" "The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!" "And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to kiss their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very well, but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help of one embrace from beginning to end." "Uncle!" the girl vividly exclaimed, "why don't you _do_ it? It would be the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the start--just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be raving about it. Why _don't_ you do it, uncle? You know I do so want you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!" "I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of suppressed passion, that's a story in itself." "Tell it!" she entreated. "The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. But I'll tell you something else. When I was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came rather in anticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the whole range of mythological topics, and then I had my knack lying idle. I observed that there was one subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but somehow I felt myself disqualified for treating it. How could I sing of Love when I had never been in love? For I didn't count those youthful affairs when I was only in the Third Reader and the first part of the Arithmetic. I went about trying to be in love, as a matter of business; but I couldn't manage it. Suddenly it managed itself; and then I found myself worse disqualified than ever. I didn't want to mention it; either to myself or to her, much less to the world at large. It seemed a little too personal." "Oh, uncle! How funny you are!" "Do you think so? I didn't think it much fun then, and I don't now. Once I didn't know what love was, and now I've forgotten!" "No such thing, uncle! You write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you say so." "Well, then, my dear, if I haven't forgotten, I'm not interested. You see, I know so much more about it than my lovers do. I can't take their point of view any longer. To tell you the truth, I don't care a rap whether they get married or not. In that story there, that you've been reading, I got awfully tired of the girl. She was such a fool, and the fellow was a perfect donkey." "But he was the dearest donkey in the world! I wanted to h--shake hands with him, and I wanted to kiss--yes, kiss!--_her_, she was such a lovable fool." "You're very kind to say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was poking fun at my lovers." "And here I," the girl lamented, "didn't take the slightest notice, but began on you with the harshest criticisms!" "I didn't mind. I dare say it was for my good." "I'm sure I meant it so, uncle. And what are you going to do about it?" "Well, I must get a new point of view." "Yes?" "I must change my ground altogether. I can't pretend any longer to be the contemporary of my lovers, or to have the least sympathy with their hopes and fears. If I were to be perfectly honest with them, I should tell them, perhaps, that disappointed love was the best thing that could happen to either of them, but, if they insisted on happiness, that a good broken engagement promised more of it than anything else I could think of." "That is true," the girl sighed. "There are a great many unhappy marriages. Of course, people would say it was _rather_ pessimistic, wouldn't they?" "People will say anything. One mustn't mind them. But now I'll tell you what I've been thinking all the time we've been talking." "Well? I knew you were not thinking of _my_ nonsense!" "It was very good nonsense, as nonsense goes, my dear. What I've been thinking is that I must still have the love interest in my books, and have it the main interest, but I must treat it from the vantage-ground of age; it must be something I look back upon, and a little down upon." "I see what you mean," the girl dissentingly assented. "I must be in the whole secret--the secret, not merely of my lovers' love, but the secret of love itself. I must know, and I must subtly intimate, that it doesn't really matter to anybody how their affair turns out; for in a few years, twenty or thirty years, it's a thousand to one that they won't care anything about it themselves. I must maintain the attitude of the sage, dealing not unkindly but truthfully with the situation." "It would be rather sad," the girl murmured. "But one likes sad things." "When one is young, one does; when one is old, one likes true things. But, of course, my love-stories would be only for those who have outlived love. I ought to be fair with my readers, and forewarn them that my story was not for the young, the hopeful, the happy." The girl jumped to her feet and stood magnificent. "Uncle! It's grand!" He rose, too. "What is?" he faltered. "The idea! Don't you see? You can have the publisher announce it as a story for the disillusioned, the wretched, and the despairing, and that would make every girl want it, for that's what every girl thinks she is, and they would talk to the men about it, and then _they_ would want it, and it would be the book of the month! Don't say another word. Oh, you dear!" In spite of the insanitary nature of the action, she caught her uncle round the neck, and kissed him on his bald spot, and ran out of the room. She opened the door to call back: "Don't lose a single minute. Begin it _now_!" But the Veteran Novelist sank again into his chair in the posture in which she had surprised him. XIX A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY We lately received a publication which has interested us somewhat out of proportion to its size. It is called _The Way into Print_, but it does not treat, as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best method of getting your name into the newspapers, either as a lady who is giving a dinner to thirteen otherwise unknown persons, or is making a coming-out tea for her débutante daughter, or had a box full of expensively confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or is going to read a paper at a woman's club, or is in any sort figuring in the thousand and one modern phases of publicity; it does not even advise her guests or hearers how to appear among those present, or those who were invited and did not come, or those who would not have come if they had been invited. Its scope is far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely higher, its reach incomparably further. The Print which it proposes to lead the Way into is that print where the elect, who were once few and are now many, are making the corridors of time resound to their footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of immortality. Their procession, which from the point of the impartial spectator has been looking more and more like a cake-walk in these later years, is so increasingly the attraction of young-eyed ambition that nothing interests a very large class of people more than advice for the means of joining it, and it is this advice which the publication in point supplies: supplies, we must say, with as much good sense and good feeling as is consistent with an office which does not seem so dignified as we could wish. Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to the folly of the aspirant, inevitably he must use that folly from time to time with wholesome severity, but he does not feel himself equal to the work unaided. Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible force of our imaginative work, into an intellectual world-power has thrust a responsibility upon the veterans of a simpler time which they may not shirk, and the author of _The Way into Print_ calls upon them to share his task. He is not satisfied with the interesting chapters contributed by younger authors who are in the act of winning their spurs, but he appeals to those established in the public recognition to do their part in aiding us to hold our conquest through the instruction and discipline of those who must take their places when they put their armor off. He does this by means of a letter, almost an open letter, addressed personally to each veteran by means of the substitution of his typewritten name for that of some other veteran, but not differenced in the terms of the ensuing appeal to his kindness or his conscience. He puts himself upon a broad humanitarian ground, and asks that the typewritten author, who, he assumes, is "prominently before the public," shall answer certain questions to which the appellant owns that he has already received hundreds of replies. By an odd mischance one of his half-open letters found its way to the Easy Chair, and, although that judgment-seat felt relieved from the sense of anything like a lonely prominence before the public by the very multitude of those similarly consulted, it did not remain as Easy as it would have liked under the erring attribution of prominence. Yet to have refused to help in so good a work would not have been in its nature, and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a real author of prominence to consider the problems so baffling to a mere editorial effigy; for, as we ought to explain, the _de facto_ editor is to be found in the Study next door, and never in the Easy Chair. The author prominently before the public came at once, for that kind of author has very little to do, and is only too happy to respond to calls like that of the friend of rising authorship. Most of his time is spent at symposiums, imagined by the Sunday editions of the newspapers, to consider, decide the question whether fig-paste is truly a health-food; or whether, in view of a recent colossal gift for educational purposes, the product of the Standard Oil Company was the midnight oil which Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of the scholar wasting it; or something of that kind. His mind is whetted to the sharpest edge by its employment with these problems, and is in prime condition for such simple practical inquiries as those proposed by the letter we had received. But, of course, he put on an air of great hurry, and spoke of the different poems, novels, essays, and sketches which he had laid aside to oblige us, and begged us to get down to business at once. "We wish nothing better than to do so," we said, to humor him, "for we know you are a very busy man, and we will not keep you a moment longer than is absolutely necessary. Would you like to have all the questions at once, or would you rather study them one after another?" He said he thought he could better give an undivided mind to each if he had them one at a time, and so we began with the first: "'1. Would you advise the young story-writer to study the old masters in literature or the stories in the current magazines, in order to meet the demands of the current editors?'" "Will you read that again?" the author prominently before the public demanded, but when we had read it a second time it seemed only to plunge him deeper into despair. He clutched his revered head with both hands, and but for an opportune baldness would probably have torn his hair. He murmured, huskily, "Do you think you have got it right?" We avoided the response "Sure thing" by an appropriate circumlocution, and then he thundered back: "How in--nature--is a young writer to forecast the demands of current editors? If an editor is worth his salt--his Attic salt--he does not know himself what he wants, except by the eternal yearning of the editorial soul for something new and good. If he has any other demands, he is not a current editor, he is a stagnant editor. Is it possible that there is a superstition to the contrary?" "Apparently." "Then that would account for many things. But go on." "Go on yourself. You have not answered the question." "Oh, by all means," the author sardonically answered; "if the current editor has demands beyond freshness and goodness, let the young writer avoid the masters in literature and study the stories in the current magazines." "You are not treating the matter seriously," we expostulated. "Yes, I am--seriously, sadly, even tragically. I could not have imagined a condition of things so bad, even with the results all round us. Let us have the second question of your correspondent." "Here it is: '2. Has the unknown writer an equal chance with the well-known author, provided his work is up to the standard of the latter's?'" "Of the latter's?--of the latter's?--of the latter's?" Our friend whispered the phrase to himself before he groaned out: "What a frightful locution! Really, really, it is more than I can bear!" "For the cause you ought to bear anything. What do you really think?" "Why, if the former's work is as good as the latter's, why isn't the former's chance as good if the current editor's demands are for the same kind in the former's case as in the latter's? If the latter's aim is to meet the imaginary demands of the stagnant editor, then the former's work ought to be as attractive as the latter's. Ha, ha, ha!" He laughed wildly, and in order to recall him to himself we read the third question: "'3. Which is the more acceptable--a well-told story with a weak plot, or a poorly told story with a strong plot?'" "Oh, but that is a conundrum, pure and simple!" the author protested. "It is a poor parody on the old End-man pleasantry, 'Would you rather be as foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?' You are making it up!" "We assure you we are not. It is no more a conundrum than the others. Come: question!" "Well, in the first place, I should like to know what a plot is. Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?" "You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. Do you confess yourself posed by this plain problem? Do you give it up?" "For the present. Perhaps I may gather light from the next question." "Then here it is: '4. What do you consider the primary weakness in the average stories or verses of the old writers?" "Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average stories and verses of the younger writers--absence of mind." "Are you sure you are not shirking? Cannot you give a categorical answer--something that will really help some younger writer to take the place which you are now more or less fraudulently holding? The younger writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble is absence of mind, but what line of reading would you suggest which would turn this into presence of mind?" "There is none, except to have themselves newly ancestored. Presence of mind as well as absence of mind is something derived; you cannot acquire it." "We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now here is the next problem: '5. What are the successful author's necessary qualifications in the matters of natural ability, education, life as he sees it and lives it, technical training, etc?'" "This will be the death of me!" the prominent author lamented. "Couldn't I skip that one?" "It seems to cover some of the most important points. We do not think your self-respect will allow you to skip it. At any rate, make an effort to answer it." Thus challenged, the prominent author pulled himself together. "Oh," he said, sadly, "which of us knows whether he has natural ability or not, and what is education, and what is life as one sees it, and what is technical training? Do these poor young fellows think that one is tall or short by taking thought? It is the same as that, it seems to me; or if you prefer a mystical solution, I should say, if you have a longing, from your earliest consciousness, to write poetry or fiction, and cannot keep from doing it for any long time together, you are possibly born with a gift for it. But this may be altogether a mistake; it may be the effect of your early and incessant scribblings on the minds of spectators wholly incompetent to judge of your abilities, such as your fond parents. This must rather often happen if we can judge from what nine-tenths of what is called literature is composed of. If your longing to write is the real thing, or is not, still education will not help or hinder you in doing it. No man was ever yet taught any art. He may be taught a trade, and that is what most of the versing and prosing is, I suppose. If you have the gift, you will technically train yourself: that is, you will learn how to be simple and clear and honest. Charm you will have got from your great-grandfather or great-grandmother; and life, which is only another sort of school, will not qualify you to depict life; but if you do not want to depict life, you will perhaps be able to meet the demands of what our friend calls the current editors." Here the prominent author rose, but we stayed him with a gesture. "There is another question, the last: '6. Do you care to convey any hints or suggestions gleaned from your personal experiences in the climb to success that may make easier the gaining of the heights for the beginner?" The prominent author roared with laughter. "Read that again!" But when we had done so, he became grave, even sorrowful. "Is it really true, then, as we seem to see, that there is a large body of young people taking up literature as a business? The thing that all my life I have fondly dreamed was an art, dear and almost holy! Are they going into it for the money there is in it? And am I, in my prominence--more or less fraudulent, as you say--an incentive to them to persevere in their enterprises? Is that what one has to come to after a life of conscientious devotion to--an ideal? Come, old friend, say it isn't so bad as that! It is? Then"--the prominent author paused and sank weakly into the chair from which he had risen--"perhaps I have been dreaming all these years; but in my dream it seems to me that everything outside of myself which seemed to hinder me has really helped me. There has been no obstacle in my way which if I were at the bottom of the hill, where I might very rightfully be, I would have removed. I am glad that the climb to success, as your friend calls it, has been hard and long, and I bless God for my difficulties and backsets, all of them. Sometimes they seemed cruel; they filled me with despair and shame; but there was not one that did not make me stronger and fitter for my work, if I was fit for it. You know very well that in this art of ours we need all the strength we can get from our overthrows. There is no training that can ever make the true artist's work easy to him, and if he is a true artist he will suspect everything easily done as ill done. What comes hard and slow and hopelessly, that is the thing which when we look at it we find is the thing that was worth doing. I had my downs with my ups, and when I was beginning the downs outnumbered the ups ten to one. For one manuscript accepted, and after the days of many years printed, I had a dozen rejected and rejected without delay. But every such rejection helped me. In some cases I had to swallow the bitter dose and own that the editor was right; but the bitter was wholesome. In other cases I knew that he was wrong, and then I set my teeth, and took my courage in both hands, and tried and tried with that rejected manuscript till the divinely appointed editor owned that I was right. But these are the commonplaces of literary biography. I don't brag of them; and I have always tried to keep my head in such shape that even defeat has not swelled it beyond the No. 7 I began with. Why should I be so wicked as to help another and a younger man over the bad places? If I could only gain his confidence I should like to tell him that these are the places that will strengthen his heart for the climb. But if he has a weak heart, he had better try some other road. There! I have given you all the 'hints and suggestions from my experience' that I can think of, and now let me go." Once more he rose, and once more we stayed him. "Yes," we said, "no doubt you think you have spoken honestly and faithfully, but you have addressed yourself to the wrong audience. You have spoken to artists, born and self-made, but artists can always manage without help. Your help was invoked in behalf of artisans, of adventurers, of speculators. What was wanted of you was a formula for the fabrication of gold bricks which would meet the demands of current dealers in that sort of wares." "But if I have never made gold bricks myself, or not knowingly?" "Ah, that is what you say! But do you suppose anybody will believe you?" The prominent author put on the hat which he flattered himself was a No. 7, but which we could plainly see was a No. 12, and said, with an air of patronizing compassion, "You have sat here so long in your cushioned comfort, looking out on the publishing world, that you have become corrupt, cynical, pessimistic." XX PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to some of its most valued friends was of the life after death, and it will not surprise any experienced observer to learn that the talk went on amid much unserious chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more appropriate to the pouring of champagne, and the changing of plates, than to the very solemn affair in hand. It may not really have been so very solemn. Nobody at table took the topic much to heart apparently. The women, some of them, affected an earnest attention, but were not uncheerful; others frankly talked of other things; some, at the farther end of the table, asked what a given speaker was saying; the men did not, in some cases, conceal that they were bored. "No," the first speaker said, after weighing the pros and cons, "for my part, I don't desire it. When I am through, here, I don't ask to begin again elsewhere." "And you don't expect to?" his closest listener inquired. "And I don't expect to." "It is curious," the closest listener went on, "how much our beliefs are governed by our wishes in this matter. When we are young and are still hungering for things to happen, we have a strong faith in immortality. When we are older, and the whole round of things, except death, has happened, we think it very likely we shall not live again. It seems to be the same with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old peoples doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be convinced, as a friend of mine has been convinced against the grain, of the reality of the life after death. I will not say by what means he was convinced, for that is not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to me: 'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that people do. The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are irresistible; and I have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to reject them.'" "Yes," the first speaker said, "that is certainly an uncommon experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy him his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don't." "No," the other rejoined, "I don't know that I accuse your sincerity. But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to immortality?" "It wouldn't be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes out of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me enormously leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I can't trust immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances are that in the lapse of a few æons I should find eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what it _really_ is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I have an acquired antipathy." "That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not inconceivable," the closest listener assented. "I'm not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke his silence for the first time. "Do you mean to say," he asked of the first speaker, "that you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?" The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied, and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, "Precisely." "Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 'instinct of death,' which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty years or more, as they once did." "Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book?" the light skirmisher cut in. "He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and his book is called _The Nature of Man_." "That blighting book!" One of the women who had caught on to the drift of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration. "Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker parleyed. "Don't you call it blighting," she returned, "to be told not only that you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape--we had got used to that--but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?" "Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher formulated the case. "We are merely apes in error." The closest listener put this playfulness by. "What seems to me a fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we are badly made, and that there are all sorts of 'disharmonies,' as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything, than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy hereafter." "Well, I suppose," the first speaker said, "that Metchnikoff may err in his premises through a temperamental 'disharmony' of Russian nature rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their readers which we don't recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends and neighbors. Other people don't think of death so much as he supposes, and when they do they don't dread it so much. But I think he is still more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less afraid of death than the old because they risk their lives more readily. That is not from indifference to death, it is from inexperience of life; they haven't learned yet the dangers which beset it and the old have; that is all." "I don't know but you're right," the first speaker said. "And I couldn't see the logic of Metchnikoff's position in regard to the 'instinct of death' which he expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred and fifty we shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death after we die. The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we have not the instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. Then, until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we have the instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun death; lastly the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I don't see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, children dread death far more than men who are not yet old enough to have developed the instinct of it. Still, it's a fascinating and suggestive book." "But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living again which it takes away so pitilessly," said the woman who had followed the talk. "Is that such a very precious hope?" the first speaker asked. "I know you pretend not," she said, "but I don't believe you." "Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good end, are buoyed up by that hope?" "I don't see why they shouldn't be. I know it's the custom for scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can't prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?" "Ah," the light skirmisher put in, "some of the scientific people dispose of that point very simply. They say it's self-hypnotism." "Well, but they can't prove that, either," she retorted. Then she went on: "Besides, the dying are not almost universally willing to die. Sometimes they are very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling because they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn't it be just as reasonable to suppose that we could evolve the instinct of death by believing in the life hereafter as by living here a hundred and fifty years? For the present, it's as easy to do the one as the other." "But not for the future," the first speaker said. "As you suggest, it may be just as reasonable to think we can evolve the instinct of death by faith as by longevity, but it isn't as scientific." "What M. Metchnikoff wants is the scientific certainty--which we can have only by beginning to live a century and a half apiece--that the coming man will not be afraid to die." This, of course, was from the light skirmisher. The woman contended, "The coming man may be scientifically resigned if he prefers, but the going man, the _gone_ man, was rapturously ready to die, in untold thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed that he should live again." The first speaker smiled compassionately, and perhaps also a little patronizingly. "I'm not sure that you have met the point exactly. Metchnikoff denies, on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is possible for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two extremely interesting chapters of his, which treat of the 'Religious Remedies' and the 'Philosophical Remedies' for the 'disharmonies of the human constitution,' he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of the saints. The Christians and the Buddhists fare no worse than Plato and the Stoics; the last are no less unscientific than the first in his view, and no less fallacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned or enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physically desire it when we are tired of living, just as we physically desire sleep when we are tired of waking." "And to that end," the light skirmisher said, "he asks nothing but that we shall live a hundred and fifty years." "No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives that we shall die natural deaths, which are voluntary deaths. He contends that most of us now die accidental and violent deaths." The woman who had caught on demanded, "Why does he think we could live a century and a half?" "From analogies in the lives of other animals and from the facts of our constitution. He instances the remarkable cases of longevity recorded in the Bible." "I think he's very inconsistent," his pursuer continued. "The Bible says men lived anywhere from a hundred to nine hundred years, and he thinks it quite possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and he thinks that's impossible." "Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after death?" the first speaker asked. "No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years old? If it comes to undeniable proof there is far more proof of ghosts than of bicentenarians." "Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I don't believe in either." "And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch!" the light skirmisher reproached him. "You don't believe in the instinct of death! And I was just going to begin living to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily by leaving off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gorgonzola." Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the woman who had caught on; they both looked rather grave, and the closest listener left off laughing soonest. "We can't be too grateful to science for its devotion to truth. But isn't it possible for it to overlook one kind of truth in looking for another? Isn't it imaginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went wrong and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a soul, and as a slight compensation for having involuntarily degenerated from his anthropoid ancestor, came into the birthright of eternal life?" "It's imaginable," the first speaker granted. "But science leaves imagining things to religion and philosophy." "Ah, that's just where you're mistaken!" the woman who had caught on exclaimed. "Science does nothing but imagine things!" "Well, not quite," the light skirmisher mocked. She persisted unheeding: "First the suggestion from the mystical somewhere--the same _where_, probably, that music and pictures and poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and knocks it over." "It would be very interesting if some one would proceed hypothetically concerning the soul and its immortality, as the scientific people do in their inquiries concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and the rest." "Yes," the light skirmisher agreed. "Why doesn't some fellow bet himself that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the proofs?" The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, and he launched a random inquiry upon the general silence. "By-the-way, I wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again than men, as a general thing." "Because they don't feel," one of them at table ventured, "that they have had a fair chance here." "Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't had their say." "Is it quite certain," the closest listener asked, "that they _are_ more anxious to live again than men?" He looked round at the ladies present, and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they feared the men would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing than themselves for immortality. Finally the woman who had caught on said: "I don't know whether it's so or not; and I don't think it matters. But I don't mind saying that I long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very much of myself; but I'm interested in living. Then"--she dropped her voice a little--"there are some I should like to see again. I have known people--characters--natures--that I can't believe are wasted. And those that were dear to us and that we have lost--" She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her with a compassion unalloyed by patronage, and did not ask, as he might, "What has all that to do with it?" In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole company. It was broken at last by the closest listener's saying: "After all, I don't know that Metchnikoff's book is so very blighting. It's certainly a very important book, and it produces a reaction which may be wholesome or unwholesome as you choose to think. And no matter what we believe, we must respect the honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a matter that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, perhaps. In all seriousness I wish some scientific man would apply the scientific method to finding out the soul, as you"--he turned to the light skirmisher--"suggest. Why shouldn't it be investigated?" Upon this invitation the light skirmisher tried to imagine some psychological experiments which should bear a certain analogy to those of the physicists, but he failed to keep the level of his suggestion. "As I said," the closest listener remarked, "he produces a secondary state of revolt which is desirable, for in that state we begin to inquire not only where we stand, but where _he_ stands." "And what is your conclusion as to his place in the inquiry?" "That it isn't different from yours or mine, really. We all share the illusion of the race from the beginning that somehow our opinion of the matter affects its reality. I should distinguish so far as to say that we think we believe, and he thinks he knows. For my own part, I have the impression that he has helped my belief." The light skirmisher made a desperate effort to retrieve himself: "Then a few more books like his would restore the age of faith." XXI AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE A number of the Easy Chair's friends were sitting round the fire in the library of a country-house. The room was large and full of a soft, flattering light. The fire was freshly kindled, and flashed and crackled with a young vivacity, letting its rays frolic over the serried bindings on the shelves, the glazed pictures on the walls, the cups of after-luncheon coffee in the hands of the people, and the tall jugs and pots in the tray left standing on the library table. It was summer, but a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else could come, and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a just self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the accidental assemblage of those people at that time and place. The talk was rather naturally, though not necessarily, of books, and one of the people was noting that children seemed to like short stories because their minds had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole book. The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not because a book did not interest them, but because it exhausted their little powers. They were good for a leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature, even very high literature, but they had not really the force for anything covering greater time and space. Another declared this very suggestive, and declared it in such a way that the whole company perceived he had something behind his words, and besought him to say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could, after protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, perhaps not very important, and if it was important, perhaps it was not true. They said they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but æsthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which should not be a travesty of the old fairy-tales, or stories of adventures among giants and robbers and pirates, or fables with human beings speaking from the motives and passions of animals. He mentioned fiction, he said, because the new reading of the new reading public seemed to be nearly altogether fiction. All this had so much the effect of philosophical analysis that those comfortable people were lulled into self-approving assent; and putting themselves altogether apart from the new reading public, they begged him to say what he meant. He answered that there was nothing more phenomenal in the modern American life; and he paid a pretty tribute to their ignorance in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing of that public. He promised that he would try to define it, and he began by remarking that it seemed to be largely composed of the kind of persons who at the theatre audibly interpret the action to one another. The present company must have heard them? His listeners again assented. Was the new reading public drawn from the theatre-going, or more definitely speaking, the matinée class? There was something odd, there, the philosopher returned. The matinée class was as large as ever: larger; while the new reading public, perfectly interchangeable with it in its intellectual pleasure and experiences, had suddenly outnumbered it a thousandfold. The popular novel and the popular play were so entirely of one fibre and texture, and so easily convertible, that a new novel was scarcely in every one's bread-trough before it was on the boards of all the theatres. This led some to believe that we were experiencing a revival of the drama, and that if we kept on having authors who sold half a million copies we could not help having a Shakespeare by-and-by: he must follow. One of those listening asked, But how had these people begun so instantaneously to form themselves into this new innumerable reading public? If they were of that quality of mind which requires the translation of an unmistakable meaning from the players to the playgoers, they must find themselves helpless when grappling in solitude with the sense of a book. Why did not they go increasingly to the theatre instead of turning so overwhelmingly to the printed word? The philosopher replied that they had not now begun to do this, but only seemed to have begun, since there really was no beginning in anything. The readers had always been in the immense majority, because they could read anywhere, and they could see plays only in the cities and towns. If the theatre were universal, undoubtedly they would prefer plays, because a play makes far less draft upon the mental capacities or energies than the silliest book; and what seemed their effort to interpret it to one another might very well be the exchange of their delight in it. The books they preferred were of the nature of poor plays, full of "easy things to understand," cheap, common incidents, obvious motives, and vulgar passions, such as had been used a thousand times over in literature. They were fitted for the new reading public for this reason; the constant repetition of the same characters, events, scenes, plots, gave their infantile minds the pleasure which children find in having a story told over and over in exactly the same terms. The new reading public would rebel against any variance, just as children do. The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at least were silent, but one of them made the speaker observe that he had not told them what this innumerable unreasoning multitude had read before the present plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had infested everybody's bread-trough. The philosopher said the actual interior form of non-literary literature was an effect of the thin spread of our literary culture, and outwardly was the effect of the thick spread of our material prosperity. The dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel of yesterday in an avatar which left its essence unchanged. It was even worse, for it was less sincerely and forcibly written, and it could not be so quickly worn out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, and binding gave it a claim to regard which could not be ignored, and established for it a sort of right to lie upon the table, and then stand upon the shelf, where it seemed to relate itself to genuine literature, and to be of the same race and lineage. As for this vast new reading public, it was the vast old reading public with more means in its pocket of satisfying its crude, childish taste. Its head was the same empty head. There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for a while no one spoke. Then some one tried in vain to turn the subject, while the philosopher smiled upon the desolation he had made; and then one of that sex which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its "sense of satisfaction ache" through the increase of conviction, asked him why the English reading public, which must be so much more cultivated than our new reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile effects in works of imagination, the stirring incidents, the well-worn plots, the primitive passions, and the robustious incentives. He owned the fact, but he contended that the fact, though interesting, was not so mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be explained that the English had never taken the imagination very seriously, and that in their dense, close civilization, packed tight with social, political, and material interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly excitement and amusement. They had not turned to it for edification or instruction, for that thrill of solemn joy which comes of vital truth profoundly seen and clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe besides turned her face to the light, some decades ago, in the pages of the great prose poets who made the age illustrious, England preferred the smoky links and dancing camp-fires which had pleased her immature fancy, and kept herself well in the twilight of the old ideal of imagination as the mother of unrealities. There could be no doubt, the philosopher thought, that the recrudescence which her best wits recognized as the effects of this perversity, was the origin of the preposterous fiction which we now feed to the new reading public, and which we think must somehow be right because it was hers and is ours, and has the sanction of race and tradition. It was not, he continued, a thing to shed the tear of unavailing regret for, though it was not a transitory phase, or a state of transition, for the condition that now existed had always existed. The new reading public was larger than ever before not merely because there was a fresh demand for reading, but because more people were lettered and moneyed and leisured, and did not know what otherwise to do with themselves. It was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted in itself than for an indirect result which might be feared from it. He paused at this, in order to be asked what this result was, and being promptly asked he went on. It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a calling, in the popular regard. He owned that in the past authorship had enjoyed too much honor in the reverence and affection of the world: not always, indeed, but at certain times. As long as authors were the clients and dependents of the great, they could not have been the objects of a general interest or honor. They had then passed the stage when the simple poet or story-teller was wont to --sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings, to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had not yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the peasantry, now turned people, and threw itself upon the people's generous acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that hour came, it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent curiosity concerning literature and the literary life, which the philosopher said he was afraid could not survive the actual superabundance of authors and the transformation of the novelist into the artisan. There seemed, he pursued, a fixed formula for the manufacture of a work of fiction, to be studied and practised like any other. Literature was degraded from an art to a poor sort of science, in the practical application of which thousands were seen prospering; for the immense output of our press represented the industry of hundreds and thousands. A book was concocted, according to a patent recipe, advertised, and sold like any other nostrum, and perhaps the time was already here when it was no longer more creditable to be known as the author of a popular novel than as the author of a popular medicine, a Pain-killer, a Soothing Syrup, a Vegetable Compound, a Horse Liniment, or a Germicide. Was it possible, he asked, for a reader of the last book selling a hundred thousand copies to stand in the loving or thrilling awe of the author that we used to feel for Longfellow and Tennyson, for Emerson and Carlyle, for Hawthorne and George Eliot, for Irving and Scott, or for any of their great elders or youngers? He repeated that perhaps authorship had worked its worshippers too hard, but there was no doubt that their worship was a genuine devotion. For at least a hundred and fifty years it had been eagerly offered in a full acceptance of the Schiller superstition that at the sharing of the earth the poet, representing authorship, had been so much preoccupied with higher things that he had left the fleshpots and the loaves and fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a share of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. From Goethe to Carlyle, what a long roll of gods, demigods, and demisemigods it was! It might have been bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather thought it was, but burning incense on the different shrines was an excellent thing for the votaries, and kept them out of all sorts of mischiefs, low pleasures, and vain amusements. Whether that was really so or not, the doubt remained whether authorship was not now a creed outworn. Did tender maids and virtuous matrons still cherish the hope of some day meeting their literary idols in the flesh? Did generous youth aspire to see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires teach their children that it was an epoch-making event when a great poet or novelist visited the country; or when they passed afar, did they whip some favored boy, as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped him at sight of a salamander in the fire that he might not forget the prodigy? Now that the earth had been divided over again, and the poet in his actual guise of novelist had richly shared in its goods with the farmer, the noble, the merchant, and the abbot, was it necessary or even fair that he should be the guest of heaven? In other words, now that every successful author could keep his automobile, did any one want his autograph? In the silence that fell upon the company at these words, the ticking of the clock under its classic pediment on the mantel was painfully audible, and had the effect of intimating that time now had its innings and eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes seemed to pass before any one had the courage to ask whether the degradation of authorship was not partially the result of the stand taken by the naturalists in Zola, who scorned the name of art for his calling and aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who suggested this possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former times by the poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the pianist, the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor, and the architect, who still deigned to practise an art. The philosopher smiled, and owned that this was very interesting, and opened up a fresh field of inquiry. The first question there was whether the imaginative author were not rather to blame for not having gone far enough in the scientific direction in the right scientific fashion than for having taken that course at all. The famous reproach of poetry made by Huxley, that it was mostly "sensual caterwauling," might well have given the singer pause in striking the sympathetic catgut of his lyre: perhaps the strings were metallic; but no matter. The reproach had a justice in it that must have stung, and made the lyrist wish to be an atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that very moment science had, as it were, caught the bread out of fiction's mouth, and usurped the highest functions of imagination. In almost every direction of its recent advance it had made believe that such and such a thing was so, and then proceeded to prove it. To this method we owed not only the possession of our present happy abundance of microbes in every sort, but our knowledge of the universe in almost every respect. Science no longer waited for the apple to fall before inferring a law of gravitation, but went about with a stick knocking fruit off every bough in the hope that something suggestive would come of it. On make-believes of all kinds it based the edifices of all kinds of eternal veracities. It behooved poetry, or fiction, which was radically the same, to return to its earliest and simplest devices if it would find itself in the embrace of science, and practise the make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many there were chances of some coming true if they were carried far enough and long enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science had apparently been used in the art of advertising the works in which the appetite of the new reading public was flattered. The publishers had hypothesized from the fact of a population of seventy millions, the existence of an immense body of raw, coarse minds, untouched by taste or intelligence, and boldly addressed the new fiction to it. As in many suppositions of science their guess proved true. Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken before inquired, was not make-believe the right method for the author, if it was the right method for the scientist and the publisher? Why should not the novelist hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and then go on by persistent study to find them true? It seemed to this inquirer that the mistake of fiction, when it refused longer to be called an art and wished to be known as a science, was in taking up the obsolescent scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, or human documents, and deducing a case from them, instead of boldly supposing a case, as the new science did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it. The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very thing he was contending for. The documents should be collected in support of the hypothesis; the hypothesis should not be based on documents already collected. First the inference, then the fact; was not that the new scientific way? It looked like it; and it seemed as if the favorite literature of the new reading public were quite in the spirit of the new science. Its bold events, its prodigious characters, its incredible motives, were not they quite of the nature of the fearless conjecture which imagined long and short electric waves and then spread a mesh of wire to intercept them and seize their message? The hardy inquirer demanded: Then if so, why despise the literature of the new reading public? Why despise the new reading public, anyway? The philosopher responded that he despised nothing, not even a thing so unphilosophical as modern science. He merely wished his interpellant to observe again that the unification of the literary spirit and the scientific spirit was degrading the literary man to the level of the scientific man. He thought this was bad for the small remnant of mankind, who in default of their former idolatry might take to the worship of themselves. Now, however bad a writer might be, it was always well for the reader to believe him better than himself. If we had not been brought up in this superstition, what would have become of the classics of all tongues? But for this, what was to prevent the present company from making a clearance of three-fourths of the surrounding shelves and feeding that dying flame on the hearth? At this the host, who had been keeping himself in a modest abeyance, came forward and put some sticks on the fire. He said he would like to see any one touch his bindings; which seemed to be his notion of books. Nobody minded him; but one of those dutyolators, who abound in a certain sex, asked the philosopher what he thought we ought to do for the maintenance of author-worship among us. He answered, he had not thought of that; his mind had been fixed upon the fact of its decay. But perhaps something could be done by looking up the author whose book had sold least during the season, and asking him candidly whether he would not like to be paid the divine honors now going begging from one big seller to another; for the decay of author-worship must be as much from the indifference of the authors as from the irreverence of the readers. If such a low-selling author did not seem to regard it as rather invidious, then pay him the divine honors; it might be a wholesome and stimulating example; but perhaps we should afterward have the demigod on our hands. Something might be safelier done by writing, as with the present company, and inquiring into "the present condition of polite learning." This would keep the sacred flame alive, and give us the comfort of refined association in an exquisite moment of joy from the sense of our superiority to other people. That, after all, was the great thing. The company drew a little closer round the fire. The rain beat upon the panes, and the wind swept the wet leaves against them, while each exhaled a sigh of aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret. XXII THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of that strange passion for reading which has of late possessed the public, and the contagion or infection by which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never read before; and then the talk was of how this prodigious force might be controlled and turned in the right way: not suffered to run to waste like water over the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon wheels that turn the mills of the gods or something like that. There were, of course, a great many words; in fact, talk is composed of words, and the people at that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, and they did not mind how many words they used. But the sum of their words was the hope, after a due season of despair, that the present passion for reading might be made to eventuate in more civilization than it seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to good literature, supposing it was ever there in great strength, and the question was how to do this. One of the company said he had lately been reading a good many books of Leigh Hunt's, and after everybody had interrupted with "Delightful!" "Perfectly charming!" and the like, he went on to observe that one of the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in quotation. That, he remarked, was almost a lost art with critics, who had got to thinking that they could tell better what an author was than the author himself could. Like every other power disused, the power of apt quotation had died, and there were very few critics now who knew how to quote: not one knew, as Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the great quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps overworked their gift, and might have been justly accused, as they certainly were accused, of misleading the reader and making him think that the poets, whose best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so that they could not be missed, were as good throughout as in the passages given. It was this sense of having abused innocence, or ignorance, which led to the present reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the present reaction was an error. Suppose that the poets whose best was given by quotation were not altogether as good as that? The critics never pretended they were; they were merely showing how very good these poets could be, and at the same time offering a delicate pleasure to the reader, who could not complain that his digestion was overtaxed by the choice morsels. If his pleasure in them prompted him to go to the entire poet quoted, in the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the reader was rightly served in one sense. In another, he was certainly not misserved or his time wasted. It would be hard for him to prove that he could have employed it more profitably. Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had the eye and ear of the table went on to remark that he had not meant to make a defence of the extinct school of quotational criticism. What he really meant to do was to suggest a way out of the present situation in which the new multitude of voracious readers were grossly feeding upon such intellectual husks as swine would not eat, and imagining themselves nourished by their fodder. There might be some person present who could improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as he conceived it, was that something might be done in the line of quotational criticism to restore the great poets to the public favor, for he understood that good authors were now proportionately less read than they once were. He thought that a pity: and the rest of the company joined in asking him how he proposed to employ the quotational method for his purpose. In answering he said that he would not go outside of the English classics, and he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy, he would have each of these poets treated in the whole measure of his work as many or most of them had been topically or partially treated by the quotational critics. Some one here made him observe that he was laying out rather a large piece of work, and to this he answered, Not at all; the work had been already done. Asked then, somewhat derisively, why it need be done over again, he explained, with a modesty and patience which restored him to the regard he had lost by the derision (all had impartially united in it), that though the work had already been done, there needed some slight additions to it which would easily fit it to his purpose. He was not thinking of going in for one of those dreadful series of books which seemed the dismay alike of publisher and reader, and required rewriting of matter more than enough rewritten. In fact, he said, that for his purpose the writing was done fully and probably better than it could be done again, and it was only the reading and quoting that demanded editorial attention. Another said he did not see how that could be, and the inventor of the brave scheme, which was still _in petto_, said that he would try to show him. We had, he contended, only too great riches in the criticisms of the poets open to our choice, but suppose we took Spenser and let Lowell introduce him to us. There would be needed a very brief biographical note, and then some able hand to intersperse the criticism with passages from Spenser, or with amplifications of the existing quotations, such as would give a full notion of the poet's scope and quality. The story of each of his poems could be given in a few words, where the poems themselves could not be given even in part, and with the constant help of the critic the reader could be possessed of a luminous idea of the poet, such as he probably could not get by going to him direct, though this was not to be deprecated, but encouraged, after the preparatory acquaintance. The explanatory and illustrative passages could be interpolated in the text of the criticism without interrupting the critic, and something for Spenser might thus be done on the scale of what Addison did for Milton. It was known how those successive papers in the _Spectator_ had rehabilitated one of the greatest English poets, or, rather, rehabilitated the English public, and restored the poet and the public to each other. They formed almost an ideal body of criticism, and if they did not embody all that the reader need know of Milton, they embodied so much that he could no longer feel himself ignorant of Milton. In fact, they possessed him of a high degree of Miltonian culture, which was what one wanted to have with respect to any poet. They might be extended with still greater quotation, and if something more yet were needed the essay on Milton which made Macaulay's reputation might be employed as a vessel to catch the overrunnings of the precious ichor. Who could not wish to know the poetry of Keats as we already knew his life through the matchless essay of Lowell? That might be filled out with the most striking passages of his poetry, simply let in at appropriate places, without breaking the flow of that high discourse, and forming a rich accompaniment which could leave no reader unpleasured or uninstructed. The passages given from the poet need not be relevant to the text of the critic; they might be quite irrelevant and serve the imaginable end still better. For instance, some passages might be given in the teeth of the critic, and made to gainsay what he had been saying. This would probably send the reader, if he was very much perplexed, to the poet himself, which was the imaginable end. He might be disappointed one way or he might be disappointed the other way, but in the mean while he would have passed his time, and he would have instructed if he had not amused himself. It would be very interesting to take such a criticism as that of Lowell on Dryden and give not only the fine things from him, but the things that counted for the critic in his interesting contention that Dryden failed of being a prime poet because of the great weight of prose in him, and very good prose; or, as the critic charmingly put it, he had wings that helped him run along the ground, but did not enable him to fly. It would be most valuable for us to see how Dryden was a great literary man, but not one of the greatest poets, and yet must be ranked as a great poet. If the balance inclined now toward this opinion, and now against it, very possibly the reader would find himself impelled to turn to the poet's work, and again the imaginable end would be served. A listener here asked why the talker went chiefly to Lowell for the illustration of his theory, and was frankly answered, For the same reason that he had first alluded to Leigh Hunt: because he had lately been reading him. It was not because he had not read any other criticism, or not that he entirely admired Lowell's; in fact, he often found fault with that. Lowell was too much a poet to be a perfect critic. He was no more the greatest sort of critic than Dryden was the greatest sort of poet. To turn his figure round, he had wings that lifted him into the air when he ought to be running along the ground. The company laughed civilly at this piece of luck, and then they asked, civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had not done for a great many poets just what he was proposing to have done. What about the treatment of the poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on _Wit and Humor, Imagination and Fancy_, _A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla_, and the rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was not prepared to answer for them. One of the company said that she had read those Italian poets in Leigh Hunt's version of them when she was a girl, and it had had the effect of making her think she had read the poets themselves, and she had not since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. She regarded that as an irreparable injury, and she doubted whether, if the great English poets could be introduced in that manner, very many people would pursue their acquaintance for themselves. They would think they were familiar with them already. Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, but it was not; or, at least, it was only part of the scheme. The scheme was to give the ever-increasing multitude of readers a chance to know something of the best literature. If they chose to pursue the acquaintance, very good; if they chose not to pursue the acquaintance, still very good; they could not have made it at all without being somewhat refined and enlightened. He felt very much about it as he felt about seeing Europe, which some people left unseen because they could not give all the time to it they would like. He always said to such people, Go if they could only be gone a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, was a treasure such as a lifetime at home could not lay up; an hour of Venice or Florence was precious; a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or Mantua, was beyond price. So you could not know a great poet so little as not to be enriched by him. A look from a beautiful woman, or a witty word from a wise one, distinguished and embellished the life into which it fell, so that it could never afterward be so common as it was before. Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the ladies tried to think whether the speaker had her in mind or not, and whether he ought really to be so personal, why could not Mr. Morley's _English Men of Letters_ series be used to carry out the scheme proposed; and its proposer said he had nothing to say against that, except perhaps that the frames might be too much for the pictures. He would rather choose a critical essay, as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in this sort of thing we had an endless choice, both new and old. If he had any preference it would be for the older-fashioned critics, like Hazlitt or perhaps like De Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without the book, whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, but he had the sense of wonderful things in him about the eighteenth-century poets: things that made you think you knew them, and that yet made you burn to be on the same intimate terms with them as De Quincey himself. His method of knowing the poets through the critics, the sympathetic critics, who were the only real critics, would have the advantage of acquainting the reader with the critics as well as the poets. The critics got a good deal of ingratitude from the reader generally, and perhaps in their character of mere reviewers they got no more than they merited, but in their friendly function of ushers to the good things, even the best things, in the authors they were studying, they had a claim upon him which he could not requite too generously. They acted the part of real friends, and in the high company where the reader found himself strange and alone, they hospitably made him at home. Above all other kinds of writers, they made one feel that he was uttering the good things they said. Of course, for the young reader, there was the danger of his continuing always to think their thoughts in their terms, but there were also great chances that he would begin by-and-by to think his own thoughts in terms of his own. The more quotational the critics were, the better. For himself the speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but it was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great beauty pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of puzzling it out; sometimes he never sees it, and then his life is sublimed with an insoluble conundrum. Sometimes, still, he sees what the critic means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is not likely to go to the end of his journey without finding a critic whom he agrees with about the passage in question. After all, however, it was asked by one that had not spoken before (with that fine air of saying a novel thing which people put on who have not spoken before), would not the superficial knowledge of the poets imparted by quotational criticism result in a sort of pseudo-culture which would be rather worse than nothing, a kind of intellectual plated ware or æsthetic near-silk? The talker said he thought not, and that he had already touched upon some such point in what he had said about going to Europe for a few months. He offered the opinion that there was no such thing as pseudo-culture; there was culture or there was not; and the reader of a quotational criticism, if he enjoyed the quotations, became, so far, cultivated. It could not be said that he knew the poets treated of, but neither could it be said that he was quite ignorant of them. As a matter of fact, he did know them in a fashion, through a mind larger and clearer than his own. For this reason the talker favored the reading of criticism, especially the kind of criticism that quoted. He would even go so far as to say that there was no just and honest criticism without quotation. The critic was bound to make out his case, or else abdicate his function, and he could not make out his case, either for or against an author, without calling him to testify. Therefore, he was in favor of quotational criticism, for fairness' sake, as well as for his pleasure; and it was for the extension of it that he now contended. He was not sure that he wished to send the reader to the authors quoted in all cases. The reader could get through the passages cited a pretty good notion of the authors' quality, and as for their quantity, that was often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the case of the old poets, and most of the English classics, there was a great deal of filth which the reader would be better for not taking into his mind and which the most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer him. If any one said that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of those authors, he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of themselves, yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them from living at periods when manners were foul. XXIII READING FOR A GRANDFATHER A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had the real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a Christmas present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She thought, only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the finest cigars, of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did not smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he went to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her grandmother, very short and very scant (according to her notion at the chance moments when she had surprised him in it), from which neither love nor money could part him; the others she rejected for the reason already assigned. Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, and she was glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected, she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it. As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across the afternoon tea-cups whether she had seen this or that new book, and scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those new books. "Now, grandfather," she began, "you know I always give you a Christmas present." "Yes, my dear," the old gentleman patiently assented, "I know you do. You are very thoughtful." "Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being thoughtful. What I like is being spontaneous." "Well, then, my dear, I don't mind saying you are very spontaneous." "And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make a lasting enemy of me, let him surprise me. So I am going to tell you now what I am going to give you. Do you like that?" "I like everything you do, my child." "Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I am going to give you books. And in order not to disappoint you by giving you books that you have read before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you mind it?" "Oh no, but I'm afraid you won't find me very frank." "I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there is no fun in not surprising you, or in not giving you books that you have read." "There is something in that," her grandfather assented. "But now, instead of finding out what I have read, or what I like, why not tell me what I ought to read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn't the girls turn the tables and advise their elders? I often feel the need of advice from girls on all sorts of subjects, and you would find me very grateful, I believe." The girl's eyes sparkled and then softened toward this docile ancestor. "Do you really mean it, grandfather? It would be fun if you did." "But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I should be glad if your good counsel could include the whole conduct of life, for I am sensible sometimes of a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am sure you could help me to combat." "Oh, grandfather," said the girl, tenderly, "you know that isn't true!" "Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn't. My difficulty in regard to reading remains, and there you certainly could help me. At moments it seems to me that I have come to the end of my line." The old gentleman's voice fell, and she could no longer suspect him of joking. So she began, "Why, what have you been reading last?" "Well, my dear, I have been looking into the _Spectator_ a little." "The London _Spectator_? Jim says they have it at the club, and he swears by it. But I mean, what books; and that's a weekly newspaper, or a kind of review, isn't it?" "The _Spectator_ I mean was a London newspaper, and it was a kind of review, but it was a daily. Is it possible that you've never heard of it?" The young girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully, but upon the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any important thing in literature had escaped her. "But you've heard of Addison, and Steele, and Pope, and Swift?" "Oh yes, we had them at school, when we were reading _Henry Esmond_; they all came into that. And I remember, now: Colonel Esmond wrote a number of the _Spectator_ for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought it was all a make-up." "And you don't know about Sir Roger de Coverley?" "Of course I do! It's what the English call the Virginia Reel. But why do you ask? I thought we were talking about your reading. I don't see how you could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it amuses you! _Is_ it so amusing?" "It's charming, but after one has read it as often as I have one begins to know it a little too well." "Yes; and what else have you been reading?" "Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues the old essayist tradition, and he is gently delightful." "Never heard of him!" the girl frankly declared. "He was a poet, too, and he wrote the _Story of Rimini_--about Paolo and Francesca, you know." "Oh, there you're away off, grandfather! Mr. Philips wrote about _them_; and that horrid D'Annunzio. Why, Duse gave D'Annunzio's play last winter! What are you thinking of?" "Perhaps I am wandering a little," the grandfather meekly submitted, and the girl had to make him go on. "Do you read poetry a great deal?" she asked, and she thought if his taste was mainly for poetry, it would simplify the difficulty of choosing the books for her present. "Well, I'm rather returning to it. I've been looking into Crabbe of late, and I have found him full of a quaint charm." "Crabbe? I never heard of him!" she owned as boldly as before, for if he had been worth hearing of, she knew that she would have heard of him. "Don't you like Kipling?" "Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer William Watson among your very modern moderns." "Why, is _he_ living yet? I thought he wrote ten or fifteen years ago! You don't call _him_ modern! You like Stevenson, don't you? He's a great stylist; everybody says he is, and so is George Meredith. You must like _him_?" "He's a great intellect, but a little of him goes almost as long a way as a little of Browning. I think I prefer Henry James." "Oh yes, he's just coming up. He's the one that has distinction. But the people who write _like_ him are a great deal more popular. They have all his distinction, and they don't tax your mind so much. But don't let's get off on novelists or there's no end to it. Who are really your favorite poets?" "Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read Dante by fits and starts; and I do not mind Milton from time to time. I like Wordsworth, and I like Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take up Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself going back to Pope with real relish. And Byron; yes, Byron! But I shouldn't advise your reading _Don Juan_." "That's an opera, isn't it? What they call 'Don Giovanni.' I never heard of any such poem." "That shows how careful you have been of your reading." "Oh, we read everything nowadays--if it's up to date; and if _Don Juan_ had been, you may be sure I would have heard of it. I suppose you like Tennyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those _old_ poets?" "Are they old? They used to be so new! Yes, I like them, and I like Whittier and some things of Bryant's." At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she said: "Oh yes, I suppose so. And I suppose you like the old dramatists?" "Some of them--Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their plays. But I can't stand most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben Jonson at all." "Oh yes--'Rasselas.' I can't stand him either, grandfather. I'm quite with you about Ben Jonson. 'Too much Johnson,' you know." The grandfather looked rather blank. "Too _different_ Johnsons, I think, my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his _Vicar of Wakefield_, and his poems to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very best. Shakespeare's are the only plays that one _wants_ to read." The young girl held up her charming chin, with the air of keeping it above water too deep for her. "And Ibsen?" she suggested. "I hope you despise Ibsen as much as I do. He's clear gone out now, thank goodness! Don't you think _Ghosts_ was horrid?" "It's dreadful, my dear; but I shouldn't say it was horrid. No, I don't despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero's plays good reading." "Oh," the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. "'The Gay Lord Quex'; Miss Vanbrugh was _great_ in that. But now don't get off on the theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the old, _old_ poets--before Burns or Shelley even--do you like?" "Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked him very much; and the other day when I was looking over Leigh Hunt's essays, I found a number of them about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I don't know when I've found greater pleasure in poetry. If I must have a favorite among the old poets, I will take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser is rather more modern." "Yes, but I can't bear his agnosticism, can you? And I hate metaphysics, anyway." The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, "Now, I'm afraid we are getting too much Spenser." The girl went off at a tangent. "Don't you just _love_ Mr. Gillette in 'Sherlock Holmes'? There's a play I should think you would like to read! They say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I could get hold of it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!" "No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you think you've catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very old-fashioned." "No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always laughing at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I should say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in fiction, grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels." "Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I----" "Tell me what novels you have read," she broke in upon him imperatively. "The ones you consider the greatest." The grandfather had to think. "It is rather a long list--so long that I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd better mention only the very greatest, like _Don Quixote_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Wilhelm Meister_, and _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Emma_, and _Pride and Prejudice_, and _The Bride of Lammermoor_, and _I Promessi Sposi_, and _Belinda_, and _Frankenstein_, and _Chartreuse de Parme_, and _César Birotteau_, and _The Last Days of Pompeii_, and _David Copperfield_, and _Pendennis_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, and _Blithedale Romance_, and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, and _Middlemarch_, and _Smoke_, and _Fathers and Sons_, and _A Nest of Nobles_, and _War and Peace_, and _Anna Karénina_, and _Resurrection_, and _Dona Perfecta_, and _Marta y Maria_, and _I Malavoglia_, and _The Return of the Native_, and _L'Assomoir_, and _Madame Bovary_, and _The Awkward Age_, and _The Grandissimes_--and most of the other books of the same authors. Of course, I've read many more perhaps as great as these, that I can't think of at the moment." The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile ancestor in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of which she did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she believed to be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply moralized, denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or the authors. Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession which his reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than ever the necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his reform, in respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give him books for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas for good resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn over a new leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it. She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm him too much, and said she had never been so much interested as in knowing what books he really liked. But as he had read all those he named-- "Oh, dozens of times!" he broke in. --Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an entirely new list for him, so that he could have something freshly entertaining; she did not like to say more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed him on his bald head and ran away to take the matter under immediate advisement. Her notion then was to look over several lists of the world's best hundred books which she had been keeping by her, but when she came to compare them, she found that they contained most of the books he had mentioned, besides many others. It would never do to give him any one of these libraries of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the reason that a hundred books would cost more of her grandfather's money than she felt justified in spending on him at a season when she had to make so many other presents. Just when she was at her wit's end, a sudden inspiration seized her. She pinned on her hat, and put on her new winter jacket, and went out and bought the last number of _The Bookworm_. At the end of this periodical she had often got suggestions for her own reading, and she was sure that she should find there the means of helping her poor grandfather to a better taste in literature than he seemed to have. So she took the different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and up-town and down-town in New York, giving the best-selling books of the month in all those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them, which she gave to her bookseller with orders to get them as nearly of the same sizes and colors as possible. He followed her instructions with a great deal of taste and allowed her twenty-five per cent. off, which she applied toward a wedding-present she would have to give shortly. In this way she was able to provide her grandfather for the new year with reading that everybody was talking about, and that brought him up to date with a round turn. XXIV SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE Among the many letters which the Easy Chair has received after its conference on the state of poetry, one of most decided note was from a writer confessing herself of the contrary-minded. "I love some children, but not childhood in general merely because it is childhood. So I love some poems rather than poetry in general just because it is poetry.... I object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life and more or less the common thought of the day, then more of the common people will read it." There were other things in this letter which seemed to us of so much importance that we submitted it as a whole to a Woman's Club of our acquaintance. The nine ladies composing the club were not all literary, but they were all of æsthetic pursuits, and together they brought a good deal of culture to bear on the main points of the letter. They were not quite of one mind, but they were so far agreed that what they had to say might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We will not attempt to report their remarks at any length--they ran to all lengths--but in offering a résumé of what they variously said to a sole effect, we will do what we can to further the cause they joined in defending. The Muses--for we will no longer conceal that this Woman's Club was composed of the tuneful Nine--acknowledged that there was a great deal in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in all its established forms, they thought themselves bound to direct her attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had apparently overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to take her own part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it _was_ ridiculous for poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it apart and put it together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention, or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance, there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and trills, or even expressing yourself in _recitativo secco_, it would simply set people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had to make believe that things two inches high were life-size, and that there were relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that colors which were really like nothing in nature were natural. As for sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether you took it in bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or three-quarters out, or in groups with people in eternal action; or in single figures, standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if they were not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors bareheaded where they would take their deaths of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without a stitch of clothes on. All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to them perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of poetry _not_ to conform to "the mental tone and spirit of the times"; and though it might very well reflect the life, it must not reflect "the common thought of the day" upon pain of vulgarizing and annulling itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its business was the interpretation of enduring beauty and eternal veracity. If it stooped in submission to any such expectation as that expressed, and dedicated itself to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions and opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had its law, and its law was distinction of ideal and elevation of tendency, no matter what material it dealt with. It might deal with the commonest, the cheapest material, but always in such a way as to dignify and beautify the material. Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge all those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun; shunning those silly elisions like _ne'er_ and _o'er_, and, above all, avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite article. Of the tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded sister meant the rhyme, they said they could very well remember when there was no such thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on perfectly well without it, and even those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse. The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both because they were really great authorities and because it is always best to agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view of their sister's contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In short, the Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very intimate occasion as this, when it could impart them without wounding the susceptibilities of others, or risking a painful snub for itself. But it appeared to the Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough in justifying the convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. They could easily have proved that much of the mystical charm which differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its syntactical acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a man inverting his head and looking at the landscape between his legs gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so literature forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really achieves something richly strange by the novel and surprising postures permissible in verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps lingering in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually full of these licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little proved as denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly to the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which is a sort of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him. While the ladies of that club were talking, some such thoughts as these were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear, delightful poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is proof, indeed, how shallow was all the debate about realism and romanticism that the poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the charm which truth to condition and character has, in whatever form. But once, long before that ineffectual clamor arose, he was valued as he should be still. Edmund Burke was the first to understand his purpose and appreciate his work. He helped the poet not only with praises but with pounds till he could get upon his feet. He introduced Crabbe's verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose oaths were harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young singer. The sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best followed him through his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox loved him and his rhyme, and wished his tales to be read to him on the bed he never left alive. Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him letters of cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, the magnanimous, hailed him brother, and would always have his books by him; none of his poems appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day. Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean, the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis, sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed. Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same cæsura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that travel is the fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than it has worried along with hitherto. XXV A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late. As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then say: "No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly certain." "Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man returned, in a despair tinged with resentment. She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both tastefully dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of civilized life yet known. "I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion, "that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It's a great disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been in a short story for ages." "Is it so bad as that?" the young man asked, sadly. "Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe that I should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don't think I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessary, and, if I didn't like to live in England because I was fond of my own country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time with me; and that would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I would care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was from. But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it came to anything like right or wrong I should act conscientiously. In society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing or dining or teaing, and I should be willing to take my part in the lighter athletics. But," she ended, as she began, with a sigh, "I'm not wanted." "Yes, I see what you mean," the young man said, with a thoughtful knot between his brows. "I'm not wanted myself, at present, in the short stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I certainly didn't meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of course, a hero is only something in an author's fancy, and I've no right to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who ropes cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of the kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can't forget that I'm a gentleman, and it's difficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like it themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way. They're generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have married lady-like girls and wouldn't think of associating with a shady or ignorant person." "The authoresses are quite as inconsistent," the professional heroine rejoined. "They wouldn't speak to the kind of young men whom they expect a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know how very oddly a girl feels about people who are outside of the world she's been brought up in. It isn't enough that a man should be very noble at heart and do grand things, or save your life every now and then, or be masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with him. I don't see why they can't let one have, now and then, the kind of husbands they get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to give my heart to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable man who could offer me a pleasant home--I wouldn't mind the suburbs; and I could work with him and work for him till I dropped--the kind of man that the real world seems to be so full of. I've never had a fair chance to show what was in me; I've always been placed in such a false position. Now I have no position at all, not even a false one!" Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: "Yes, they all seem, authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a good moment--I'm sure _you_ were--and I should like an engagement in an honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it." "I _know_ you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly, so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary _rapprochement_ of their shadowy substances on the bench where they floated in a sitting posture. "I don't want to be greedy; I believe in living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change--" "I shouldn't wish _you_ to change," the hero said, so fondly that the witness trembled for something more demonstrative. "Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't _they_ change a little? Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the abnormal, in some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and happiness, till they got married--a relief from, well, the other thing. I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty." "You would have more than the charm of novelty," the hero said, and the witness trembled again for the _convenances_ which one so often sees offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of misbehavior. "And for a time, at least, I believe you--I believe _we_, for I must necessarily be engaged with you--would succeed. The difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors." It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he could manage that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, "But they would say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever having a run." A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word. "No, no!" he conjured them. "_Not_ commonplace. A judicious paragraph anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could be hailed as the _normal_ hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediæval men and maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that luminous word _normal_ before the reading public at once, and you will be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start--yes! in _advance_ of the start--for what you are: types of the loveliness of our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is coming again!" It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath, and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not spoken, and then the heroine said: "Perhaps we shall have to wait for a new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the magazines. Some beginner _must_ see in us what has always pleased: the likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably _end well_, and that we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can take heart from our happy dénouements, when they see a family resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy themselves in the company of those degenerates, as _I_ call them. They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck." "Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?" he returned, in his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted. Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted, like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her first position: "Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour before the dawn. We must wait." "And perish in the mean time?" "Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinically. "It's not for nothing that we are immortal," and as she spoke she passed her translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall. OTHER ESSAYS I AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now dead. That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices, and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country. Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward winter. There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d'hôte express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry. [Illustration: BROADWAY AT NIGHT] But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of _revenants_, which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid sort of _revenants_ if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables d'hôte; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize. But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval. But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it. Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot, will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the actresses. At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be, if it is not positively raining, you "do not know or need to know." Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night, which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York's present at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang, "Forget it, forget it." There remains only the future from which she can derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derived from immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists. [Illustration: ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS] Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months. It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the Election Night you _feel_ New York as you do in no other hour. The sense extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his sins and is no longer sorry for them. After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers come in late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows? New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we must wait another year before we can put it to the test again; wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet, and the wind comes up and blows them bare, and yet another summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the _revenants_ have once more returned to town. II PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon "Across the walnuts and the wine." "How," this puzzled spirit has asked, "shall I address a friend of mine who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to the respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our letters to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy, of letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities? Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?" Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, _not_ "Mr. Smythe Johnes" if you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with any man who knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply "Smythe Johnes," with his street and number, for he feels himself classed by your "Mr. Smythe Johnes" with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our revolt in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are now conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or below it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they will address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence. The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than they think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was the proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so commonly called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older form of Armiger they forgot that _inter arma silent leges_, and that Esquire was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago, yielded to the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately addressed all his contributors as "Mr." One of them, the most liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a year, and then he protested. After that the young editor (he was then almost as young as any one now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately addressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abiding sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Friend and an abhorrer of war, he could not be hailed Armiger without something like insult. With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but it is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly addressing doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In England, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you cannot call a surgeon "doctor" without offence; he is Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven knows. It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall superscribe him. A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their letters simply Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or affix. They kept up this good custom till in process of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted their manners, so that when they came home they began addressing each other as Esq., and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and doubtless if mankind could be brought to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes which these friends once disused the race would be none the worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes on one's visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial who is not to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is the United States post-office which delivers the letters of Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service which conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely the explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other William H. Taft. Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were wanting in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well as hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The signory of the proudest republic in the world held that their family names were of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own day a lady of the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that the title of count existed in it or need exist: "Ognuno può essere conte: Peruzzi, no." ("Any one may be a count; but not a Peruzzi.") In like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and Washington and Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher regard with the help of these titles; and Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not have had greater glory from the survival of parchments so directed to them. The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to be saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when used orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become "Doc," and Captain, "Cap," until one might rather have no title at all. Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses, can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success, though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the bell-strap, "Step lively, lady," but you cannot say, "Step lively, gentleman," and the fine old vocative "Sir" is quite obsolete. We ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted each other with "Sir!" and "Sir!" when they met; and "Step lively, sir," might convey the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor as "Step lively, lady." Sir might look very well on the back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly enough, it would be less archaic. Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to say to the sovereign, "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," as the use is, instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," unless you are in that station of life to which you would be very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the difference of years is great enough. The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant reader's difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to simplify themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We fancy not; besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best Comrade looks affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as Friend Smythe Johnes. It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on without the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the roll of parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Cæsar was simply C. Julius Cæsar to his correspondents, and Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of his fellow-citizens. These historical personages may have had the number of their houses inscribed on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus added to his name for purposes of identification; but apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, without anything equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of "The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome," name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add Cæsar to the last name, though Cæsar seems to have finally served the turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style for imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the Roman state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine. However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be styled on the backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not Miss Mary but Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr. before his name? In the case of a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it and D.D. after it? These are important questions, or, if they are not important, they are at least interesting. Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably knows no better than the sender how it should be addressed; but in the rarer case in which he does know, his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it is misaddressed. It is something like having your name misspelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it. The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by legislation, as it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be. The first French Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of address, which could be used without offence to the self-love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and Citoyenne for all women was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified; but some things, though they are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. The same imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal chronology, and a new era, very handy and very clear; but the old week of seven days came back and replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur and Madame returned victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the reform of weights and measures, when once established, continued, and spread from France to most other countries--to nearly all, indeed, less stupid than Great Britain and the United States--so that the whole civilized world now counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine difference? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an opportunity to prove himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly be, or else the Society of Friends could not have so absolutely substituted First Day and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and could not have successfully refused all name-honor whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals. But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic, one and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board, something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety. The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's given names could be added. III DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes, and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand, whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as "supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not even certain just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority; what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque. It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter. But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service, nowise appears. What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of one's inn, as a place where one shall take one's ease, has perished in the evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One may take one's ease in one's hotel only if one is dressed to the mind of the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is more important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate, tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice, would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like, with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London. Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and which now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is a question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and it will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom of the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do people from every part of their country who have got bored out with their happy homes and want a few days' or a few weeks' change. One may not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade, or at least more distinguished than one's own; with the best will in the world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four: a tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up, dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of a set in some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches aplenty, and aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true, intelligent, and heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle class, offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the effect of champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer, was to be noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the effect of something more than champagne in the face loomed in the perspective through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely far, the greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming promenade were simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, of a varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity. They were the stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it his imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe. The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted with his kind for half a century of æsthetic consciousness, and now had he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No," he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock foundations." Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his fancy--never imagination--began to play forward with the vivacity of that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five. If all this were true--and its truth shone the more distinctly from a ground of potential dissent--was not there the stuff in the actual conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now that the first glow of his prime was past, might fashion an image of our decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had been easy--how easy it had been!--to catch the likeness of those formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of classic fable or mediæval romance. But there remained the days of the years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang. The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature; which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted, hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has never yet taken the eyes of wonder. We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any _genre_ result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving emotion of an immense hotel dining-room, all in _décolletée_ and _frac paré_, the old, simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be led out between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and delivered over to the police to be conducted in ignominy to the nearest Italian table d'hôte. The national character, on the broad level of equality which fiction once delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have no fear but some genius will arrive and impart the effect of the society which has arrived. IV THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH As Eugenio--we will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal name--grew older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating the case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were young enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had only the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact, however, will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were young writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to know one thing: namely, how he did it. What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for making the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint their phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one's modesty, one likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's pleasure in their flatteries was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how to return them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out to those generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in their teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with the fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing to show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods; he said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left them out of the question. In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he was more ashamed than he had been with their praise. Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible. If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway; that there were only byways; private paths over other people's grounds; easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery to the latest-comer. His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it themselves from _his_ having practised. The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had gone out of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled the stock criticism of the connoisseur in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains; but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: "Courage is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely, because the end with them absorbs the means." Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end could no more justify bad means in æsthetics than in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result. If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop. Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There were times when it changed to some other end or took a different significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel turning out other than he had forecast it. In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds, and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own mind. As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art, and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like _Hamlet_, say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch, forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and walk the world forever. Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done? The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the earnestness of his nature, to write their _Hamlets_ from the beginning forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective _Hamlets_; they must slowly make their _Hamlets_' acquaintance by living with them. If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate triumph. "But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a style?" "By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is the one thing you must _not_ try for. If you try for style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante?" Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so? One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our choice of two things--stop working; stop going, cease to move, to exist--or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which we have not dropped, drops us. Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could sell or give or lend it. Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that, whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men, and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it? If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art _was_ a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider, deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it, partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done and call him master. But how could Eugenio make such things--so true and yet so self-contradictory, so mutually repellent--clear to these simple-hearted young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more he resolved to do nothing about it. V THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues, but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course, the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these. Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt, that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly been cropped the season before. The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would notice the coincidence. He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them, if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but obliged to say that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the author in question has endeared to generations of readers; or one of those tedious prudes for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many psychological romances, the author has stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his work; or if the contrary is the case, he has to read of himself as doing something habitual and entirely characteristic of him. In vain, so far as that acute young critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if he has with much compunction consciously turned his furrows in a field tilled before, he stands a fair chance of being hailed at the outset of a new career. He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help being what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the veteran author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any rate, bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer brings. What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive book of his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had liked him from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work. Such a critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground, and that he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he seemed to be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields. Such a critic would be alert to detect those fine differences of situation which distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He would note with unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which constitute Florindo an essentially novel character when presented under the name of Lindoro, or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even when he could not deny that these persons were in themselves one and the same, he would be able to make the reader observe that the new light thrown upon them by the author's ever-renascent art revealed in familiar creations traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined before. He would insist that, if not new, they were newer, because being more fully ascertained they were truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in Eugenio's former books whom they reminded one of, and, studying them in contrast, would convince the reader that the increasing purpose of the author in the treatment of the well-known types had been to reveal the infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human type. Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits of a veteran author. In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic, coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer, because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor, as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might be the means of destroying himself as a great author. After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise. There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right, then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen? Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the article of criticism, but somehow it is not. Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The author would not mind if the critic's report were physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its theories and methods with gratitude. As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of criticism. In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty, bring himself to call "creative," though he did not mind others calling it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the recognition. Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed, should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book? Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition. In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author. What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad, the grateful care of such elders? VI THE FICKLENESS OF AGE All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that "From some odd corner of the mind Beats time to nothing in the brain." But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and listener are the twin spheres that form one star. A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his soul with a newly realized purport in the words, "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and "sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age, and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or, if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to our friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood, and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age. He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them. He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain, when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils. These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his repose. His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which is superannuated, while its "muddy vesture of decay" is in very tolerable repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged, with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he once predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like _this_ with me!" he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of his conditional. But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of the Lapland song, "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts," erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of "The young heart hot and restless, And the old subdued and slow." He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless; it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there is. Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as much in one respect as in the other, but our friend contends only for greater justice to it in the last. In the light that he has come into, he holds that where such unions are unhappy, though they may have been formed with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior partner who is to blame if blame may ever be attached to involuntary change. It is the senior partner who has wearied first of the companionship and wished for release with the impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of the annoyances which seem inherent in every union of the kind, and impatient of those differences of temperament which tell far more than any disparities of age, and which exist even where there are no such disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic of the husband where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer instances of her seniority. In the unions where two old people join their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically, doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything else of marriages in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in their youth, attempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are, for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against them. Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with the value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can appeal for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we could imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain regret, an acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed for no apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the constitution of things, and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time of life. Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned upon grounds where age could more justly base its defence. It may be more reckless than age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly hobbles or hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate, for it has plenty of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little but eternity before it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life's trolley while it is still in motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps impatiently before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see physical proof of this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who would willingly wait years for them? The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age. Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant occupation in the æons before it, or that its emotions or volitions shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems it in. Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast, because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth--the star of trust and hope which "Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines, and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the Addisonian Cato: "But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds." VII THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated purveyor of intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty. Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its increase of incident; the moral and social and æsthetical world is open on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye. A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them. Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: "I feel that I have got my technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a subject." It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case. They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it; and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him. Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them, he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it. He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives, situations, catastrophes and dénouements, and characters eagerly fitting themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects. After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was concerning his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself capable of in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed sometimes weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that others would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work of producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had afflicted him from time to time before his illumination. Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America, or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not be so dull as it promises. One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end. Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him (like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The writers in the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, the _Tatler_, the _Rambler_, and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic, because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point, to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking about everything else in the world but the business they started with. But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter with any sort of talker. When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is, though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the early Victorian period. But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's concern was with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome. The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score, he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth, with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least one is as right as the other. When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while man is working--plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre? It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them, his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays, will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity; only in the practice of the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon, it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. VIII THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain interest. Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as encyclopædic. The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies. After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family wash, sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl with her as maid. In the first days of September, when the most enterprising of the fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the table, and the mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in the cellar and rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting used to the peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little teethers back to town with her; and when she found her husband in the comfortable dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and tender steak, and rich cream (such as never comes on "pure milk"), and hot and cold baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he had been very selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it. In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the seaside, but if it had been better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as it was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better; and there was the beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an effect of superior fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every three of the three hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing at the yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out to lie on the sand and dry their hair. At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap, but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him, as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends; he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company, they would be cutting off a frightful drain. It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week, when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places where you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city after a long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this. Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed. Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, sick and tired; and, as far as she could see, all those mountain-places were the same places. She could get no good of the air if she bored herself; the nice people did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the children were dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, who had long ceased to teethe but needed a summer outing as much as ever. A series of seasons followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in. Then, at least, she could look a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the club that he had fairly forgotten he _had_ a wife and children. The trouble was all with Florindo, anyway; he cared more for his business than his family, much; if he did not, he could have managed somehow to spend the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran down once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then came back. Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one morning with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a revelation. She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only solution. Once in Europe, you need not worry about where to go, for you could go anywhere. Europe was everywhere, and you had your choice of the Swiss mountains, where every breath made another person of you, or the Italian lakes with their glorious scenery, or the English lakes with their literary associations, or Scheveningen and all Holland, or Étretât, or Ostend, or any of those thousands of German baths where you could get over whatever you had, and the children could pick up languages with tutors, and the life was so amusing. Going to Europe was excuse enough in itself for Florindo to leave his business, and, if he could not be gone more than one summer, he could place her and the children out there till their health and education were completed, and they could all return home when it was time for the girls to think of coming out and the boys of going to college. Florindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word to say against a scheme that must commend itself to any reasonable man. In fact, he scarcely opposed it. He said he had begun to feel a little run down, and he had just been going to propose Europe himself as the true solution. She gladly gave him credit for the idea, and said he had the most inventive mind she ever heard of. She agreed without a murmur to the particular German baths which the doctor said would be best for him, because she just knew that the waters would be good for all of them; and when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure with him, and they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in the early autumn, and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were comfortably settled in Paris for the winter. As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After three years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and the family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there, and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding. They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent, however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking. She was now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and, if not ideal to those within, it is nevertheless the best way of spending the hot season known to competitive civilization. What is most interesting to the student of that civilization is the surprisingly short time in which it has been evolved. Half a century ago it was known only to some of the richest people. A few very old and opulent families in New York had country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the same class had summer houses at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy planters of the South came North to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the vast majority of the fashionable Northern people also resorted. In the West it was the custom to leave home for a summer trip up the lakes or down the St. Lawrence. But this was the custom only for the very sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not summer outside of their winter homes to at all the same extent as in the East. The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in that of innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the primitive joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels, as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish in their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic. The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have typically come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the typical experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow domestic things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be astonished to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively poor, have summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps as much below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of Newport are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those who have them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, progressing toward those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and gradually arriving at picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with all the modern conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more of one's income than one has a quiet conscience in. It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been known, after keeping a private hotel in their cottages for a series of summers, to shut them or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed rest, leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days of their youth, or even allowing them to live in their own houses with their cooks. Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we want it to be; we ourselves are not all that we could wish; and, whatever shape our summering takes, the crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose. The only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under them are those who have no repose, but stay striving on amid the heat of the city while the prey of the crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills or by the sea. Those home-keeping Sybarites, composing seven-eighths of our urban populations, immune from the anguish of the rose-leaf, form themselves the pang of its victims in certain extreme cases; the thought of them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleepless rest-seeker in the resorts where there are no mosquitoes. There are Florindos, there are Lindoras, so sensitively conscienced that, in the most picturesque, the most prettily appointed and thoroughly convenienced cottages, they cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the summer hotels, in the boarding-houses by sea or shore, in the farms where they have small fruits, fresh vegetables, and abundance of milk and eggs; yes, they even remember those distant relations who toil and swelter in the offices, the shops, the streets, the sewers; and they are not without an unavailing shame for their own good-fortune. But is it really their good-fortune? They would not exchange it for the better fortune of the home-keepers, and yet it seems worse than that of people less voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left for Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the summer on a yacht, which they see many other Florindos and Lindoras doing. Even these gay voyagers, or gay anchorers (for they seem most of the time to be moored in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their lot, or to be so constantly contented with it but that they are always coming off in boats to dine at the neighboring hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a crumpled rose-leaf under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the houseboat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere. Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of that in her own case, for she has never been unreasonably exacting of circumstance. She has always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual endeavor for the amelioration of circumstance that civilization springs. The fault may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot see, but it is certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora's experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her practical guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable sphinx for which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor cottaging is the true answer. Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the summer, and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo, as far as she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business to provide the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it impossible, he is not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her that their trouble is that they have always endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly borne might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make her believe that some of the best times he has had in summer have been when he was too busy to think about it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from morning till night, without finding the least relief from the summer ordeal or forgetting it a single moment. The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and told her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was properly disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once, she did not care where it was. "Well, I don't know," he answered. "There would have to be two opinions, I believe." "Why?" she demanded, sharply. "Where is it?" "In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me about it. In one of the celestial heavens--there seem to be seven of them--it appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This sole season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual springtime. How would you like that?" Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry. He, too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and he would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora's impatience with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of his greatest amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that law of the universal life by which no human creature is permitted to escape a due share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common lot, or realized that to seek escape from them is a species of immorality which is unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and from itself. IX TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and money to waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for squandering both, find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true diner must be well on in middle life, for though the young may eat and drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray head difficultly bowed over the successive courses, and the full form of third youth straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it, that the vision presents itself when one thinks of dinners and diners. After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large that one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than attach itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger or smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet a step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part elderly men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need not be counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to throng the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit, looking down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of bald heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and showing like dim, décolleté angels to the bleared vision raised to them from the floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and speaking have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds of tobacco and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether they abuse the chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height, where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear them softly gasping, gently coughing. It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner has recorded her bird's-eye impression of it at the interesting moment when their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and the speakers sit must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in bed. What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and looking down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration? Does it seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization? To their "finer female sense," what is the appeal of that evanescing spectacle, as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the clapping of hands rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal intelligences as the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we may have still the hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them the splendid and graceful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of the next day's papers. The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the mellowed tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those courses of meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the morning following, he wakes "high sorrowful and cloyed," and has not yet read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes "the burning forehead and the parching tongue" like a gush of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker goes a great way, almost the whole way; and, especially if he is a comic speaker, he might rise up and sit down without a word and yet leave his hearers the sense of having been richly amused. If he does more, if he really says something droll, no matter how much below the average of the give and take of common talk, the listener's gratitude is frantic. It is so eager, it so outruns utterance, that it is not strange the after-dinner speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist, who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and prospers on to a celebrity for brilliancy which there is little danger of his ever forfeiting so long as he keeps there. The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising. They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in their torpidity. The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America. Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences, leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be pitied from the bottom of one's soul. But the man whose words come actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests to him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not feared the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still, who thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly, but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to say something before he stops, and so cannot stop. The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, "We have with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless explosives." Or if it is the Discovery of America they are commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle it. At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a while at least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the honored guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods, poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on the honored guest and talk of other things; and when sometimes he does so it seems rude. The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped open for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter from every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous ladle in his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the honored guest's character or career and drenches it with drawn butter. To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place, proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation, some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared, preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and shouting, "Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk eggs grew before." Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter, till the whole place sticks and reeks with it. Of course, the reader--especially if he has never been asked to a personal dinner of this sort--will be saying that the fault is not with the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the supper given to Æschylus on the hundredth performance of the _OEdipus_ of Sophocles. The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in the opening toast, "The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved, in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly obliterated under the régime of the Thirty Tyrants. At the supper to Æschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke of inspiration to have on the speaker's left, where Sophocles would have sat if he had been present at a supper given to Æschylus, the sitting figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No allusion was made to Æschylus during the evening, after his health had been proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and exquisite surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches that followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all ostensibly devoted to the examination of the _OEdipus_ and the other dramas of Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt with. But the unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly to take the character of appreciation of the Æschylus tragedies, whose good points were all turned to the light without open mention of them. This afforded the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending his younger _confrère_, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as some one said, from head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could not put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman gentleman present remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for sincere deprecation, since Cæsar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and the effect was that intended throughout--the supreme honor of Æschylus in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic proverb, "Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then lay down again amid shrieks of merriment from the whole company. There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be questioned whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair; they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating memory of the other. There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on, each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his soul. They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not against a permanent _folie des grandeurs_ that we need seek to guard the victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the speeches to follow. X A DAY AT BRONX PARK In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love. * * * * * By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street. This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life: the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind, which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale. When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinità de' Monti at Rome. It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely, so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning to paint themselves palely green. At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find. He had the very horse he ought to have had--old, weary, infirm, decently hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts--the collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground--so short is our patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press. [Illustration: ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK] While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down; when he turned away as if _that_ cask were done for, there it was bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would renew the struggle presently. There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above all, so many small mammals? Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman, who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right; but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him. It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality, instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear. Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man. These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven, rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim. But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving presences by the water's brink. The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own. They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts, from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc iguana, for you have helped pay for them all. The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes you fifty cents on that; and paying it back. Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the end of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward the shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked better, through that mystical law of population by which poverty is richer than prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and screaming at their games, though they could not hear them, and they yelled and screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes which in the east of these States is such a crying evil. Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which made the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental operations are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She was a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face full of a petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too much for her weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out of the window and looking both ways at once, and she fought away the feebly restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks, so that the companions expected every moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death, and suffered many things from their fear. When it seemed as if nothing could save them, the guard came in and told the weak, meek mother that the child must not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the force of all constituted authority among us, the child sat down quietly in her mother's lap, and for the rest of the journey remained an example to angels, so that the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness as in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of their happy day, a day so happy that now in the faint air of August it is hard to believe it even of May. THE END 
14031	----	Proofreading Team. The Colloquies of Erasmus. TRANSLATED BY N. BAILEY. _Edited, with Notes, by the Rev. E. Johnson, M.A._ VOL. I. LONDON: 1878. CONTENTS. VOL. I. _Prefatory Note_ _Dedication_ _Admonitory Note_ _To the Divines of_ Louvain _Copy of_ Bailey's _Title_ Bailey's _Preface_ _Life of_ Erasmus _Courtesy in Saluting_ _Family Discourse_ _Of Rash Vows_ _Of Benefice-Hunters_ _Of a Soldier's Life_ _The Commands of a Master_ _The School-master's Admonitions_ _Of Various Plays_ _The Child's Piety_ _The Art of Hunting_ _Scholastic Studies_ _The Profane Feast_ _The Religious Treat_ _The Apotheosis of_ Capnio _A Lover and Maiden_ _The Virgin Averse to Matrimony_ _The Penitent Virgin_ _The Uneasy Wife_ _The Soldier and Carthusian_ Philetymus _and_ Pseudocheus _The Shipwreck_ _Diversoria_ _Young Man and Harlot_ _The Poetical Feast_ _An Enquiry concerning Faith_ _The Old Mens Dialogue_ _The Franciscans,_ [Greek: Ptôchoplousioi], _or Rich Beggars_ _The Abbot and Learned Woman_ _The Epithalamium of Petrus Ægidius_ _The Exorcism or Apparition_ _The Alchymist_ _The Horse-Cheat_ _The Beggars' Dialogue_ _The Fabulous Feast_ _The Lying-in Woman_ Prefatory Note. The present English version of Erasmus' _Colloquies_ is a reprint of the translation of N. Bailey, the compiler of a well-known Dictionary. In his Preface Bailey says, "I have labour'd to give such a Translation as might in the general, be capable of being compar'd with the Original, endeavouring to avoid running into a paraphrase: but keeping as close to the original as I could, without Latinizing and deviating from the English Idiom, and so depriving the English reader of that pleasure that Erasmus so plentifully entertains his reader with in Latin." This is a modest and fair account of Bailey's work. The chief peculiarity of his version is its reproduction of the idiomatic and proverbial Latinisms, and generally of the classical phrases and allusions in which Erasmus abounds, in corresponding or analogous English forms. Bailey had acquired, perhaps from his lexicographical studies, a great command of homely and colloquial English; the words and phrases by which he frequently _represents_ rather than construes Erasmus' text have perhaps in many instances not less piquancy than the original. Thus his translation, as a piece of racy English, has a certain independent value of its own, and may be read with interest even by those who are familiar with the original. In preparing this volume for the press, Bailey's text has been carefully revised, and clerical errors have been corrected, but the liberty has not been taken of altering his language, even to the extent of removing the coarsenesses of expression which disfigure the book and in which he exaggerates the plain speaking of the original. Literary feeling is jealous, no doubt justly, on general grounds, of expurgations. Further, throughout the greater part of the work, the translation has been closely compared with the Latin original. Occasional inaccuracies on Bailey's part have been pointed out in the Appendix of Notes at the end of the volume. The literal sense of the original, sometimes its language, has in many of these notes been given, with the view of increasing the interest of perusal to the general reader. The remainder of the notes are, like the contents of the volume, of a miscellaneous character: philological, antiquarian, historical. They do not, of course, profess to supply an exhaustive commentary; but are designed to afford elucidations and illustrations of the text that may be intelligible and instructive to the English reader, and possibly to some extent to the scholar. The Colloquies of Erasmus form a rich quarry of intellectual material, from which each student will extract that which he regards to be of peculiar value. The linguist, the antiquary, the observer of life and manners, the historian, the moralist, the theologian may all find themselves attracted to these pages. It is hoped that there are many who at the present time will welcome the republication, in English, of a book which not only produced so great a sensation in Europe on its appearance, but may be said to have had something to do with the making of history. It is unnecessary to do more than refer to the fact that the Editor undertook his task under certain inconveniences, and limitations as to space and time, which have prevented him from satisfying his own idea of what the book should be. He trusts it will not be found wanting in accuracy, however falling short of completeness. The Latin text used has been that of P. Scriver's edition, printed by the Elzevirs. 1643. A translation of Erasmus' dedication to young Froben has been added; also of several pieces from the _Coronis Apologetica_, not given by Bailey, which contain matters of interest bearing upon the history or contents of the book. DEDICATION. _D. ERASMUS_ Rot. TO _JOHN ERASMIUS FROBEN_, _A Boy of Excellent Promise: Greeting._ The Book dedicated to you has surpassed my expectation, my dearest Erasmius: it will be your part to take care that _you_ do not disappoint my expectation. Our studious youth are so in love with the book, seize upon it so eagerly, handle it so constantly, that your father has had repeatedly to print it, and I to enrich it with new additions. You might say it too was an [Greek: herasmion], the delight of the Muses, who foster sacred things. It will be the more your endeavour that you also may be what you are called, that is, that you may be, by learning and probity of manners, "most endeared" to all good men. It were deep cause for shame, if, while this book has rendered so many both better Latin scholars and better men, you should so act that the same use and profit should not return to yourself, which by your means has come to all. And since there are so many young fellows, who thank you for the sake of the Colloquies, would it not be justly thought absurd, if through your fault the fact should seem that you could not thank me on the same account? The little book has increased to the fair size of a volume. You must also endeavour, in proportion as your age increases, to improve in sound learning and integrity of manners. No ordinary hopes are placed upon you: it is indispensable that you should answer to them; it would be glorious for you to surpass them; disappoint them you surely cannot without the greatest disgrace. Nor do I say this, because your course thus far gives me occasion for regret, but by way of spurring the runner, that you may run more nimbly; especially since you have arrived at an age, than which none happier occurs in the course of life for imbibing the seeds of letters and of piety. Act then in such a way, that these Colloquies may be truly called yours. The Lord Jesus keep the present season of your life pure from all pollutions, and ever lead you on to better things! Farewell. BASIL, _August 1st._, 1524. AN ADMONITORY NOTE OF ERASMUS ON THE TRICKS AND IMPOSTURES OF A CERTAIN DOMINICAN, WHO HAD PUBLISHED IN FRANCE THE COLLOQUIES OF ERASMUS RIDICULOUSLY INTERPOLATED BY HIMSELF. _A Book of Colloquies had appeared, the material of which was collected partly from domestic talks, partly from my papers; but with a mixture of certain trivialities, not only without sense, but also in bad Latin,--perfect solecisms. This trash was received with wonderful applause; for in these matters too Fortune has her sport. I was compelled therefore to lay hands on these trumperies. At length, having applied somewhat greater care, I added considerable matter, so that the book might be of fair size, and in fact might appear worthy even of the honour of being dedicated to John Erasmius, son of Froben, a boy then six years old, but of extraordinary natural ability. This was done in the year 1522. But the nature of this work is such, that it receives addition as often as it is revised. Accordingly I frequently made an addition for the sake of the studious, and of John Froben; but so tempered the subject-matters, that besides the pleasure of reading, and their use in polishing the style, they might also contain that which would conduce to the formation of character. Even while the book I have referred to contained nothing but mere rubbish, it was read with wonderful favour by all. But when it had gained a richer utility, it could not escape [Greek: tôn sykophantôn dêgmata]. A certain divine of Louvain, frightfully blear of eye, but still more of mind, saw in it four heretical passages. There was also another incident connected with this work worth relating. It was lately printed at Paris with certain passages corrected, that is to say, corrupted, which appeared to attack monks, vows, pilgrimages, indulgences, and other things of that kind which, if held in great esteem among the people, would be a source of more plentiful profit to gentlemen of that order. But he did this so stupidly, so clumsily, that you would swear he had been some street buffoon: although the author of so silly a piece is said to be a certain divine of the Dominican order, by nation a Saxon. Of what avail is it to add his name and surname, which he himself does not desire to have suppressed? A monster like him knows not what shame is; he would rather look for praise from his villany. This rogue added a new Preface in my name, in which he represented three men sweating at the instruction of one boy: Capito, who taught him Hebrew, Beatus Greek, and me, Latin. He represents me as inferior to each of the others alike in learning and in piety; intimating that there is in the Colloquies a sprinkling of certain matters which savour of Luther's dogmas. And here I know that some will chuckle, when they read that Capito is favoured by such a hater of Luther with the designation of an excellent and most accomplished man. These and many things of the like kind he represents me as saying, taking the pattern of his effrontery from a letter of Jerome, who complains that his rivals had circulated a forged letter under his name amongst a synod of bishops in Africa; in which he was made to confess that, deceived by certain Jews, he had falsely translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew. And they would have succeeded in persuading the bishops that the letter was Jerome's, had they been able in any tolerable degree, to imitate Jerome's style. Although Jerome speaks of this deed as one of extreme and incurable roguery, our Phormio takes peculiar delight in this, which is more rascally than any notorious book. But his malicious will was wanting in power to carry out what he had intended. He could not come up to Erasmus' style, unpolished though it be: for he thus closes his flowery preface:_ Thus age has admonished, piety has bidden me, while life is still spared in my burdensome age, to cleanse my writings, lest those who follow my mournful funeral should transcribe my departed soul! _Such being the man's style throughout, he has nevertheless not shrunk from interweaving his flowers with my crowns; either pleasing himself in a most senseless manner, or having a very ill opinion of the judgment of divines. For these things were composed for their benefit, all of whom he supposes to be such blockheads that they will not instantly detect the patch-work he has so awkwardly sewn together. So abjectly does he everywhere flatter France, Paris, the theologians, the Sorbonne, the Colleges, no beggar could be more cringing. Accordingly, if anything uncomplimentary seems to be said against the French, he transfers it to the British; or against Paris, he turns it off to London. He added some odious sayings as if coming from me, with the view of stirring up hatred against me amongst those by whom he is grieved to know me beloved. It is needless to dwell upon the matter. Throughout he curtails, makes additions, alterations after his fashion, like a sow smeared with mud, rolling herself in a strange garden, bespattering, disturbing, rooting up everything. Meanwhile, he does not perceive that the points made by me are quite lost. For example, when to one who says_, 'From a Dutchman you are turned into a Gaul,'[A] _the answer is made_, 'What? was I a Capon then, when I went hence?': _he alters_ 'From a Dutchman you are turned into a Briton. What? was I a Saxon, then, when I went hence?' _Again, when the same speaker had said_, 'Your garb shows that you are changed from a Batavian into a Gaul,' _he puts_ 'Briton' _for_ 'Gaul'; _and when the speaker had replied_, 'I had rather that metamorphosis, than into a Hen,' _alluding to_ 'Cock:' _he changed_ 'Hen' _into_ 'Bohemian.' _Presently, when there is a joke_, 'that he pronounces Latin in French style,' _he changes_ 'French' _into_ 'British,' _and yet allows the following to stand_, 'Then you will never make good verses, because you have lost your quantities'; _and this does not apply to the British. Again, when my text reads_, 'What has happened to the Gauls' _(cocks)_ 'that they should wage war with the Eagle?' _he thus spoils the joke_, 'What has happened to the pards, that they should go to war with the lilies? _as if lilies were in the habit of going forth to war. Occasionally he does not perceive that what follows his alterations does not hang together with them. As in the very passage I had written_, 'Is Paris free from the plague?' _he alters_, 'Is London free[B] from the plague?' _Again, in another place, where one says_, 'Why are we afraid to cut up this capon?' _he changes_ 'capon' _into_ 'hare'; _yet makes no alteration in what follows_, 'Do you prefer wing or leg?' _Forsooth, although he so kindly favours the Dominican interest that he desired to sit among the famous Commissaries: nevertheless he bears with equal mind a cruel attack on Scotus. For he made no change in what one says in my text_, 'I would sooner let the whole of Scotus perish than the books of one Cicero.' _But as these things are full of folly, so very many of the contents bear an equal malice joined to folly. A speaker in my text rallies his comrade, who, although of abandoned life, nevertheless puts faith in indulgentiary bulls. My Corrector makes the former confess that he, along with his master Luther, was of opinion that the Pope's indulgences were of no value; presently he represents the same speaker as recanting and professing penitence for his error. And these he wants to appear my corrections. O wondrous Atlases of faith! This is just as if one should feign, by means of morsels dipped in blood, a wound in the human body, and presently, by removing what he had supplied, should cure the wound. In my text a boy says_, 'that the confession which is made to God is the best;' _he made a correction, asserting_ 'that the confession which is made to the priest is the best.' _Thus did he take care for imperilled confession. I have referred to this one matter for the sake of example, although he frequently indulges in tricks of this kind. And these answer to the palinode (recantation) which he promises in my name in his forged preface. As if it were any man's business to sing a palinode for another's error; or as if anything that is said in that work of mine under any character whatever, were my own opinion. For it does not at all trouble me, that he represents a man not yet sixty, as burdened with old age. Formerly, it was a capital offence to publish anything under another man's name; now, to scatter rascalities of this kind amongst the public, under the pretended name of the very man who is slandered, is the sport of divines. For he wishes to appear a divine when his matter cries out that he does not grasp a straw of theological science. I have no doubt but that yonder thief imposed with his lies upon his starved printer; for I do not think there is a man so mad as to be willing knowingly to print such ignorant trash. I ceased to wonder at the incorrigible effrontery of the fellow, after I learnt that he was a chick who once upon a time fell out of a nest at Berne, entirely [Greek: hek kakistou korakost kakiston hôon]. This I am astonished at, if the report is true: that there are among the Parisian divines those who pride themselves on having at length secured a man who by the thunderbolt of his eloquence is to break asunder the whole party of Luther and restore the church to its pristine tranquility. For he wrote also against Luther as I hear. And then the divines complain that they are slandered by me, who aid their studies in so many night-watches; while they themselves willingly embrace monsters of this description, who bring more dishonour to the order of divines and even of monks, than any foe, however foul-mouthed, can do. He who has audacity for such an act as this, will not hesitate to employ fire or poison. And these things are printed at Paris, where it is unlawful to print even the Gospel, unless approved by the opinion of the faculty. This last work of the Colloquies, with the addition of an appendix, is issued in the month of September, 1524._ [Footnote A: Gallus: meaning also a Cock.] [Footnote B: _Immunis_ instead of _immune_ agreeing with Londinum.] * * * * * _From a letter of Erasmus dated 5th Oct. 1532, we gather some further particulars about the obnoxious person above referred to. His name was Lambert Campester. Subsequently to his exploit at Paris in printing a garbled edition of the Colloquies, he "fled to Leyden; and pretending to be a great friend of Erasmus, found a patron, from whom having soon stolen 300 crowns, fled, was taken in his flight amongst some girls, and would have been nailed to a cross, had not his sacred Dominican cowl saved him. He, I say, many other offences and crimes having been proved against him, is at length in a certain town of Germany, called, I think, Zorst, in the Duchy of Juliers,--his cowl thrown aside, teaching the Gospel, that is, mere sedition. The Duke begged them to turn the fellow out. They answered that they could not do without their preacher. And this sort of plague spreads from day to day."_ #ERASMUS ROTERODAMUS# TO THE _DIVINES OF LOUVAIN_, _His dearly beloved brethren in the Lord, greeting._ A matter has been brought to my knowledge, not only by rumour, but by the letters of trustworthy friends, expressly stating in what words, in what place, a calumny was directed against me in our midst, through the agency of a well-known person, who is ever true to himself; whose very character and former doings lead one to assume as ascertained fact what in another would have been but probable. Accordingly, I thought I ought to make no concealment of the matter; especially from you, whose part it was to restrain the unbridled impudence of the fellow, if not for my sake, at all events for that of your Order. He boasts and vociferates that in the book of Colloquies there are four passages more than heretical: concerning the _Eating of meats_ and _Fasting_, concerning _Indulgences_, and concerning _Vows_, Although such be his bold and impudent assertion, whoever reads the book in its entirety will find the facts to be otherwise. If, however, leisure be wanting for the reading of trifles of this description, I will briefly lay the matter open. But before I approach it, I think well to make three prefatory remarks. First, in this matter contempt of the Emperor's edict[C] cannot be laid to my charge. For I understand it was published May 6th, 1522, whereas this book was printed long before: and that at Basle, where no Imperial edict had up to the time been made known, whether publicly or privately. [Footnote C: Edict of the Emperor Charles V.: 1523.] Secondly, although in that book I do not teach dogmas of Faith, but formulae for speaking Latin; yet there are matters intermixed by the way, which conduce to good manners. Now if, when a theme has been previously written down in German or French, a master should teach his boys to render the sense in Latin thus: _Utinam nihil edant praeter allia, qui nobis hos dies pisculentos invexerunt_. ("Would they might eat naught but garlic, who imposed these fish-days upon us.") Or this: _Utinam inedia pereant, qui liberos homines adigunt ac jejunandi necessitatem_. ("Would they might starve to death, who force the necessity of fasting on free men.") Or this: _Digni sunt ut fumo pereant qui nobis Dispensationum ad Indulgentiarum fumos tam care vendunt_. ("They deserve to be stifled to death who sell us the smokes (pretences) of dispensations and indulgences at so dear a rate.") Or this: _Utinam vere castrentur, qui nolentes arcent à matrimonio_. ("Would they might indeed be made eunuchs of, who keep people from marrying, against their will")--I ask, whether he should be forced to defend himself, for having taught how to turn a sentence, though of bad meaning, into good Latin words? I think there is no one so unjust, as to deem this just. Thirdly, I had in the first instance to take care what sort of person it should be to whom I ascribe the speech in the dialogue. For I do not there represent a divine preaching, but good fellows having a gossip together. Now if any one is so unfair as to refuse to concede me the quality of the person represented, he ought, by the same reasoning, to lay it to my charge, that there one Augustine (I think) disparages the Stoics' principle of the _honestum_, and prefers the sect of the Epicureans, who placed the highest good in pleasure. He may also bring it against me, that in that passage a soldier, amongst many things which he speaks about in true soldier-fashion, says that he will look for a priest to confess to, who shall have as little of good as possible about him. The same objector would, I imagine, bring it up against me, were I to ascribe to Arius in a dialogue a discourse at variance with the Church. If such charges against me would be absurd, why in other matters should not regard be had to the quality of the person speaking? Unless perchance, were I to represent a Turk speaking, they should decide to lay at my door whatever he might say. With this preface, I will make a few general remarks on the passages criticised by the person to whom I refer. In the first passage, a boy of sixteen years says that he confesses only sins that are unquestionably capital, or gravely suspected; while the Lutherans teach, as I understand, that it is not necessary to confess all capital offences. Thus the very facts show, that this boy's speech is in great disagreement with the dogma which you condemn. Presently, the same boy being asked, whether it be sufficient to confess to Christ himself, answers that it will satisfy his mind, if the fathers of the Church were of the same opinion. From this my critic argues, not with dialectic art, but with rascally cunning, that I suggest that this _Confession_ which we now practise was not instituted by Christ, but by the leaders of the Church. Such an inference might appear sound, were not Christ one of the Primates of the Church, since according to Peter's saying He is Chief Shepherd, and according to the word of the Gospel, Good Shepherd. Therefore he who speaks of princes of the Church, does not exclude Christ, but includes Him along with the Apostles, and the successors of the Apostles, in the same manner as he who names the principal members of the body does not exclude the head. But if any one shall deem this reply to savour of artifice: well now, let us grant that the boy was thinking of pure men, heads of the Church: is it then not enough for the boy that he follows in the matter of confession their authority, even although he is not assured whether the Popes could ordain this on their own authority, or handed it down to us from the ordinance of Christ? For he has a mind to obey, in whatever way they have handed it down. I am not even myself fully convinced as yet, that the Church defined the present practice of Confession to be of Christ's ordinance. For there are very many arguments, to me in fact insoluble, which persuade to the contrary. Nevertheless, I entirely submit this feeling of my own to the judgment of the Church. Gladly will I follow it, so soon as on my watch, for certainty I shall have heard its clear voice. Nay, had Leo's Bull given the fullest expression of this doctrine, and any one should either be ignorant of it, or should have forgotten it, it would meanwhile suffice (I imagine) to obey in this matter the authority of the Church, with a disposition of obedience, should the point be established. Nor in truth can it be rightly inferred, _This Confession is of human ordinance, therefore Christ is not its Author_. The Apostles laid down the discipline of the Church, without doubt from Christ's ordinances: they ordained Baptism, they ordained Bishops, &c., but by the authority of Christ. And yet it cannot be denied, that many particulars of this Confession depend on the appointment of the Pontiffs, viz., that we confess once a year, at Easter, to this or that priest; that any priest absolves us from any trespasses whatever. Hence I judge it to be clear how manifest is the calumny in what relates to _Confession_. Further, no mention is there made of _fasting_, to which the Gospel and the Apostolic epistles exhort us, but _concerning the choice of foods_, which Christ openly sets at naught in the Gospel, and the Pauline epistles not seldom condemn; especially that which is Jewish and superstitious. Some one will say, this is to accuse the Roman Pontiff who teaches that which the Apostle condemns. What the Gospel teaches, is perfectly plain. The Pontiff himself must declare with what intention he commands what the Gospel does not require. Yet no one there says--what I know not whether Luther teaches--that the constitutions of the Pontiffs do not render us liable to guilt, unless there has been contempt besides. In fact, he who speaks in that passage grants that the Pope may appoint an observance; he simply enquires, whether this were the intention of the Pope, to bind all equally to abstinence from meats, so that one who should partake would be liable to hell-fire, even although no perverse contempt should be committed. And he who says this in the Colloquies, adds that he hates fishes not otherwise than he does a serpent. Now, there are some so affected that fish is poison to them, just as there are found those who in like manner shrink from wine. If one who is thus affected with regard to fishes, should be forbidden to feed on flesh and milk-food, will he not be hardly treated? Is it possible that any man can desire him to be exposed to the pains of hell, if for the necessity of his body he should live on flesh? If any constitution of Popes and Bishops involves liability to the punishment of hell, the condition of Christians is hard indeed. If some impose the liability, others not; no one will better declare his intention than the Pope himself. And it would conduce to the peace of consciences to have it declared. What if some Pope should decree that priests should go girt; would it be probable that he declared this with the intention that if one because of renal suffering should lay aside the girdle, he should be liable to hell? I think not. St. Gregory laid down, That if any one had had intercourse with his wife by night, he should abstain the next day from entering church: in this case, supposing that a man, concealing the fact of intercourse having taken place, should have gone to church for no other reason than that he might hear the preaching of the Gospel, would he be liable to hell? I do not think the holiest man could be so harsh. If a man with a sick wife should live on meat, because otherwise she could not be provoked to eat, and her health required food, surely the Pope would not on that account determine him to be liable to hell! This matter is simply made a subject of enquiry in the passage referred to, and no positive statement is made. And certainly before the Imperial Edict, men were at liberty to enquire concerning these matters. In point of fact, neither in that place nor elsewhere do I absolutely condemn the _Indulgences_ of the Popes, although hitherto more than sufficient indulgence has been shown them. It is simply that a speaker ridicules his comrade, who, although in other respects the most frivolous of triflers (for so he is depicted), yet believed that by the protection of a Bull he would get safely to heaven. So far from thinking this to be heretical, I should imagine there was no holier duty than to warn the people not to put their trust in Bulls, unless they study to change their life and correct their evil desires. But _Vows_ are ridiculed in that passage. Yes, they are ridiculed, and those (of whom there is a vast multitude) are admonished, who, leaving wife and children at home, under a vow made in their cups, run off along with a few pot-companions to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem. But, as manners now are, I think it a holier work to dissuade men altogether from such Vows than to urge to the making of them. These, forsooth, are the execrable heresies which yonder Lynceus descries in the Puerile Colloquy. I wonder why he does not also give my Catunculus and the Publian mimes[D] a dusting. Who does not perceive that these attacks proceed from some private grudge? Yet in nothing have I done him an injury, except that I have favoured good literature, which he hates more than sin; and knows not why. Meantime he boasts that he too has a weapon, by which he may take his revenge. If a man at a feast calls him Choroebus or a drunkard, he in his turn will in the pulpit cry heretic, or forger, or schismatic upon him. I believe, if the cook were to set burnt meat on the dinner-table, he would next day bawl out in the course of his sermon that she was suspected of heresy. Nor is he ashamed, nor does he retreat, though so often caught, by the very facts, in manifest falsehood. [Footnote D: Publius Syrus (B.C. 45), a writer of _mimes_, or familiar prose dramas. A collection of apophthegms from his works is said to have been used as a school-book in Jerome's days.] In the first place what a foolish, what a mad blather he made against my revised New Testament! Next, what could be more like madness than that remark which he threw out against J. Faber and myself, when the very facts bespoke that he did not understand what agreement there was between me and Faber, or what was the subject of controversy! What more shameless than his fixing a charge of forgery and heresy in the course of a public address on me, because I rendered according to the Greek: Omnes quidem non resurgemus, sed omnes immutabimur ("We shall not all rise again, but we shall all be changed.") What more like a raging madman, then his warning the people at Mechlin, in a public address, to beware of the heresy of Luther and Erasmus! Why should I now recall the ravings that he belches out rather than utters in the midst of his high feasting as often as his zeal for the house of the Lord is inflamed from his cups? He lately said in Holland, that I was set down for a forger among the divines of Louvain. (One who was present and heard it wrote to me.) When asked, Why? Because, says he, he so often corrects the New Testament! What a dolt of a tongue! Jerome so often corrected the Psalter: is he therefore a forger? In short if he is a forger, who either rashly or from ignorance translates anything otherwise than it should be, he was a forger, whose translation we use at the present day in the Church. But what good does this sort of behavior do him? All men laugh at him as a Morychus,[E] shun him as a crackbrain,--get out of his way as a peevish fellow you can do nothing with. Nor can they think ill of him, of whom he says such spiteful things. And though he displeases all, himself alone he cannot displease. [Footnote E: Lit.: One stained or smeared: an epithet of Bacchus (Dionysos) in Sicily, "smeared with wine-lees." ([Greek: moryssô].)] This doubtless he holds to be an Imperial edict, that he with raging insolence of tongue should rave at whomsoever he pleases. Thus does this wise and weighty man support the interests of the orthodox faith. This is not a zeal of God, to hurt the harmless; but it is a rage of the devil. The Jewish zeal of Phinehas was once extolled, but not that it might pass as a pattern with Christians. And yet Phinehas openly slew impious persons. To your colleague whatever he hates is Lutheran and heretical. In the same way, I suppose, he will call small-beer, flat wine, and tasteless broth, Lutheran. And the Greek tongue, which is his _unique_ aversion,--I suppose for this reason, that the Apostles dignified it with so great an honour as to write in no other,--will be called Lutheran. Poetic art, for he hates this too, being fonder of the _potatic_, will be Lutheran. He complains that his authority is lessened by our means, and that he is made a laughing-stock in my writings. The fact is, he offers himself as an object of ridicule to all men of education and sense; and this without end. I _repel slander_. But if learned and good men think ill of _a man_ who directs a slander at one who has not deserved it, which is it fair to consider the accountable person, he who rightly repels what he ought not to acknowledge, or he who injuriously sets it afoot? If a man were to be laughed at for saying that asses in Brabant have wings, would he not himself make the laughing-matter? He cries out that _the whole of Luther is in my books_, that on all sides they swarm with heretical errors. But when those who read my writings find nothing of the kind, even if ignorant of dialectics, they readily infer the true conclusion. He has authority from the Emperor. Let him therefore conduct himself in the spirit of the Emperor, who would rather that wrong-doers should be cured than punished, and certainly does not desire that the harmless should be injured. He has entrusted this function to a man he did not know; when he shall have ascertained the fellow's character, he will doubtless recall what he has entrusted. It is not the disposition of the mildest of Emperors, nor of the most upright of Popes, that those who spend their night-watches in studying how to adorn and assist the State, should be exposed to the spite of such men; even although there were some human infirmity in the case. So far are they from desiring to estrange good and honest men, and force them to take a different side. These matters are more your concern than mine. For this man's manners invite much discredit upon your order, while the mass of the people judge of you all by this one sample. Unjustly so, I admit; but so the world wags. And the harshness of your brother estranges no small number from the study of divinity. I know that the man is utterly disliked by you, with the exception of two or three boon companions, and one old hand, who abuses the man's folly in the interests of his own lusts. But all would definitely understand that you disapprove of him, if, since he cannot be restrained, you were to expel him from your table. I well know such a step will be very difficult to take. For men of his stamp are reluctantly torn away from the smell of stated, sumptuous, and free repasts. Nevertheless this concerns the honour of your Order, towards which I have good reason to be well-disposed. Farewell. Supposed to have been written in 1531. ALL THE #Familiar Colloquies# OF _#Desiderius Erasmus#_, OF #ROTERDAM,# Concerning Men, Manners, and Things, translated into _English_. * * * * * By N. BAILEY. * * * * * Unlike in Method, with conceal'd Design, Did crafty _Horace_ his low Numbers join; And, with a sly insinuating Grace, Laugh'd at his Friend, and look'd him in the Face: Would raise a Blush, when secret Vice he found; And tickled, while he gently prob'd the Wound: With seeming Innocence the Crowd beguil'd; But made the desperate Passes, when he smil'd. _Persius Sat. I. Dryden_. * * * * * _LONDON_ 1725. #THE PREFACE.# _There are two Things I would take some Notice of: The first relates to my Author, and the second to myself, or the Reasons why I have attempted this Translation of him. And in speaking of the first, I presume I shall save myself much of what might be said as to the second. Tho'_ Erasmus _is so well known, especially to those versed in the_ Latin _Tongue, that there seems to be but little Occasion to say any Thing in his Commendation; yet since I have taken upon me to make him an_ English-man, _give me Leave to say, that in my Opinion, he as well deserves this Naturalization, as any modern Foreigner whose Works are in_ Latin, _as well for the Usefulness of the Matter of his Colloquies, as the Pleasantness of Style, and Elegancy of the_ Latin. _They are under an egregious Mistake, who think there is nothing to be found in them, but Things that savour of Puerility, written indeed ingeniously, and in elegant_ Latin. _For this Book contains, besides those, Things of a far greater Concern; and indeed, there is scarce any Thing wanting in them, fit to be taught to a_ Christian _Youth design'd for liberal Studies. The Principles of Faith are not only plainly and clearly laid down, but establish'd upon their own firm and genuine Basis. The Rules of Piety, Justice, Charity, Purity, Meekness, Brotherly Concord, the Subjection due to Superiors, are so treated of, that, in a Word, scarce any Thing is omitted that belongs to a Man, a Subject, or a Christian. Neither are those Things omitted, which respect a Medium of Life, by which every one may chuse out safely what Ratio of Life he has most Mind to, and by which he may be taught, not only Civility and Courtesy, but also may know how to behave himself in the World, so as to gain himself the good Will of many, and, a good Name among all, and may be able to discern the Follies and Childishnesses of Fools, and the Frauds and Villanies of Knaves, so as to guard against 'em all. And neither are there wanting Sketches, and that ample ones too, of Poetical Story, or Pagan Theology, universal History, sacred and profane, Poetry, Criticism, Logick, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Oeconomics and Politics; to which are added, a good Number of Proverbs and Apothegms used by the most celebrated of the Antients. But there is one Thing in an especial Manner, that should recommend this Book to all_ Protestants _in general, and cause them to recommend it to be read by their Children, that there is no Book fitter for them to read, which does in so delightful and instructing a Manner utterly overthrow almost all the Popish Opinions and Superstitions, and erect in their Stead, a Superstructure of Opinions that are purely Protestant. And notwithstanding whatsoever_ Erasmus _hath said in his Apology concerning the Utility of his Colloquies, that he could say with Modesty, according to his wonted Dexterity, to temper, and alleviate the Bitterness of the Wormwood that he gave the_ Papists _to drink in the Colloquies, it is past a Question, that he lays down a great many Things agreeable to the_ Protestant _Hypothesis, so that (if you except Transubstantiation) he reprehends, explodes and derides almost all the_ Popish _Opinions, Superstitions and Customs. Therefore if this golden Book be read with Attention, I doubt not but it will plainly appear, that the Scripture was in all Things preferr'd by the Author before them all; and that he accounted that alone truly infallible, and of irrefragable Authority, and did not account the Councils, Popes or Bishops so. And as to the praying to Saints, it was his Opinion, the christian World would be well enough without it, and that he abhor'd that common Custom of asking unworthy Things of them, and flying to them for Refuge more than to the Father and Christ. That he look'd upon all external Things of very small Account, of whatsoever Species they were: Either the Choice of Meats, Processions, Stations, and innumerable other Ordinances and Ceremonies, and that they were in themselves unprofitable, although he, for the sake of Peace and Order, did conform himself to all harmless Things that publick Authority had appointed. Not judging those Persons, who out of a Scrupulousness of Conscience thought otherwise, but wishing that those in Authority would use their Power with more Mildness. And that he esteem'd, as Trifles and Frauds, the Community of good Works, of all Men whatsoever, or in any Society whatsoever; that he abhor'd the Sale of Pardons for Sins, and derided the Treasury of Indulgences, from whence it is a plain Inference, that he believ'd nothing of Purgatory. And that he more than doubted, whether auricular Confession was instituted by Christ or the Apostles; and he plainly condemns Absolution, and laugh'd at the giving it in an unknown Tongue. From whence we may fairly infer, that he was against having the Liturgy (which ought to be read to Edification) in an unknown Tongue. But he either thought it not safe, or not convenient, or at least not absolutely necessary to speak his Mind plainly as to that Matter. Likewise, he particularly laugh'd at all the Species of popular and monastical Piety; such as Prayers repeated over and over, without the Mind, but recited by a certain Number with their_ Rosaries, _and_ Ave-Maria's, _by which, God being neglected, they expected to obtain all Things, though none were particularly nam'd: Their_ tricenary, _and_ anniversary Masses, _nay, and all those for the Dead: The dying and being buried in a_ Franciscan's _and_ Dominican's _Garment or Cowl, and all the Trumpery belonging to it; and did, in a manner condemn all Sorts of Monastical Life and Order, as practis'd among the Papists. He shews it likewise to have been his Opinion, as to the Reliques of_ Christ, _and he and she Saints, that he judg'd the Worship of them a vain and foolish Thing, and believ'd no Virtue to be in any of them, nay, that the most, if not all of them, were false and counterfeit. And to crown the Whole, he did not spare that beloved Principle and Custom of the Papists, so zealously practis'd by them upon Protestants, viz. the Persecution and Burning of Hereticks. And now, of how much Use and Advantage such Things, and from such a Person as_ Erasmus, _may be, and how much they may conduce to the extirpating those Seeds of Popery, that may have been unhappily sown, or may be subtilly instill'd into the Minds of uncautious Persons, under the specious Shew of Sanctity, will, I presume, easily appear. Tho' the Things before-mention'd may be Reason sufficient for the turning these Colloquies of_ Erasmus _into_ English, _that so useful a Treatise may not be a Book seal'd, either to Persons not at all, or not enough acquainted with the_ Latin _tongue, as to read them with Edification; yet I did it from another Motive,_ i.e. _the Benefit of such as having been initiated, desire a more familiar Acquaintance with the_ Latin _Tongue (as to the Speaking Part especially, to which_ Erasmus's _Colloquies are excellently adapted) that by comparing this Version with the Original, they may be thereby assisted, to more perfectly understand, and familiarize themselves with those Beauties of the_ Latin _Language, in which_ Erasmus _in these Colloquies abounds. And for that End, I have labour'd to give such a Translation of them, as might in the general, be capable of being compar'd with the Original, endeavouring to avoid running into a Paraphrase: But keeping as close to the Original as I could, without Latinizing and deviating from the_ English _Idiom, and so depriving the_ English _Reader of that Pleasure, that_ Erasmus _so plentifully entertains his Reader with in_ Latin. _It is true, Sir_ Roger l'Estrange _and Mr._ Tho. Brown, _have formerly done some select Colloquies, and Mr._ H.M. _many years since has translated the whole; but the former being rather Paraphrases than Translations, are not so capable of affording the Assistance before-mention'd; and as to the latter, besides that his Version is grown very scarce, the Style is not only antient, but too flat for so pleasant and facetious an Author as_ Erasmus _is_. _I do not pretend to have come up in my_ English, _to that Life and Beauty of_ Erasmus _in Latin, which as it is often inimitable in the_ English _Language, so it is also a Task fit to be undertaken by none but an_ English Erasmus _himself_, i.e. _one that had the same Felicity of Expression that he had; but I hope it will appear that I have kept my Author still in my Eye, tho' I have followed him_ passibus haud æquis, _and could seldom come up to him. I shall not detain you any longer; but subscribe my self, yours to serve you_, _Jan. 25th_, N. BAILEY. 1724-5. _The_ LIFE _of_ ERASMUS. _DESIDERIUS Erasmus_, surnamed _Roterodamus_, was born at _Roterdam_, a Town of _Holland_, on the Vigil of _Simon and Jude_, or _October_ the 20th or 28th, 1465, according to his Epitaph at _Basil_; or according to the Account of his life, _Erasmo Auctore, circa annum, &c._ about the Year 1467, which agrees with the Inscription of his Statue at _Roterdam_, which being the Place of his Nativity, may be suppos'd to be the most authentick. His Mother's Name was _Margaret_, the Daughter of one _Peter_, a Physician of _Sevenbergen_. His Father's Name was _Gerard_, who carried on a private Correspondence with her, upon Promise of Marriage; and as it should seem from the Life which has _Erasmus's_ Name before it, was actually contracted to her, which seems plainly to be insinuated by these Words; _Sunt qui intercessisse verba ferunt_: However, it is not to be denied that _Erasmus_ was born out of Wedlock, and on that Account, Father _Theophilus Ragnaud_, has this pleasant Passage concerning him: _If one may be allow'd to droll upon a Man, that droll'd upon all the World_, Erasmus, _tho' he was not the Son of a King, yet he was the Son of a crown'd Head_, meaning a Priest. But in this he appears to have been mistaken, in that his Father was not in Orders when he begat him. His Father _Gerard_ was the Son of one _Elias_, by his Mother _Catherine_, who both liv'd to a very advanc'd Age; _Catherine_ living to the Age of 95. _Gerard_ had nine Brethren by the same Father and Mother, without one Sister coming between them; he himself was the youngest of the ten, and liv'd to see two of his Brothers at _Dort_ in _Holland_, near 90 Years of Age each. All his Brothers were married but himself; and according to the Superstition of those Times, the old People had a mind to consecrate him to God, being a tenth Child, and his Brothers lik'd the Motion well enough, because by that Means they thought they should have a sure Friend, where they might eat and drink, and be merry upon Occasion. They being all very pressing upon him to turn Ecclesiastick, (which was a Course of Life that he had no Inclination to,) _Gerard_ finding himself beset on all Sides, and by their universal Consent excluded from Matrimony, resolving not to be prevail'd upon by any Importunities, as desperate Persons do, fled from them, and left a Letter for his Parents and Brothers upon the Road, acquainting them with the Reason of his Elopement, bidding them an eternal Farewell, telling them he would never see them more. He prosecuted his Journey to _Rome_, leaving _Margaret_, his Spouse that was to be, big with Child of _Erasmus. Gerard_ being arriv'd at _Rome_, betook himself to get his Living by his Pen, (by transcribing Books) being an excellent Penman; and there being at that Time a great deal of that Sort of Business to do (for as the Life that is said to be _Erasmo Auctore_ has it, _tum nondum ars typographorum erat_, i.e. _The Art of Printing was not then found out_; which was a Mistake, for it had been found out twenty-four Years before, in the Year 1442. But perhaps the Meaning may be, tho' it was found out, it was not then commonly used) he got Money plentifully, and for some Time, as young Fellows us'd to do, liv'd at large; but afterwards apply'd himself in good Earnest to his Studies, made a considerable Progress in the _Latin_ and _Greek_ Tongues, which was very much facilitated by his Employment of transcribing Authors, which could not but strongly impress them on his Memory; and he had also another great Advantage, in that a great many learned Men then flourish'd at _Rome_ and he heard particularly one _Guarinus_. But to return to _Erasmus_, his Mother _Margaret_ being delivered of him, he was after his Father called _Gerard_, which in the _German_ Tongue, signifies _Amiable_; and as it was the Custom among learned Men in those Times, (who affected to give their Names either in _Latin_ or _Greek_,) it was turn'd into _Desiderius_ (_Didier_) in _Latin_, and into _Erasmus_ [Greek: Herasmios] in _Greek_, which has the same Signification. He was at first brought up by his Grandmother, till _Gerard's_ Parents coming to the Knowledge that he was at _Rome_, wrote to him, sending him Word, that the young Gentlewoman whom he courted for a Wife was dead; which he giving Credit to, in a melancholy Fit, took Orders, being made a Presbyter, and apply'd his Mind seriously to the Study of Religion. But upon his Return into his own Country, he found that they had impos'd upon him. Having taken Orders, it was too late to think of Marriage; he therefore quitted all further Pretensions to her, nor would she after this, be induced to marry. _Gerard_ took Care to have his Son _Erasmus_ liberally educated, and put him to School when he was scarce four Years old. (They have in _Holland_, an ill-grounded Tradition; that _Erasmus_, when he was young, was a dull Boy, and slow at Learning; but Monsieur _Bayle_ has sufficiently refuted that Error, tho' were it true, it were no more Dishonour to him, than it was to _Thomas Aquinas, Suarez_, and others.) He was a Chorister at _Utrecht_, till he was nine Years old, and afterwards was sent to _Daventer_, his Mother also going thither to take Care of him. That School was but barbarous, the most that was minded, was _Matins_, Even-Song, &c. till _Alexander Hegius_ of _Westphalia_, and _Zinthius_, began to introduce something of better Literature. (This _Alexander Hegius_, was an intimate Friend to the learned _Rodolphus Agricola_, who was the first that brought the _Greek_ Tongue over the Mountains of _Germany_, and was newly returned out of _Italy_, having learned the _Greek_ Tongue of him.) _Erasmus_ took his first Taste of solid Learning from some of his Playfellows, who being older than himself, were under the Instruction of _Zinthius_: And afterwards he sometimes heard _Hegius_; but that was only upon holy Days, on which he read publickly, and so rose to be in the third Class, and made a very good Proficiency: He is said to have had so happy a Memory, as to be able to repeat all _Terence_ and _Horace_ by Heart. The Plague at that Time raging violently at _Daventer_, carry'd off his Mother, when _Erasmus_ was about thirteen Years of Age; which Contagion increasing more and more every Day, having swept away the whole Family where he boarded, he returned Home. His Father _Gerard_ hearing of the Death of his Wife, was so concern'd at it, that he grew melancholy upon it, fell sick, and died soon after, neither of them being much above forty Years of Age. He assign'd to his Son _Erasmus_ three Guardians, whom he esteem'd as trusty Friends, the Principal of whom was _Peter Winkel_, the Schoolmaster of _Goude_. The Substance that he left for his Education, had been sufficient for that Purpose, if his Guardians had discharg'd their Trust faithfully. By them he was remov'd to _Boisleduc_, tho' he was at that Time fit to have gone to the University. But the Trustees were against sending him to the University, because they had design'd him for a Monastick Life. Here he liv'd (or, as he himself says, rather lost three Years) in a _Franciscan_ Convent, where one _Rombold_ taught Humanity, who was exceedingly taken with the pregnant Parts of the Youth, and began to sollicit him to take the Habit upon him, and become one of their Order. _Erasmus_ excused himself, alledging the Rawness and Unexperiencedness of his Age. The Plague spreading in these Parts, and after he had struggled a whole Year with an Ague, he went Home to his Guardians, having by this Time furnished himself with an indifferent good Style, by daily reading the best Authors. One of his Guardians was carried off by the Plague; the other two not having manag'd his Fortune with the greatest Care, began to contrive how they might fix him in some Monastery. _Erasmus_ still languishing under this Indisposition, tho' he had no Aversion to the Severities of a pious Life, yet he had an Aversion for a Monastery, and therefore desired Time to consider of the Matter. In the mean Time his Guardians employ'd Persons to sollicit him, by fair Speeches, and the Menaces of what he must expect, if he did not comply, to bring him over. In this Interim they found out a Place for him in _Sion_, a College of Canons Regulars near _Delft_, which was the principal House belonging to that Chapter. When the Day came that _Erasmus_ was to give his final Answer, he fairly told them, he neither knew what the World was, nor what a Monastery was, nor yet, what himself was, and that he thought it more advisable for him to pass a few Years more at School, till he came to know himself better. _Peter Winkel_ perceiving that he was unmoveable in this Resolution, fell into a Rage, telling him, he had taken a great deal of Pains to a fine Purpose indeed, who had by earnest Sollicitations, provided a good Preferment for an obstinate Boy, that did not understand his own Interest: And having given him some hard Words, told him, that from that Time he threw up his Guardianship, and now he might look to himself. _Erasmus_ presently reply'd, that he took him at his first Word; that he was now of that Age, that he thought himself capable of taking Care of himself. When his Guardian saw that threatening would not do any Thing with him, he set his Brother Guardian, who was his Tutor, to see what he could do with him: Thus was _Erasmus_ surrounded by them and their Agents on all Hands. He had also a Companion that was treacherous to him, and his old Companion his Ague stuck close to him; but all these would not make a monastick Life go down with him; till at last, by meer Accident, he went to pay a Visit at a Monastery of the same Order at _Emaus_ or _Steyn_ near _Goude_, where he found one _Cornelius_, who had been his Chamber-fellow at _Daventer_. He had not yet taken the Habit, but had travelled to _Italy_, and came back without making any great Improvements in Learning. This _Cornelius_, with all the Eloquence he was Master of, was continually setting out the Advantages of a religious Life, the Conveniency of noble Libraries, Retirement from the Hurry of the World, and heavenly Company, and the like. Some intic'd him on one Hand, others urg'd him on the other, his Ague stuck close to him, so that at last he was induc'd to pitch upon this Convent. And after his Admission he was fed up with great Promises to engage him to take upon him the holy Cloth. Altho' he was but young, he soon perceived how vastly short all Things there fell of answering his Expectations; however, he set the whole Brotherhood to applying their Minds to Study. Before he professed himself he would have quitted the Monastery; but his own Modesty, the ill Usage he was treated with, and the Necessities of his Circumstances, overcame him, so that he did profess himself. Not long after this, by the means of _Gulielmus Hermannus_ of _Buda_, his intimate Associate, he had the Honour to be known to _Henry a Bergis_ Bishop of _Cambray_, who was then in Hopes of obtaining a Cardinal's Hat, which he had obtained, had not Money been wanting: In order to sollicit this Affair for him, he had Occasion for one that was Master of the _Latin_ Tongue; therefore being recommended by the Bishop of _Utrecht_, he was sent for by him; he had also the Recommendation of the _Prior_, and General, and was entertained in the Bishop's Family, but still wore the Habit of his Order: But the Bishop, disappointed in his Hope of wearing the Cardinal's Hat, _Erasmus_ finding his Patron fickle and wavering in his Affections, prevail'd with him to send him to _Paris_, to prosecute his Studies there. He did so, and promised him a yearly Allowance, but it was never paid him, according to the Custom of great Men. He was admitted of _Montague_ College there, but by Reason of ill Diet and a damp Chamber, he contracted an Indisposition of Body, upon which he return'd to the Bishop, who entertain'd him again courteously and honourably: Having recover'd his Health, he return'd into _Holland_, with a Design to settle there; but being again invited, he went back to _Paris_. But having no Patron to support him, he rather made a Shift to live (to use his own Expression) than to study there; and undertook the Tuition of an _English_ Gentleman's two Sons. And the Plague returning there periodically for many Years, he was obliged every Year to return into his own Country. At length it raging all the Year long, he retir'd to _Louvain_. After this he visited _England_, going along with a young Gentleman, to whom he was Tutor, who, as he says himself, was rather his Friend than his Patron. In _England_ he was received with universal Respect; and, as he tells us himself in his Life, he won the Affections of all good Men in our Island. During his Residence here, he was intimately acquainted with _Sir Thomas More_, _William Warham_, Archbishop of _Canterbury_, _John Colet_, Dean of St. _Pauls_, the Founder of St. _Paul's School_, a Man remarkable for the Regularity of his Life, great Learning and Magnificence; with _Hugh Latimer_ Bishop of _Winchester_, _Linacre_, _Grocinus_, and many other honourable and learned Persons, and passed some Years at _Cambridge_, and is said to have taught there; but whether this was after his first or second Time of visiting _England_, I do not determine: However, not meeting with the Preferment he expected, he went away hence to make a Journey to _Italy_, in the Company of the Sons of _Baptista Boetius_, a _Genoese_, Royal Professor of Physick in _England_; which Country, at that Time, could boast of a Set of learned Men, not much inferior to the _Augustan_ Age: But as he was going to _France_, it was his ill Fortune, at _Dover_, to be stripp'd of all he had; this he seems to hint at in his _Colloquy_, intitled, the _Religious Pilgrimage_: But yet he was so far from revenging the Injury, by reflecting upon the Nation, that he immediately published a Book in Praise of the King and Country; which Piece of Generosity gained him no small Respect in _England_. And it appears by several of his Epistles, that he honoured _England_ next to the Place of his Nativity. It appears by _Epist. 10. Lib. 16_. that when he was in _England_ Learning flourished very much here, in that he writes, _Apud Anglos triumphant bonæ Literæ recta Studia_; and in _Epist. 12. Lib. 16_. he makes no Scruple to equal it to _Italy_ itself; and _Epist. 26. Lib. 6._ commends the _English_ Nobility for their great Application to all useful Learning, and entertaining themselves at Table with learned Discourses, when the Table-Talk of Churchmen was nothing but Ribaldry and Profaneness. In _Epist_. 10. _Lib_. 5, which he addresses to _Andrelinus_, he invites him to come into _England_, recommending it as worth his While, were it upon no other Account, than to see the charming Beauties with which this Island abounded; and in a very pleasant Manner describes to him the Complaisance and innocent Freedom of the _English_ Ladies, telling him, that when he came into a Gentleman's House he was allowed to salute the Ladies, and also to do the same at taking Leave: And tho' he seems to talk very feelingly on the Subject, yet makes no Reflections upon the Virtue of _English_ Women. But to return to him; as to his Voyage to _Italy_, he prosecuted his Journey to _Turin_, and took the Degree of Doctor of Divinity in that University; he dwelt a whole year in _Bolognia_, and there obtain'd a Dispensation from Pope _Julian_ to put off his Canon's Habit, but upon Condition not to put off the Habit of Priest; and after that went to _Venice_, where was the Printing-House of the famous _Manutius Aldus_, and there he published his Book of _Adagies_, and staying some Time there, wrote several Treatises, and had the Conversation of many eminent and learned Men. From thence he went to _Padua_, where at that Time _Alexander_ the Son of _James_ King of _Scotland_, and Bishop of St. _Andrews_ in _Scotland_, studied, who chose _Erasmus_ for his Tutor in Rhetorick, and went to _Seana_, and thence to _Rome_, where his great Merits had made his Presence expected long before. At _Rome_ he gained the Friendship and Esteem of the most considerable Persons in the City, was offered the Dignity of a Penitentiary, if he would have remained there: But he returned back to the Archbishop, and not long after went with him again to _Italy_, and travelling farther into the Country, went to _Cuma_, and visited the Cave of _Sybilla_. After the Death of the Archbishop he began to think of returning to his own Country, and coming over the _Rhetian Alps_, went to _Argentorat_, and thence by the Way of the _Rhine_ into _Holland_, having in his Way visited his Friends at _Antwerp_ and _Louvain_; but _Henry_ VIII. coming to the Crown of England, his Friends here, with many Invitations and great Promises, prevailed upon him to come over to _England_ again, where it was his Purpose to have settled for the remaining Part of his Life, had he found Things according to the Expectation they had given him: But how it came about is uncertain, whether _Erasmus_ was wanting in making his Court aright to Cardinal _Wolsey_, who at that Time manag'd all Things at his Pleasure; or, whether it were that the Cardinal look'd with a jealous Eye upon him, because of his intimate Friendship with _William Warham_, Archbishop of _Canterbury_, who had taken him into his Favour, between whom and _Wolsey_ there was continual Clashing, (the Cardinal after he had been made the Pope's Legate, pretending a Power in the Archbishoprick of _Canterbury_.) On this Disappointment he left _England_, and went to _Flanders_; Archbishop _Warham_ had indeed shewed his Esteem for him, in giving him the Living of _Aldington_. In short, _Erasmus_ takes Notice of the Friendship between himself and _Warham_ in the _Colloquy_ called, _The Religious Pilgrimage_. As to his Familiarity with Sir _Thomas More_, there are several Stories related, and especially one concerning the Disputes that had been between them about _Transubstantiation_, or the _real Presence_ of Christ in the consecrated Wafer, of which Sir _Thomas_ was a strenuous Maintainer, and _Erasmus_ an Opponent; of which, when _Erasmus_ saw he was too strongly byassed to be convinced by Arguments, he at last made use of the following facetious Retortion on him. It seems in their Disputes concerning the real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, which were in _Latin_, Sir _Thomas_ had frequently used this Expression, and laid the Stress of his Proof upon the Force of Believing, _Crede quod edis et edis_, _i.e._ Believe you eat [Christ] and you do eat him; therefore _Erasmus_ answers him, _Crede quod habes et habes, Believe that you have_ [_your Horse_] _and you have him_. It seems, at _Erasmus's_ going away, Sir _Thomas_ had lent him his Horse to carry him to the Sea-side or _Dover_; but he either carried him with him over Sea to _Holland_, or sent him not back to Sir _Thomas_, at least for some Time; upon which Sir _Thomas_ writing to _Erasmus_ about his Horse, _Erasmus_ is said to have written back to him as follows. _Ut mihi scripsisti de corpore Christi, Crede quod edis et edis. Sic tibi rescribo de tuo Palfrido; Crede quod habes et habes_. Being arriv'd at _Flanders_ by the Interest of _Sylvagius_ Chancellor to _Charles of Austria_, afterwards Emperor of _Germany_, known by the name of _Charles_ V: he was made one of his Counsellors. In the mean Time _Johannes Frobenius_, a famous Printer, having printed many of his Works at _Basil_ in _Switzerland_, and being much taken with the Elegancy of his Printing, and the Neatness of his Edition, he went thither, pretending that he undertook that Journey for the Performance of some Vow he had made; he was kindly entertain'd by him, and publish'd several Books there, and dedicated this his Book of Colloquies to _Frobenius's_ Son, and resided till the Mass had been put down there by the Reformers. When he left that Place, he retir'd to _Friburg_ in _Alsace_. Before his going to _Friburg_, he visited the low Countries to settle certain Affairs there. And was at _Cologn_ at the Time that the Assembly was at _Worms_, which being dissolv'd, he went again to _Basil_, either, as some say, for the Recovery of his Health, or, as others, for the publishing of several Books. He receiv'd the Bounty and Munificence of several Kings, Princes, and Popes, and was honourably entertain'd by many of the chief Cities which he pass'd through. And by his Procurement, a College of three Languages was instituted at _Louvain_, at the Charge of _Hieronimus Buslidius_, Governour of _Aria_, out of certain Monies he at his Death bequeath'd to the use of studious and learned Men. An Account of which coming to the Ears of _Francis_ King of _France_, he invited him by Letters to _Paris_, in order, by his Advice to erect the like College there. But certain Affairs happening, his Journey thither was hindred. He went to _Friburg_ in _Alsace_, where he bought him an House, and liv'd seven Years in great Esteem and Reputation, both with the chief Magistrates and Citizens of the Place, and all Persons of any Note in the University. But his Distemper, which was the Gout, coming rudely upon him, he, thinking the Change of Air would afford him Relief, sold his House, and went again to _Basil_, to the House of _Frobenius_; but he had not been there above nine Months before his Gout violently assaulted him, and his strength having gradually decay'd, he was seized with a Dysentery, under which having laboured for a Month, it at last overcame him, and he died at the House of _Jerome Frobenius_, the son of _John_ the famous Printer, the 12th of _July_ 1536, about Midnight, being about seventy Years of Age: After his last retreat to _Basil_, he went seldom abroad; and for some of the last Months stirred not out of his Chamber. He retained a sound Mind, even to the last Moments of his Life; and, as a certain Author saith, bid Farewell to the World, and passed into the State of another Life, after the Manner of a Protestant, without the Papistical Ceremonies of Rosaries, Crosses, Confession, Absolution, or receiving the transubstantiated Wafer, and in one Word, not desiring to have any of the _Romish_ Superstitions administered, but according to the true Tenor of the Gospel, taking Sanctuary in nothing but the Mercies of God in Christ. And finding himself near Death, he gave many Testimonies of Piety and Christian Hope in God's Mercy, and oftentimes cry'd out in the _German_ Language, _Liever Godt_, _i.e._ dear God; often repeating, O Jesus have Mercy on me! O Lord, deliver me! Lord, put an End to my Misery! Lord, have Mercy upon me. In his last Will, he made the celebrated Lawyer _Bonifacius Amerbachius_ his Executor, bequeathing the greatest Part of his Substance to charitable Uses; as for the Maintenance of such as were poor and disabled through Age or Sickness; for the Marrying of poor young Virgins, to keep them from Temptations to Unchastity; for the maintaining hopeful Students in the University, and such like charitable Uses. In the overseeing of his Will, he join'd with _Amerbachius_, two others, _Jerome Frobenius_, and _Nicholas Episcopius_, who were his intimate Friends, and whom a certain Author says, had then espoused the Reformation began by _Luther_ and other Reformers. The city of _Basil_ still pays _Erasmus_ the Respect which is due to the Memory of so eminent a Person; they not only call'd one of the Colleges there after his Name, but shew the House where he died to Strangers, with as much Veneration as the People of _Roterdam_ do the House where he was born. I shall not here pretend to give a Catalogue of all _Erasmus's_ genuine Pieces, which they shew at _Basil_: As to his Colloquies and _Moria Encomium_, they have seen more Editions than any other of his Works; and _Moreri_ says, that a Bookseller at _Paris_, who thoroughly understood his Trade, sold twenty four thousand of them at one Impression, by getting it whisper'd to his Customers, that the Book was prohibited, and would suddenly be call'd in. He was buried at _Basil_, in the Cathedral Church, on the left Side near the Choir, in a Marble Tomb; on the fore Side of which was this Inscription: CHRISTO SERVATORIS. DESID. ERASMO ROTERODAMO. _Viro_ omnibus modis maximo; Cujus incomparabilem in omni disciplinarum genere eruditionem, pari conjunctam prudentia, _Posteri_ et admirabuntur et prædicabunt BONIFACIUS AMERBACHIUS, HIERONYMUS FROBENIUS, NICHOLAS EPISCOPIUS Hæredes, Et nuncupati supremæ suæ voluntatis _vindices_ _Patrono optimo_, non _Memoriæ_, quam immortalem sibi Editis Lucubrationibus comparavit, iis, tantisper dum orbis Terrarum stabit, superfuturo, ac eruditis ubique gentium colloquuturo: sed _Corporis Mortalis_, quo reconditum sit ergo, hoc saxum posuere. Mortuus est IV. Eidus Julias jam septuagenarius, Anno à Christo nato, M.D. XXXVI. Upon the upper Part of the Tomb is a quadrangular Base, upon which stands the Effigies of the Deity of _Terminus_, which _Erasmus_ chose for the Impress of his Seal, and on the Front of that Base is this Inscription. DES. ERASMUM ROTERODAMUM _Amici_ sub hoc saxo condebant, IV, eid. Julias M.D. XXXVI. In the Year 1549, a wooden Statue, in Honour of so great a Man, was erected in the Market-place at _Roterdam_; and in the Year 1557, a Stone one was erected in the Stead of it; but this having been defaced by the _Spaniards_ in the Year 1572, as soon as the Country had recovered its Liberty it was restored again. But in the Year 1622, instead of it, a very compleat one of Brass eight Foot high with the Pedestal, was erected, which is now standing on the Bridge at _Roterdam_, and likely long to remain there, on the Foot of which is the following Inscription. DESIDERIO ERASMO MAGNO, Scientiarum atque Literature politioris _vindici et instauratori_: _Viro_ sæculi sui _Primario_, _civi_ omnium præstantissimo, ac nominis immortalitatem scriptis æviternis jure _consecuto_, S.P.Q. ROTERODAMUS. Ne quod tantis apud se suosque posteros _virtutibus_ præmium deesset, _Statuam_ hanc ex sere publico erigendam curaverunt. On the right Side are these Verses of _Nicholas Heinsius_. _Barbariæ talem se debellator_ Erasmus, _Maxima laus Batavi nominis, ore tulit. Reddidit, en, fatis, Ars obluctata sinistris, De tanto spolium nacta quod urna viro est. Ingenii cæleste jubar, majusque caduco Tempore qui reddat, solus_ Erasmus _erit_. On the left Side, and behind, there is an Inscription in the _Dutch_ Language, much to the Purport of the first Inscription. On the House where _Erasmus_ was born, formerly was this Inscription. _Hæc est parva Domus, magnus quâ natus_ Erasmus. The same House being rebuilt and enlarged, has the following Inscription. _Ædibus his ortus Mundum decoravit_ Erasmus, _Artibus ingenuis, Religione, Fide_. As for his Stature, he was neither very low nor very tall, his Body well set, proportioned and handsome, neither fat nor lean, but of a nice and tender Constitution, and easily put out of Order with the least Deviation from his ordinary Way of Living; he had from his Childhood so great an Aversion to eating of Fish, that he never attempted it without the Danger of his Life, and therefore obtain'd a Dispensation from the Pope from eating Fish in _Lent_, as appears by the Story of _Eras_, (as he stiles himself) in the Colloquy call'd _Ichthyophagia_. He was of a fair and pale Complexion, had a high Forehead, his Hair, in his younger Years, inclining to yellow, his Nose pretty long, a little thick at the End, his Mouth something large, but not ill made, his Eyes grey but lively, his Countenance chearful and pleasant, his Voice small, but musical, his Speech distinct and plain, pleasant and jocose, his Gaite handsome and grave; he had a, most happy Memory and acute Wit, he was very constant to his Friend, and exceeding liberal to those that were under Necessity, especially to studious and hopeful Youths, and to such as were destitute in their Journey: In his Conversation he was very pleasant and affable, free from peevish and morose Humours, but very witty and satyrical. It is related, that when _Erasmus_ was told, that _Luther_ had married and gotten the famous _Catharine Bora_ with Child, he should in a jesting Manner say, that, if according to the popular Tradition, _Antichrist_ was to be begotten between a Monk and a Nun, the World was in a fair Way now to have a Litter of Antichrists. I shall conclude with the Character given of _Erasmus_ by Mr. _Thomas Brown_, who comparing him with _Lucian_, says, That whereas _Erasmus_ had translated Part of his Dialogues into _Latin_, he had made _Lucian_ the Pattern of his Colloquies, and had copied his Graces with that Success, that it is difficult to say which of the two was the Original. That both of them had an equal Aversion to austere, sullen, designing Knaves, of what Complexion, Magnitude, or Party soever. That both of them were Men of Wit and Satyr, but that _Erasmus_, according to the Genius of his Country, had more of the Humourist in him than _Lucian_, and in all Parts of Learning was infinitely his Superior. That _Lucian_ liv'd in an Age, when Fiction and Fable had usurp'd the Name of Religion, and Morality was debauch'd by a Set of sowr Scoundrels, Men of Beard and Grimace, but scandalously lewd and ignorant, who yet had the Impudence to preach up Virtue, and stile themselves Philosophers, perpetually clashing with one another about the Precedence of their several Founders, the Merits of their different Sects, and if it is possible, about Trifles of less Importance; yet all agreeing in a different Way, to dupe and amuse the poor People by the fantastick Singularity of their Habits, the unintelligible Jargon of their Schools, and their Pretentions to a severe and mortified Life. This motly Herd of Jugglers _Lucian_ in a great Measure help'd to chase out of the World, by exposing them in their proper Colours. But in a few Generations after him, a new Generation sprung up in the World, well known by the Name of Monks and Friars, differing from the former in Religion, Garb, and a few other Circumstances, but in the main, the same individual Imposters; the same everlasting Cobweb-Spinners as to their nonsensical Controversies, the same abandon'd Rakehells as to their Morals; but as for the mysterious Arts of heaping up Wealth, and picking the Peoples Pockets, as much superior to their Predecessors the _Pagan_ Philosophers, as an overgrown Favourite that cheats a whole Kingdom, is to a common Malefactor. These were the sanctified Cheats, whose Follies and Vices _Erasmus_ has so effectually lash'd, that some Countries have entirely turn'd these Drones out of their Cells, and in other Places where they are still kept, they are grown contemptible to the highest Degree, and oblig'd to be always upon their Guard. THE _Familiar Colloquies_ OF DESIDERIUS ERASMUS, OF _ROTERDAM_. * * * * * The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy teaches Courtesy and Civility in Saluting, who, when, and by what Title we ought to Salute_. _At the First Meeting_. A Certain Person teaches, and not without Reason, that we should Salute freely. For a courteous and kind Salutation oftentimes engages Friendship, and reconciles Persons at Variance, and does undoubtedly nourish and increase a mutual Benevolence. There are indeed some Persons that are such Churls, and of so clownish a Disposition, that if you salute them, they will scarcely salute you again. But this Vice is in some Persons rather the Effect of their Education, than their natural Disposition. It is a Piece of Civility to salute those that come in your Way; either such as come to us, or those that we go to speak with. And in like Manner such as are about any Sort of Work, either at Supper, or that yawn, or hiccop, or sneeze, or cough. But it is the Part of a Man that is civil even to an Extreme, to salute one that belches, or breaks Wind backward. But he is uncivilly civil that salutes one that is making Water, or easing Nature. God save you Father, God save you little Mother, God save you Brother, God save you my worthy Master, God save you heartily Uncle, God save you sweet Cousin. It is courteous to make Use of a Title of Relation or Affinity, unless when it carries something of a Reflection along with it, then indeed it is better not to use such Titles, tho' proper; but rather some that are more engaging, as when we call a Mother in Law, Mother; a Son in Law, Son; a Father in Law, Father; a Sister's Husband, Brother; a Brother's Wife, Sister: And the same we should do in Titles, either of Age or Office. For it will be more acceptable to salute an antient Man by the Name of Father, or venerable Sir, than by the Sirname of Age; altho' in antient Times they used to make use of [Greek: hô geron], as an honourable Title. God save you Lieutenant, God save you Captain; but not God save you Hosier or Shoe-maker. God save you Youth, or young Man. Old Men salute young Men that are Strangers to them by the Name of Sons, and young Men again salute them by the Name of Fathers or Sirs. _A more affectionate Salutation between Lovers_. God save you my little _Cornelia_, my Life, my Light, my Delight, my Sweet-heart, my Honey, my only Pleasure, my little Heart, my Hope, my Comfort, my Glory. _Either for the Sake of Honour or otherwise_. _Sal._ O Master, God bless ye. _Ans._ Oh! Good Sir, I wish you the same. _Sal._ God bless you most accomplish'd, and most famous Sir. God bless you again and again thou Glory of Learning. God save you heartily my very good Friend. God save you my _Mæcenas_. _Ans._ God save you my Singular Patron, God save you most approv'd Sir. God save you, the only Ornament of this Age. God bless you, the Delight of _Germany_. _Sal._ God bless you all together. God bless you all alike. _Ans._ God bless you my brave Boys. _Sal._ God save you merry Companion. God bless you Destroyer of Wine. _Ans._ God bless you Glutton, and unmerciful Devourer of Cakes. _Sal._ God bless you heartily President of all Virtue. _Ans._ God bless you in like Manner, Pattern of universal Honesty. _Sal._ God save you little old Woman of Fifteen Years of Age. _Ans._ God save you Girl, eighty Years old. _Sal._ Much good may it do you with your bald Pate. _Ans._ And much good may it do you with your slit Nose. As you salute, so you shall be saluted again. If you say that which is ill, you shall hear that which is worse. _Sal._ God save you again and again. _Ans._ God save you for ever and ever. _Sal._ God save you more than a thousand Times. _Ans._ In truth I had rather be well once for all. _Sal._ God bless you as much as you can desire. _Ans._ And you as much as you deserve. _Sal._ I wish you well. _Ans._ But what if I won't be so? In truth I had rather be sick, than to enjoy the Health that you want. God bless your Holiness, Your Greatness, Your Highness, Your Majesty, Your Beatitude, Your High Mightiness, are Salutations rather us'd by the Vulgar, than approv'd by the Learned. _In the Third Person_. _Sapidus_ wishes Health to his _Erasmus_. _Sapidus_ salutes his _Beatus_, wishing him much Health. * * * * * _Another Form_. _Sal._ God bless you _Crito_, I wish you well good Sir. _Ans._ And I wish you better. Peace be to thee Brother, is indeed a Christian Salutation, borrow'd from the _Jews_: but yet not to be rejected. And of the like Kind is, A happy Life to you. _Sal._ Hail Master. _Ans._ In truth I had rather have than crave. _Sal._ [Greek: Chaire]. _Ans._ Remember you are at _Basil_, and not _Athens_. _Sal._ How do you then dare to speak _Latin_ when you are not at _Rome_? * * * * * _Forms of well Wishing_. And to wish well is a Sort of Salutation. _To a Woman with Child_. God send you a good Delivery, and that you may make your Husband Father of a fine Child. May the Virgin Mother make you a happy Mother. I wish that this swell'd Belly may asswage happily. Heaven grant that this Burthen you carry, whatsoever it is, may have as easy an out-coming as it had an in-going. God give you a good Time. _To Guests_. Happy be this Feast. Much good may it do all the Company. I wish all Happiness to you all. God give you a happy Banquet. _To one that sneezes._ May it be lucky and happy to you. God keep you. May it be for your Health. God bless it to you. _To one that is about to begin any Business._ May it prove happy and prosperous for the Publick Good. May that you are going about be an universal Good. God prosper what you are about. God bless your Labours. God bless your Endeavours. I pray that by God's Assistance you may happily finish what you have begun. May Christ in Heaven prosper what is under your Hand. May what you have begun end happily. May what you are set about end happily. You are about a good Work, I wish you a good End of it, and that propitious Heaven may favour your pious Undertakings. Christ give Prosperity to your Enterprise. May what you have undertaken prosper. I heartily beg of Almighty God that this Design may be as successful as it is honourable. May the Affair so happily begun, more happily end. I wish you a good Journey to _Italy_, and a better Return. I wish you a happy Voyage, and a more happy Return. I pray God that, this Journey being happily perform'd, we may in a short Time have the Opportunity of congratulating you upon your happy Return. May it be your good Fortune to make a good Voyage thither and back again. May your Journey be pleasant, but your Return more pleasant. I wish this Journey may succeed according to your Heart's Desire. I wish this Journey may be as pleasant to you, as the want of your good Company in the mean Time will be troublesome to us. May you set Sail with promising Presages. I wish this Journey may succeed according to both our Wishes. I wish this Bargain may be for the Good and Advantage of us both. I wish this may be a happy Match to us all. The blessed Jesus God keep thee. Kind Heaven return you safe. God keep thee who art one Half of my Life. I wish you a safe Return. I wish that this New-Year may begin happily, go on more happily, and end most happily to you, and that you may have many of them, and every Year happier than other. _Ans._ And I again wish you many happy Ages, that you mayn't wish well to me _gratis_. _Sal._ I wish you a glorious Day to Day. May this Sun-rising be a happy one to you. _Ans._ I wish you the same. May this be a happy and a prosperous Morning to both of us. _Sal._ Father, I wish you a good Night. I wish you good Repose to Night. May you sleep sweetly. God give you good Rest. May you sleep without dreaming. God send you may either sleep sweetly or dream pleasantly. A good Night to you. _Ans._ Since you always love to be on the getting Hand, I wish you a thousand Happinesses to one you wish to me. * * * * * _Farewell at parting._ Fare ye all well. Farewell. Take care of your Health. Take a great Care of your Health. I bid you good by, Time calls me away, fare ye well. I wish you as well as may be. Farewell mightily, or if you had rather have it so, lustily. Fare you well as you are worthy. Fare you as well as you deserve. Farewell for these two Days. If you send me away, farewell till to-morrow. Would you have any Thing with me? Have you any Thing else to say to me? _Ans._ Nothing but to wish you well. _Sal._ Take Care to preserve your Health. Take Care of your Health. Look well to your Health. See that at the next Meeting we see you merry and hearty. I charge you make much of your self. See that you have a sound Mind in a healthful Body. Take Care you be universally well both in Body and Mind. _Ans._ I'll promise you I will do my Endeavour. Fare you well also; and I again wish you prosperous Health. _Of saluting by another._ Remember my hearty Love to _Frobenius_. Be sure to remember my Love to little _Erasmus_. Remember me to _Gertrude's_ Mother with all imaginable Respect; tell them I wish 'em all well. Remember me to my old Companions. Remember me to my Friends. Give my Love to my Wife. Remember me to your Brother in your Letter. Remember my Love to my Kinsman. Have you any Service to command by me to your Friends? _Ans._ Tell them I wish them all heartily well. _Sal._ Have you any Recommendations to send by me to your Friends? _Ans._ Much Health to them all, but especially to my Father. _Sal._ Are there any Persons to whom you would command me any Service? _Ans._ To all that ask how I do. The Health you have brought from my Friends to me, carry back again with much Interest. Carry my hearty Service to all them that have sent their Service to me. Pray do so much as be my Representative in saluting my Friends. I would have written to my Son in Law, but you will serve me instead of a Letter to him. _Sal._ Soho, soho, whither are you going so fast? _Ans._ Strait to _Louvain_. _Sal._ Stay a little, I have something to send by you. _Ans._ But it is inconvenient for a Footman to carry a Fardel? What is it? _Sal._ That you recommend me to _Goclenius, Rutgerus, John Campensis_, and all the Society of Trilinguists. _Ans._ If you put nothing into my Snapsack but Healths, I shall carry them with Ease. _Sal._ And that you may not do that for nothing, I pray that Health may be your Companion both going and coming back. _How we ought to congratulate one that is return'd from a Journey._ We are glad you are come well Home. It is a Pleasure that you are come Home safe. It is a Pleasure to us that you are come well Home. We congratulate your happy Return. We give God Thanks that you are come safe Home to us. The more uneasy we were at the Want of you, the more glad we are to see you again. We congratulate you and ourselves too that you are come Home to us alive and well. Your Return is the more pleasant by how much it was less expected. _Ans._ I am glad too that as I am well myself I find you so. I am very glad to find you in good Health. I should not have thought myself well come Home if I had not found you well; but now I think myself safe, in that I see you safe and in good Health. * * * * * _A Form of asking Questions at the first meeting._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy teaches Forms of enquiring at the first meeting. Whence come you? What News bring you? How do you do? &c._ _GEORGE, LIVINUS._ _George._ Out of what Hen-Coop or Cave came you? _Liv._ Why do you ask me such a Question? _Ge._ Because you have been so poorly fed; you are so thin a Body may see thro' you, and as dry as a Kecks. Whence came you from? _Liv._ From Montacute College. _Ge._ Then sure you are come loaden with Letters for us. _Liv._ Not so, but with Lice I am. _Ge._ Well then you had Company enough. _Liv._ In truth it is not safe for a Traveller now a Days to go without Company. _Ge._ I know well enough a Louse is a Scholar's Companion. Well but do you bring any News from _Paris_? _Liv._ Ay, I do, and that in the first Place that I know you won't believe. At _Paris_ a _Bete_ is wise, and an _Oak_ preaches. _Ge._ What's that you tell me? _Liv._ That which you hear. _Ge._ What is it I hear? _Liv._ That which I tell you. _Ge._ O monstrous! Sure Mushrooms and Stones must be the Hearers where there are such Preachers. _Liv._ Well, but it is even so as I tell you, nor do I speak only by hear say, but what I know to be true. _Ge._ Sure Men must needs be very wise there where _Betes_ and _Oaks_ are so. _Liv._ You are in the right on't. * * * * * _Of enquiring concerning Health._ _Ge._ Are you well? _Liv._ Look in my Face. _Ge._ Why do you not rather bid me cast your Water? Do you take me for a Doctor? I don't ask you if you are in Health, for your Face bespeaks you so to be; but I ask you how you like your own Condition? _Liv._ I am very well in my Body, but sick in my Mind. _Ge._ He's not well indeed that is sick in that Part. _Liv._ This is my Case, I'm well in my Body, but sick in my Pocket. _Ge._ Your Mother will easily cure that Distemper. How have you done for this long Time? _Liv._ Sometimes better, and sometimes worse, as human Affairs commonly go. _Ge._ Are you very well in health? Are your Affairs in a good Condition? Are your Circumstances as you would have them? Have you always had your Health well? _Liv._ Very well, I thank God. By God's Goodness I have always had my Health very well. I have always been very well hitherto. I have been in very good, favourable, secure, happy, prosperous, successful, perfect Health, like a Prince, like a Champion, fit for any Thing. _Ge._ God send you may always enjoy the same. I am glad to hear it. You give me a Pleasure in saying so. It is very pleasant to me to hear that. I am glad at my Heart to hear this from you. This is no bad News to me. I am exceeding glad to hear you say so. I wish you may be so always. I wish you may enjoy the same Health as long as you live. In congratulating you, I joy myself, Thanks to Heaven for it. _Li._ Indeed I am very well if you are so. _Ge._ Well, but have you met with no Trouble all this while? _Li._ None but the Want of your good Company. _Ge._ Well, but how do you do though? _Li._ Well enough, finely, bravely, very well as may be, very well indeed, happily, commodiously, no Way amiss. I enjoy rather what Health I wish, than what I deserved, Princely, Herculean, Champion-like. _Ge._ I was expecting when you would say Bull-like too. * * * * * _Of being Ill._ _Ge._ Are you in good Health? _Li._ I wish I were. Not altogether so well as I would be. Indeed I am so, so. Pretty well. I am as well as I can be, since I can't be so well as I would be. As I use to be. So as it pleases God. Truly not very well. Never worse in all my Life. As I am wont to be. I am as they use to be who have to do with the Doctor. _Ge._ How do you do? _Li._ Not as I would do. _Ge._ Why truly not well, ill, very ill, in an unhappy, unprosperous, unfavourable, bad, adverse, unlucky, feeble, dubious, indifferent, State of Health, not at all as I would, a tolerable, such as I would not wish even to my Enemies. _Ge._ You tell me a melancholy Story. Heavens forbid it. God forbid. No more of that I pray. I wish what you say were not true. But you must be of good Chear, you must pluck up a good Heart. A good Heart is a good Help in bad Circumstances. You must bear up your Mind with the Hope of better Fortune. What Distemper is it? What Sort of Disease is it? What Distemper is it that afflicts you? What Distemper are you troubled with? _Li._ I can't tell, and in that my Condition is the more dangerous. _Ge._ That's true, for when the Disease is known, it is half cured. Have you had the Advice of any Doctor? _Li._ Ay, of a great many. _Ge._ What do they say to your Case? _Li._ What the Lawyers of _Demiphon_ (in the Play) said to him. One says one Thing, another he says another, and the third he'll consider of it. But they all agree in this, that I am in a sad Condition. _Ge._ How long have you been taken with this Illness? How long have you been ill of this Distemper? How long has this Illness seiz'd you? _Li._ About twenty Days more or less, almost a Month. It's now near three Months. It seems an Age to me since I was first taken ill. _Ge._ But I think you ought to take care that the Distemper don't grow upon you. _Li._ It has grown too much upon me already. _Ge._ Is it a Dropsy? _Li._ They say it is not. _Ge._ Is it a Dissentery? _Li._ I think not. _Ge._ Is it a Fever? _Li._ I believe it is a Kind of Fever; but a new one, as ever and anon new ones spring up that were unknown before. _Ge._ There were more old ones than enough before. _Li._ Thus it pleases Nature to deal with us, which is a little too severe. _Ge._ How often does the Fit come? _Li._ How often do you say? Every Day, nay every Hour indeed. _Ge._ O wonderful! It is a sad Affliction. How did you get this Distemper? How do you think you came by it? _Li._ By Reason of Want. _Ge._ Why you don't use to be so superstitious as to starve yourself with Fasting. _Li._ It is not Bigotry but Penury. _Ge._ What do you mean by Penury? _Li._ I mean I could get no Victuals, I believe it came by a Cold. I fancy I got the Distemper by eating rotten Eggs. By drinking too much Water in my Wine. This Crudity in my Stomach came by eating green Apples. _Ge._ But consider whether you han't contracted this Distemper by long and late Studying, by hard Drinking, or immoderate use of Venery? Why don't you send for a Doctor? _Li._ I am afraid he should do me more Harm than good. I am afraid he should poison me instead of curing me. _Ge._ You ought to chuse one that you can confide in. _Li._ If I must dye, I had rather dye once for all, than to be tormented with so many Slops. _Ge._ Well then, be your own Doctor. If you can't trust to a Doctor, pray God be your Physician. There have been some that have recover'd their Health, by putting on a Dominican or a Franciscan Fryars Cowl. _Li._ And perhaps it had been the same Thing, if they had put on a Whore-master's Cloak. These things have no Effect upon those that have no Faith in 'em. _Ge._ Why then, believe that you may recover. Some have been cur'd by making Vows to a Saint. _Li._ But I have no Dealings with Saints. _Ge._ Then pray to Christ that you may have Faith, and that he would be pleased to bestow the Blessing of Health upon you. _Li._ I can't tell whether it would be a Blessing or no. _Ge._ Why, is it not a Blessing to be freed from a Distemper? _Li._ Sometimes it is better to dye. I ask nothing of him, but only that he'd give me what would be best for me. _Ge._ Take something to purge you. _Li._ I am laxative enough already. _Ge._ Take something to make you go to Stool. You must take a Purge. _Li._ I ought to take something that is binding rather, for I am too laxative. * * * * * _Of enquiring of a Person upon his Return_. The ARGUMENT. _Of interrogating a Person returning from a Journey, concerning War, private Affairs, a Disappointment, great Promises, a Wife Lying-in, Dangers, Losses_, &c. _George._ Have you had a good and prosperous Journey? _Li._ Pretty good; but that there is such Robbing every where. _Ge._ This is the Effect of War. _Li._ It is so, but it is a wicked one. _Ge._ Did you come on Foot or on Horse-back? _Li._ Part of the Way a Foot, Part in a Coach, Part on Horse-back, and Part by Sea. _Ge._ How go Matters in _France?_ _Li._ All's in Confusion, there's nothing but War talk'd of. What Mischiefs they may bring upon their Enemies I know not; but this I'm sure of, the _French_ themselves are afflicted with unexpressible Calamities. _Ge._ Whence come all these tumultuary Wars? _Li._ Whence should they come but from the Ambition of Monarchs? _Ge._ But it would be more their Prudence to appease these Storms of human Affairs. _Li._ Appease 'em! Ay, so they do, as the South Wind does the Sea. They fancy themselves to be Gods, and that the World was made for their Sakes. _Ge._ Nay, rather a Prince was made for the Good of the Commonwealth, and not the Commonwealth for the Sake of the Prince. _Li._ Nay, there are Clergymen too, who blow up the Coals, and sound an Alarm to these Tumults. _Ge._ I'd have them set in the Front of the Battel. _Li._ Ay, ay, but they take Care to keep out of Harm's Way. _Ge._ But let us leave these publick Affairs to Providence. How go your own Matters? _Li._ Very well, happily, indifferently well, tolerably. _Ge._ How goes it with your own Business? As you would have it? _Li._ Nay, better than I could have wish'd for, better than I deserve, beyond what I could have hop'd for. _Ge._ Are all Things according to your Mind? Is all well? Has every Thing succeeded? _Li._ It can't be worse. It is impossible it should be worse than it is. _Ge._ What then, han't you got what you sought for? Han't you caught the Game you hunted? _Li._ Hunt! Ay, I did hunt indeed, but with very ill Success. _Ge._ But is there no Hope then? _Li._ Hope enough, but nothing else. _Ge._ Did the Bishop give you no Hopes? _Li._ Yes, whole Cart Loads, and whole Ship Loads of Hope; but nothing else. _Ge._ Has he sent you nothing yet? _Li._ He promis'd me largely, but he has never sent me a Farthing. _Ge._ Then you must live in Hopes. _Li._ Ay, but that won't fill the Belly; they that feed upon Hope may be said to hang, but not to live. _Ge._ But however then, you were the lighter for travelling, not having your Pockets loaded. _Li._ I confess that, nay, and safer too; for an empty Pocket is the best Defence in the World against Thieves; but for all that, I had rather have the Burthen and the Danger too. _Ge._ You was not robb'd of any Thing by the Way, I hope? _Li._ Robb'd! What can you rob a Man of that has nothing? There was more Reason for other Folks to be afraid of me, than I of them, having never a Penny in my Pocket. I might sing and be starved all the Way I went. Have you anything more to say? _Ge._ Where are you going now? _Li._ Strait Home, to see how all do there, whom I han't seen this long Time. _Ge._ I wish you may find all well at Home. _Li._ I pray God I may. Has any Thing new happen'd at our House since I went away? _Ge._ Nothing but only you'll find your Family bigger than it was; for your _Catulla_ has brought you a little _Catulus_ since you have been gone. Your Hen has laid you an Egg. _Li._ That's good News, I like your News, and I'll promise to give you a Gospel for it. _Ge._ What Gospel? The Gospel according to St. _Matthew_? _Li._ No, but according to _Homer_. Here take it. _Ge._ Keep your Gospel to yourself, I have Stones enough at Home. _Li._ Don't slight my Present, it is the Eagle's Stone; It is good for Women with Child; it is good to bring on their Labour. _Ge._ Say you so? Then it is a very acceptable Present to me, and I'll endeavour to make you Amends. _Li._ The Amends is made already by your kind Acceptance. _Ge._ Nay, nothing in the World could come more seasonably, for my Wife's Belly is up to her Mouth almost. _Li._ Then I'll make this Bargain with you; that if she has a Boy, you will let me be the Godfather. _Ge._ Well I'll promise you that, and that you shall name it too. _Li._ I wish it may be for both our Good. _Ge._ Nay, for all our Good. * * * * * _MAURICE, CYPRIAN._ _Ma._ You are come back fatter than you used to be: You are returned taller. _Cy._ But in Truth I had rather it had been wiser, or more learned. _Ma._ You had no Beard when you went away; but you have brought a little one back with you. You are grown somewhat oldish since you went away. What makes you look so pale, so lean, so wrinkled? _Cy._ As is my Fortune, so is the Habit of my Body. _Ma._ Has it been but bad then? _Cy._ She never is otherwise to me, but never worse in my Life than now. _Ma._ I am sorry for that. I am sorry for your Misfortune. But pray, what is this Mischance? _Cy._ I have lost all my Money. _Ma._ What in the Sea? _Cy._ No, on Shore, before I went abroad. _Ma._ Where? _Cy._ Upon the _English_ Coast. _Ma._ It is well you scap'd with your Life; it is better to lose your Money, than that; the loss of ones good Name, is worse than the Loss of Money. _Cy._ My Life and Reputation are safe; but my Money is lost. _Ma._ The Loss of Life never can be repair'd; the Loss of Reputation very hardly; but the Loss of Money may easily be made up one Way or another. But how came it about? _Cy._ I can't tell, unless it was my Destiny. So it pleas'd God. As the Devil would have it. _Ma._ Now you see that Learning and Virtue are the safest Riches; for as they can't be taken from a Man, so neither are they burthensome to him that carries them. _Cy._ Indeed you Philosophize very well; but in the mean Time I'm in Perplexity. * * * * * _CLAUDIUS, BALBUS._ _Cl._ I am glad to see you well come Home _Balbus_. _Ba._ And I to see you alive _Claudius_. _Cl._ You are welcome Home into your own Country again. _Ba._ You should rather congratulate me as a Fugitive from _France_. _Cl._ Why so? _Ba._ Because they are all up in Arms there. _Cl._ But what have Scholars to do with Arms? _Ba._ But there they don't spare even Scholars. _Cl._ It is well you're got off safe. _Ba._ But I did not get off without Danger neither. _Cl._ You are come back quite another Man than you went away. _Ba._ How so? _Cl._ Why, of a _Dutch_ Man, you are become a _French_ Man. _Ba._ Why, was I a Capon when I went away? _Cl._ Your Dress shows that you're turn'd from a _Dutch_ Man into a _French_ Man. _Ba._ I had rather suffer this Metamorphosis, than be turn'd into a Hen. But as a Cowl does not make a Monk, so neither does a Garment a _French_ Man. _Cl._ Have you learn'd to speak _French?_ _Ba._ Indifferently well. _Cl._ How did you learn it? _Ba._ Of Teachers that were no dumb ones I assure you. _Cl._ From whom. _Ba._ Of little Women, more full of Tongue, than Turtle Doves. _Cl._ It is easy to learn to speak in such a School. Do you pronounce the _French_ well? _Ba._ Yes, that I do, and I pronounce _Latin_ after the _French_ Mode. _Cl._ Then you will never write good Verses. _Ba._ Why so? _Cl._ Because you'll make false Quantities. _Ba._ The Quality is enough for me. _Cl._ Is _Paris_ clear of the Plague? _Ba._ Not quite, but it is not continual, sometimes it abates, and anon it returns again; sometimes it slackens, and then rages again. _Cl._ Is not War itself Plague enough? _Ba._ It is so, unless God thought otherwise. _Cl._ Sure Bread must be very dear there. _Ba._ There is a great Scarcity of it. There is a great Want of every Thing but wicked Soldiers. Good Men are wonderful cheap there. _Cl._ What is in the Mind of the _French_ to go to War with the _Germans_? _Ba._ They have a Mind to imitate the Beetle, that won't give Place to the Eagle. Every one thinks himself an _Hercules_ in War. _Cl._ I won't detain you any longer, at some other Time we'll divert ourselves more largely, when we can both spare Time. At present I have a little Business that calls me to another Place. _FAMILY DISCOURSE._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy presents us with the Sayings and Jokes of intimate Acquaintance, and the Repartees and Behaviour of familiar Friends one with another. 1. Of walking abroad, and calling Companions. 2. Of seldom visiting, of asking concerning a Wife, Daughter, Sons. 3. Concerning Leisure, the tingling of the Ear, the Description of a homely Maid. Invitation to a Wedding. 4. Of Studying too hard, &c._ PETER, MIDAS, _a Boy_, JODOCUS. _Peter_, Soho, soho, Boy! does no Body come to the Door? _Mi._ I think this Fellow will beat the Door down. Sure he must needs be some intimate Acquaintance or other. O old Friend _Peter_, what hast brought? _Pe._ Myself. _Mi._ In Truth then you have brought that which is not much worth. _Pe._ But I'm sure I cost my Father a great deal. _Mi._ I believe so, more than you can be sold for again. _Pe._ But is _Jodocus_ at Home? _Mi._ I can't tell, but I'll go see. _Pe._ Go in first, and ask him if he pleases to be at Home now. _Mi._ Go yourself, and be your own Errand Boy. _Pe._ Soho! _Jodocus_, are you at Home? _Jo._ No, I am not. _Pe._ Oh! You impudent Fellow I don't I hear you speak? _Jo._ Nay, you are more impudent, for I took your Maid's Word for it lately, that you were not at Home, and you won't believe me myself. _Pe._ You're in the Right on't, you've serv'd me in my own Kind. _Jo._ As I sleep not for every Body, so I am not at Home to every Body, but for Time to come shall always be at Home to you. _Pe._ Methinks you live the Life of a Snail. _Jo._ Why so? _Pe._ Because you keep always at Home and never stir abroad, just like a lame Cobler always in his Stall. You sit at Home till your Breech grows to your Seat. _Jo._ At Home I have something to do, but I have no Business abroad, and if I had, the Weather we have had for several Days past, would have kept me from going abroad. _Pe._ But now it is fair, and would tempt a Body to walk out; see how charming pleasant it is. _Jo._ If you have a Mind to walk I won't be against it. _Pe._ In Truth, I think we ought to take the Opportunity of this fine Weather. _Jo._ But we ought to get a merry Companion or two, to go along with us. _Pe._ So we will; but tell me who you'd have then. _Jo._ What if we should get Hugh? _Pe._ There is no great Difference between _Hugo_ and _Nugo._ _Jo._ Come on then, I like it mighty well. _Pe._ What if we should call _Alardus?_ _Jo._ He's no dumb Man I'll assure you, what he wants in Hearing he'll make up in Talking. _Pe._ If you will, we'll get _Nævius_ along with us too. _Jo._ If we have but him, we shall never want merry Stories. I like the Company mainly, the next Thing is to pitch upon a pleasant Place. _Pe._ I'll show you a Place where you shall neither want the Shade of a Grove, nor the pleasant Verdure of Meadows, nor the purling Streams of Fountains, you'll say it is a Place worthy of the Muses themselves. _Jo._ You promise nobly. _Pe._ You are too intent upon your Books; you sit too close to your Books; you make yourself lean with immoderate Study. _Jo._ I had rather grow lean with Study than with Love. _Pe._ We don't live to study, but we therefore study that we may live pleasantly. _Jo._ Indeed I could live and dye in my Study. _Pe._ I approve well enough of studying hard, but not to study myself to Death. _Pe._ Has this Walk pleas'd you? _Jo._ It has been a charming pleasant one. * * * * * _2. GILES, LEONARD._ _Gi._ Where is our Leonard a going? _Le._ I was coming to you. _Gi._ That you do but seldom. _Le._ Why so? _Gi._ Because you han't been to see me this twelve Months. _Le._ I had rather err on that Hand to be wanted, than to be tiresome. _Gi._ I am never tired with the Company of a good Friend: Nay, the oftner you come the more welcome you are. _Le._ But by the Way, how goes Matters at your House. _Gi._ Why truly not many Things as I would have them. _Le._ I don't wonder at that, but is your Wife brought to Bed yet? _Gi._ Ay, a great While ago, and had two at a Birth too. _Le._ How, two at once! _Gi._ 'Tis as I tell you, and more than that she's with Child again. _Le._ That's the Way to increase your Family. _Gi._ Ay, but I wish Fortune would increase my Money as much as my Wife does my Family. _Le._ Have you disposed of your Daughter yet? _Gi._ No, not yet. _Le._ I would have you consider if it be not hazardous to keep such a great Maid as she at Home, you should look out for a Husband for her. _Gi._ There's no Need of that, for she has Sweet-hearts enough already. _Le._ But why then don't you single out one for her, him that you like the best of them? _Gi._ They are all so good that I can't tell which to chuse: But my Daughter won't hear of marrying. _Le._ How say you! If I am not mistaken, she has been marriageable for some Time. She has been fit for a Husband a great While, ripe for Wedlock, ready for a Husband this great While. _Gi._ Why not, she is above seventeen, she's above two and twenty, she's in her nineteenth Year, she's above eighteen Years old. _Le._ But why is she averse to Marriage? _Gi._ She says she has a Mind to be married to Christ. _Le._ In Truth he has a great many Brides. But is she married to an evil Genius that lives chastly with a Husband? _Gi._ I don't think so. _Le._ How came that Whimsey into her Head? _Gi._ I can't tell, but there's no persuading her out of it by all that can be said to her. _Le._ You should take Care that there be no Tricksters that inveagle or draw her away. _Gi._ I know these Kidnappers well enough, and I drive this Kind of Cattel as far from my House as I can. _Le._ But what do you intend to do then? Do you intend to let her have her Humour? _Gi._ No, I'll prevent it if possible; I'll try every Method to alter her Mind; but if she persists in it, I'll not force her against her Will, lest I should be found to fight against God, or rather to fight against the Monks. _Le._ Indeed you speak very religiously; but take Care to try her Constancy throughly, lest she should afterwards repent it, when it is too late. _Gi._ I'll do my utmost Endeavours. _Le._ What Employment do your Sons follow? _Gi._ The eldest has been married this good While, and will be a Father in a little Time; I have sent the youngest away to _Paris_, for he did nothing but play while he was here. _Le._ Why did you send him thither? _Gi._ That he might come back a greater Fool than he went. _Le._ Don't talk so. _Gi._ The middlemost has lately enter'd into holy Orders. _Le._ I wish 'em all well. * * * * * 3. _MOPSUS, DROMO._ _Mo._ How is it? What are you doing Dromo? _Dr._ I'm sitting still. _Mo._ I see that; but how do Matters go with you? _Dr._ As they use to do with unfortunate Persons. _Mo._ God forbid that that should be your Case. But what are you doing? _Dr._ I am idling, as you see; doing just nothing at all. _Mo._ It is better to be idle than doing of nothing; it may be I interrupt you, being employ'd in some Matters of Consequence? _Dr._ No, really, entirely at Leisure; I just began to be tir'd of being alone, and was wishing for a merry Companion. _Mo._ It may be I hinder, interrupt, disturb you, being about some Business? _Dr._ No, you divert me, being tired with being idle. _Mo._ Pray pardon me if I have interrupted you unseasonably. _Dr._ Nay, you came very seasonably; you are come in the Nick of Time; I was just now wishing for you; I am extreme glad of your Company. _Mo._ It may be you are about some serious Business, that I would by no means interrupt or hinder? _Dr._ Nay, rather it is according to the old Proverb, _Talk of the Devil and he'll appear_; for we were just now speaking of you. _Mo._ In short, I believe you were, for my Ear tingled mightily as I came along. _Dr._ Which Ear was it? _Mo._ My left, from which I guess there was no Good said of me. _Dr._ Nay, I'll assure you there was nothing but Good said. _Mo._ Then the old Proverb is not true. But what good News have you? _Dr._ They say you are become a Huntsman. _Mo._ Nay, more than that, I have gotten the Game now in my Nets that I have been hunting after. _Dr._ What Game is it? _Mo._ A pretty Girl, that I am to marry in a Day or two; and I intreat you to honour me with your good Company at my Wedding. _Dr._ Pray, who is your Bride? _Mo. Alice_, the Daughter of _Chremes_. _Dr._ You are a rare Fellow to chuse a Beauty for one! Can you fancy that Black-a-top, Snub-nos'd, Sparrow-mouth'd, Paunch-belly'd Creature. _Mo._ Prithee hold thy Tongue, I marry her to please myself, and not you. Pray, is it not enough that I like her? The less she pleases you, the more she'll please me. * * * * * 4. _SYRUS, GETA._ _Sy._ I wish you much Happiness. _Ge._ And I wish you double what you wish me. _Sy._ What are you doing? _Ge._ I am talking. _Sy._ What! By yourself? _Ge._ As you see. _Sy._ It may be you are talking to yourself, and then you ought to see to it that you talk to an honest Man. _Ge._ Nay, I am conversing with a very facetious Companion. _Sy._ With whom? _Ge._ With _Apuleius_. _Sy._ That I think you are always doing, but the Muses love Intermission; you study continually. _Ge._ I am never tired with Study. _Sy._ It may be so, but yet you ought to set Bounds; though Study ought not to be omitted, yet it ought sometimes to be intermitted; Studies are not to be quite thrown aside, yet they ought for a While to be laid aside; there is nothing pleasant that wants Variety; the seldomer Pleasures are made use of the pleasanter they are. You do nothing else but study. You are always studying. You are continually at your Books. You read incessantly. You study Night and Day. You never are but a studying. You are continually at your Study. You are always intent upon your Books. You know no End of, nor set no Bound to Study. You give yourself no Rest from your Studies. You allow yourself no Intermission in, nor ever give over studying. _Ge._ Very well! This is like you. You banter me as you use to do. You make a Game of me. You joke upon me. You satyrize me. You treat me with a Sneer. I see how you jeer me well enough. You only jest with me. I am your Laughing-stock. I am laugh'd at by you. You make yourself merry with me. You make a meer Game and Sport of me. Why don't you put me on Asses Ears too? My Books, that are all over dusty and mouldy, shew how hard a Studier I am. _Sy._ Let me die if I don't speak my Mind. Let me perish if I don't speak as I think. Let me not live if I dissemble. I speak what I think. I speak the Truth. I speak seriously. I speak from my Heart. I speak nothing but what I think. * * * * * _Why don't you come to see me_? _Ge._ What's the Matter you ha'n't come to see me all this While? What's the Matter you visit me so seldom? What has happen'd to you that you never have come at me for so long Time? Why are you so seldom a Visitor? What is the Meaning that you never come near one for so long Time? What has hinder'd you that you have come to see me no oftner? What has prevented you that you have never let me have the Opportunity of seeing you for this long Time? * * * * * _I could not by Reason of Business._ _Sy._ I had not Leisure. I would have come, but I could not for my Business. Business would not permit me hitherto to come to see you. These Floods of Business that I have been plung'd in would not permit me to pay my Respects to you. I have been so busy I could not come. I have been harass'd with so many vexatious Matters that I could not get an Opportunity. I have been so taken up with a troublesome Business that I could never have so much Command of myself. You must impute it to my Business, and not to me. It was not for Want of Will, but Opportunity. I could not get Time till now. I have had no Time till now. I never have had any Leisure till this Time. I have been so ill I could not come. I could not come, the Weather has been so bad. _Ge._ Indeed I accept of your Excuse, but upon this Condition, that you don't make use of it often. If Sickness has been the Occasion of your Absence, your Excuse is juster than I wish it had been; I'll excuse you upon this Condition, that you make Amends for your Omission by Kindness, if you make up your past Neglect by your future frequent Visits. _Sy._ You don't esteem these common Formalities. Our Friendship is more firm than to need to be supported by such vulgar Ceremonies. He visits often enough that loves constantly. _Ge._ A Mischief take those Incumbrances that have depriv'd us of your Company. I can't tell what to wish for bad enough to those Affairs that have envy'd us the Company of so good a Friend. A Mischief take that Fever that hath tormented us so long with the Want of you. I wish that Fever may perish, so thou thyself wert but safe. * * * * * _Of Commanding and Promising._ _JAMES, SAPIDUS._ _Ja._ I pray you take a special Care of this Matter. I earnestly intreat you to take Care of this Affair. If you have any Respect for me, pray manage this Affair diligently. Pray be very careful in this Affair. Pray take a great Deal of Care about this Business for my Sake. If you are indeed the Man I always took you to be, let me see in this Concern what Esteem you have for me. _Sa._ Say no more, I'll dispatch this Affair for you, and that very shortly too. I can't indeed warrant you what the Event shall be, but this I promise you, that neither Fidelity nor Industry shall be wanting in me. I will take more Care of it than if it were mine own Affair; tho' indeed that which is my Friend's I account as my own. I will so manage the Affair, that whatever is wanting, Care and Diligence shall not be wanting. Take you no Care about the Matter, I'll do it for you. Do you be easy, I'll take the Management of it upon myself. I am glad to have an Opportunity put into my Hand of shewing you my Respect. I do not promise you in Words, but I will in Reality perform whatsoever is to be expected from a real Friend, and one that heartily wishes you well. I won't bring you into a Fool's Paradise. I'll do that which shall give you Occasion to say you trusted the Affair to a Friend. * * * * * _Success._ _Sa._ The Matter succeeded better than I could have expected. Fortune has favour'd both our Wishes. If Fortune had been your Wife she could not have been more observant to you. Your Affair went on bravely with Wind and Tide. Fortune has out-done our very Wishes. You must needs be a Favourite of Fortune, to whom all Things fall out just as you would have them. I have obtain'd more than I could presume to wish for. This Journey has been perform'd from Beginning to End with all the fortunate Circumstances imaginable. The whole Affair has fallen out according to our Wish. This Chance fell out happily for us. I think we have been lucky to Admiration, that what has been so imprudently enterpriz'd, has so happily succeeded. * * * * * _A giving one Thanks._ _Ja._ Indeed I thank you, and shall thank you heartily as long as I live for that good Service you have done me. I can scarce give you the Thanks you deserve, and shall never be able to make you Amends. I see how much I am oblig'd to you for your Kindness to me. Indeed I don't wonder at it, for it is no new Thing, and in that I am the more oblig'd to you. My _Sapidus_ I do, and it is my Duty to love you heartily for your Kindness to me. In as much as in this Affair you have not acted the Part of a Courtier, I do, and always shall thank you. I respect you, and thank you, that you made my Affair your Care. You have oblig'd me very much by that Kindness of yours. It is a great Obligation upon me that you have manag'd my Concern with Fidelity. Of all your Kindnesses, which are indeed a great many, you have shew'd me none has oblig'd me more than this. I cannot possibly make you a Return according to your Merit Too much Ceremony between you and I is unnecessary, but that which is in my Power I'll do. I'll be thankful as long as I live. I confess myself highly oblig'd to you for your good Service. For this Kindness I owe you more than I am able to pay. By this good Office you have attach'd me to you so firmly, that I can never be able to disengage myself. You have laid me under so many and great Obligations, that I shall never be able to get out of your Debt. No Slave was ever so engag'd in Duty to his Master as you have engag'd me by this Office. You have by this good Turn brought me more into your Debt than ever I shall be able to pay. I am oblig'd to you upon many Accounts, but upon none more than upon this. Thanks are due for common Kindness, but this is beyond the Power of Thanks to retaliate. * * * * * _The Answer._ _Sa._ Forbear these Compliments, the Friendship between you and I is greater than that we should thank one another for any Service done. I have not bestow'd this Kindness upon you, but only made a Return of it to you. I think the Amends is sufficiently made, if my most sedulous Endeavours are acceptable to you. There is no Reason you should thank me for repaying this small Kindness, for those uncommon Kindnesses I have so often receiv'd from you. Indeed I merit no Praise, but should have been the most ungrateful Man in the World if I had been wanting to my Friend. Whatsoever I have, and whatsoever I can do, you may call as much your own as any Thing that you have the best Title to. I look upon it as a Favour that you take my Service kindly. You pay so great an Acknowledgment to me for so small a Kindness, as tho' I did not owe you much greater. He serves himself that serves his Friend. He that serves a Friend does not give away his Service, but puts it out to Interest. If you approve of my Service, pray make frequent Use of it; then I shall think my Service is acceptable, if as often as you have Occasion for it you would not request but command it. _OF RASH VOWS._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy treats chiefly of three Things, 1. Of the superstitious Pilgrimages of some Persons to_ Jerusalem, _and other holy Places, under Pretence of Devotion. 2. That Vows are not to be made rashly over a Pot of Ale: but that Time, Expence and Pains ought to be employ d otherwise, in such Matters as have a real Tendency to promote trite Piety. 3. Of the Insignificancy and Absurdity of Popish Indulgencies_. ARNOLDUS, CORNELIUS. _ARNOLDUS._ O! _Cornelius_, well met heartily, you have been lost this hundred Years. _Co._ What my old Companion _Arnoldus_, the Man I long'd to see most of any Man in the World! God save you. _Ar._ We all gave thee over for lost. But prithee where hast been rambling all this While? _Co._ In t'other World. _Ar._ Why truly a Body would think so by thy slovenly Dress, lean Carcase, and ghastly Phyz. _Co._ Well, but I am just come from _Jerusalem_, not from the _Stygian_ Shades. _Ar._ What Wind blew thee thither? _Co._ What Wind blows a great many other Folks thither? _Ar._ Why Folly, or else I am mistaken. _Co._ However, I am not the only Fool in the World. _Ar._ What did you hunt after there? _Co._ Why Misery. _Ar._ You might have found that nearer Home. But did you meet with any Thing worth seeing there? _Co._ Why truly, to speak ingenuously, little or nothing. They shew us some certain Monuments of Antiquity, which I look upon to be most of 'em Counterfeits, and meer Contrivances to bubble the Simple and Credulous. I don't think they know precisely the Place that _Jerusalem_ anciently stood in. _Ar._ What did you see then? _Co._ A great deal of Barbarity every where. _Ar._ But I hope you are come back more holy than you went. _Co._ No indeed, rather ten Times worse. _Ar._ Well, but then you are richer? _Co._ Nay, rather poorer than _Job_. _Ar._ But don't you repent you have taken so long a Journey to so little Purpose? _Co._ No, nor I am not asham'd neither, I have so many Companions of my Folly to keep me in Countenance; and as for Repentance, it's too late now. _Ar._ What! do you get no Good then by so dangerous a Voyage? _Co._ Yes, a great Deal. _Ar._ What is it? _Co._ Why, I shall live more pleasantly for it for Time to come. _Ar._ What, because you'll have the Pleasure of telling old Stories when the Danger is over? _Co._ That is something indeed, but that is not all. _Ar._ Is there any other Advantage in it besides that? _Co._ Yes, there is. _Ar._ What is it? Pray tell me. _Co._ Why, I can divert myself and Company, as oft as I have a Mind to it, in romancing upon my Adventures over a Pot of Ale, or a good Dinner. _Ar._ Why, truly that is something, as you say. _Co._ And besides, I shall take as much Pleasure myself when I hear others romancing about Things they never heard nor saw; nay, and that they do with that Assurance, that when they are telling the most ridiculous and impossible Things in Nature, they persuade themselves they are speaking Truth all the While. _Ar._ This is a wonderful Pleasure. Well then, you have not lost all your Cost and Labour, as the Saying is. _Co._ Nay, I think this is something better still than what they do, who, for the sake of little Advance-money, list themselves for Soldiers in the Army, which is the Nursery of all Impiety. _Ar._ But it is an ungentleman-like Thing to take Delight in telling Lies. _Co._ But it is a little more like a Gentleman than either to delight others, or be delighted in slandering other Persons, or lavishing away a Man's Time or Substance in Gaming. _Ar._ Indeed I must be of your Mind in that. _Co._ But then there is another Advantage. _Ar._ What is that? _Co._ If there shall be any Friend that I love very well, who shall happen to be tainted with this Phrensy, I will advise him to stay at Home; as your Mariners that have been cast away, advise them that are going to Sea, to steer clear of the Place where they miscarried. _Ar._ I wish you had been my Moniter in Time. _Co._ What Man! Have you been infected with this Disease too? _Ar._ Yes, I have been at _Rome_ and _Compostella_. _Co._ Good God! how I am pleas'd that you have been as great a Fool as I! What _Pallas_ put that into your Head? _Ar._ No _Pallas_, but _Moria_ rather, especially when I left at Home a handsome young Wife, several Children, and a Family, who had nothing in the World to depend upon for a Maintenance but my daily Labour. _Co._ Sure it must be some important Reason that drew you away from all these engaging Relations. Prithee tell me what it was. _Ar._ I am asham'd to tell it. _Co._ You need not be asham'd to tell me, who, you know, have been sick of the same Distemper. _Ar._ There was a Knot of Neighbours of us drinking together, and when the Wine began to work in our Noddles, one said he had a Mind to make a Visit to St. _James_, and another to St. _Peter_; presently there was one or two that promis'd to go with them, till at last it was concluded upon to go all together; and I, that I might not seem a disagreeable Companion, rather than break good Company, promised to go too. The next Question was, whether we should go to _Rome_ or _Compostella_? Upon the Debate it was determin'd that we should all, God willing, set out the next Day for both Places. _Co._ A grave Decree, fitter to be writ in Wine than engrav'd in Brass. _Ar._ Presently a Bumper was put about to our good Journey, which when every Man had taken off in his Turn, the Vote passed into an Act, and became inviolable. _Co._ A new Religion! But did you all come safe back? _Ar._ All but three, one dy'd by the Way, and gave us in Charge to give his humble Service to _Peter_ and _James_; another dy'd at _Rome_, who bad us remember him to his Wife and Children; and the third we left at _Florence_ dangerously ill, and I believe he is in Heaven before now. _Co._ Was he so good a Man then? _Ar._ The veriest Droll in Nature. _Co._ Why do you think he is in Heaven then? _Ar._ Because he had a whole Satchel full of large Indulgencies. _Co._ I understand you, but it is a long Way to Heaven, and a very dangerous one too, as I am told, by reason of the little Thieves that infest the middle Region of the Air. _Ar._ That's true, but he was well fortify'd with Bulls. _Co._ What Language were they written in? _Ar._ In _Latin_. _Co._ And will they secure him? _Ar._ Yes, unless he should happen upon some Spirit that does not understand _Latin_, in that Case he must go back to _Rome_, and get a new Passport. _Co._ Do they sell Bulls there to dead Men too? _Ar._ Yes. _Co._ But by the Way, let me advise you to have a Care what you say, for now there are a great many Spies abroad. _Ar._ I don't speak slightingly of Indulgencies themselves, but I laugh at the Folly of my fuddling Companion, who tho' he was the greatest Trifler that ever was born, yet chose rather to venture the whole Stress of his Salvation upon a Skin of Parchment than upon the Amendment of his Life. But when shall we have that merry Bout you spoke of just now? _Co._ When Opportunity offers we'll set a Time for a small Collation, and invite some of our Comrades, there we will tell Lies, who can lye fastest, and divert one another with Lies till we have our Bellies full. _Ar._ Come on, a Match. _OF BENEFICE-HUNTERS._ The ARGUMENT. _In this Colloquy those Persons are reprehended that run to and again to_ Rome _hunting after Benefices, and that oftentimes with the Hazard of the Corruption of their Morals, and the Loss of their Money. The Clergy are admonished to divert themselves with reading of good Books, rather than with a Concubine. Jocular Discourse concerning a long Nose_. PAMPHAGUS, COCLES. _PAM._ Either my Sight fails me, or this is my old Pot-Companion _Cocles_. _Co._ No, no, your Eyes don't deceive you at all, you see a Companion that is yours heartily. Nobody ever thought to have seen you again, you have been gone so many Years, and no Body knew what was become of you. But whence come you from? Prithee tell me. _Pa._ From the _Antipodes_. _Co._ Nay, but I believe you are come from the fortunate Islands. _Pa._ I am glad you know your old Companion, I was afraid I should come home as _Ulysses_ did. _Co._ Why pray? After what Manner did he come Home? _Pa._ His own Wife did not know him; only his Dog, being grown very old, acknowledg'd his Master, by wagging his Tail. _Co._ How many Years was he from Home? _Pa._ Twenty. _Co._ You have been absent more than twenty Years, and yet I knew your Face again. But who tells that Story of _Ulysses_? _Pa._ _Homer._ _Co._ He? They say he's the Father of all fabulous Stories. It may be his Wife had gotten herself a Gallant in the mean time, and therefore did not know her own _Ulysses_. _Pa._ No, nothing of that, she was one of the chastest Women in the World. But _Pallas_ had made _Ulysses_ look old, that he might not be known. _Co._ How came he to be known at last? _Pa._ By a little Wart that he had upon one of his Toes. His Nurse, who was now a very old Woman, took Notice of that as she was washing his Feet. _Co._ A curious old Hagg. Well then, do you admire that I know you that have so remarkable a Nose. _Pa._ I am not at all sorry for this Nose. _Co._ No, nor have you any Occasion to be sorry for having a Thing that is fit for so many Uses. _Pa._ For what Uses? _Co._ First of all, it will serve instead of an Extinguisher, to put out Candles. _Pa._ Go on. _Co._ Again, if you want to draw any Thing out of a deep Pit, it will serve instead of an Elephant's Trunk. _Pa._ O wonderful. _Co._ If your Hands be employ'd, it will serve instead of a Pin. _Pa._ Is it good for any Thing else? _Co._ If you have no Bellows, it will serve to blow the Fire. _Pa._ This is very pretty; have you any more of it? _Co._ If the Light offends you when you are writing, it will serve for an Umbrella. _Pa._ Ha, ha, ha! Have you any Thing more to say? _Co._ In a Sea-fight it will serve for a Grappling-hook. _Pa._ What will it serve for in a Land-fight? _Co._ Instead of a Shield. _Pa._ And what else? _Co._ It will serve for a Wedge to cleave Wood withal. _Pa._ Well said. _Co._ If you act the Part of a Herald, it will be for a Trumpet; if you sound an Alarm, a Horn; if you dig, a Spade; if you reap, a Sickle; if you go to Sea, an Anchor; in the Kitchen it will serve for a Flesh-hook; and in Fishing a Fish-hook. _Pa._ I am a happy Fellow indeed, I did not know I carry'd about me a Piece of Houshold Stuff that would serve for so many Uses. _Co._ But in the mean Time, in what Corner of the Earth have you hid yourself all this While? _Pa._ In _Rome_. _Co._ But is it possible that in so publick a Place no Body should know you were alive? _Pa._ Good Men are no where in the World so much _incognito_ as there, so that in the brightest Day you shall scarce see one in a throng'd Market. _Co._ Well, but then you're come home loaden with Benefices. _Pa._ Indeed I hunted after them diligently, but I had no Success; for the Way of Fishing there is according to the Proverb, with a golden Hook. _Co._ That's a foolish Way of Fishing. _Pa._ No Matter for that, some Folks find it a very good Way. _Co._ Are they not the greatest Fools in Nature that change Gold for Lead? _Pa._ But don't you know that there are Veins of Gold in holy Lead? _Co._ What then! Are you come back nothing but a _Pamphagus_? _Pa._ No. _Co._ What then, pray? _Pa._ A ravenous Wolf. _Co._ But they make a better Voyage of it, that return laden with Budgets full of Benefices. Why had you rather have a Benefice than a Wife? _Pa._ Because I love to live at Ease. I love to live a pleasant Life. _Co._ But in my Opinion they live the most pleasant Life that have at Home a pretty Girl, that they may embrace as often as they have a Mind to it. _Pa._ And you may add this to it, sometimes when they have no Mind to it. I love a continual Pleasure; he that marries a Wife is happy for a Month, but he that gets a fat Benefice lives merrily all his Life. _Co._ But Solitude is so melancholy a Life, that _Adam_, in _Paradise_ could not have liv'd happily unless God had given him an _Eve_. _Pa._ He'll ne'er need to want an _Eve_ that has gotten a good Benefice. _Co._ But that Pleasure can't really be call'd Pleasure that carries an ill Name and bad Conscience with it. _Pa._ You say true, and therefore I design to divert the Tediousness of Solitude by a Conversation with Books. _Co._ They are the pleasantest Companions in the World. But do you intend to return to your Fishing again? _Pa._ Yes, I would, if I could get a fresh Bait. _Co._ Would you have a golden one or a silver one? _Pa._ Either of them. _Co._ Be of good Cheer, your Father will supply you. _Pa._ He'll part with nothing; and especially he'll not trust me again, when he comes to understand I have spent what I had to no Purpose. _Co._ That's the Chance of the Dice. _Pa._ But he don't like those Dice. _Co._ If he shall absolutely deny you, I'll shew you where you may have as much as you please. _Pa._ You tell me good News indeed, come shew it me, my Heart leaps for Joy. _Co._ It is here hard by. _Pa._ Why, have you gotten a Treasure? _Co._ If I had, I would have it for myself, not for you. _Pa._ If I could but get together 100 Ducats I should be in Hopes again. _Co._ I'll shew you where you may have 100,000. _Pa._ Prithee put me out of my Pain then, and do not teaze me to Death. Tell me where I may have it. _Co._ From the _Asse Budæi_, there you may find a great many Ten Thousands, whether you'd have it Gold or Silver. _Pa._ Go and be hang'd with your Banter, I'll pay you what I owe you out of that Bank. _Co._ Ay, so you shall, but it shall be what I lend you out of it. _Pa._ I know your waggish Tricks well enough. _Co._ I'm not to be compar'd to you for that. _Pa._ Nay, you are the veriest Wag in Nature, you are nothing but Waggery; you make a Jest of a serious Matter. In this Affair it is far easier Matter to teaze me than it is to please me. The Matter is of too great a Consequence to be made a Jest on. If you were in my Case you would not be so gamesome; you make a mere Game of me; you game and banter me. You joke upon me in a Thing that is not a joking Matter. _Co._ I don't jeer you, I speak what I think. Indeed I do not laugh, I speak my Mind. I speak seriously. I speak from my Heart. I speak sincerely. I speak the Truth. _Pa._ So may your Cap stand always upon your Head, as you speak sincerely. But do I stand loitering here, and make no haste Home to see how all Things go there? _Co._ You'll find a great many Things new. _Pa._ I believe I shall; but I wish I may find all Things as I would have them. _Co._ We may all wish so if we will, but never any Body found it so yet. _Pa._ Our Rambles will do us both this Good, that we shall like Home the better for Time to come. _Co._ I can't tell that, for I have seen some that have play'd the same Game over and over again; if once this Infection seizes a Person he seldom gets rid of it. _OF A SOLDIER'S LIFE._ The ARGUMENT. _The wicked Life of Soldiers is here reprehended, and shewn to be very miserable: That War is Confusion, and a Sink of all manner of Vices, in as much as in it there is no Distinction made betwixt Things sacred and profane. The Hope of Plunder allures many to become Soldiers. The Impieties of a Military Life are here laid open, by this Confession of a Soldier, that Youth may be put out of Conceit of going into the Army._ HANNO, THRASYMACHUS. _Hanno._ How comes it about that you that went away a _Mercury_, come back a _Vulcan_? _Thr._ What do you talk to me of your _Mercuries_ and your _Vulcans_ for? _Ha._ Because you seem'd to be ready to fly when you went away, but you're come limping Home. _Thr._ I'm come back like a Soldier then. _Ha._ You a Soldier, that would out-run a Stag if an Enemy were at your Heels. _Thr._ The Hope of Booty made me valiant. _Ha._ Well, have you brought Home a good Deal of Plunder then? _Thr._ Empty Pockets. _Ha._ Then you were the lighter for travelling. _Thr._ But I was heavy loaden with Sin. _Ha._ That's heavy Luggage indeed, if the Prophet says right, who calls Sin Lead. _Thr._ I have seen and had a Hand in more Villanies this Campaign than in the whole Course of my Life before. _Ha._ How do you like a Soldier's Life? _Thr._ There is no Course of Life in the. World more wicked or more wretched. _Ha._ What then must be in the Minds of those People, that for the Sake of a little Money, and some out of Curiosity, make as much Haste to a Battel as to a Banquet? _Thr._ In Truth, I can think no other but they are possess'd; for if the Devil were not in them they would never anticipate their Fate. _Ha._ So one would think, for if you'd put 'em upon any honest Business, they'll scarce stir a Foot in it for any Money. But tell me, how went the Battel? Who got the better on't? _Thr._ There was such a Hallooing, Hurly-burly, Noise of Guns, Trumpets and Drums, Neighing of Horses, and Shouting of Men, that I was so far from knowing what others were a doing, that I scarcely knew where I was myself. _Ha._ How comes it about then that others, after a Fight is over, do paint you out every Circumstance so to the Life, and tell you what such an Officer said, and what t'other did, as tho' they had been nothing but Lookers on all the Time, and had been every where at the same Time? _Thr._ It is my Opinion that they lye confoundedly. I can tell you what was done in my own Tent, but as to what was done in the Battel, I know nothing at all of that. _Ha._ Don't you know how you came to be lame neither? _Thr._ Scarce that upon my Honour, but I suppose my Knee was hurt by a Stone, or a Horse-heel, or so. _Ha._ Well, but I can tell you. _Thr._ You tell me? Why, has any Body told you? _Ha._ No, but I guess. _Thr._ Tell me then. _Ha._ When you were running away in a Fright, you fell down and hit it against a Stone. _Thr._ Let me die if you han't hit the Nail on the Head. _Ha._ Go, get you Home, and tell your Wife of your Exploits. _Thr._ She'll read me a Juniper-Lecture for coming Home in such a Pickle. _Ha._ But what Restitution will you make for what you have stolen? _Thr._ That's made already. _Ha._ To whom? _Thr._ Why, to Whores, Sutlers, and Gamesters. _Ha._ That's like a Soldier for all the World, it's but just that what's got over the Devil's Back should be spent under his Belly. _Ha._ But I hope you have kept your Fingers all this While from Sacrilege? _Thr._ There's nothing sacred in Hostility, there we neither spare private Houses nor Churches. _Ha._ How will you make Satisfaction? _Thr._ They say there is no Satisfaction to be made for what is done in War, for all Things are lawful there. _Ha._ You mean by the Law of Arms, I suppose? _Thr._ You are right. _Ha._ But that Law is the highest Injustice. It was not the Love of your Country, but the Love of Booty that made you a Soldier. _Thr._ I confess so, and I believe very few go into the Army with any better Design. _Ha._ It is indeed some Excuse to be mad with the greater Part of Mankind. _Thr._ I have heard a Parson say in his Pulpit that War was lawful. _Ha._ Pulpits indeed are the Oracles of Truth. But War may be lawful for a Prince, and yet not so for you. _Thr._ I have heard that every Man must live by his Trade. _Ha._ A very honourable Trade indeed to burn Houses, rob Churches, ravish Nuns, plunder the Poor, and murder the Innocent! _Thr._ Butchers are hired to kill Beasts; and why is our Trade found Fault with who are hired to kill Men? _Ha._ But was you never thoughtful what should become of your Soul if you happen'd to be kill'd in the Battel? _Thr._ Not very much; I was very well satisfied in my Mind, having once for all commended myself to St. _Barbara_. _Ha._ And did she take you under her Protection? _Thr._ I fancied so, for methought she gave me a little Nod. _Ha._ What Time was it? In the Morning? _Thr._ No, no, 'twas after Supper. _Ha._ And by that Time I suppose the Trees seem'd to walk too? _Thr._ How this Man guesses every Thing! But St. _Christopher_ was the Saint I most depended on, whose Picture I had always in my Eye. _Ha._ What in your Tent? _Thr._ We had drawn him with Charcoal upon our Sail-cloth. _Thr._ Then to be sure that _Christopher_ the Collier was a sure Card to trust to? But without jesting, I don't see how you can expect to be forgiven all these Villanies, unless you go to _Rome_. _Thr._ Yes, I can, I know a shorter Way than that. _Ha._ What Way is that? _Thr._ I'll go to the _Dominicans_, and there I can do my Business with the Commissaries for a Trifle. _Ha._ What, for Sacrilege? _Thr._ Ay, if I had robb'd Christ himself, and cut off his Head afterwards, they have Pardons would reach it, and Commissions large enough to compound for it. _Ha._ That is well indeed, if God should ratify your Composition. _Thr._ Nay, I am rather afraid the Devil should not ratify it; God is of a forgiving Nature. _Ha._ What Priest will you get you? _Thr._ One that I know has but little Modesty or Honesty. _Ha._ Like to like. And when that's over, you'll go strait away to the Communion, like a good Christian, will you not? _Thr._ Why should I not? For after I have once discharg'd the Jakes of my Sins into his Cowl, and unburden'd myself of my Luggage, let him look to it that absolv'd me. _Ha._ But how can you be sure that he does absolve you? _Thr._ I know that well enough. _Ha._ How do you know it? _Thr._ Because he lays his Hand upon my Head and mutters over something, I don't know what. _Ha._ What if he should give you all your Sins again when he lays his Hand upon your Head, and these should be the Words he mutters to himself? _I absolve thee from all thy good Deeds, of which I find few or none in thee; I restore thee to thy wonted Manners, and leave thee just as I found thee_. _Thr._ Let him look to what he says, it is enough for me that I believe I am absolv'd. _Ha._ But you run a great Hazard by that Belief, for perhaps that will not be Satisfaction to God, to whom thou art indebted. _Thr._ Who a Mischief put you in my Way to disturb my Conscience, which was very quiet before? _Ha._ Nay, I think it is a very happy Encounter to meet a Friend that gives good Advice. _Thr._ I can't tell how good it is, but I am sure it is not very pleasant. _The COMMANDS OF A MASTER._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy treats of the Commands of a Master, and the Business of a Servant, 1. The Master calls up his sleepy Servant, commands him to set the House to rights; the Servant answers again, that he speaks not a Word about Dinner, &c. 2. Of sending him on various Errands. 3. Concerning Riding_. 1. _Of calling up the Sleeper._ RABANUS, SYRUS. _RA._ Soho, soho, Rascal, I am hoarse a bawling to you, and you lye snoring still, you'll sleep for ever I think in my Conscience; either get up presently or I'll rouze you with a good Cudgel. When will you have slept out your Yesterday's Debauch? Are you not asham'd, you sleepy Sot, to lye a-bed till this time of Day? Good Servants rise as soon as it is Day, and take Care to get every Thing in order before their Master rises. How loth this Drone is to leave his warm Nest! he is a whole Hour a scratching, and stretching, and yawning. _Sy._ It is scarce Day yet. _Ra._ I believe not to you; it is Midnight yet to your Eyes. _Sy._ What do you want me to do? _Ra._ Make the Fire burn, brush my Cap and Cloke, clean my Shoes and Galloshoes, take my Stockings and turn them inside out, and brush them well, first within, and then without, burn a little Perfume to sweeten the Air, light a Candle, give me a clean Shirt, air it well before a clear Fire. _Sy._ It shall be done Sir. _Ra._ But make Haste then, all this ought to have been done before now. _Sy._ I do make Haste Sir. _Ra._ I see what Haste you make, you are never the forwarder, you go a Snail's Gallop. _Sy._ Sir, I cannot do two Things at once. _Ra._ You Scoundrel, do you speak Sentences too? Take away the Chamber-Pot, lay the Bed-Clothes to Rights, draw back the Curtains, sweep the House, sweep the Chamber-floor, fetch me some Water to wash my Hands. What are you a sliving about you Drone? You are a Year a lighting a Candle. _Sy._ I can't find a Spark of Fire. _Ra._ Is it so you rak'd it up last Night? _Sy._ I have no Bellows. _Ra._ How the Knave thwarts me, as if he that has you can want Bellows. _Sy._ What an imperious Master have I gotten! Ten of the nimblest Fellows in the World are scarce sufficient to perform his Orders. _Ra._ What's that you say you slow-Back? _Sy._ Nothing at all, Sir. _Ra._ No, Sirrah, did I not hear you mutter? _Sy._ I was saying my Prayers. _Ra._ Ay, I believe so, but it was the Lord's-Prayer backwards then. Pray, what was that you were chattering about Imperiousness? _Sy._ I was wishing you might be an Emperor. _Ra._ And I wish you may be made a Man of a Stump of a Tree. Wait upon me to Church, and then run Home and make the Bed, and put every Thing in its Place; let the House be set to Rights from Top to Bottom, rub the Chamber-Pot, put these foul Things out of Sight, perhaps I may have some Gentry come to pay me a Visit; if I find any Thing out of Order I'll thresh you soundly. _Sy._ I know your good Humour well enough in that Matter. _Ra._ Then it behoves you to look about you, if you are wise. _Sy._ But all this while here is not one Word about Dinner. _Ra._ Out you Villain, one may see what your Mind runs on. I don't dine at Home, therefore come to me a little before Ten a-Clock, that you may wait upon me where I am to go to Dinner. _Sy._ You have taken Care of yourself, but there is not a Bit of Bread for me to put into my Head. _Ra._ If you have nothing to eat, you have something to hunger after. _Sy._ But Fasting won't fill the Belly. _Ra._ There is Bread for you. _Sy._ There is so, but it is as black as my Hat, and as coarse as the Bran itself. _Ra._ You dainty chap'd Fellow, you ought to be fed with Hay, if you had such Commons as you deserve. What, I warrant you, Mr. Ass, you must be fed with Plumb Cakes, must you? If you can't eat dry Bread, take a Leek to eat with it, or an Onion, if you like that better. * * * * * _2. Of sending about various Businesses._ _Ra._ You must go to Market. _Sy._ What, so far? _Ra._ It is not a Stone's Throw off, but it seems two Miles to such an idle Fellow as you; but however, I'll save you as much Labour as I can, you shall dispatch several Businesses in one Errand; count 'em upon your Fingers, that mayn't forget any of 'em: First of all step to the Salesman, and bring my water'd Camblet Doublet if it be done; then go and enquire for _Cornelius_ the Waggoner, he's commonly at the Sign of the _Roe-buck_, he uses that House, ask him if he has any Letters for me, and what Day he sets out on his Journey; then go to the Woollen Draper, and tell him from me, not to be uneasy, that I have not sent him the Money at the Time appointed, for he shall have it in a very little Time. _Sy._ When? To morrow come never? _Ra._ Do you grin you Pimp? Yes, before the first of _March_: And as you come back, turn on the Left-hand, and go to the Bookseller, and enquire of him, if there be any new Books come out of _Germany_, learn what they are, and the Price of them; then desire _Goclenius_, to do me the Honour to come to Supper with me, tell him I must sup by myself if he don't. _Sy._ What do you invite Guests too? You han't Victuals enough in the House to give a Mouse a Meal. _Ra._ And when you have done all these, go to the Market, and buy a Shoulder of Mutton, and get it nicely roasted: Do you hear this? _Sy._ I hear more than I like to hear. _Ra._ But take you Care you remember 'em all. _Sy._ I shall scarce be able to remember half of 'em. _Ra._ What do you stand loytering here, you idle Knave? You might have been back before now. _Sy._ What one Person in the World can do all these? Truly I must wait upon him out, and attend upon him home; I'm his Swabber, his Chamberlain, his Footman, his Clerk, his Butler, his Book-keeper, his Brawl, his Errand-boy, and last of all he does not think I have Business enough upon my Hands, unless I am his Cook too. * * * * * _3. Concerning Riding._ _Ra._ Bring me my Boots, I am to ride out. _Sy._ Here they are, Sir. _Ra._ You have look'd after them bravely, they are all over mouldy with lying by; I believe they han't been clean'd nor greased this twelve Months Day; they are so dry, they chap again; wipe them with a wet Cloth, and liquor them well before the Fire, and chafe them till they grow soft. _Sy._ It shall be done, Sir. _Ra._ Where are my Spurs? _Sy._ Here they are. _Ra._ Ay, here they are indeed, but all eaten up with Rust. Where is my Bridle and Saddle? _Sy._ They are just by. _Ra._ See that nothing is wanting or broken, or ready to break, that nothing may be a Hinderance to us, when we are upon our Journey. Run to the Sadlers, and get him to mend that Rein: When you come back, look upon the Horses Feet, and Shoes, and see if there be any Nails wanting, or loose. How lean and rough these Horses are! How often do you rub 'em down, or kemb them in a Year? _Sy._ I'm sure I do it every Day? _Ra._ That may be seen, I believe they have not had a bit of Victuals for three Days together. _Sy._ Indeed they have, Sir. _Ra._ You say so, but the Horses would tell me another Tale, if they could but speak: Though indeed their Leanness speaks loud enough. _Sy._ Indeed I take all the Care in the World of 'em. _Ra._ How comes it about then, that they don't look as well as you do? _Sy._ Because I don't eat Hay. _Ra._ You have this to do still; make ready my Portmanteau quickly. _Sy._ It shall be done. _The SCHOOL-MASTER'S ADMONITIONS._ The ARGUMENT. _The School-master's Instructions teach a Boy Modesty, Civility, and Manners becoming his Age, in what Posture he ought to stand while he talks to his Superiors; concerning Habit, Discourse, and Behaviour at Table and in School._ _The School-master and Boy._ _Sch._ You seem not to have been bred at Court, but in a Cow-stall; you behave yourself so clownishly. A Gentleman ought to behave himself like a Gentleman. As often or whenever any one that is your Superior speaks to you, stand strait, pull off your Hat, and look neither doggedly, surlily, saucily, malapertly, nor unsettledly, but with a staid, modest, pleasant Air in your Countenance, and a bashful Look fix'd upon the Person who speaks to you; your Feet set close one by t'other; your Hands without Action: Don't stand titter, totter, first standing upon one Foot, and then upon another, nor playing with your Fingers, biting your Lip, scratching your Head, or picking your Ears: Let your Cloaths be put on tight and neat, that your whole Dress, Air, Motion and Habit, may bespeak a modest and bashful Temper. _Bo._ What if I shall try, Sir? _Ma._ Do so. _Bo._ Is this right? _Ma._ Not quite. _Bo._ Must I do so? _Ma._ That's pretty well. _Bo._ Must I stand so? _Ma._ Ay, that's very well, remember that Posture; don't be a Prittle prattle, nor Prate apace, nor be a minding any Thing but what is said to you. If you are to make an Answer, do it in few Words, and to the Purpose, every now and then prefacing with some Title of Respect, and sometimes use a Title of Honour, and now and then make a Bow, especially when you have done speaking: Nor do you go away without asking Leave, or being bid to go: Now come let me see how you can practise this. How long have you been from Home? _Bo._ Almost six Months. _Ma._ You should have said, Sir. _Bo._ Almost six Months, Sir. _Ma._ Don't you long to see your Mother? _Bo._ Yes, sometimes. _Ma._ Have you a Mind to go to see her? _Bo._ Yes, with your Leave, Sir. _Ma._ Now you should have made a Bow; that's very well, remember to do so; when you speak, don't speak fast, stammer, or speak in your Throat, but use yourself to pronounce your Words distinctly and clearly. If you pass by any ancient Person, a Magistrate, a Minister, or Doctor, or any Person of Figure, be sure to pull off your Hat, and make your Reverence: Do the same when you pass by any sacred Place, or the Image of the Cross. When you are at a Feast, behave yourself chearfully, but always so as to remember what becomes your Age: Serve yourself last; and if any nice Bit be offer'd you, refuse it modestly; but if they press it upon you, take it, and thank the Person, and cutting off a Bit of it, offer the rest either to him that gave it you, or to him that sits next to you. If any Body drinks to you merrily, thank him, and drink moderately. If you don't care to drink, however, kiss the Cup. Look pleasantly upon him that speaks to you; and be sure not to speak till you are spoken to. If any Thing that is obscene be said, don't laugh at it, but keep your Countenance, as though you did not understand it; don't reflect on any Body, nor take place of any Body, nor boast of any Thing of your own, nor undervalue any Thing of another Bodies. Be courteous to your Companions that are your Inferiors; traduce no Body; don't be a Blab with your Tongue, and by this Means you'll get a good Character, and gain Friends without Envy. If the Entertainment shall be long, desire to be excus'd, bid much good may it do the Guests, and withdraw from Table: See that you remember these Things. _Bo._ I'll do my Endeavour, Sir. Is there any Thing else you'd have me do? _Ma._ Now go to your Books. _Bo._ Yes, Sir. _Of VARIOUS PLAYS._ The ARGUMENT. _The Boys sending_ Cocles _their Messenger to their Master, get Leave to go to Play; who shews that moderate Recreations are very necessary both for Mind and Body. The Master admonishes them that they keep together at Play, &c. 1. Of playing at Stool-ball: Of chusing Partners. 2. Of playing at Bowls, the Orders of the Bowling-Green. 3. Of playing at striking a Ball through an Iron Ring. 4. Of Dancing, that they should not dance presently after Dinner: Of playing at Leap-frog: Of Running: Of Swimming._ NICHOLAS, JEROME, COCLES, _the_ MASTER. _Nic._ I have had a great Mind a good While, and this fine Weather is a great Invitation to go to Play. _Jer._ These indeed invite you, but the Master don't. _Nic._ We must get some Spokesman that may extort a Holiday from him. _Jer._ You did very well to say extort, for you may sooner wrest _Hercules's_ Club out of his Hands than get a Play-day from him; but Time was when Nobody lov'd Play better than he did. _Nic._ That is true, but he has forgot a great While ago since he was a Boy himself; he is as ready and free at whipping as any Body, but as sparing and backward at this as any Body in the World. _Jer._ We must pick out a Messenger that is not very bashful that won't be presently dashed out of Countenance by his surly Words. _Nic._ Let who will go for me, I had rather go without Play than ask him for it. _Jer._ There is Nobody fitter for this Business than _Cocles._ _Nic._ Nobody in the World, he has a good bold Face of his own, and Tongue enough; and besides, he knows his Humour too. _Jer._ Go, _Cocles_, you will highly oblige us all. _Coc._ Well, I'll try; but if I do not succeed, do not lay the Fault on your Spokesman. _Jer._ You promise well for it, I am out in my Opinion if you don't get Leave. Go on Intreater, and return an Obtainer. _Coc._ I'll go, may _Mercury_ send me good Luck of my Errand. God save you, Sir. _Ma._ What does this idle Pack want? _Coc._ Your Servant, Reverend Master. _Ma._ This is a treacherous Civility! I am well enough already. Tell me what 'tis you came for. _Coc._ Your whole School beg a Play-day. _Ma._ You do nothing else but play, even without Leave. _Coc._ Your Wisdom knows that moderate Play quickens the Wit, as you have taught us out of _Quintilian_. _Ma._ Very well, how well you can remember what's to your purpose? They that labour hard, had need of some Relaxation: But you that study idly, and play laboriously, had more need of a Curb, than a Snaffle. _Coc._ If any Thing has been wanting in Times past, we'll labour to make it up by future Diligence. _Ma._ O rare Makers up! who will be Sureties for the performing this Promise? _Coc._ I'll venture my Head upon it. _Ma._ Nay, rather venture your Tail. I know there is but little Dependance upon your Word; but however, I'll try this Time what Credit may be given to you; if you deceive me now, you shall never obtain any Thing from me again. Let 'em play; but let them keep together in the Field, don't let them go a tippling or worse Exercises, and see they come Home betimes, before Sun set. _Coc._ We will, Sir, I have gotten Leave, but with much a do. _Jer._ O brave Lad! we all love you dearly. _Coc._ But we must be sure not to transgress our Orders, for if we do, it will be all laid upon my Back; I have engaged for ye all, and if ye do, I'll never be your Spokesman again. _Jer._ We'll take Care: But what Play do you like best? _Coc._ We'll talk of that when we come into the Fields. * * * * * I. _Of playing at Ball._ _NICHOLAS_ and _JEROME._ _Nic._ No Play is better to exercise all Parts of the Body than Stool-ball; but that's fitter for Winter than Summer. _Jer._ There is no Time of the Year with us, but what's fit to play in. _Nic._ We shall sweat less, if we play at Tennis. _Jer._ Let's let Nets alone to Fishermen; it's prettier to catch it in our Hands. _Nic._ Well, come on, I don't much Matter; but how much shall we play for? _Nic._ But I had rather spare my Corps than my Money. _Jer._ And I value my Corps more than my Money: We must play for something, or we shall never play our best. _Nic._ You say true. _Jer._ Which Hand soever shall get the first three Games, shall pay the sixth Part of a Groat to the other; but upon Condition that what's won shall be spent among all the Company alike. _Nic._ Well, I like the Proposal; come done, let's chuse Hands; but we are all so equally match'd, that it's no great Matter who and who's together. _Jer._ You play a great Deal better than I. _Nic._ But for all that, you have the better Luck. _Jer._ Has Fortune anything to do at this Play? _Nic._ She has to do everywhere. _Jer._ Well, come let's toss up. O Boys, very well indeed. I have got the Partners I would have. _Nic._ And we like our Partners very well. _Jer._ Come on, now for't, he that will win, must look to his Game. Let every one stand to his Place bravely. Do you stand behind me ready to catch the Ball, if it goes beyond me; do you mind there, and beat it back when it comes from our Adversaries. _Nic._ I'll warrant ye, I'll hit it if it comes near me. _Jer._ Go on and prosper, throw up the Ball upon the House. He that throws and do's not speak first shall lose his Cast. _Nic._ Well, take it then. _Jer._ Do you toss it; if you throw it beyond the Bounds, or short, or over the House, it shall go for nothing, and we won't be cheated: And truly you throw nastily. As you toss it, I'll give it you again; I'll give you _a Rowland for an Oliver_; but it is better to play fairly and honestly. _Nic._ It is best at Diversion, to beat by fair Play. _Jer._ It is so, and in War too; these Arts have each their respective Laws: There are some Arts that are very unfair ones. _Nic._ I believe so too, and more than seven too. Mark the Bounds with a Shell, or Brick-bat, or with your Hat if you will. _Jer._ I'd rather do it with yours. _Nic._ Take the Ball again. _Jer._ Throw it; score it up. _Nic._ We have two good wide Goals. _Jer._ Pretty wide, but they are not out of Reach. _Nic._ They may be reach'd if no Body hinders it. _Jer._ O brave, I have gone beyond the first Goal. We are fifteen. Play stoutly, we had got this too, if you had stood in your Place. Well, now we are equal. _Nic._ But you shan't be so long. Well, we are thirty; we are forty five. _Jer._ What, Sesterces? _Nic._ No. _Jer._ What then? _Nic._ Numbers. _Jer._ What signifies Numbers, if you have nothing to pay? _Nic._ We have gotten this Game. _Jer._ You are a little too hasty; _you reckon your Chickens before they are hatch'd_. I have seen those lose the Game that have had so many for Love. War and Play is a meer Lottery. We have got thirty, now we are equal again. _Nic._ This is the Game Stroke. O brave! we have got the better of you. _Jer._ Well, but you shan't have it long; did I not say so? We are equally fortunate. _Nic._ Fortune inclines first to one side, and then to t'other, as if she could not tell which to give the Victory to. Fortune, be but on our Side, and we'll help thee to a Husband. O rare! She has answer'd her Desire, we have got this Game, set it up, that we mayn't forget. _Jer._ It is almost Night, and we have play'd enough, we had better leave off, too much of one Thing is good for nothing, let us reckon our Winnings. _Nic._ We have won three Groats, and you have won two; then there is one to be spent. But who must pay for the Balls? _Jer._ All alike, every one his Part. For there is so little won, we can't take any Thing from that. * * * * * _2. BOWL PLAYING._ _ADOLPHUS, BERNARDUS_, the Arbitrators. _Adol._ You have been often bragging what a mighty Gamester you were at Bowls. Come now, I have a Mind to try what a one you are. _Ber._ I'll answer you, if you have a Mind to that Sport. Now you'll find according to the Proverb; _You have met with your Match._ _Adol._ Well, and you shall find I am a Match for you too. _Ber._ Shall we play single Hands or double Hands? _Adol._ I had rather play single, that another may not come in with me for a Share of the Victory. _Ber._ And I had rather have it so too, that the Victory may be entirely my own. _Adol._ They shall look on, and be Judges. _Ber._ I take you up; But what shall he that beats get, or he that is beaten lose? _Adol._ What if he that beats shall have a Piece of his Ear cut off. _Ber._ Nay, rather let one of his Stones be cut out. It is a mean Thing to play for Money; you are a _Frenchman_, and I a _German_, we'll both play for the Honour of his Country. _Adol._ If I shall beat you, you shall cry out thrice, let _France_ flourish; If I shall be beat (which I hope I shan't) I'll in the same Words celebrate your _Germany_. _Ber._ Well, a Match. Now for good Luck; since two great Nations are at Stake in this Game, let the Bowls be both alike. _Adol._ Do you see that Stone that lies by the Port there. _Ber._ Yes I do. _Adol._ That shall be the Jack. _Ber._ Very well, let it be so; but I say let the Bowls be alike. _Adol._ They are as like as two Peas. Take which you please, it's all one to me. _Ber._ Bowl away. _Adol._ Hey-day, you whirl your Bowl as if your Arm was a Sling. _Ber._ You have bit your Lip, and whirled your Bowl long enough: Come bowl away. A strong Bowl indeed, but I am best. _Adol._ If it had not been for that mischievous Bit of a Brick-bat there, that lay in my Way, I had beat you off. _Ber._ Stand fair. _Adol._ I won't cheat: I intend to beat you, by Art, and not to cheat ye, since we contend for the Prize of Honour: Rub, rub. _Ber._ A great Cast in Troth. _Adol._ Nay, don't laugh before you've won. We are equal yet. _Ber._ This is who shall: He that first hits the Jack is up. I have beat you, sing. _Adol._ Stay, you should have said how many you'd make up, for my Hand is not come in yet. _Ber._ Judgment, Gentlemen. _Arbitr._ 3. _Adol._ Very well. _Ber._ Well, what do you say now? Are you beat or no? _Adol._ You have had better Luck than I, but yet I won't vail to you, as to Strength and Art; I'll stand to what the Company says. _Arb._ The _German_ has beat, and the Victory is the more glorious, that he has beat so good a Gamester. _Ber._ Now Cock, crow. _Adol._ I am hoarse. _Ber._ That's no new Thing to Cocks; but if you can't crow like an old Cock, crow like a Cockeril. _Adol._ Let _Germany_ flourish thrice. _Ber._ You ought to have said so thrice. I am a-dry; let us drink somewhere, I'll make an end of the Song there. _Adol._ I won't stand upon that, if the Company likes it. _Arb._ That will be the best, the Cock will crow clearer when his Throat is gargled. * * * * * _3. The Play of striking a Ball through an Iron Ring. GASPAR, ERASMUS. Gas._ Come, let's begin, _Marcolphus_ shall come in, in the Losers Place. _Er._ But what shall we play for? _Gas._ He that is beat shall make and repeat _extempore_ a Distich, in Praise of him that beat him. _Er._ With all my Heart. _Gas._ Shall we toss up who shall go first? _Er._ Do you go first if you will, I had rather go last. _Gas._ You have the better of me, because you know the Ground. _Er._ You're upon your own Ground. _Gas._ Indeed I am better acquainted with the Ground, than I am with my Books; but that's but a small Commendation. _Er._ You that are so good a Gamester ought to give me Odds. _Gas._ Nay, you should rather give me Odds; but there's no great Honour in getting a Victory, when Odds is taken: He only can properly be said to get the Game, that gets it by his own Art; we are as well match'd as can be. _Er._ Yours is a better Ball than mine. _Gas._ And yours is beyond me. _Er._ Play fair, without cheating and cozening. _Gas._ You shall say you have had to do with a fair Gamester. _Er._ But I would first know the Orders of the Bowling-alley. _Gas._ We make 4 up; whoever bowls beyond this Line it goes for nothing; if you can go beyond those other Bounds, do it fairly and welcome: Whoever hits a Bowl out of his Place loses his Cast. _Er._ I understand these Things. _Gas._ I have shut you out. _Er._ But I'll give you a Remove. _Gas._ If you do that I'll give you the Game. _Er._ Will you upon your Word? _Gas._ Yes, upon my Word: You have no other Way for it but to bank your Bowl so as to make it rebound on mine. _Er._ I'll try: Well, what say you now Friend? Are not you beaten away? (Have I not struck you away?) _Gas._ I am, I confess it; I wish you were but as wise as you are lucky; you can scarce do so once in a hundred Times. _Er._ I'll lay you, if you will, that I do it once in three Times. But come pay me what I have won. _Gas._ What's that? _Er._ Why, a Distich. _Gas._ Well, I'll pay it now. _Er._ And an extempore one too. Why do you bite your Nails? _Gas._ I have it. _Er._ Recite it out. _Gas._ As loud as you will. _Young Standers-by, dap ye the Conqueror brave, Who me has beat, is the more learned Knave_. Han't you a Distich now? _Er._ I have, and I'll give you as good as you bring. * * * * * 4. _Leaping._ VINCENT, LAURENCE. _Vi._ Have you a Mind to jump with me? _Lau._ That Play is not good presently after Dinner. _Vi._ Why so? _Lau._ Because that a Fulness of Belly makes the Body heavy. _Vi._ Not very much to those that live upon Scholars Commons, for these oftentimes are ready for a Supper before they have done Dinner. _Lau._ What Sort of leaping is it that you like best? _Vi._ Let us first begin with that which is the plainest, as that of Grasshoppers; or Leap-frog, if you like that better, both Feet at once, and close to one another; and when we have play'd enough at this, then we'll try other Sorts. _Lau._ I'll play at any Sort, where there is no Danger of breaking ones Legs; I have no Mind to make Work for the Surgeon. _Vi._ What if we should play at hopping? _Lau._ That the Ghosts play, I am not for that. _Vi._ It's the cleverest Way to leap with a Pole. _Lau._ Running is a more noble Exercise; for _Æneas_ in _Virgil_ proposed this Exercise. _Vi._ Very true, and he also propos'd the righting with Whirly-bats too, and I don't like that Sport. _Lau._ Mark the Course, let this be the Starting-place, and yonder Oak the Goal. _Vi._ I wish _Æneas_ was here, that he might propose what should be the Conqueror's Prize. _Lau._ Glory is a Reward sufficient for Victory. _Vi._ You should rather give a Reward to him that is beat, to comfort him. _Lau._ Then let the Victor's Reward be to go into the Town crowned with a Bur. _Vi._ Well, 'tis done, provided you'll go before playing upon a Pipe. _Lau._ It is very hot. _Vi._ That is not strange when it is Midsummer. _Lau._ Swimming is better. _Vi._ I don't love to live like a Frog, I am a Land Animal, not an amphibious one. _Lau._ But in old Time this was look'd upon to be one of the most noble Exercises. _Vi._ Nay, and a very useful one too. _Lau._ For What? _Vi._ If Men are forc'd to fly in Battel, they are in the best Condition that can run and swim best. _Lau._ The Art you speak of is not to be set light by; it is as Praise-worthy sometimes to run away nimbly as it is to fight stoutly. _Vi._ I can't swim at all, and it is dangerous to converse with an unaccustomed Element. _Lau._ You ought to learn then, for no Body was born an Artist. _Vi._ But I have heard of a great many of these Artists that have swum in, but never swam out again. _Lau._ First try with Corks. _Vi._ I can't trust more to a Cork than to my Feet; if you have a Mind to swim, I had rather be a Spectator than an Actor. _The CHILD'S PIETY._ The ARGUMENT. _This Discourse furnishes a childish Mind with pious Instructions of Religion, in what it consists. What is to be done in the Morning in Bed, at getting up, at Home, at School, before Meat, after Meat, before going to Sleep. Of beginning the Day, of praying, of behaving themselves studiously at School, Thriftiness of Time: Age flies. What is to be done after Supper. How we ought to sleep. Of Behaviour at holy Worship. All Things to be applied to ourselves. The Meditation of a pious Soul at Church. What Preachers are chiefly to be heard. Fasting is prejudicial to Children. Confession is to be made to Christ. The Society of wicked Persons is to be avoided. Of the prudent chusing a Way of Living. Holy Orders and Matrimony are not to be entred into before the Age of Twenty-two. What Poets are fit to be read, and how._ ERASMUS, GASPAR. _ERASMUS._ Whence came you from? Out of some Alehouse? _Ga._ No, indeed. _Er._ What from a Bowling Green? _Ga._ No, nor from thence neither. _Er._ What from the Tavern then? _Ga._ No. _Er._ Well, since I can't guess, tell me. _Ga._ From St. _Mary's_ Church. _Er._ What Business had you there? _Ga._ I saluted some Persons. _Er._ Who? _Ga._ Christ, and some of the Saints. _Er._ You have more Religion than is common to one of your Age. _Ga._ Religion is becoming to every Age. _Er._ If I had a Mind to be religious, I'd become a Monk. _Ga._ And so would I too, if a Monk's Hood carried in it as much Piety as it does Warmth. _Er._ There is an old Saying, a young Saint and an old Devil. _Ga._ But I believe that old Saying came from old Satan: I can hardly think an old Man to be truly religious, that has not been so in his young Days. Nothing is learn'd to greater Advantage, than what we learn in our youngest Years. _Er._ What is that which is call'd Religion? _Ga._ It is the pure Worship of God, and Observation of his Commandments. _Er._ What are they? _Ga._ It is too long to relate all; but I'll tell you in short, it consists in four Things. _Er._ What are they? _Ga._ In the first Place, that we have a true and pious Apprehension of God himself, and the Holy Scriptures; and that we not only stand in Awe of him as a Lord, but that we love him with all our Heart, as a most beneficent Father. 2. That we take the greatest Care to keep ourselves blameless; that is, that we do no Injury to any one. 3. That we exercise Charity, _i.e._ to deserve well of all Persons (as much as in us lyes). 4. That we practise Patience, _i.e._ to bear patiently Injuries that are offered us, when we can't prevent them, not revenging them, nor requiting Evil for Evil. _Er._ You hold forth finely; but do you practise what you teach? _Ga._ I endeavour it manfully. _Er._ How can you do it like a Man, when you are but a Boy? _Ga._ I meditate according to my Ability, and call myself to an Account every Day; and correct myself for what I have done amiss: That was unhandsomely done this saucily said, this was uncautiously acted; in that it were better to have held my Peace, that was neglected. _Er._ When do you come to this Reckoning? _Ga._ Most commonly at Night; or at any Time that I am most at Leisure. _Er._ But tell me, in what Studies do you spend the Day? _Ga._ I will hide nothing from so intimate a Companion: In the Morning, as soon as I am awake, (and that is commonly about six a Clock, or sometimes at five) I sign myself with my Finger in the Forehead and Breast with the Sign of the Cross. _Er._ What then? _Ga._ I begin the Day in the Name of the Father, Son, and holy Spirit. _Er._ Indeed that is very piously done. _Ga._ By and by I put up a short Ejaculation to Christ. _Er._ What dost thou say to him? _Ga._ I give him Thanks that he has been pleased to bless me that Night; and I pray him that he would in like Manner prosper me the whole of that Day, so as may be for his Glory, and my Soul's Good; and that he who is the true Light that never sets, the eternal Sun, that enlivens, nourishes and exhilarates all Things, would vouchsafe to enlighten my Soul, that I mayn't fall into Sin; but by his Guidance, may attain everlasting Life. _Er._ A very good Beginning of the Day indeed. _Ga._ And then having bid my Parents good Morrow, to whom next to God, I owe the greatest Reverence, when it is Time I go to School; but so that I may pass by some Church, if I can conveniently. _Er._ What do you do there? _Ga._ I salute Jesus again in three Words, and all the Saints, either Men or Women; but the Virgin _Mary_ by Name, and especially that I account most peculiarly my own. _Er._ Indeed you seem to have read that Sentence of _Cato, Saluta libenter_, to good Purpose; was it not enough to have saluted Christ in the Morning, without saluting him again presently? Are you not afraid lest you should be troublesome by your over Officiousness? _Ga._ Christ loves to be often called upon. _Er._ But it seems to be ridiculous to speak to one you don't see. _Ga._ No more do I see that Part of me that speaks to him. _Er._ What Part is that? _Ga._ My Mind. _Er._ But it seems to be Labour lost, to salute one that does not salute you again. _Ga._ He frequently salutes again by his secret Inspiration; and he answers sufficiently that gives what is ask'd of him. _Er._ What is it you ask of him? For I perceive your Salutations are petitionary, like those of Beggars. _Ga._ Indeed you are very right; for I pray that he, who, when he was a Boy of about twelve Years of Age, sitting in the Temple, taught the Doctors themselves, and to whom the heavenly Father, by a Voice from Heaven, gave Authority to teach Mankind, saying, _This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him_; and who is the eternal Wisdom of the most high Father, would vouchsafe to enlighten my Understanding, to receive wholesome Learning, that I may use it to his Glory. _Er._ Who are those Saints that you call peculiarly yours? _Ga._ Of the Apostles, St. _Paul_; of the Martyrs, St. _Cyprian_; of the Doctors, St. _Jerome_; of the Virgins, St. _Agnes_. _Er._ How came these to be yours, more than the rest. Was it by Choice or by Chance? _Ga._ They fell to me by Lot. _Er._ But you only salute them I suppose; do you beg any Thing of them? _Ga._ I pray, that by their Suffrages they would recommend me to Christ, and procure that by his Assistance it may in Time come to pass that I be made one of their Company. _Er._ Indeed what you ask for is no ordinary Thing: But what do you do then? _Ga._ I go to School, and do what is to be done there with my utmost Endeavour; I so implore Christ's Assistance, as if my Study without it would signify nothing; and I study as if he offered no Help but to him that labours industriously; and I do my utmost not to deserve to be beaten, nor to offend my Master either in Word or Deed, nor any of my Companions. _Er._ You are a good Boy to mind these Things. _Ga._ When School is done I make haste Home, and if I can I take a Church in my Way, and in three Words, I salute Jesus again; and I pay my Respects to my Parents; and if I have any Time, I repeat, either by myself, or with one of my School-fellows, what was dictated in School. _Er._ Indeed you are a very good Husband of Time. _Ga._ No wonder I am of that, which is the most precious Thing in the World, and when past is irrecoverable. _Er._ And _Hesiod_ teaches, that good Husbandry ought to be in the Middle, it is too soon in the Beginning, and too late in the End. _Ga._ _Hesiod_ spoke right enough concerning Wine, but of Time no good Husbandry is unseasonable. If you let a Hogshead of Wine alone it won't empty itself; but Time is always a flying, sleeping or waking. _Er._ I confess so, but what do you do after that? _Ga._ When my Parents sit down to Dinner I say Grace, and then wait at Table till I am bid to take my own Dinner; and having returned Thanks, if I have any Time left I divert myself with my Companions with some lawful Recreation till the Time comes to go to School again. _Er._ Do you salute Jesus again? _Ga._ Yes, if I have an Opportunity; but if it so happen that I have not an Opportunity, or it be not seasonable, as I pass by the Church I salute him mentally; and then I do what is to be done at School with all my Might; and when I go Home again I do what I did before Dinner: After Supper I divert myself with some pleasant Stories; and afterwards bidding my Parents and the Family good Night, I go to Bed betimes, and there kneeling down by the Bedside, as I have said, I say over those Things I have been learning that Day at School; if I have committed any great Fault, I implore Christ's Clemency, that he would pardon me, and I promise Amendment: and if I have committed no Fault, I thank him for his Goodness in preserving me from all Vice, and then I recommend myself to him with all my Soul, that he would preserve me from the Attempts of my evil Genius and filthy Dreams. When this is done, and I am got into Bed, I cross my Forehead and Breast, and compose myself to Rest. _Er._ In what Posture do you compose yourself? _Ga._ I don't lye upon my Face or my Back, but first leaning upon my Right-Side, I fold my Arms a-cross, so that they may defend my Breast, as it were with the Figure of a Cross, with my Right-hand upon my Left Shoulder, and my Left upon my Right, and so I sleep sweetly, either till I awake of myself, or am called up. _Er._ You are a little Saint that can do thus. _Ga._ You are a little Fool for saying so. _Er._ I praise your Method, and I would I could practise it. _Ga._ Give your Mind to it and you will do it, for when once you have accustom'd yourself to it for a few Months, these Things will be pleasant, and become natural. _Er._ But I want to hear concerning divine Service. _Ga._ I don't neglect that, especially upon holy Days. _Er._ How do you manage yourself on holy Days? _Ga._ In the first place I examine myself if my Mind be Polluted by any Stain of Sin. _Er._ And if you find it is, what do you do then? Do you refrain from the Altar? _Ga._ Not by my bodily Presence, but I withdraw myself, as to my Mind, and standing as it were afar off, as tho' not daring to lift up my Eyes to God the Father, whom I have offended, I strike upon my Breast, crying out with the Publican in the Gospel, _Lord, be merciful to me a Sinner_. And then if I know I have offended any Man, I take Care to make him Satisfaction if I can presently; but if I cannot do that, I resolve in my Mind to reconcile my Neighbour as soon as possible. If any Body has offended me, I forbear Revenge, and endeavour to bring it about, that he that has offended me may be made sensible of his Fault, and be sorry for it; but if there be no Hope of that, I leave all Vengeance to God. _Er._ That's a hard Task. _Ga._ Is it hard to forgive a small Offence to your Brother, whose mutual Forgiveness thou wilt stand in frequent need of, when Christ has at once forgiven us all our Offences, and is every Day forgiving us? Nay, this seems to me not to be Liberality to our Neighbour, but putting to Interest to God; just as tho' one Fellow-Servant should agree with another to forgive him three Groats, that his Lord might forgive him ten Talents. _Er._ You indeed argue very rationally, if what you say be true. _Ga._ Can you desire any Thing truer than the Gospel? _Er._ That is unreasonable; but there are some who can't believe themselves to be Christians unless they hear Mass (as they call it) every Day. _Ga._ Indeed I don't condemn the Practise in those that have Time enough, and spend whole Days in profane Exercises; but I only disapprove of those who superstitiously fancy that that Day must needs be unfortunate to them that they have not begun with the Mass; and presently after divine Service is over they go either to Trading, Gaming, or the Court, where whatsoever succeeds, though done justly or unjustly, they attribute to the Mass. _Er._ Are there any Persons that are so absurd? _Ga._ The greatest part of Mankind. _Er._ But return to divine Service. _Ga._ If I can, I get to stand so close by the Holy Altar, that I can hear what the Priest reads, especially the Epistle and the Gospel; from these I endeavour to pick something, which I fix in my Mind, and this I ruminate upon for some Time. _Er._ Don't you pray at all in the mean Time? _Ga._ I do pray, but rather mentally than vocally. From the Things the Priest reads I take occasion of Prayer. _Er._ Explain that a little more, I don't well take in what you mean. _Ga._ I'll tell you; suppose this Epistle was read, _Purge out the old Leaven, that ye may be a new Lump, as ye are unleavened_. On occasion of these Words I thus address myself to Christ, "I wish I were the unleavened Bread, pure from all Leaven of Malice; but do thou, O Lord Jesus, who alone art pure, and free from all Malice, grant that I may every Day more and more purge out the old Leaven." Again, if the Gospel chance to be read concerning the Sower sowing his Seed, I thus pray with my self, "Happy is he that deserves to be that good Ground, and I pray that of barren Ground, he of his great Goodness would make me good Ground, without whose Blessing nothing at all is good." These for Example Sake, for it would be tedious to mention every Thing. But if I happen to meet with a dumb Priest, (such as there are many in _Germany_) or that I can't get near the Altar, I commonly get a little Book that has the Gospel of that Day and Epistle, and this I either say out aloud, or run it over with my Eye. _Er._ I understand; but with what Contemplations chiefly dost thou pass away the Time? _Ga._ I give Thanks to Jesus Christ for his unspeakable Love, in condescending to redeem Mankind by his Death; I pray that he would not suffer his most holy Blood to be shed in vain for me, but that with his Body he would always feed my Soul, and that with his Blood he would quicken my Spirit, that growing by little and little in the Increase of Graces, I may be made a fit Member of his mystical Body, which is the Church; nor may ever fall from that holy Covenant that he made with his elect Disciples at the last Supper, when he distributed the Bread, and gave the Cup; and through these, with all who are engraffed into his Society by Baptism. And if I find my Thoughts to wander, I read some Psalms, or some pious Matter, that may keep my Mind from wandring. _Er._ Have you any particular Psalms for this Purpose? _Ga._ I have; but I have not so tyed myself up to them, but that I can omit them, if any Meditation comes into my Mind that is more refreshing, than the Recitation of those Psalms. _Er._ What do you do as to Fasting? _Ga._ I have nothing to do with Fasting, for so _Jerome_ has taught me; that Health is not to be impair'd by fasting, until the Body is arrived at its full Strength. I am not quite 17 Years old; but yet if I find Occasion, I dine and sup sparingly, that I may be more lively for Spiritual Exercises on holy Days. _Er._ Since I have begun, I will go through with my Enquiries. How do you find yourself affected towards Sermons? _Ga._ Very well, I go to them as devoutly as if I was a going to a holy Assembly; and yet I pick and chuse whom to hear, for there are some, one had better not hear than hear; and if such an one happens to preach, or if it happen that no Body preaches, I pass this Time in reading the Scriptures, I read the Gospel or Epistle with _Chrysostom's_ or _Jerome's_ Interpretation, or any other pious and learned Interpreter that I meet with. _Er._ But Word of Mouth is more affecting. _Ga._ I confess it is. I had rather hear if I can but meet with a tolerable Preacher; but I don't seem to be wholly destitute of a Sermon if I hear _Chrysostom_ or _Jerome_ speaking by their Writings. _Er._ I am of your Mind; but how do you stand affected as to Confession? _Ga._ Very well; for I confess daily. _Er._ Every Day? _Ga._ Yes. _Er._ Then you ought to keep a Priest to yourself. _Ga._ But I confess to him who only truly remits Sins, to whom all the Power is given. _Er._ To whom? _Ga._ To Christ. _Er._ And do you think that's sufficient? _Ga._ It would be enough for me, if it were enough for the Rulers of the Church, and receiv'd Custom. _Er._ Who do you call the Rulers of the Church? _Ga._ The Popes, Bishops and Apostles. _Er._ And do you put Christ into this Number? _Ga._ He is without Controversy the chief Head of e'm all. _Er._ And was he the Author of this Confession in use? _Ga._ He is indeed the Author of all good; but whether he appointed Confession as it is now us'd in the Church, I leave to be disputed by Divines. The Authority of my Betters is enough for me that am but a Lad and a private Person. This is certainly the principal Confession; nor is it an easy Matter to confess to Christ; no Body confesses to him, but he that is angry with his Sin. If I have committed any great Offence, I lay it open, and bewail it to him, and implore his Mercy; I cry out, weep and lament, nor do I give over before I feel the Love of Sin throughly purged from the Bottom of my Heart, and some Tranquility and Chearfulness of Mind follow upon it, which is an Argument of the Sin being pardoned. And when the Time requires to go to the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ; then I make Confession to a Priest too, but in few Words, and nothing but what I am well satisfy'd are Faults, or such that carry in them a very great Suspicion that they are such; neither do I always take it to be a capital or enormous Crime, every Thing that is done contrary to human Constitutions, unless a wicked Contemptuousness shall go along with it: Nay, I scarce believe any Crime to be Capital, that has not Malice join'd with it, that is, a perverse Will. _Er._ I commend you, that you are so religious, and yet not superstitious: Here I think the old Proverb takes place: _Nec omnia, nec passim, nec quibuslibet_, That a Person should neither speak all, nor every where, nor to all Persons. _Ga._ I chuse me a Priest, that I can trust with the Secrets of my Heart. _Er._ That's wisely done: For there are a great many, as is found by Experience, do blab out what in Confessions is discovered to them. And there are some vile impudent Fellows that enquire of the Person confessing, those Things, that it were better if they were conceal'd; and there are some unlearned and foolish Fellows, who for the Sake of filthy Gain, lend their Ear, but apply not their Mind, who can't distinguish between a Fault and a good Deed, nor can neither teach, comfort nor advise. These Things I have heard from many, and in Part have experienced my self. _Ga._ And I too much; therefore I chuse me one that is learn'd, grave, of approv'd Integrity, and one that keeps his Tongue within his Teeth. _Er._ Truly you are happy that can make a Judgment of Things so early. _Ga._ But above all, I take Care of doing any Thing that I can't safely trust a Priest with. _Er._ That's the best Thing in the World, if you can but do so. _Ga._ Indeed it is hard to us of ourselves, but by the Help of Christ it is easy; the greatest Matter is, that there be a Will to it. I often renew my Resolution, especially upon Sundays: And besides that, I endeavour as much as I can to keep out of evil Company, and associate myself with good Company, by whose Conversation I may be better'd. _Er._ Indeed you manage yourself rightly: For _evil Conversations corrupt good Manners_. _Ga._ I shun Idleness as the Plague. _Er._ You are very right, for Idleness is the Root of all Evil; but as the World goes now, he must live by himself that would keep out of bad Company. _Ga._ What you say is very true, for as the _Greek_ wise Men said the bad are the greatest Number. But I chuse the best out of a few, and sometimes a good Companion makes his Companion better. I avoid those Diversions that incite to Naughtiness, and use those that are innocent. I behave myself courteous to all; but familiarly with none but those that are good. If I happen at any Time to fall into bad Company, I either correct them by a soft Admonition, or wink at and bear with them, if I can do them no good; but I be sure to get out of their Company as soon as I can. _Er._ Had you never an itching Mind to become a Monk? _Ga._ Never; but I have been often solicited to it by some, that call you into a Monastery, as into a Port from a Shipwreck. _Er._ Say you so? Were they in Hopes of a Prey? _Ga._ They set upon both me and my Parents with a great many crafty Persuasions; but I have taken a Resolution not to give my Mind either to Matrimony or Priesthood, nor to be a Monk, nor to any Kind of Life out of which I can't extricate myself, before I know myself very well. _Er._ When will that be? _Ga._ Perhaps never. But before the 28th Year of ones Age, nothing should be resolved on. _Er._ Why so? _Ga._ Because I hear every where, so many Priests, Monks and married Men lamenting that they hurried themselves rashly into Servitude. _Er._ You are very cautious not to be catch'd. _Ga._ In the mean Time I take a special Care of three Things. _Er._ What are they? _Ga._ First of all to make a good Progress in Morality, and if I can't do that, I am resolv'd to maintain an unspotted Innocence and good Name; and last of all I furnish myself with Languages and Sciences that will be of Use in any Kind of Life. _Er._ But do you neglect the Poets? _Ga._ Not wholly, but I read generally the chastest of them, and if I meet with any Thing that is not modest, I pass that by, as _Ulysses_ passed by the _Sirens_, stopping his Ears. _Er._ To what Kind of Study do you chiefly addict your self? To Physic, the Common or Civil Law, or to Divinity? For Languages, the Sciences and Philosophy are all conducive to any Profession whatsoever. _Ga._ I have not yet thoroughly betaken myself to any one particularly, but I take a Taste of all, that I be not wholly ignorant of any; and the rather, that having tasted of all I may the better chuse that I am fittest for. Medicine is a certain Portion in whatsoever Land a Man is; the Law is the Way to Preferment: But I like Divinity the best, saving that the Manners of some of the Professors of it, and the bitter Contentions that are among them, displease me. _Er._ He won't be very apt to fall that goes so warily along. Many in these Days are frighted from Divinity, because they are afraid they should not be found in the Catholick Faith, because they see no Principle of Religion, but what is called in Question. _Ga._ I believe firmly what I read in the holy Scriptures, and the Creed, called the Apostles, and I don't trouble my Head any farther: I leave the rest to be disputed and defined by the Clergy, if they please; and if any Thing is in common Use with Christians that is not repugnant to the holy Scriptures, I observe it for this Reason, that I may not offend other People. _Er._ What _Thales_ taught you that Philosophy? _Ga._ When I was a Boy and very young, I happen'd to live in the House with that honestest of Men, _John Colet_, do you know him? _Er._ Know him, ay, as well as I do you. _Ga._ He instructed me when I was young in these Precepts. _Er._ You won't envy me, I hope, if I endeavour to imitate you? _Ga._ Nay, by that Means you will be much dearer to me. For you know, Familiarity and good Will, are closer ty'd by Similitude of Manners. _Er._ True, but not among Candidates for the same Office, when they are both sick of the same Disease. _Ga._ No, nor between two Sweet-hearts of the same Mistress, when they are both sick of the same Love. _Er._ But without jesting, I'll try to imitate that Course of Life. _Ga._ I wish you as good Success as may be. _Er._ It may be I shall overtake thee. _Ga._ I wish you might get before me; but in the mean Time I won't stay for you; but I will every Day endeavour to out-go myself, and do you endeavour to out-go me if you can. _The ART OF HUNTING._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy presents you with the Art of Hunting; Fishing, of bringing Earth-Worms out of the Ground, of sticking Frogs._ PAUL, THOMAS, VINCENT, LAWRENCE, BARTHOLUS. _Pa. Every one to his Mind._ I love Hunting. _Th._ And so do I too, but where are the Dogs? The hunting Poles? And the hunting Nets? _Pa._ Farewell Boars, Bears, Bucks, and Foxes, we'll lay Snares for Rabbets. _Vi._ But I'll set Gins for Locusts and Crickets. _La._ But I'll catch Frogs. _Ba._ I'll hunt Butterflies. _La._ 'Tis difficult to follow flying Creatures. _Ba._ It is difficult, but 'tis fine Sport; unless you think it finer Sport to hunt after Earth-Worms, Snails or Cockles, because they have no Wings. _La._ Indeed I had rather go a Fishing; I have a neat Hook. _Ba._ But where will you get Baits? _La._ There are Earth-Worms enough every where to be had. _Ba._ So there is, if they would but creep out of the Ground to you. _La._ But I'll make a great many thousand jump out presently. _Ba._ How? By Witch-Craft? _La._ You shall see the Art. Fill this Bucket with Water, break these green Peels of Walnuts to Pieces and put into it: Wet the Ground with the Water. Now mind a little, do you see them coming out? _Ba._ I see a Miracle. I believe the armed Men started out of the Earth after this Manner from the Serpents Teeth that were sown: But a great many Fish are of too fine and delicate a Palate to be catch'd by such a vulgar Bait. _La._ I know a certain Sort of an Insect that I us'd to catch such with. _Ba._ See if you can impose upon the Fishes so, I'll make work with the Frogs. _La._ How, with a Net? _Ba._ No, with a Bow. _La._ That's a new Way of Fishing! _Ba._ But 'tis a pleasant one; you'll say so, when you see it. _Vi._ What if we two should play at holding up our Fingers? _Ba._ That's an idle, clownish Play indeed, fitter for them that are sitting in a Chimney Corner, than those that are ranging in the Field. _Vi._ What if we should play at Cob-Nut? _Pa._ Let us let Nuts alone for little Chits, we are great Boys. _Vi._ And yet we are but Boys for all that. _Pa._ But they that are fit to play at Cob-Nut, are fit to ride upon a Hobby-Horse. _Vi._ Well then, do you say what we shall play at; and I'll play at what you will. _Pa._ And I'll be conformable. _SCHOLASTIC STUDIES._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy treats of scholastic Studies, and School Plays, I. The Boys going into the School. The striking of a Clock. A whipping Master. Of saying a Lesson. Fear hurts the Memory. 2. Of Writing, the Paper sinks. Of making a Pen. Of a hard Nip. A soft Nip. Of writing quick, well._ SYLVIUS, JOHN. _Sy._ What makes you run so, _John?_ _Jo._ What makes a Hare run before the Dogs, as they use to say? _Sy._ What Proverb is this? _Jo._ Because unless I am there in Time, before the Bill is called over, I am sure to be whipp'd. _Sy._ You need not be afraid of that, it is but a little past five: Look upon the Clock, the Hand is not come to the half Hour Point yet. _Jo._ Ay, but I can scarce trust to Clocks, they go wrong sometimes. _Sy._ But trust me then, I heard the Clock strike. _Jo._ What did that strike? _Sy._ Five. _Jo._ But there is something else that I am more afraid of than that, I must say by Heart a good long Lesson for Yesterday, and I am afraid I can't say it. _Sy._ I am in the same Case with you; for I myself have hardly got mine as it should be. _Jo._ And you know the Master's Severity. Every Fault is a Capital one with him: He has no more Mercy of our Breeches, than if they were made of a Bull's Hide. _Sy._ But he won't be in the School. _Jo._ Who has he appointed in his Place? _Sy. Cornelius._ _Jo._ That squint-ey'd Fellow! Wo to our Back-Sides, he's a greater Whip-Master than _Busby_ himself. _Sy._ You say very true, and for that Reason I have often wish'd he had a Palsy in his Arm. _Jo._ It is not pious to wish ill to ones Master: it is our Business rather to take Care not to fall under the Tyrant's Hands. _Sy._ Let us say one to another, one repeating and the other looking in the Book. _Jo._ That's well thought on. _Sy._ Come, be of good Heart; for Fear spoils the Memory. _Jo._ I could easily lay aside Fear, if I were out of Danger; but who can be at Ease in his Mind, that is in so much Danger. _Sy._ I confess so; but we are not in Danger of our Heads, but of our Tails. * * * * * 2. _Of Writing._ CORNELIUS, ANDREW. _Co._ You write finely, but your Paper sinks. Your Paper is damp, and the Ink sinks through it. _An._ Pray make me a Pen of this. _Co._ I have not a Pen-knife. _An._ Here is one for you. _Co._ Out on't, how blunt it is! _An._ Take the Hoan. _Co._ Do you love to write with a hard-nip'd Pen, or a soft? _An._ Make it fit for your own Hand. _Co._ I use to write with a soft Nip. _An._ Pray write me out the Alphabet. _Co._ Greek or Latin? _An._ Write me the Latin first; I'll try to imitate it. _Co._ Give me some Paper then. _An._ Take some. _Co._ But my Ink is too thin, by often pouring in of Water. _An._ But my Cotton is quite dry. _Co._ Squeeze it, or else piss in it. _An._ I had rather get some Body to give me some. _Co._ It is better to have of one's own, than to borrow. _An._ What's a Scholar without Pen and Ink? _Co._ The same that a Soldier is without Shield or Sword. _An._ I wish my Fingers were so nimble, I can't write as fast as another speaks. _Co._ Let it be your first chief Care to write well, and your next to write quick: No more Haste than good Speed. _An._ Very well; say to the Master when he dictates, no more Haste than good Speed. * * * * * _A Form of giving Thanks. PETER, CHRISTIAN._ _Pe._ You have oblig'd me, in that you have written to me sometimes. I thank you for writing to me often. I love you, that you have not thought much to send me now and then a Letter. I give you Thanks that you have visited me with frequent Letters. I thank you for loading of me with Packets of Letters. I thank you heartily that you have now and then provoked me with Letters. You have oblig'd me very much that you have honour'd me with your Letters. I am much beholden to you for your most obliging Letters to me. I take it as a great Favour, that you have not thought much to write to me. _The Answer._ _Ch._ Indeed I ought to beg Pardon for my Presumption, who dar'd presume to trouble a Man of so much Business, and so much Learning with my unlearned Letters. I acknowledge your usual Humanity, who have taken my Boldness in good Part. I was afraid my Letters had given you some Offence, that you sent me no Answer. There is no Reason that you should thank me, it is more than enough for me, if you have taken my Industry in good Part. * * * * * _A Form of asking after News._ _Pe._ Is there no News come from our Country? Have you had any News from our Countrymen? What News? Do you bring any News? Is there any News come to Town? Is there any News abroad from our Country? _The Answer._ _Ch._ There is much News; but nothing of Truth. News enough indeed; but nothing certain. A great deal of News; but nothing to be depended upon. Not a little News; but not much Truth. There is no News come. I have had no News at all. Something of News; but nothing certain. There are a great many Reports come to Town; but they are all doubtful. There is a great deal of Talk; but nothing true, nothing certain. If Lies please, I have brought you a whole Cart-Load of them. I bring you whole Bushels of Tales. I bring you as many Lies as a good Ship will carry. _Pe._ Then unlade yourself as fast as you can, for fear you should sink, being so over-freighted. _Ch._ I have nothing but what's the Chat of Barbers Shops, Coaches and Boats. _Han't you received any Letters. The Form_. _Pe._ Have you had no Letters? Have you had any Letters out of your own Country? Have no Letters been brought to you? Have you receiv'd any Letters? Have you had any Letters? Have you receiv'd any Letters from your Friends? Are there no Letters come from _France_? _The Answer._ _Ch._ I have received no Letters. I han't had so much as a Letter. I han't had the least Bit of a Letter. No Body has sent me any Letter. There is not the least Word come from any Body. I have received no more Letters for this long Time, than what you see in my Eye. Indeed I had rather have Money than Letters. I had rather receive Money than Letters. I don't matter Letters, so the Money does but come. I had rather be paid, than be written to. * * * * * _I believe so. The Form._ _Pe._ I easily believe you. That is not hard to be believ'd. It is a very easy Thing to believe that. Who would not believe you in that? He will be very incredulous, that won't believe you in that Matter. In Truth I do believe you. You will easily make me believe that. I can believe you without swearing. What you say is very likely. But for all that, Letters bring some Comfort. I had rather have either of them, than neither. * * * * * _Of Profit. A Form._ _Ch._ What signifies Letters without Money? What signifies empty Letters? What do empty Letters avail? What good do they do, what do they profit, advantage? To whom are Letters grateful or acceptable without Money? What Advantage do empty Letters bring? What are idle Letters good for? What do they do? What use are they of? What are they good for? What do they bring with them of Moment? What Use are empty Letters of? _The Answer._ _Pe._ They are useful, fit, proper, to wipe your Breech with. They are good to wipe your Backside with. If you don't know the Use of them, they are good to wipe your Arse with. To wipe your Breech with. To wipe your Backside with. They are good to cleanse that Part of the Body that often fouls itself. They are good to wrap Mackrel in. Good to make up Grocery Ware in. * * * * * _Of wishing well._ 1. _To a Man whose Wife is with Child._ _Pe._ What? are our little Friends well? How does your Wife do? _Ch._ Very well, I left her with her Mother, and with Child. _Pe._ I wish it may be well for you, and her too: To you, because you're shortly to be a Father, and she a Mother. God be with you. I pray and desire that it may be prosperous and happy to you both. I pray, I beg of God that she, having a safe Delivery, may bear a Child worthy of you both; and may make you a Father of a fine Child. I commend you that you have shewed yourself to be a Man. I am glad you have prov'd yourself to be a Man. You have shew'd yourself to be a Gallus, but not _Cybele_'s. Now you may go, I believe you are a Man. _Ch._ You joke upon me, as you are used to do. Well, go on, you may say what you please to me. * * * * * 2. _To one coming Home into his own Country._ _Ch._ I hear, you have lately been in your own Country. _Pe._ I have so, I had been out of it a pretty While. I could not bear to be out of it long. I could not bear to be out of my Parents Sight any longer. I thought it long till I enjoy'd my Friends Company. _Ch._ You have acted very piously. You are very good Humour'd, to think of those Matters. We have all a strange Affection for the Country that hath bred us, and brought us forth. _As_ Ovid _says_: _Nescio quâ natale solum dulcedine cunctos Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui._ Pray tell me how did you find all Things there. * * * * * _All Things new. The Form._ _Pe._ Nothing but what was new. All Things changed, all Things become new. See how soon Time changes all human Affairs. Methought I came into another World. I had scarce been absent ten Years, and yet I admired at every Thing, as much as _Epimenides_ the Prince of Sleepers, when he first wak'd out of his Sleep. _Ch._ What Story is that? What Fable is that? _Pe._ I'll tell you if you are at Leisure. _Ch._ There is nothing more pleasant. _Pe._ Then order me a Chair and a Cushion. _Ch._ That's very well thought on, for you will tell Lyes the better, sitting at Ease. _Pe._ Historians tell us a Story, of one _Epimenides_ a Man of _Crete_, who taking a Walk alone by himself without the City, being caught in a hasty Shower of Rain, went for Shelter into a Cave, and there fell asleep, and slept on for seven and forty Years together. _I don't believe it. The Form._ _Ch._ What a Story you tell? 'Tis incredible. What you say is not very likely. You tell me a Fiction. I don't think 'tis true. You tell me a monstrous Story. Are you not asham'd to be guilty of so wicked a Lye? This is a Fable fit to be put among _Lucian's_ Legends. _Pe._ Nay, I tell you what is related by Authors of Credit, unless you think _Aulus Gellius_ is not an Author of approv'd Credit. _Ch._ Nay, whatsoever he has written are Oracles to me. _Pe._ Do you think that a Divine dream'd so many Years? For it is storied that he was a Divine. _Ch._ I am with Child to hear. _The Answer._ _Pe._ What is it more than what _Scotus_ and the School-men did afterwards? But _Epimenides_, he came off pretty well, he came to himself again at last; but a great many Divines never wake out of their Dreams. _Ch._ Well go on, you do like a Poet; But go on with your Lye. _Pe._ _Epimenides_ waking out of his Sleep, goes out of his Cave, and looks about him, and sees all Things chang'd, the Woods, the Banks, the Rivers, the Trees, the Fields; and, in short, there was nothing but was new: He goes to the City, and enquires; he stays there a little While, but knows no Body, nor did any Body know him: the Men were dress'd after another Fashion, than what they were before; they had not the same Countenances; their Speech was alter'd, and their Manners quite different: Nor do I wonder it was so with _Epimenides_, after so many Years, when it was almost so with me, when I had been absent but a few Years. _Ch._ But how do your Father and Mother do? Are they living? _Pe._ They are both alive and well; but pretty much worn out with old Age, Diseases, and lastly, with the Calamities of War. _Ch._ This is the Comedy of human Life. This is the inevitable Law of Destiny. * * * * * _Words, Names of Affinity._ _Pe._ Will you sup at Home to Day? _Ch._ I am to sup abroad: I must go out to Supper. _Pe._ With whom? _Ch._ With my Father in Law; with my Son in Law; at my Daughter's in Law; with my Kinsman. They are call'd, _Affines_, Kinsmen, who are ally'd not by Blood, but Marriage. _Pe._ What are the usual Names of Affinity? _Ch._ A Husband and Wife are noted Names. _Socer_, Is my Wife's Father. _Gener_, My Daughter's Husband. _Socrus_, My Wife's Mother. _Nurus_, My Son's Wife. _Levir_, A Husband's Brother. _Levir_ is call'd by the Wife, as _Helen_ calls _Hector_, _Levir_, because she was married to _Paris_. _Fratria_, My Brother's Wife. _Glos_, A Husband's Sister. _Vitricus_, My Mother's Husband. _Noverca_, My Father's Wife. _Privignus_, The Son of my Wife or Husband. _Privigna_, The Daughter of either of them. _Rivalis_, He that loves the same Woman another does. _Pellex_, She that loves the same Man another does; as _Thraso_ is the Rival of _Phroedria_, and _Europa_ the _Pellex_ of _Juno_. * * * * * _Of inviting to a Feast._ _Dine with me to Morrow._ _Pe._ I give you Thanks, I commend you, I invite you to Supper against to Morrow, I entreat your Company at Supper to Morrow. I desire you'd come to Dinner with me to Morrow. I would have your Company at Dinner to Morrow. _I fear I can't come._ _Ch._ I fear I can't. I am afraid I can't. I will come if I can; but I am afraid I can't. _Why?_ _Pe._ Why can't you? How so? Why so? Wherefore? For what Reason? For what Cause? What hinders you that you can't. _I must stay at Home._ _Ch._ Indeed I must be at Home at that Time. I must needs be at Home at Night. I must not be abroad at that Time. I shall not have an Opportunity to go out any where to Morrow. I must not be absent at Dinner. I expect some Guests myself upon that Day. Some Friends have made an Appointment to sup at our House that Night. I have some Guests to entertain that Night, or else I would come with all my Heart. Unless it were so, I would not be unwilling to come. If it were not so, I should not want much entreating. I would make no Excuse if I could come. If I could come, I would not be ask'd twice. If I could by any Means come, I would come with a very little, or without any Invitation at all. If I could, I would obey your Command very readily. It is in vain to ask one that is not at his own Disposal: And there would be no need to ask me if I could come: But at present, though I had never so much Mind, I can't; and it would be altogether unnecessary to ask one that is willing. _Pe._ Then pray let me have your Company the next Day after: However, I must needs have your Company at Supper the next Day after to Morrow. You must not deny me your Company four Days hence. You must make no Excuse as to coming next Thursday. _I can't promise._ _Ch._ I can't promise. I cannot positively promise you. I can't certainly promise you. I will come when it shall be most convenient for us both. _You ought to set the Day._ _Pe._ I would have you appoint a Day when you will come to sup with me. You must assign a Day. You must set the Day. I desire a certain Day may be prefix'd, prescrib'd, appointed, set; but set a certain Day. I would have you tell me the Day. _I would not have you know before Hand._ _Ch._ Indeed I don't use to set a Day for my Friends. I am used to set a Day for those I'm at Law with. I would not have you know before Hand. I'll take you at unawares. I'll come unexpectedly. I will catch you when you don't think on me. I shall take you when you don't think on me. I'll come unlooked for. I'll come upon you before you are aware. I'll come an uninvited and unexpected Guest. _I would know before Hand._ _Pe._ I would know two Days before Hand. Give me Notice two Days before you come. Make me acquainted two Days before. _Ch._ If you will have me, I'll make a _Sybaritical_ Appointment, that you may have Time enough to provide afore Hand. _Pe._ What Appointment is that? _Ch._ The _Sybarites_ invited their Guests against the next Year, that they might both have Time to be prepar'd. _Pe._ Away with the _Sybarites_, and their troublesome Entertainments: I invite an old Chrony, and not a Courtier. _You desire to your own Detriment._ _Ch._ Indeed 'tis to your Detriment. Indeed 'tis to your own Harm. To your own Loss. You wish for it. You pray for that to your own Ill-convenience. _Pe._ Why so? Wherefore. _Ch._ I'll come provided. I'll come prepar'd. I'll set upon you accoutred. I'll come furnish'd with a sharp Stomach; do you take Care that you have enough to satisfy a Vulture. I'll prepare my Belly and whet my Teeth; do you look to it, to get enough to satisfy a Wolf. _Pe._ Come and welcome, I dare you to it. Come on, if you can do any Thing, do it to your utmost, with all your Might. _Ch._ I'll come, but I won't come alone. _Pe._ You shall be the more welcome for that; but who will you bring with you? _Ch._ My _Umbra_. _Pe._ You can't do otherwise if you come in the Day Time. _Ch._ Ay, but I'll bring one _Umbra_ or two that have got Teeth, that you shan't have invited me for nothing. _Pe._ Well, do as you will, so you don't bring any Ghosts along with you. But if you please explain what is the Meaning of the Word _Umbra_. _Ch._ Among the Learned they are call'd _Umbræ_, who being uninvited, bear another Person, that is invited, Company to a Feast. _Pe._ Well, bring such Ghosts along with you as many as you will. * * * * * _I promise upon this Condition._ _Ch._ Well, I will come, but upon this Condition, that you shall come to Supper with me the next Day. I will do it upon this Condition that you shall be my Guest afterwards. Upon that Condition I promise to come to Supper, that you again shall be my Guest. I promise I will, but upon these Terms, that you in the like Manner shall be my Guest the next Day. I promise I will, I give you my Word I will, upon this Consideration, that you dine with me the next Day. _Pe._ Come on, let it be done, let it be so. It shall be as you would have it. If you command me, I'll do it. I know the _French_ Ambition, You won't sup with me, but you'll make me Amends for it. And so by this Means Feasts use to go round. From hence it comes to pass, that it is a long Time before we have done feasting one with another. By this Interchangeableness Feasts become reciprocal without End. _Ch._ It is the pleasantest Way of Living in the World, if no more Provision be made, but what is used to be made daily. But, I detain you, it may be, when you are going some whither. _Pe._ Nay, I believe, I do you. But we'll talk more largely and more freely to Morrow. But we'll divert ourselves to Morrow more plentifully. In the mean Time take Care of your Health. In the mean Time take Care to keep yourself in good Health. Farewell till then. * * * * * _Whither are you going? The Form._ _Ch._ Where are you a going now? Whither are you going so fast? Where are you a going in such great Haste. Whither go you? What's your Way? * * * * * _I go Home. The Form._ _Pe._ I go Home. I return Home. I go to see what they are a doing at Home. I go to call a Doctor. I am going into the Country. I made an Appointment just at this Time to go to speak with a certain great Man. I made an Appointment to meet a great Man at this Time. _Ch._ Whom? _Pe._ Talkative _Curio_. _Ch._ I wish you _Mercury_'s Assistance. _Pe._ What need of _Mercury_'s Assistance? _Ch._ Because you have to do with a Man of Words. _Pe._ Then it were more proper to wish the Assistance of the Goddess _Memoria_. _Ch._ Why so? _Pe._ Because you'll have more Occasion for patient Ears, than a strenuous Tongue. And the Ear is dedicated to the Goddess _Memoria_. _Ch._ Whither are you going? Whither will you go? _Pe._ This Way, to the left Hand. This Way, that Way, through the Market. _Ch._ Then I'll bear you Company as far as the next Turning. _Pe._ I won't let you go about. You shan't put yourself to so much Trouble on my Account. Save that Trouble till it shall be of Use, it is altogether unnecessary at this Time. Don't go out of your Way upon my Account. _Ch._ I reckon I save my Time while I enjoy the Company of so good a Friend. I have nothing else to do, and I am not so lazy, if my Company won't be troublesome. _Pe._ No Body is a more pleasant Companion. But I won't suffer you to go on my left Hand. I won't let you walk on my left Hand. Here I bid God be with you. I shall not bear you Company any longer. You shan't go further with me. * * * * * _A Form of Recommending._ _Ch._ Recommend me kindly to _Curio_. Recommend me as kindly as may be to talkative _Curio_. Take Care to recommend me heartily to _Curio_. I desire you have me recommended to him. I recommend myself to him by you. I recommend myself to you again and again. I recommend myself to your Favour with all the Earnestness possible. Leave _recommendo_ instead of _commendo_ to _Barbarians_. See that you don't be sparing of your Speech with one that is full of Tongue. See that you be not of few Words with him that is a Man of many Words. * * * * * _A Form of Obsequiousness._ _Pe._ Would you have me obey you? Would you have me be obedient? Shall I obey you? Then you command me to imitate you. Since you would have it so, I'll do it with all my Heart. Don't hinder me any longer; don't let us hinder one another. _Ch._ But before you go, I intreat you not to think much to teach me how I must use these Sentences, _in morâ, in causâ, in culpâ_; you use to be studious of Elegancy. Wherefore come on, I entreat you teach me; explain it to me, I love you dearly. * * * * * _In Culpâ, In Causâ, In Morâ._ _Pe._ I must do as you would have me. The Fault is not in me. It is not in thee. The Delay is in thee. Thou art the Cause, is indeed grammatically spoken; these are more elegant. _In Culpâ._ I am not in the Fault. The Fault is not mine. I am without Fault. Your Idleness has been the Cause, that you have made no Proficiency, not your Master nor your Father. You are all in Fault. You are both in Fault. You are both to be blam'd. Ye are both to be accus'd. You have gotten this Distemper by your own ill Management. In like Manner they are said to be _in vitio_, to whom the Fault is to be imputed; and _in crimine_, they who are to be blam'd; and _in damno_, who are Losers. This sort of Phrase is not to be inverted commonly; _Damnum in illo est. Vitium in illo est._ * * * * * _In Causâ._ Sickness has been the Occasion that I have not written to you. My Affairs have been the Cause that I have written to you so seldom, and not Neglect. What was the Cause? What Cause was there? I was not the Cause. The Post-Man was in the Fault that you have had no Letters from me. Love and not Study is the Cause of your being so lean. This is the Cause. _In Morâ._ I won't hinder you. What has hinder'd you? You have hindred us. You are always a Hindrance. What hindred you? Who has hindred you? You have what you ask'd for. It is your Duty to remember it. You have the Reward of your Respect. Farewell, my _Christian_. _Ch._ And fare you well till to Morrow, my _Peter_. * * * * * _At Meeting._ _CHRISTIAN, AUSTIN._ _Ch._ God save you heartily, sweet _Austin_. _Au._ I wish the same to you, most kind _Christian_. Good Morrow to you. I wish you a good Day; but how do you do? _Ch._ Very well as Things go, and I wish you what you wish for. _Au._ I love you deservedly. I love thee. Thou deservest to be lov'd heartily. Thou speakest kindly. Thou art courteous. I give thee Thanks. * * * * * _I am angry with thee. The Form._ _Ch._ But I am something angry with you. But I am a little angry with you. But I am a little provok'd at you. I have something to be angry with you for. * * * * * _For what Cause. The Form._ _Au._ I pray what is it? Why so? But why, I beseech you? What Crime have I committed? What have I done? _Promereor bona_, I deserve Good; _Commereor mala_, I deserve Ill, or Punishment: The one is used in a good Sense, and the other in an ill. _Demeremur eum_, is said of him that we have attach'd to us by Kindness. * * * * * _Because you don't Regard me._ _Ch._ Because you take no Care of me. Because you don't regard me. Because you come to see us so seldom. Because you wholly neglect us. Because you quite neglect me. Because you seem to have cast off all Care of us. _Au._ But there is no Cause for you to be angry. But you are angry without my Desert, and undeservedly; for it has not been my Fault, that I have come to see you but seldom: Forgive my Hurry of Business that has hindered me from seeing you, as often as I would have done. _Ch._ I will pardon you upon this Condition, if you'll come to Supper with me to Night. I'll quit you upon that Condition, if you come to Supper with me in the Evening. _Au. Christian_, you prescribe no hard Articles of Peace, and therefore I'll come with all my Heart. Indeed I will do it willingly. Indeed I would do that with all Readiness in the World. I shan't do that unwillingly. I won't want much Courting to that. There is nothing in the World that I would do with more Readiness. I will do it with a willing Mind. _Ch._ I commend your obliging Temper in this, and in all other Things. _Au._ I use always to be thus obsequious to my Friends, especially when they require nothing but what's reasonable. O ridiculous! Do you think I would refuse when offer'd me, that which I should have ask'd for of my own Accord? * * * * * _Don't deceive me. The Form._ _Ch._ Well, but take Care you don't delude me. See you don't deceive me. Take Care you don't make me feed a vain Hope. See you don't fail my Expectation. See you don't disappoint me. See you don't lull me on with a vain Hope. _Au._ There is no Need to swear. In other Things, in other Matters you may be afraid of Perfidy. In this I won't deceive you. But hark you, see that you provide nothing but what you do daily: I would have no holy Day made upon my Account. You know that I am a Guest that am no great Trencher Man, but a very merry Man. _Ch._ I'll be sure to take Care. I will entertain you with Scholars Commons, if not with slenderer Fare. _Au._ Nay, if you'd please me, let it be with _Diogenes_'s Fare. _Ch._ You may depend upon it, I will treat you with a _Platonick_ Supper, in which you shall have a great many learned Stories, and but a little Meat, the Pleasure of which shall last till the next Day: whereas they that have been nobly entertain'd, enjoy perhaps a little Pleasure that Day, but the next are troubled with the Head-ach, and Sickness at the Stomach. He that supp'd with _Plato_, had one Pleasure from the easy Preparation, and Philosopher's Stories; and another the next Day, that his Head did not ach, and that his Stomach was not sick, and so had a good Dinner of the sauce of last Night's Supper. _Au._ I like it very well, let it be as you have said. _Ch._ Do you see that you leave all your Cares and melancholy Airs at Home, and bring nothing hither but Jokes and Merriment; and as _Juvenal_ says, _Protenus ante meum, quicquid dolet, exue limen. Lay all that troubles you down before my Door, before you come into it._ _Au._ What? Would you have me bring no Learning along with me? I will bring my Muses with me, unless you think it not convenient. _Ch._ Shut up your ill-natured Muses at Home with your Business, but bring your good-natured Muses, all your witty Jests, your By-words, your Banters, your Pleasantries, your pretty Sayings, and all your Ridiculosities along with you. _Au._ I'll do as you bid me; put on all my best Looks. We'll be merry Fellows. We'll laugh our Bellies full. We'll make much of ourselves. We'll feast jovially. We'll play the _Epicureans_. We'll set a good Face on't, and be boon Blades. These are fine Phrases of clownish Fellows that have a peculiar Way of speaking to themselves. _Ch._ Where are you going so fast? _Au._ To my Son's in Law. _Ch._ What do you do there? Why thither? What do you with him? _Au._ I hear there is Disturbance among them; I am going to make them Friends again, to bring them to an Agreement; to make Peace among them. _Ch._ You do very well, though I believe they don't want you; for they will make the Matter up better among themselves. _Au._ Perhaps there is a Cessation of Arms, and the Peace is to be concluded at Night. But have you any Thing else to say to me? _Ch._ I will send my Boy to call you. _Au._ When you please. I shall be at Home. Farewell. _Ch._ I wish you well. See that you be here by five a-Clock. Soho _Peter_, call _Austin_ to Supper, who you know promised to come to Supper with me to Day. _Pe._ Soho! Poet, God bless you, Supper has been ready this good While, and my Master stays for you at Home, you may come when you will. _Au._ I come this Minute. _The PROFANE FEAST._ The ARGUMENT. _Our_ Erasmus _most elegantly proposes all the Furniture of this Feast; the Discourses and Behaviour of the Entertainer and the Guests_, &c. _Water and a Bason before Dinner. The_ Stoics, _the_ Epicureans; _the Form of the Grace at Table. It is good Wine that pleases four Senses. Why_ Bacchus _is the Poets God; why he is painted a Boy. Mutton very wholsome. That a Man does not live by Bread and Wine only. Sleep makes some Persons fat. Venison is dear. Concerning Deers, Hares, and Geese: They of old defended the Capitol at_ Rome. _Of Cocks, Capons and Fishes. Here is discoursed of by the by, Fasting. Of the Choice of Meats. Some Persons Superstition in that Matter. The Cruelty of those Persons that require these Things of those Persons they are hurtful to; when the eating of Fish is neither necessary, nor commanded by Christ. The eating of Fish is condemned by Physicians. The chief Luxury of old Time consisted in Fishes. We should always live a sober Life. What Number of Guests there should be at an Entertainment. The Bill of Fare of the second Course. The Magnificence of the_ French. _The ancient Law of Feasts. Either drink, or begone. A Variation of Phrases. Thanksgiving after Meat._ AUSTIN, CHRISTIAN, _a_ BOY. _Au._ O, my _Christian_, God bless you. _Ch._ It is very well that you are come. I am glad you're come. I congratulate myself that you are come. I believe it has not struck five yet. _Boy._ Yes, it is a good While past five. It is not far from six. It is almost six. You'll hear it strike six presently. _Au._ It is no great Matter whether I come before five or after five, as long as I am not come after Supper; for that is a miserable Thing, to come after a Feast is over. What's all this great Preparation for? What means all this Provision? What, do you think I'm a Wolf? Do you take me for a Wolf? Do you think I'm a Vulture? _Ch._ Not a Vulture, nor yet do I think you a Grashopper, to live upon Dew. Here is nothing of Extravagancy, I always lov'd Neatness, and abhor Slovenliness. I am for being neither luxurious nor niggardly. We had better leave than lack. If I dress'd but one Dish of Peas, and the Soot should chance to fall in the Pot and spoil it, what should we have to eat then? Nor does every Body love one Thing; therefore I love a moderate Variety. _Au._ An't you afraid of the sumptuary Laws? _Ch._ Nay, I most commonly offend on the contrary Side. There is no need of the _Fannian_ Law at our House. The Slenderness of my Income teaches me Frugality sufficiently. _Au._ This is contrary to our Agreement. You promised me quite otherwise. _Ch._ Well, Mr. Fool, you don't stand to your Agreement. For it was agreed upon that you should bring nothing but merry Tales. But let us have done with these Matters, and wash, and sit down to Supper. Soho, Boy, bring a little Water and a Bason; hang a Towel over your Shoulder, pour out some Water. What do you loiter for? Wash, _Austin_. _Au._ Do you wash first. _Ch._ Pray excuse me. I had rather eat my Supper with unwashen Hands this twelve Months. _Au._ O ridiculous! 'Tis not he that is the most honourable, but he that is the dirtiest that should wash first; then do you wash as the dirtiest. _Ch._ You are too complaisant. You are more complaisant than enough; than is fitting. But to what Purpose is all this Ceremony? Let us leave these trifling Ceremonies to Women, they are quite kick'd out of the Court already, although they came from thence at first. Wash three or four at a Time. Don't let us spend the Time in these Delays. I won't place any Body, let every one take what Place he likes best. He that loves to sit by the Fire, will sit best here. He that can't bear the Light let him take this Corner. He that loves to look about him, let him sit here. Come, here has been Delays enough. Sit down. I am at Home, I'll take my Supper standing, or walking about, which I like best. Why don't you sit down, Supper will be spoiled. _Au._ Now let us enjoy ourselves, and eat heartily. Now let us be _Epicures_. We have nothing to do with Superciliousness. Farewell Care, let all Ill-will and Detraction be banished. Let us be merry, pleasant, and facetious. _Ch. Austin_, pray who are those _Stoics_ and _Epicures_? _Au._ The _Stoics_ are a certain melancholy, rigid, parcimonious Sect of Philosophers, who make the _Summum bonum_ of Mankind, to consist in a certain, I can't tell what, _honestum_. The _Epicures_ are the Reverse of these, and they make the Felicity of a Man to consist in Pleasure. _Ch._ Pray what Sect are you of, a _Stoic_ or an _Epicure_? _Au._ I recommend _Zeno_'s Rules; but I follow _Epicurus_'s Practice. _Ch. Austin_, what you speak in Jest, a great many do in Earnest, and are only Philosophers by their Cloaks and Beards. _Au._ Nay, indeed they out-live the _Asots_ in Luxury. _Ch. Dromo_, come hither. Do your Office, say Grace. _Boy._ "May he that feeds all Things by his Bounty, command his Blessing upon what is or shall be set upon this Table. Amen." _Ch._ Set the Victuals on the Table. Why do we delay to eat up this Capon? Why are we afraid to carve this Cock? _Au._ I'll be _Hercules_, and slay this Beast. Which had you rather have, a Wing or a Leg? _Ch._ Which you will, I don't matter which. _Au._ In this Sort of Fowls the Wing is look'd upon the best; in other Fowls the Leg is commonly esteemed the greater dainty Bit. _Ch._ I put you to a great Deal of Trouble. You take a great Deal of Trouble upon you, upon my Account. You help every Body else, and eat nothing yourself. I'll help you to this Wing; but upon this Condition, that you shall give me Half of it back. _Au._ Say you so, that is serving yourself and not me; keep it for yourself. I am not so bashful as to want any Body to help me. _Ch._ You do very well. _Au._ Do you carve for a Wolf? Have you invited a Vulture? _Ch._ You fast. You don't eat. _Au._ I eat more than any Body. _Ch._ Nay, rather, you lye more than any Body. Pray be as free as if you were at your own House. _Au._ I take myself to be there. I do so. I am resolv'd so to do. I design to do so. _Ch._ How does this Wine please you? Does this Wine please your Palate? _Au._ Indeed it pleases me very well. Indeed it pleases mightily. It pleases me well enough. It pleases me very well. _Ch._ Which had you rather have, Red or White? _It is no Matter what Colour it is._ _Au._ Indeed I like both alike. It is no Matter what Colour 'tis, so the Taste be pleasing. I don't much mind how the Wine pleases the Eye, so it do but please the Palate. I an't much mov'd at the Sight of it, if the Taste be but grateful. It is no great Matter what Colour it is of, or what Colour it has, if it does but taste well. I don't desire to please my Eyes if I can but please my Taste. If it do but please the Palate, I don't regard the Colour, if it be well relish'd. _Ch._ I believe so: But there are some Persons that are mighty deeply read in Table Philosophy, who deny that the Wine can be good, unless it pleases four Senses: The Eye, with its Colour; the Nose, with its Smell; the Palate, with its Taste; the Ears, by its Fame and Name. _Au._ O ridiculous! What signifies Fame to Drink? _Ch._ As much as many that have a good Palate mightily approve of _Lovain_ Wine, when they believe it to be _Bern_ Wine. _Au._ It may be, they had spoiled their Palate by much Drinking. _Ch._ No, before they had drank one Drop. But I have a Mind to hear your Opinion, who are a Man of great Skill in these Matters. _Au._ Our Countrymen prefer White before Red, because the Red is a little more upon the Acid, and the White a smaller Wine; but that is the milder, and in my Opinion the more wholsome. _Ch._ We have a pale red Wine, and a yellow Wine, and a purple Colour Wine. This is new Wine, this Year's Wine. This is two Years old, if any Body is for an old Wine. We have some four Years old, but it is grown flat and dead with Age. The Strength is gone with Age. _Au._ Why, you're as rich as _Lucullus_. _Ch._ Soho, Boy, where are you a loitering? You give us no Attendance; don't you see we have no Wine here? What if a Fire should happen now? How should we put it out? Give every one a full Glass. _Austin_, What's the matter that you are not merry? What makes you sit so Melancholy? What's the Matter with you, that you an't chearful? You are either troubled at something, or you're making Verses. You play the _Crysippus_ now, you want a _Melissa_ to feed you. _Au._ What Story is this you are telling me of? _Ch. Crysippus_ is reported to have been so intent upon his logical Subtilties, that he would have been starved at Table, unless his Maid _Melissa_ had put the Meat into his Mouth. _Au._ He did not deserve to have his Life sav'd; but if Silence is an Offence to you, and you love a noisy Feast, you have gotten that will make one. _Ch._ I remember I have. That's very well minded: We must drink more freely, we ought to drink more largely, more Wine and less Water. _You have hit on the Matter._ _Au._ You have hit the Nail on the Head. You are in the Right. You have hit the Mark. For, _Foecundi calices quem non fecere disertum?_ _Ch._ That is very learnedly spoken, _Austin_, and so indeed is all that comes from you; but since we are fallen into a Discourse concerning Wine, since we have happen'd to make mention of Wine, I have a mind to ask you, for what Reason the Ancients, who will have _Bacchus_ the Inventor of Wine, call him the God of the Poets? What has that drunken God to do with Poets, who are the Votaries of the Virgin Muses? _Au._ By _Bacchus_, this is a Question fit to be put over a Bottle. But I see very well, what your Question drives at. _Ch._ What, prithee? _Au._ You very cunningly put a Question about Wine, by a _French_ Trick, which I believe you learn'd at _Paris_, that you may save your Wine by that Means. Ah, go your Way, I see you're a Sophister; you have made a good Proficiency in that School. _Ch._ Well, I take all your Jokes; I'll return the like to you, when Opportunity shall offer. But to the Matter in Hand. _Au._ I'll go on, but I'll drink first, for it is absurd to dispute about a tippling Question with a dry Throat. Here's to you _Christian_. Half this Cup to you. _Ch._ I thank you kindly. God bless it to you, much good may it do you. _Au._ Now I'm ready, at your Service. I'll do it as well as I can after my Manner. That they have given a Boy's Face to _Bacchus_, has this Mystery in it; that Wine being drank, takes away Cares and Vexations from our Minds, and adds a Sort of a Chearfulness to them. And for this Reason, it adds a Sort of Youthfulness even to old Men, in that it makes them more chearful, and of a better Complexion. The same thing _Horace_ in many Places, and particularly testifies in these Verses: _Ad mare cum veni, generosum et lene requiro, Quod curas abigat, quod cum spe divite manet. In venas, animumque meum, quod verba ministret. Quod me Lucanoe juvenem commendet amicæ._ For that they have assign'd the Poets to this Deity, I believe by it they design'd to intimate this, that Wine both stirs up Wit and administers Eloquence; which two Things are very fit for Poets. Whence it comes to pass, that your Water Drinkers make poor Verses. For _Bacchus_ is of a fiery Constitution naturally, but he is made more temperate, being united with the Nymphs. Have you been answer'd to your Satisfaction? _Ch._ I never heard any Thing more to the Purpose from a Poet. You deserve to drink out of a Cup set with Jewels. Boy, take away this Dish, and set on another. _Au._ You have got a very clownish Boy. _Ch._ He is the unluckiest Knave in the World. _Au._ Why don't you teach him better Manners? _Ch._ He is too old to learn. It is a hard matter to mend the Manners of an old Sinner. An old Dog won't be easily brought to wear the Collar. He's well enough for me. Like Master like Man. * * * * * _If I knew what you lik'd, I would help you._ _Au._ I would cut you a Slice, if I knew what would please you. I would help you, if I knew your Palate. I would help you, if I knew what you lik'd best. If I knew the Disposition of your Palate, I would be your Carver. Indeed my Palate is like my Judgment. _Ch._ You have a very nice Palate. No Body has a nicer Palate than you have. I don't think you come behind him of whose exquisite Skill the Satyrist says, _Ostrea callebat primo deprendere morsu, Et semel aspecti dicebat littus echini._ _Au._ And you, my _Christian_, that I may return the Compliment, seem to have been Scholar to _Epicurus_, or brought up in the _Catian_ School. For what's more delicate or nice than your Palate? _Ch._ If I understood Oratory so well as I do Cookery, I'd challenge _Cicero_ himself. _Au._ Indeed if I must be without one, I had rather want Oratory than Cookery. _Ch._ I am entirely of your Mind, you judge gravely, wisely, and truly. For what is the Prattle of Orators good for, but to tickle idle Ears with a vain Pleasure? But Cookery feeds and repairs the Palate, the Belly, and the whole Man, let him be as big as he will. _Cicero_ says, _Concedat laurea lingæ_; but both of them must give place to Cookery. I never very well liked those _Stoicks_, who referring all things to their (I can't tell what) _honestum_, thought we ought to have no regard to our Persons and our Palates. _Aristippus_ was wiser than _Diogenes_ beyond Expression in my Opinion. _Au._ I despise the _Stoicks_ with all their Fasts. But I praise and approve _Epicurus_ more than that _Cynic Diogenes_, who lived upon raw Herbs and Water; and therefore I don't wonder that _Alexander_, that fortunate King, had rather be _Alexander_ than _Diogenes_. _Ch._ Nor indeed would I myself, who am but an ordinary Man, change my Philosophy for _Diogenes_'s; and I believe your _Catius_ would refuse to do it too. The Philosophers of our Time are wiser, who are content to dispute like _Stoicks_, but in living out-do even _Epicurus_ himself. And yet for all that, I look upon Philosophy to be one of the most excellent Things in Nature, if used moderately. I don't approve of philosophising too much, for it is a very jejune, barren, and melancholy Thing. When I fall into any Calamity or Sickness, then I betake myself to Philosophy, as to a Physician; but when I am well again, I bid it farewell. _Au._ I like your Method. You do philosophize very well. Your humble Servant, Mr. Philosopher; not of the _Stoick_ School, but the Kitchen. _Ch._ What is the Matter with you, _Erasmus_, that you are so melancholy? What makes you look so frowningly? What makes you so silent? Are you angry with me because I have entertained you with such a slender Supper? _Er._ Nay, I am angry with you that you have put your self to so much Charge upon my Account. _Austin_ laid a strict Charge upon you that you would provide nothing extraordinary upon his Account. I believe you have a Mind we should never come to see you again; for they give such a Supper as this that intended to make but one. What sort of Guests did you expect? You seem to have provided not for Friends, but for Princes. Do you think we are Gluttons? This is not to entertain one with a Supper, but victualling one for three Days together. _Ch._ You will be ill-humour'd. Dispute about that Matter to-Morrow; pray be good humour'd to-Day. We'll talk about the Charge to-Morrow; I have no Mind to hear any Thing but what is merry at this time. _Au. Christian_, whether had you rather have, Beef or Mutton? _Ch._ I like Beef best, but I think Mutton is the most wholsome. It is the Disposition of Mankind to be most desirous of those Things that are the most hurtful. _Au._ The _French_ are wonderful Admirers of Pork. _Ch._ The _French_ love that most that costs least. _Au._ I am a Jew in this one Thing, there is nothing I hate so much as Swine's Flesh. _Ch._ Nor without Reason, for what is more unwholsome? In this I am not of the _French_ Man's but of the _Jew's_ Mind. _Er._ But I love both Mutton and Pork, but for a different Reason; for I eat freely of Mutton, because I love it; but Hogs Flesh I don't touch, by Reason of Love, that I may not give Offence. _Ch._ You are a clever Man, _Erasmus_, and a very merry one too. Indeed I am apt to admire from whence it comes to pass that there is such a great Diversity in Mens Palates, for if I may make use of this Verse of _Horace_, Tres mihi convivæ propè dissentire videntur, Poscentes vario multùm diversa palato. _Er._ Although as the Comedian says, _So many Men, so many Minds_, and every Man has his own Way; yet no Body can make me believe, there is more Variety in Mens Dispositions, than there is in their Palates: So that you can scarce find two that love the same Things. I have seen a great many, that can't bear so much as the Smell of Butter and Cheese: Some loath Flesh; one will not eat roast Meat, and another won't eat boil'd. There are many that prefer Water before Wine. And more than this, which you'll hardly believe; I have seen a Man who would neither eat Bread, nor drink Wine. _Ch._ What did that poor Man live on? _Er._ There was nothing else but what he could eat; Meat, Fish, Herbs and Fruit. _Ch._ Would you have me believe you? _Er._ Yes, if you will. _Ch._ I will believe you; but upon this Condition, that you shall believe me when I tell a Lye. _Er._ Well, I will do it, so that you lye modestly. _Ch._ As if any Thing could be more impudent than your Lye. _Er._ What would your Confidence say, if I should shew you the Man? _Ch._ He must needs be a starveling Fellow, a meer Shadow. _Er._ You'd say he was a Champion. _Ch._ Nay, rather a _Polyphemus_. _Er._ I wonder this should seem so strange to you, when there are a great many that eat dry'd Fish instead of Bread: And some that the Roots of Herbs serve for the same Use that Bread does us. _Ch._ I believe you; lye on. _Er._ I remember, I saw a Man when I was in _Italy_, that grew fat with Sleep, without the Assistance either of Meat or Drink. _Ch._ Fie for Shame; I can't forbear making Use of that Expression of the Satyrist, Tunc immensa cavi spirant mendacia folles. Thou poeticisest. You play the Part of a Poet. I am loath to give you the Lye. _Er._ I am the greatest Lyar in the World, if _Pliny_, an Author of undoubted Credit, has not written, that a Bear in fourteen Days Time will grow wonderfully fat with nothing but Sleep: And that he will sleep so sound, that you can scarce wake him, by wounding him: Nay, to make you admire the more, I will add what _Theophrastus_ writes, that during that Time, if the Flesh of the Bear be boil'd, and kept some Time, it will come to Life again. _Ch._ I am afraid that _Parmeno_ in _Terence_ will hardly be able to comprehend these Things. I believe it readily. I would help you to some Venison, if I were well enough accomplished. _Er._ Where have you any Hunting now? How came you by Venison? _Ch._ _Midas_, the most generous spirited Man living, and a very good Friend of mine, sent it me for a Present; but so, that I oftentimes buy it for less. _Er._ How so? _Ch._ Because I am obliged to give more to his Servants, than I could buy it for in the Market. _Er._ Who obliges you to that? _Ch._ The most violent Tyrant in the World. _Er._ Who is he? _Ch._ Custom. _Er._ Indeed, that Tyrant does frequently impose the most unjust Laws upon Mankind. _Ch._ The same Tyrant hunted this Stag, but the Day before Yesterday. What did you do, who used to be a very great Lover of that Sport? _Au._ Indeed I have left off that Sport, and now I hunt after nothing but Learning. _Ch._ In my Opinion, Learning is fleeter than any Stag. _Au._ But I hunt chiefly with two Dogs, that is to say, with Love and Industry: For Love affords a great Deal of Eagerness to learn, and as the most elegant Poet says, ----_Labor improbus omnia vincit._ _Ch. Austin_, you admonish after a friendly Manner, as you use to do; and therefore, I won't give over, nor rest, nor tire, till I attain. _Au._ Venison is now in the Prime. _Pliny_ tells us a very admirable Story concerning this Animal. _Ch._ What is it, I pray you? _Au._ That as often as they prick up their Ears, they are very quick of Hearing; but on the contrary, when they let them down, they are deaf. _Ch._ That very often happens to myself; for if I happen to hear a Word spoken of receiving Guineas, there is no Body quicker of Hearing than I; for then with _Pamphilus_ in _Terence_, I prick up my Ears; but when there is any Mention made of paying them away, I let them down, and am presently hard of Hearing. _Au._ Well, I commend you; you do as you should do. _Ch._ Would you have some of the Leg of this Hare? _Au._ Take it yourself. _Ch._ Or had you rather have some of the Back? _Au._ This Creature has nothing good but its Flank and hind Legs. _Ch._ Did you ever see a white Hare? _Au._ Oftentimes. _Pliny_ writes, that on the _Alps_ there are white Hares; and that it is believed in the Winter Time they feed upon Snow: Whether it be true or no, let _Pliny_ see to that: For if Snow makes a Hare's Skin white, it must make his Stomach white too. _Ch._ I don't know but it may be true. _Au._ I have something for you that is stranger than that; but it may be you have heard of it. The same Man testifies that there is the same Nature in all of them; that is, of Males and Females, and that the Females do as commonly breed without the Use of the Male, as with it. And many Persons assert the same, and especially your skilful Hunters. _Ch._ You say right; but if you please, let us try these Rabbets, for they are fat and tender. I would help that pretty Lady if I sat nigher to her. _Austin_, pray take Care of that Lady that sits by you, for you know how to please the fair Sex. _Au._ I know what you mean, you Joker. _Ch._ Do you love Goose? _Au._ Ay, I love 'em mightily, and I an't very nice. I don't know what's the Matter, but this Goose don't please me; I never saw any Thing dryer in all my Life; it is dryer than a Pumice-Stone, or _Furius_'s Mother in Law, upon whom _Catullus_ breaks so many Jests. I believe it is made of Wood; And in Troth I believe 'tis an old Soldier, that has worn itself out with being upon the Guard. They say a Goose is the most wakeful Creature living. In Truth, if I am not out in my Guess, this Goose was one of them, who when the Watch and their Dogs were fast asleep, in old Time defended the _Roman_ Capitol. _Ch._ As I hope to live I believe it was, for I believe it liv'd in that Age. _Au._ And this Hen was either half starv'd, or else was in love, or was jealous; for this Sort of Creatures are much troubled with that Distemper. This Capon fatten'd much better; see what Cares will do. If we were to geld our _Theodoricus_, he would grow fat much the sooner. _Th._ I an't a Cock. _Au._ I confess you are not _Gallus Cybeles_, nor a Dunghil-Cock; but it may be you are _Gallus Gallaceus_. _Ch._ What Word is that? _Au._ I leave that Word to be unriddled by you: I am _Sphinx_, and you shall be _Oedipus_. _Ch. Austin_, tell me truly, have you had no Conversation with _French_ Men, have you had no Affinity with them? Had you nothing to do with them? _Au._ None at all, indeed. _Ch._ Then you are so much the worse. _Au._ But perhaps I have had to do with _French_ Women. _Ch._ Will you have any of this Goose's Liver? This was look'd upon as a great Delicacy by the Ancients. _Au._ I will refuse nothing that comes from your Hand. _Ch._ You must not expect _Roman_ Dainties. _Au._ What are they? _Ch._ Thistles, Cockles, Tortoises, Conger-Eels, Mushrooms, Truffles, etc. _Au._ I had rather have a Turnip than any of them. You are liberal and bountiful, _Christian_. _Ch._ No Body touches these Partridges nor the Pigeons, to-Morrow is a Fast-Day appointed by the Church; prepare against that Hunger; Ballast your Ship against the impending Storm. War is a coming, furnish your Belly with Provision. _Au._ I wish you had kept that Word in, we should have risen from Supper more merrily. You torment us before the Time. _Ch._ Why so? _Au._ Because I hate Fish worse than I do a Snake. _Ch._ You are not alone. _Au._ Who brought in this troublesome Custom? _Ch._ Who order'd you to take Aloes, Wormwood and Scammony in Physick? _Au._ But these Things are given to Folks that are sick. _Ch._ So these Things are given to them that are too well. It is better sometimes to be sick, than to be too well. _Au._ In my Opinion the _Jews_ themselves did not labour under such a Burden. Indeed I could easily refrain from Eels and Swines Flesh, if I might fill my Belly with Capons and Partridges. _Ch._ In a great many Circumstances it is not the Thing, but the Mind that distinguishes us from _Jews_; they held their Hands from certain Meats, as from unclean Things, that would pollute the Mind; but we, understanding that _to the Pure, all Things are pure_, yet take away Food from the wanton Flesh, as we do Hay from a pamper'd Horse, that it may be more ready to hearken to the Spirit. We sometimes chastise the immoderate Use of pleasant Things, by the Pain of Abstinence. _Au._ I hear you; but by the same Argument, Circumcision of the Flesh may be defended; for that moderates the Itch of Coition, and brings Pain. If all hated Fish as bad as I do, I would scarce put a Parricide to so much Torture. _Ch._ Some Palates are better pleas'd with Fish than Flesh. _Au._ Then they like those Things that please their Gluttony, but don't make for their Health. _Ch._ I have heard of some of the _Æsops_ and _Apitius_'s, that have look'd upon Fish as the greatest Delicacy. _Au._ How then do Dainties agree with Punishment? _Ch._ Every Body han't Lampreys, Scares, and Sturgeons. _Au._ Then it is only the poor Folks that are tormented, with whom it is bad enough, if they were permitted to eat Flesh; and it often happens, that when they may eat Flesh for the Church, they can't for their Purse. _Ch._ Indeed, a very hard Injunction! _Au._ And if the Prohibition of Flesh be turned to delicious Living to the Rich; and if the Poor can't eat Flesh many Times, when otherwise they might, nor can't eat Fish, because they are commonly the dearer; to whom does the Injunction do good? _Ch._ To all; for poor Folks may eat Cockles or Frogs, or may gnaw upon Onions or Leeks. The middle Sort of People will make some Abatement in their usual Provision; and though the Rich do make it an Occasion of living deliciously, they ought to impute that to their Gluttony, and not blame the Constitution of the Church. _Au._ You have said very well; but for all that, to require Abstinence from Flesh of poor Folks, who feed their Families by the Sweat of their Brows, and live a great Way from Rivers and Lakes, is the same Thing as to command a Famine, or rather a _Bulimia_. And if we believe _Homer_, it is the miserablest Death in the World to be starv'd to Death. _Ch._ So it seem'd to blind _Homer_; but with _Christians_, he is not miserable that dies well. _Au._ Let that be so; yet it is a very hard Thing to require any Body to die. _Ch._ The Popes don't prohibit the eating of Flesh with that Design, to kill Men, but that they may be moderately afflicted if they have transgress'd; or that taking away their pleasant Food, their Bodies may be less fierce against the Spirit. _Au._ The moderate Use of Flesh would effect that. _Ch._ But in so great a Variety of Bodies certain Bounds of Flesh can't be prescrib'd, a Kind of Food may. _Au._ There are Fishes that yield much Aliment, and there are Sorts of Flesh that yield but little. _Ch._ But in general Flesh is most nourishing. _Au._ Pray tell me, if you were to go a Journey any whither, would you chuse a lively Horse that was a little wanton, or a diseased Horse, who would often stumble and throw his Rider? _Ch._ What do you mean by that? _Au._ Because Fish-eating, by its corrupt Humours, renders the Body liable to a great many Diseases, that it can't subserve the Spirit as it should do. _Ch._ To what Diseases? _Au._ Gouts, Fevers, Leprosies, the King's-Evil. _Ch._ How do you know? _Au._ I believe Physicians. I had rather do so than try the Experiment. _Ch._ Perhaps that happens to a few. _Au._ Indeed I believe to a great many; besides, in as much as the Mind acts by the material Organs of the Body, which are affected with good or bad Humours, the Instruments being vitiated, it can't exert its Power as it would. _Ch._ I know Doctors do very much find Fault with the eating of Fish; but our Ancestors thought otherwise, and it is our Duty to obey them. _Au._ It was a Piece of Religion formerly not to break the Sabbath; but for all that, it was more eligible to save a Man on the Sabbath-Day. _Ch._ Every one consults his own Health. _Au._ If we will obey St. _Paul, Let no Body mind his own Things, but every one the Things of another_. _Ch._ How come we by this new Divine at our Table? Whence comes this new upstart Master of ours? _Au._ Because I don't like Fishes. _Ch._ What, then won't you abstain from Flesh? _Au._ I do abstain, but grumblingly, and to my great Detriment too. _Ch. Charity suffers all Things._ _Au._ It is true; but then the same requires but little. If it suffers all Things, why won't it suffer us to eat those Meats the Gospel has given us a Liberty to eat? Why do those Persons, from whom Christ has so often required the Love of himself, suffer so many Bodies of Men to be endanger'd by capital Diseases, and their Souls to be in Danger of eternal Damnation, because of a Thing neither forbidden by _Christ_, nor necessary in itself? _Ch._ When Necessity requires it, the Force of a human Constitution ceases, and the Will of the Lawgiver ceases. _Au._ But the Offence of the Weak does not cease. The Scruple of a tender Conscience does not cease. And lastly, it is uncertain with what Limits that Necessity shall be bounded; shall it be when the Fish-eater shall be a giving up the Ghost? It is too late to give Flesh to a Man when he is dying; or shall it be when his Body becomes all feverish? The Choice of Meats is not of so much Consequence. _Ch._ What would you have prescrib'd then? _Au._ I can tell well enough, if I might be allow'd to be a Dictator in Ecclesiastical Affairs. _Ch._ What do you mean by that? _Au._ If I were Pope I would exhort all Persons to a perpetual Sobriety of Life, but especially before an holy-Day; and moreover, I would give every one leave to eat what he would, for the Health of his Body, so he did it moderately, and with Thanksgiving; and I would endeavour that what was abated of these Observations should be made up in the Study of true Piety. _Ch._ That in my Opinion is of so great Weight, that we ought to make you Pope. _Au._ For all your laughing, this Neck could bear a triple Crown. _Ch._ But in the mean Time take Care that these Things be not enter'd down in the _Sorbon_ at _Paris_. _Au._ Nay, rather let what is said be written in Wine, as it is fit those Things should that are said over our Cups; but we have had Divinity enough for a Feast We are at Supper, not at the _Sorbon_. _Ch._ Why mayn't that be call'd _Sorbon_ where we sup plentifully? _Au._ Well, let us sup then, and not dispute, lest the _Sorbon_ be called after us from _Sorbis_, and not from _Sorbendo_. _CHRISTIAN, GUESTS, MIDAS, ERASMUS, the BOY, AUSTIN._ _Ch._ Well, come my kind Guests, I pray you that you would take this little Supper in good Part, though it be but a slender one. Be merry and good humour'd, though the Supper be but mean and slender. I, relying upon your Familiarity, made bold to invite you; and I will assure you, your Company and Presence is not only very grateful to me, but very pleasant. _Gu._ We do assure you, good _Christian_, that we esteem your Supper to have been very pretty and noble; and we have nothing to find Fault with, but that you make Excuses for it, for that it was very magnificent; for indeed I look upon the Entertainment to be splendid to the greatest degree, that in the first Place consisted of Courses agreeable to Nature, and was season'd with Mirth, Laughter, Jokes and Witticisms, none of which have been wanting in our Entertainment. But here is something comes into my Mind, as to the Number of the Guests, which _Varro_ writes, _should not be fewer than three, nor more than nine_. For the _Graces_, who are the Presidents of Humanity and Benevolence, are three; and the _Muses_, that are the Guides of commendable Studies, are nine; and I see here we have ten Guests besides the Virgins. _Au._ Nothing could happen more agreeably; we are in that something wiser than _Varro_, for we have gotten here three pretty Maids for the three _Graces_; and as it is not to be thought that _Apollo_ is ever absent from the Chorus of the _Muses_, we have very much _à propos_ added the tenth Guest. _Ch._ You have spoken very much like a Poet. If I had a Laurel here I would crown you with it, and you should be Poet Laureat. _Au._ If I were crown'd with Mallows, I should be Poet _Maleat_; I do not arrogate that Honour to myself. This is an Honour that I don't deserve. ------_Haud equidem tali me dignor honore._ _Ch._ Will you, every one of you, do as much for me as I will do for you? _Gu._ Ay, that we will with all our Hearts. _Ch._ Then let every one drink off his Cup round as I do. Here's to you first, _Midas_. _Mi._ I thank you heartily. I pledge you heartily; for which the Vulgar says _Præstolor_. Indeed I won't refuse. I won't refuse any Thing for your Sake. _Ch._ Now do you drink to the rest. _Mi. Erasmus_, Half this Cup to you. _Er._ I pray it may do you good. May it do you good. Much good may it do you. _Proficiat_ is an out of the Way Word. _Ch._ Why does the Cup stand still? Why does it not go about? Is our Wine gone? Where are your Eyes, you Rascal? Run quickly, fetch two Quarts of the same Wine. _Boy. Erasmus_, your humble Servant, there is one wants to speak with you at the Door. _Er._ Who is it? _Boy._ He says he is one Mr. _More_'s, Man, his Master is come out of _Britain_, and he desires you would make him a Visit, because he sets out for _Germany_ to-Morrow by Break of Day. _Er. Christian_, gather the Reckoning, for I must be going. _Ch._ The Reckoning, most learned _Erasmus_, of this Supper, I will discharge that. You have no Need to put your Hand in your Pocket. I thank you that you honour'd me with your Company; but I am sorry you are called away before the Comedy is ended. _Er._ Have I any Thing more to do but to bid you _Farewell and be merry?_ _Ch._ Farewell, we can't take it amiss, because you don't leave a Shoulder of Mutton for a Sheep's-Head, but go from Friends to a better Friend. _Er._ And I in like Manner return you my Thanks, that you have been so kind as to invite me to this most pleasant Entertainment. My very good Friends, fare ye well. Drink heartily, and live merrily. _Ch._ Soho, _Dromo_. You, all of you, have sitten still a good While. Does any Body please to have any Thing else? _Gu._ Nothing at all. We have eat very plentifully. _Ch._ Then take away these Things, and set on the Desert. Change the Trenchers and the Plates. Take up my Knife that is fallen down. Pour some Wine over the Pears. Here are some early ripe Mulberries that grew in my own Garden. _Gu._ They will be the better for being of your own Growth. _Ch._ Here are some wheaten Plumbs: See, here are Damascens, a rare Sight with us: See, here are mellow Apples; and here is a new Sort of an Apple, the Stock of which I set with my own Hands; and Chestnuts, and all Kinds of Delicacies, which our Gardens produce plentifully. _Au._ But here are no Flowers. _Ch._ They are _French_ Entertainments, who love that Sort of Splendor most that costs least; but that is not my Humour. _Au._ 'Tis not only among _Frenchmen_ that you will find those that love what is of little Cost. _Ch._ But hark you, _Austin_, do you think to come off so? What, won't you pledge me when I drink to you? You ought to have taken off Half the Cup of him that drank to you. _Au._ He excused me for that a great While ago. He discharg'd me of that Obligation. _Ch._ Pray who gave him that Power? The Pope himself can hardly dispense with this Obligation. You know the ancient Law of Drinking, _Either drink or go your Way_. _Au._ He that an Oath is made to has Power to suspend it, and especially he, whose Concern it was to have it kept. _Ch._ But it is the Duty of all Guests to observe Laws inviolably. _Au._ Well, come on, since this is the _German_ Custom, I'll drink what is left. But what Business have you with me? _Ch._ You must pay for all. Why do you look pale? Don't be afraid, you may do it very easily, do as you have often done, that by some Elegancy we may rise from Table more learned; nor are you ignorant that the Ancients over the second Course used to dispute of some more diverting Subjects. Come on then, by what, and after how many Ways may this Sentence be vary'd, _Indignum auditu?_ * * * * * _It is not worth hearing. The Form._ _Au._ You have very fitly made Use of the latter Supine. It is not worth hearing. It is unworthy to be heard. It is not worthy to be heard. It is so light it ought not to be heard. It is scarce worth While to relate. It is not of such Value as to be heard. It is too silly to be heard. It is not worth While to tell it. _Ch._ How many Ways may this Sentence be turn'd, _Magno mihi constat?_ * * * * * _The Ratio of varying this Sentence._ _Magno mihi constat._ _Au._ By these Words, _impendo, insumo, impertio, constat_, as: I have taken Pains much in teaching you. I have taken much Pains in that Matter. I have not spent less Money than I have Care upon that Matter. I have not spent a little Money, but much Time, and very much Labour, and some Study. I have spent much Study. This Thing has cost me many a Night's Sleep, much Sweat, much Endeavour, very much Labour, a great Expence, a great Deal of Money. It has cost me more than you believe. My Wife stands me in less than my Horse. _Ch._ But what is the meaning, _Austin_, that you put sometimes an Ablative, and sometimes a Genitive Case to the Verb _constat_? _Au._ You have stated a very useful and very copious Question. But that I may not be troublesome to the Company by my too much Talk, I will dispatch it in a few Words. But I desire to hear every Man's Opinion, that I may not be troublesome to any Man, as I have said. _Ch._ But why may not the Damsels desire the same? _Au._ Indeed they do nothing else but hear. I'll attempt it with _Grammatica_'s Assistance. "You know that Verbs of buying and selling, and some others, are of a like Signification, to which these Genitives are put alone, without Substantives, _tanti, quanti, pluris, minoris, tantidem, quantivis, quanticunque_: But in Case Substantives be not added, which, if they happen to be put, they are both turned into the Ablative Case; so that if a certain Price be set down, you put it in the Ablative Case; if by an Adjective put substantively, you put it in the Ablative Case, unless you had rather make Use of an Adverb." _Ch._ What are those Verbs that you speak of? _Au._ "They are commonly _emo, mereor; redimo_, (that is a Thing either taken or lost) _vendo, venundo; revendo_, (that is, I sell again that which was sold to me) _veneo_, (that is, I am sold) whose Prater Tense is _venivi_, or _venii_, the Supine _venum_; hence comes _venalis_; and from that, _i.e._ _vendo_, comes _vendibilis; mereo_, for _inservio et stipendium_ _facio_, _i.e._ to serve under (as a Soldier). _Comparo_, that is, to buy, or commit. _Computo_, I change, I exchange with. _Cambire_ is wholly barbarous in this Sense. _Æstimo_, to tax. _Indico_, for I estimate, rate. _Liceor, liceris; licitor, licitaris_, to cheapen, to bid. _Distrahor_, _i.e._ I am carried about to be sold. _Metior_, for I estimate or rate. _Constat_, for it is bought. _Conducere_, to let to hire. _Fænero_, I put to Interest. _Fæneror_, I take at Interest (to Usury.) _Paciscor, pactus sum pango, pepigi_, _i.e._ I make a Bargain." _Ch._ Give an Example. * * * * * _Of selling and buying._ _The Forms._ _Au._ How much do you lett that Field for by the Year. We will answer. For twenty _French_ Pounds. Whoo! You lett it too dear. Nay, I have lett it for more before now. But I would not give so much for it. If you hire it for less I'll be hang'd. Nay, your Neighbour _Chremes_ offer'd me a Field, and asks for it--How much? Just as much as you ask for yours. But it is much better. That's a Lye. I do as they use to do who cheapen a Thing. Do you keep it yourself at that Price. What, do you cheapen, ask the Price, when you won't buy any Thing. Whatsoever you shall lett it me for shall be paid you very honestly. _Of Selling and Buying._ _Another Example._ How much do you sell that Conger Eel for? _Syra._ For five Pence. That's too much, you nasty Jade. Nay, 'tis too little, no Body will sell you for less. Upon my Life it cost me as much within a Trifle. You Witch, you tell a Lie, that you may sell it for twice or three Times as much as it cost you. Ay, I'll sell it for a hundred Times as much if I can, but I can't find such Fools. What if I should ask the Price of yourself? What do you value yourself at? According as I like the Person. What do you prize yourself at? What Price do you set upon yourself? Tell me, what Price do you rate yourself at? Ten Shillings. Whoo, so much? O strange! Do you value me at less? Time was when I have had as much for one Night. I believe you may, but I believe you an't now worth so much as a Fish by a great Deal. Go hang yourself, you Pimp. I value you as little as you do me. He that shall give a Farthing for you buys you too dear. But I'll be sold for more, or I won't be sold at all. If you would be sold at a great Rate you must get you a Mask, for those Wrinkles in your Forehead won't let you be sold for much. He that won't give so much for me shan't have me. I would not give a Straw for you. I cost more. _A third Example._ I have been at an Auction to-Day. Say you so? I bid Money for a Share in the Customs. But how much? Ten Thousand Pound. Whoo! what, so much? There were those that bid a great Deal more; very few that offer'd less. Well, and who had the Place at last? _Chremes_, your Wife's great Friend. But guess what it was sold for. Ten. Nay, fifteen. O good God! I would not give Half so much for him and all his Family together. But he would give twice as much for your Wife. "Do you take Notice, that in all these, wheresoever there is a Substantive of the Price, that is put in the Ablative Case; but that the rest are either put in the Genitive Case, or are changed into Adverbs. You have never heard a Comparative without a Substantive, except in these two, _pluris_, and _minoris_. There are some other Verbs, of which we have spoken, that are not very much unlike these, _sum, facio, habeo, duco, æstimo, pendo_, which signify (in a Manner) the same Thing; likewise _fio_, and they are for the most Part join'd with these Genitives, _multi, parvi, magni, pluris, plurimi, minoris, minimi, maximi, tanti, quanti, flocci, pili, nihili, nauci, hujus_, and any other like them." _Ch._ Give Examples. _Of valuing. The Form._ _Au._ Do you know how much I have always valu'd you? You will always be made of such Account by Men as you make Account of Virtue. Gold is valued at a great Rate now a-Days, Learning is valued at a very little, or just nothing at all. I value Gold less than you think for. I don't value your Threats of a Rush. I make a very little Account of your Promises. I don't value you of a Hair. If Wisdom were but valued at so great a Rate as Money, no Body would want Gold. With us, Gold without Wisdom is esteem'd to be of more Worth than Wisdom without Gold. I esteem you at a greater Rate, because you are learned. You will be the less esteem'd on here because you don't know how to lye. Here are a great many that will persuade you that Black is White. I set the greater Value upon you because you love Learning. So much as you have, so much you shall be esteem'd by all Men; so much as you have, so much you shall be accounted of every where. It is no Matter what you are accounted, but what you are. I value my _Christian_ above any Man else in the World. "There are some other Verbs found with these Genitives and Ablatives, which in their own Nature don't signify buying, or anything like it." _Peter_ bought a Kiss of the Maid for a Shilling. Much good may it do him. I would not kiss at that Rate. How much do you play for? What did you pay for Supper? We read of some that have spent Six hundred Sesterces for a Supper. But the _French_ often sup for a Half-penny. What Price does _Faustus_ teach for? A very small Matter. But for more than _Delius_. For how much then? For nineteen Guineas. I won't learn to lye at so dear a Rate. _Phædria_ in _Terence_ lost both his Substance and himself. But I would not love at that Rate. Some Persons pay a great Price for sleeping. _Demosthenes_ had more for holding his Tongue than others had for speaking. I pray you to take it in good Part. "There is another Sort of Verbs, that require an Accusative Case, with a Genitive or Ablative, which are, _accuso_, _i.e._ I object a Crime, or _culpo_, also one that's absent; _Incuso_, _i.e._ I blame without Judgment; _arguo_, I reprehend, _insimulo_, _i.e._ I throw in a Suspicion of a Fault. _Postulo_, _i.e._ I require you to answer at Law, _accerso_, I impeach, _damno_, I condemn, I pronounce him to be in Fault. _Admoneo_, I admonish." _Ch._ For Example Sake? _Forms of Accusing._ _Au. Scipio_ is accused of courting the Populace. Thou who art the most impudent, accusest me of Impudence. _Lepidus_ is accused of Bribery. You are accus'd of a capital Crime. If you shall slily insinuate a Man to be guilty of Covetousness, you shall hear that which is worse again. Put him in Mind of his former Fortune. Men are put in Mind of their Condition, by that very Word. Put _Lepidus_ in Mind of his Promise. "There are many that admit of a double Accusative Case. I teach thee Letters. He entreats you to pardon him. I will unteach thee those Manners." "Here I must put you in Mind of that Matter, that in these the Passives also obtain a second Accusative Case. The others will have a Genitive." You are taught Letters by me. They accuse me of Theft. I am accused of Theft. Thou accusest me of Sacrilege. I am accused of Sacrilege. I know you are not satisfied yet. I know you are not satisfied in Mind. For when will so great a Glutton of Elegancies be satisfy'd? But I must have Regard to the Company, who are not all equally diverted with these Matters. After Supper, as we walk, we will finish what is behind, unless you shall rather chuse to have it omitted. _Ch._ Let it be as you say. Let us return Thanks to divine Bounty and afterwards we'll take a little Walk. _Mi._ You say very well, for nothing can be more pleasant, nor wholsome than this Evening Air. _Ch. Peter_, come hither, and take the Things away in Order, one after the other, and fill the Glasses with Wine. _Pe._ Do you bid me return Thanks? _Ch._ Aye, do. _Pe._ Had you rather it should be done in _Greek_, or in _Latin_. _Ch._ Both Ways. _Pe. Gratias agimus tibi, pater coelestis, qui tua ineffabili potentia condidisti omnia, tua inscrutabili sapientia gubernas universa, tua inexhausta bonitate cuncta pascis ac vegetas: largire filiis tuis, ut aliquando tecum bibant in regno tuo nectar illud immortalitatis, quod promisisti ac praeparasti vere diligentibus te, per Iesum Christum. Amen._ We thank thee, heavenly Father, who by thy unspeakable Power, hast created all Things, and by thy inexhaustible Wisdom governest all Things, and by thy inexhaustible Goodness feedest and nourishest all Things: Grant to thy Children, that they may in due Time drink with thee in thy Kingdom, that _Nectar_ of Immortality; which thou hast promis'd and prepar'd for those that truly love thee, through Jesus Christ, _Amen_. _Ch._ Say in _Greek_ too, that the rest mayn't understand what thou sayest. _Pe._ [Greek: Heucharistoumen soi, pater ouranie, ho tê arrêtô sou dunamei ktisas ta panta, ho tê anexereunêtô sou sophia kubernôn hapaxapanta, ho tê anexantlêtô sou chrêstotêti hekasta trephomenos te kai auxanon. Charizou tois yiois sou to meta sou pote piein to tês athanasias nektar, ho upechou kai êtoimasas tois alêthôs agapôsi se, dia Iêsou Christou, tou yiou sou, tou kyriou hêmôn, tou meta sou zôntos kai basileuontos en henotêti tou pneumatos hagiou, eis tous aiônas. Amên.] _Ch._ My most welcome Guests, I give you Thanks that you have honour'd my little Entertainment with your Company. I intreat you to accept it kindly. _Gu._ And we would not only have, but return our Thanks to you. Don't let us be over ceremonious in thanking, but rather let us rise from Table, and walk out a little. _Au._ Let us take these Virgins along with us, so our Walk will be more pleasant. _Ch._ You propose very well. We'll not want Flowers, if the Place we walk in don't afford any. Had you rather take a Turn in our Garden, in a poetical Manner, or walk out abroad by the River-Side. _Au._ Indeed, your Gardens are very pleasant, but keep that Pleasure for Morning Walks. When the Sun is towards setting, Rivers afford wonderful pleasant Prospects. _Ch. Austin_, do you walk foremost as a Poet should do, and I'll walk by your Side. _Au._ O good God, what a jolly Company we have, what a Retinue have I! _Christian_, I can't utter the Pleasure I take, I seem to be some Nobleman. _Ch._ Now be as good as your Word. Perform the Task you have taken upon you. _Au._ What is it you'd have me speak of chiefly? _Ch._ I us'd formerly to admire many Things in _Pollio_'s Orations; but chiefly this, that he us'd so easily, so frequently and beautifully to turn a Sentence, which seemed not only a great Piece of Wit, but of great Use. _Au._ You were much in the Right on't, _Christian_, to admire that in _Pollio_. For he seems, in this Matter, to have had a certain divine Faculty, which I believe, was peculiar to him, by a certain Dexterity of Art, and by much Use of Speaking, Reading and Writing, rather than by any Rules or Instructions. _Ch._ But I would fain have some Rule for it, if there be any to be given. _Au._ You say very well; and since I see you are very desirous of it, I'll endeavour it as much as I can: And I will give those Rules, as well as I can, which I have taken Notice of in _Pollio_'s Orations. _Ch._ Do, I should be very glad to hear 'em. _Au._ I am ready to do it. * * * * * The ARGUMENT. _A short Rule concerning this Copia, it teaches how to vary a Sentence pleasantly, copiously, easily, frequently, and elegantly; by short Rules given, and by a Praxis upon these Rules, in an elegant Turning of one Phrase._ In the first Place, it is to be set forth in pure and choice _Latin_ Words; which to do is no mean Piece of Art: For there are a great many, who do, I don't know after what Manner, affect the _Copia_ and Variation of Phrase, when they don't know how to express it once right. It is not enough for them to have babbled once, but they must render the Babble much more babbling, by first one, and then by another turning of it; as if they were resolv'd to try the Experiment, how barbarously they were able to speak: And therefore, they heap together, certain simple synonymous Words, that are so contrary one to the other, that they may admire themselves how they do agree together. For what is more absurd, than that a ragged old Fellow, that has not a Coat to his Back, but what is so ragged that he may be ashamed to put it on, should every now and then change his Rags, as though he design'd to shew his Beggary by Way of Ostentation: And those Affectators of Variety seem equally ridiculous, who, when they have spoken barbarously once, repeat the same Thing much more barbarously; and then over and over again much more unlearnedly. This is not to abound with Sentences, but Solæcisms: Therefore, in the first Place, as I have said, the Thing is to be express'd in apt and chosen Words. 2. And then we must use Variety of Words, if there are any to be found, that will express the same Thing; and there are a great many. 3. And where proper Words are wanting, then we must use borrow'd Words, so the Way of borrowing them be modest. 4. Where there is a Scarcity of Words, you must have Recourse to Passives, to express what you have said by Actives; which will afford as many Ways of Variation, as there were in the Actives. 5. And after that, if you please, you may turn them again by verbal Nouns and Participles. 6. And last of all, when we have chang'd Adverbs into Nouns, and Nouns sometimes into one Part of Speech, and sometimes into another; then we may speak by contraries. 7. We may either change affirmative Sentences into negative, or the contrary. 8. Or, at least, what we have spoken indicatively, we may speak interrogatively. Now for Example Sake, let us take this Sentence. _Literæ tuæ magnopere me delectârunt. Your Letters have delighted me very much._ _Litertæ._ Epistle, little Epistles, Writings, Sheets, Letters. _Magnopere._ After a wonderful Manner, wonderfully, in a greater, or great Manner, in a wonderful Manner, above Measure, very much, not indifferently (not a little) mightily, highly, very greatly. _Me._ My Mind, my Breast, my Eyes, my Heart, _Christian_. _Delectârunt._ They have affected, recreated, exhilarated with Pleasure, have been a Pleasure, have delighted, have bath'd me with Pleasure; have been very sweet, very pleasant, &c. Now you have Matter, it is your Business to put it together: Let us try. _Ch._ Thy Letters have very greatly delighted me. Thy Epistle has wonderfully chear'd me. _Au._ Turn the Active into a Passive, then it will look with another Face. As, It can't be said how much I have been chear'd by thy Writings. _Also by other Verbs effecting the same Thing._ I have received an incredible Pleasure from thy Writings. I have receiv'd very much Pleasure from your Highness's Letter. Your Writings have brought me not an indifferent Joy. Your Writings have overwhelmed me all over with Joy. "But here you can't turn these into Passives, only in the last, _perfusus gaudio_, as is commonly said, Pleasure was taken by me, Joy was brought, is not so commonly used, or you must not use so frequently." _By Affido._ Thy Letter hath affected me with a singular Pleasure. _Change it into a Passive._ I am affected with an incredible Pleasure by thy Letter. Thy little Epistle has brought not a little Joy. _By_ Sum _and Nouns Adjectives._ Thy Letters have been most pleasant to me many Ways. That Epistle of thine was, indeed, as acceptable, as any Thing in the World. _By Nouns Substantives._ Thy Letter was to us an unspeakable Pleasure. Your Letter was an incredible Pleasure to us. _Change it into a Negative._ Thy Letter was no small Joy. Nothing in Life could happen more delightful than thy Letters. "Although I have sometimes already made Use of this Way, which is not to be pass'd over negligently. For when we would use _multum, plurimum_, to signify, _singulariter_, we do it by a contrary Verb." As, _Henry_ loves you mightily: He loves you with no common Love. Wine pleases me very much: It pleases me not a little. He is a Man of a singular Wit: A Man of no ordinary Wit. He is a Man of admirable Learning: He is a Man not of contemptible Learning. _Thomas_ was born in the highest Place of his Family: Not in the lowest Place. _Austin_ was a most eloquent Man: He was not ineloquent. _Carneades_ the Orator was noble: Not an ignoble, not an obscure Man. "And the like, which are very frequently used." But the Mention of a Thing so plain is enough: Nor are you ignorant, that we make Use of a two-fold Manner of Speech, of this Kind: For Modesty Sake, especially, if we speak of our selves; also for Amplification Sake. For we use rightly and elegantly, not ungrateful, for very grateful; not vulgarly for singularly. _For Modesty Sake._ I have by my Letters gain'd some Reputation of Learning. I have always made it my Business not to have the last Place in the Glory of Learning. The Examples of Amplification are mention'd before: Now let us return to our own. Nothing ever fell out to me more gratefully, acceptably, than thy Letter. Nothing ever was a greater Pleasure than your Letter. I never took so much Pleasure in any Thing, as in thy most loving Letters. "After this Manner all the before-mention'd Sentences may be vary'd by an Interrogation." What in Life could be more pleasant than thy Letters? What has happened to me more sweet, than thy Letter? What has ever delighted me like your last Letter? And after this Manner you may vary almost any Sentence. _Ch._ What shall we do now? _Au._ We will now turn the whole Sentence a little more at large, that we may express one Sentence, by a Circumlocution of many Words. _Ch._ Give Examples. _Au._ "That which was sometimes express'd by the Noun _incredibile_, and then again, by the Adverb _incredibiliter_, we will change the Sentence in some Words." I can't express how much I was delighted with your Letters. It is very hard for me to write, and you to believe how much Pleasure your Letter was to me. I am wholly unable to express how I rejoic'd at your Letter. "And so _in infinitum_: Again, after another Manner. For hitherto we have varied the Sentences by Negations and Interrogations, and in the last Place by Infinitives. Now we will vary by Substantives or Conditionals, after this Manner." Let me die if any Thing ever was more desired and more pleasant than thy Letters. Let me perish if any Thing ever was more desired, and more pleasant than thy Letter. As God shall judge me, nothing in my whole Life ever happen'd more pleasant than thy Letters. "And also a great many more you may contrive after this Manner." _Ch._ What is to be done now? _Au._ Now we must proceed to Translations, Similitudes and Examples. _There is a Translation in these._ I have received your Letters, which were sweet as Honey. Your Writings seem to be nothing but meer Delight. Your Letters are a meer Pleasure; and a great many of the like Kinds. "But Care is to be taken not to make Use of harder Translations; such as this that follows, _Jupiter hybernas canâ nive conspuit Alpes._ such as this is." The Suppers of thy Writings have refreshed me with most delicious Banquets. _A Comparison by Simile._ Thy Writings have been sweeter than either _Ambrosia_ or _Nectar_. Thy Letters have been sweeter to me than any Honey. Your kind Letter has excell'd even Liquorish, Locusts, and _Attic_ Honey, and Sugar; nay, even the _Nectar_ and _Ambrosia_ of the Gods. "And here, whatsoever is ennobled with Sweetness, may be brought into the Comparison." _From Examples._ I will never be induc'd to believe, that _Hero_ receiv'd the Letters of her _Leander_, either with greater Pleasure, or more Kisses, than I received yours. I can scarce believe that _Scipio_, for the Overthrow of _Carthage_, or _Paulus Æmylius_, for the taking of _Perseus_, ever triumphed more magnificently than I did, when the Post-man gave me your most charming Letter. "There are a thousand Things of this Nature, that may be found in Poets and Historians. Likewise Similitudes are borrow'd from Natural Philosophy; the Nature of a great many of which, it is necessary to keep in Memory. Now if you please, we will try in another Sentence." _I will never forget you while I live._ I will always remember you, as long as I live. Forgetfulness of you, shall never seize me as long as I live. I will leave off to live, before I will to remember you. _By Comparisons._ If the Body can get rid of its Shadow, then this Mind of mine may forget you. The River _Lethe_ itself shall never be able to wash away your Memory. "Besides, by an Impossibility, or after the Manner of Poets by contraries. _Dum juga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit. Ante leves ergo pastentur in athere cervi._ which is no hard Matter to invent." But lest I should seem tedious, at the present let these suffice: At another Time, if you please, we will talk more copiously of this Matter. _Ch._ I thought, _Austin_, you had been quite exhausted by this Time. But thou hast shewn me a new Treasure beyond what I expected, which if you shall pursue, I perceive you'll sooner want Time than Words. _Au._ If I can perform this with my little Learning, and indifferent Genius, what do you think _Cicero_ himself could do, who is storied to have vy'd with _Roscius_ the Player? But the Sun is going to leave us; and the Dew rises; it is best to imitate the Birds, to go Home, and hide ourselves in Bed. Therefore, sweet _Christian_, farewell till to Morrow. _Ch._ Fare you well likewise, most learned _Austin._ _The RELIGIOUS TREAT._ The ARGUMENT. _This religious Treat teaches what ought to be the Table-Talk of Christians. The Nature of Things is not dumb, but very loquacious, affording Matter of Contemplation. The Description of a neat Garden, where there is a Variety of Discourse concerning Herbs. Of Marjoram, Celandine, Wolfs-Bane, Hellebore. Of Beasts, Scorpions, the Chamæleon, the Basilisk; of Sows_, Indian _Ants, Dolphins, and of the Gardens of_ Alcinous. _Tables were esteemed sacred by the very Heathens themselves. Of washing Hands before Meat. A Grace before Meat out of_ Chrysostom. _Age is to be honoured, and for what Reason. The Reading of the Scriptures very useful at Meals. That Lay Persons may Discourse concerning the Scriptures. The 21st of_ Prov. _and 1st_ Ver. _illustrated. How God hates Sacrifices, in Comparison of Mercy_, Hos. 6. _No Body is hurt but by himself. That Persons in Wine speak true. That it was unlawful for the_ Ægyptian _Priests to drink Wine. The_ I Cor. 6. _opened. All Things are lawful for me. The Spirit of Christ was in the Heathens and Poets._ Scotus _is slighted in Comparison of_ Cicero _and_ Plutarch. _A Place is cited out of_ Cicero _and_ Cato Major, _and commended;_ dare omni petenti, give to every one that asketh, _how it is to be understood. We ought to give to Christ's Poor, and not to Monasteries. The Custom of burying in Churches blam'd. That we ought to give by Choice, how much, to whom, and to what End. We ought to deny ourselves of something that we may give it to the Poor_. No Body can serve two Masters, _is explained. A Grace after Meat out of St._ Chrysostom. EUSEBIUS, TIMOTHY, THEOPHILUS, CHRYSOGLOTTUS, URANIUS, SOPHRONIUS, EULALIUS, THEODIDACTUS, NEPHALIUS. _Eu._ I admire that any Body can delight to live in smoaky Cities, when every Thing is so fresh and pleasant in the Country. _Ti._ All are not pleased with the Sight of Flowers, springing Meadows, Fountains, or Rivers: Or, if they do take a Pleasure in 'em, there is something else, in which they take more. For 'tis with Pleasure, as it is with Wedges, one drives out another. _Eu._ You speak perhaps of Usurers, or covetous Traders; which, indeed, are all one. _Ti._ I do speak of them; but not of them only, I assure you; but of a thousand other Sorts of People, even to the very Priests and Monks, who for the Sake of Gain, make Choice of the most populous Cities for their Habitation, not following the Opinion of _Plato_ or _Pythagoras_ in this Practice; but rather that of a certain blind Beggar, who loved to be where he was crowded; because, as he said, the more People, the more Profit. _Eu._ Prithee let's leave the blind Beggar and his Gain: We are Philosophers. _Ti._ So was _Socrates_ a Philosopher, and yet he preferr'd a Town Life before a Country one; because, he being desirous of Knowledge, had there the Opportunity of improving it. In the Country, 'tis true, there are Woods, Gardens, Fountains and Brooks, that entertain the Sight, but they are all mute, and therefore teach a Man nothing. _Eu._ I know _Socrates_ puts the Case of a Man's walking alone in the Fields; although, in my Opinion, there Nature is not dumb, but talkative enough, and speaks to the Instruction of a Man that has but a good Will, and a Capacity to learn. What does the beautiful Face of the Spring do, but proclaim the equal Wisdom and Goodness of the Creator? And how many excellent Things did _Socrates_ in his Retirement, both teach his _Phædrus_, and learn from him? _Ti._ If a Man could have such pleasant Company, I confess, no life in the World could be pleasanter than a Country Life. _Eu._ Have you a Mind to make Tryal of it? If you have, come take a Dinner with me to Morrow: I have a pretty neat little Country House, a little Way out of Town. _Ti._ We are too many of us; we shall eat you out of House and Home. _Eu._ Never fear that, you're to expect only a Garden Treat, of such Chear as I need not go to Market for. The Wine is of my own Growth; the Pompions, the Melons, the Figs, the Pears, the Apples and Nuts, are offered to you by the Trees themselves; you need but gape, and they'll fall into your Mouth, as it is in the _fortunate Islands_, if we may give Credit to _Lucian_. Or, it may be, we may get a Pullet out of the Hen-roost, or so. _Ti._ Upon these Terms we'll be your Guests. _Eu._ And let every Man bring his Friend along with him, and then, as you now are four, we shall be the just Number of the Muses. _Ti._ A Match. _Eu._ And take Notice, that I shall only find Meat, you are to bring your own Sauce. _Ti._ What Sauce do you mean, Pepper, or Sugar? _Eu._ No, no, something that's cheaper, but more savoury. _Ti._ What's that? _Eu._ A good Stomach. A light Supper to Night, and a little Walk to Morrow Morning, and that you may thank my Country House for. But at what Hour do you please to dine at? _Ti._ At ten a Clock. Before it grows too hot. _Eu._ I'll give Order accordingly. _Boy._ Sir, the Gentlemen are come. _Eu._ You are welcome, Gentlemen, that you are come according to your Words; but you're twice as welcome for coming so early, and bringing the best of Company along with you. There are some Persons who are guilty of an unmannerly Civility, in making their Host wait for them. _Ti._ We came the earlier, that we might have Time enough to view all the Curiosities of your Palace; for we have heard that it is so admirably contrived every where, as that it speaks who's the Master of it. _Eu._ And you will see a Palace worthy of such a Prince. This little Nest is to me more than a Court, and if he may be said to reign that lives at Liberty according to his Mind, I reign here. But I think it will be best, while the Wench in the Kitchen provides us a Salad, and it is the cool of the Morning, to take a Walk to see the Gardens. _Ti._ Have you any other beside this? For truly this is a wonderful neat one, and with a pleasing Aspect salutes a Man at his entring in, and bids him welcome. _Eu._ Let every Man gather a Nosegay, that may put by any worse Scent he may meet with within Doors. Every one likes not the same Scent, therefore let every one take what he likes. Don't be sparing, for this Place lies in a Manner common; I never shut it up but a-Nights. _Ti._ St. Peter keeps the Gates, I perceive. _Eu._ I like this Porter better than the _Mercuries_, Centaurs, and other fictitious Monsters, that some paint upon their Doors. _Ti._ And 'tis more suitable to a Christian too. _Eu._ Nor is my Porter dumb, for he speaks to you in Three Languages. _Ti._ What does he say? _Eu._ Read it yourself. _Ti._ It is too far off for my Eyes. _Eu._ Here's a reading Glass, that will make you another _Lynceus._ _Ti._ I see the Latin. _Si vis ad vitam ingredi, serva mandata_, Mat. 19, 17. If thou wilt, enter into Life, keep the Commandments. _Eu._ Now read the _Greek_. _Ti._ I see the _Greek_, but I don't well know what to make on't; I'll refer that to _Theophilus_, who's never without _Greek_ in his Mouth. _Th._ [Greek: Metanoêsate kai epistrepsate. Praxeôn tô tritô.] _Repent and be converted._ Acts 3. 19. _Ch._ I'll take the _Hebrew_ upon myself, [Hebrew: vetsadik be'emunato yihyeh] _And the Just shall live by Faithfulness._ _Eu._ Does he seem to be an unmannerly Porter, who at first Dash, bids us turn from our Iniquities, and apply our selves to Godliness, and then tells us, that Salvation comes not from the Works of the Law; but from the Faith of the Gospel; and last of all, that the Way to eternal Life, is by the Observance of evangelical Precepts. _Ti._ And see the Chapel there on the right Hand that he directs us to, it is a very fine one. Upon the Altar there's _Jesus Christ_ looking up to Heaven, and pointing with his right Hand towards God the Father, and the holy Spirit; and with his Left, he seems to court and invite all Comers. _Eu._ Nor is he mute: You see the _Latin; Ego sum via, veritas, et vita; I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life._ [Greek: Egô eimi to alpha kai to ômega.] In _Hebrew_, [Hebrew: Lechu banim shim'uh li, yr'at adonai alamdeichem] _Come, ye Children, hearken unto me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord._ _Ti._ Truly the Lord _Jesus_ salutes us with a good Omen. _Eu._ But that we may not seem uncivil, it is meet that we pay back an Acknowledgment, and pray that since we can do nothing of ourselves, he would vouchsafe of his infinite Goodness to keep us from ever straying out of the Path of Life; but that we casting away _Jewish_ Ceremonies, and the Delusions of the World, he would guide us by the Truth of the Gospel to everlasting Life, drawing us of himself to himself. _Ti._ It is most reasonable that we should pray, and the Place invites us to it. _Eu._ The Pleasantness of the Garden draws a great many Persons to it; and 'tis a rare Thing that any Passes by Jesus without an Ejaculation. I have made him Keeper, not only of my Garden, but of all my Possessions, and of both Body and Mind, instead of filthy _Priapus_. Here is you see a little Fountain pleasantly bubbling with wholsome Waters, this in some Measure represents that only Fountain of Life, that by its divine Streams, refreshes all that are weary and heavy laden; which the Soul, tired with the Evils of this World, pants after, just as the Hart in the Psalmist does after the Water Brooks, having tasted of the Flesh of Serpents. From this Fountain, whoever thirsts, may drink _gratis_. Some make it a Matter of Religion to sprinkle themselves with it; and others for the Sake of Religion, and not of Thirst, drink of it. You are loath, I perceive, to leave this Place: But it is Time to go to see this little square Garden that is wall'd in, 'tis a neater one than the other. What is to be seen within Doors, you shall see after Dinner, when the Heat of the Sun keeps us at Home for some Hours like Snails. _Ti._ Bless me! What a delightful Prospect is here. _Eu._ All this Place was designed for a Pleasure Garden, but for honest Pleasure; for the Entertainment of the Sight, the recreating the Nostrils, and refreshing the Mind; nothing grows here but sweet Herbs, nor every Sort of them, but only choice ones, and every Kind has its Bed by itself. _Ti._ I am now convinced that Plants are not mute with you. _Eu._ You are in the Right; others have magnificent Houses, but mine is made for Conversation, so that I can never be alone in it, and so you'll say, when you have seen it all. As the several Plants are as it were form'd into several Troops, so every Troop has its Standard to itself, with a peculiar Motto, as this Marjoram's is, _Abstine, sus, non tibi spiro: Keep off, Sow, I don't breathe my Perfume for thee_; for though it be of a very fragrant Scent, yet Sows have a natural Aversion to it: And so every Sort has its Title, denoting the peculiar Virtue of the Plant. _Ti._ I have seen nothing yet more delightful than this little Fountain, which being in the midst of them, does as it were smile upon all the Plants, and promises them Refreshment against the scorching Heat of the Sun. But this little Channel which shews the Water to the Eye so advantageously, and divides the Garden every where at such equal Distances, that it shews all the Flowers over on both Sides again, as in a Looking-glass, is it made of Marble? _Eu._ Marble, quoth thee, how should Marble come hither? It is a counterfeit Marble, made of a sort of Loam, and a whitish Colour given it in the Glasing. _Ti._ But where does this delicious Rivulet discharge itself at last? _Eu._ Just as it is with human Obligations, when we have served our own Turns: After this has pleasured our Eyes, it washes our Kitchen, and passes through the Sink into the common Shore. _Ti._ That's very hard-hearted, as I am a Christian. _Eu._ It had been hard-hearted, if the divine Bounty of Providence had not appointed it for this Use. We are then hard-hearted, when we pollute the Fountain of divine Truth, that is much more pleasant than this, and was given us for the refreshing and purging our Minds from our Lusts and vicious Appetites, abusing the unspeakable Bounty of God: For we make no bad Use of the Water, if we put it to the several Uses for which he appointed it, who supplies every Thing abundantly for human Use. _Ti._ You say right: But how comes it about, that all your artificial Hedges are green too? _Eu._ Because I would have every Thing green here. Some are for a Mixture of Red, because that sets off Green: But I like this best, as every Man has his Fancy, though it be but in a Garden. _Ti._ The Garden is very fine of itself; but methinks these three Walks take off very much from the Lightsomeness and Pleasantness of it. _Eu._ Here I either study or walk alone, or talk with a Friend, or eat, as the Humour takes me. _Ti._ Those speckled, wonderful, pretty party-coloured Pillars, that at equal Distances support that Edifice, are they Marble? _Eu._ Of the same Marble that this Channel is made of. _Ti._ In Truth, a pretty Cheat, I should have sworn they had been Marble. _Eu._ For this Reason then, take Care that you neither believe, nor swear any Thing rashly: You see how a Man may be mistaken. What I want in Wealth, I supply by Invention. _Ti._ Could you not be content with so neat, and well furnished a Garden in Substance, without other Gardens in Picture besides? _Eu._ In the first Place, one Garden will not hold all Sorts of Plants; and in the second, 'tis a double Pleasure, to see a painted Flower vie with the Life; and in one we contemplate the Artifice of Nature, in the other the Skill of the Painter; and in both, the Goodness of God, who gives all Things for our Use, in every Thing equally admirable and amiable: And in the last Place, a Garden is not always green; nor the Flowers always fresh; but this Garden is fresh and green all the Winter. _Ti._ But it is not fragrant. _Eu._ But then on the other Hand it wants no dressing. _Ti._ It only delights the Eye. _Eu._ But then it does that always. _Ti._ Pictures themselves grow old. _Eu._ They do so; but yet they out-live us; and besides, whereas we are the worse for Age, they are the better for it. _Ti._ That's too true, if it could be otherwise. _Eu._ In this Walk that looks toward the West, I take the Benefit of the Morning Sun; in that which looks toward the East, I take the Cool of the Evening; in that which looks toward the South, but lies open to the North, I take Sanctuary against the Heats of the Meridian Sun; but we'll walk 'em over, if you please, and take a nearer View of them: See how green 'tis under Foot, and you have the Beauty of painted Flowers in the very Chequers of the Pavement. This Wood, that you see painted upon this Wall, affords me a great Variety of Prospect: For in the first Place, as many Trees as you see, so many Sorts of Trees you see; and all express'd to the Life. As many Birds as you see, so many Kinds you see; especially if there be any scarce Ones, and remarkable upon any Account. For as for Geese, Hens, and Ducks, it is not worth While to draw them. Underneath are four-footed Creatures, or such Birds as live upon the Ground, after the Manner of Quadrupedes. _Ti._ The Variety indeed is wonderful, and every Thing is in Action, either doing or saying something. There's an Owl sits peeping through the Leaves, what says she? _Eu._ She speaks _Greek_; she says, [Greek: Sôphronei, ou pasin hiptêmi], she commands us to act advisedly; _I do not fly to all_; because an inconsiderate Rashness does not fall out happily to all Persons. There is an Eagle quarrying upon a Hare, and a Beetle interceding to no Purpose; there is a Wren stands by the Beetle, and she is a mortal Enemy to the Eagle. _Ti._ What has this Swallow got in her Mouth? _Eu._ The Herb Celandine; don't you know the Plant? with it, she restores Sight to her blind young Ones. _Ti._ What odd Sort of Lizard is this? _Eu._ It is not a Lizard, but a Chamæleon. _Ti._ Is this the Chamæleon, there is so much Talk of? I thought it had been a Beast twice as big as a Lion, and the Name is twice as long too. _En._ This Chamæleon is always gaping, and always hungry. This is a wild Fig-Tree, and that is his Aversion. He is otherwise harmless; and yet the little gaping Creature has Poison in him too, that you mayn't contemn him. _Ti._ But I don't see him change his Colour. _Eu._ True; because he does not change his Place; when he changes his Place, you will see him change his Colour too. _Ti._ What's the Meaning of that Piper? _Eu._ Don't you see a Camel there dancing hard by? _Ti._ I see a very pleasant Fancy; the Ape pipes, and the Camel dances. _Eu._ But it would require at least three Days to run through the Particulars one by one; it will be enough at present to take a cursory View of them. You have in the first Spot, all Sorts of famous Plants painted to the Life: And to increase the Wonder, here are the strongest Poisons in the World, which you may not only look upon, but handle too without Danger. _Ti._ Look ye, here is a Scorpion, an Animal very seldom seen in this Country; but very frequent in _Italy_, and very mischievous too: But the Colour in the Picture seems not to be natural. _Eu._ Why so? _Ti._ It seems too pale methinks; for those in _Italy_ are blacker. _Eu._ Don't you know the Herb it has fallen upon? _Ti._ Not very well. _Eu._ That's no Wonder, for it does not grow in these Parts: It is Wolf's-bane, so deadly a Poison, that upon the very touch of it, a Scorpion is stupified, grows pale, and yields himself overcome; but when he is hurt with one Poison, he seeks his Remedy with another. Do you see the two Sorts of Hellebore hard by; if the Scorpion can but get himself clear of the Wolf's-bane, and get to the white Hellebore, he recovers his former Vigour, by the very Touch of a different Poison. _Ti._ Then the Scorpion is undone, for he is never like to get off from the Wolfs'-bane. But do Scorpions speak here? _Eu._ Yes, they do, and speak _Greek_ too. _Ti._ What does he say? _Eu._ [Greek: Eure theos ton alitron], _God hath found out the Guilty._ Here besides the Grass, you see all Sorts of Serpents. Here is the Basilisk, that is not only formidable for his Poison; but the very Flash of his Eyes is also mortal. _Ti._ And he says something too. _Eu._ Yes, he says, _Oderint, dum metuant; Let them hate me, so they fear me._ _Ti._ Spoken like a King entirely. _Eu._ Like a Tyrant rather, not at all like a King. Here a Lizard fights with a Viper, and here lies the _Dipsas_ Serpent upon the Catch, hid under the Shell of an _Estridge_ Egg. Here you see the whole Policy of the Ant, which we are call'd upon to imitate by _Solomon_ and _Horace_. Here are _Indian_ Ants that carry Gold, and hoard it up. _Ti._ O good God! how is it possible for a Man to be weary of this Entertainment. _Eu._ And yet at some other Time you shall see I'll give you your Belly full of it. Now look before you at a Distance, there is a third Wall, where you have Lakes, Rivers, and Seas, and all Sorts of rare Fishes. This is the River _Nile_, in which you see the _Dolphin_, that natural Friend to Mankind, fighting with a _Crocodile_, Man's deadly Enemy. Upon the Banks and Shores you see several amphibious Creatures, as Crabs, Seals, Beavers. Here is a Polypus, a Catcher catch'd by an Oyster. _Ti._ What does he say? [Greek: airôn airoumai]; _The Taker taken._ The Painter has made the Water wonderfully transparent. _Eu._ If he had not done so, we should have wanted other Eyes. Just by there's another Polypus playing upon the Face of the Sea like a little Cock-Boat; and there you see a Torpedo lying along upon the Sands, both of a Colour, you may touch them here with your Hand without any Danger. But we must go to something else, for these Things feed the Eye, but not the Belly. _Ti._ Have you any more to be seen then? _Eu._ You shall see what the Back-side affords us by and by. Here's an indifferent large Garden parted: The one a Kitchen Garden, that is my Wife's and the Family's; the other is a Physick Garden, containing the choicest physical Herbs. At the left Hand there is an open Meadow, that is only a green Plot enclos'd with a quick-set Hedge. There sometimes I take the Air, and divert myself with good Company. Upon the right Hand there's an Orchard, where, when you have Leisure, you shall see a great Variety of foreign Trees, that I have brought by Degrees to endure this Climate. _Ti._ O wonderful! the King himself has not such a Seat. _Eu._ At the End of the upper Walk there's an Aviary, which I'll shew you after Dinner, and there you'll see various Forms, and hear various Tongues, and their Humours are as various. Among some of them there is an Agreeableness and mutual Love, and among others an irreconcilable Aversion: And then they are so tame and familiar, that when I'm at Supper, they'll come flying in at the Window to me, even to the Table, and take the Meat out of my Hands. If at any Time I am upon the Draw-Bridge you see there, talking, perhaps with a Friend, they'll some of them sit hearkening, others of them will perch upon my Shoulders or Arms, without any Sort of Fear, for they find that no Body hurts them. At the further End of the Orchard I have my Bees, which is a Sight worth seeing. But I must not show you any more now, that I may have something to entertain you with by and by. I'll shew you the rest after Dinner. _Boy._ Sir, my Mistress and Maid say that the Dinner will be spoil'd. _Eu._ Bid her have a little Patience, and we'll come presently. My friends, let us wash, that we may come to the Table with clean Hands as well as Hearts. The very _Pagans_ us'd a Kind of Reverence in this Case; how much more then should _Christians_ do it; if it were but in Imitation of that sacred Solemnity of our Saviour with his Disciples at his last Supper: And thence comes the Custom of washing of Hands, that if any Thing of Hatred, Ill-Will, or any Pollution should remain in the Mind of any one, he might purge it out, before he sits down at the Table. For it is my Opinion, that the Food is the wholesomer for the Body, if taken with a purified Mind. _Ti._ We believe that it is a certain Truth. _Eu. Christ_ himself gave us this Example, that we should sit down to the Table with a Hymn; and I take it from this, that we frequently read in the Evangelists, that he bless'd or gave Thanks to his Father before he broke Bread, and that he concluded with giving of Thanks: And if you please, I'll say you a Grace that St. _Chrysostom_ commends to the Skies in one of his Homilies, which he himself interpreted. _Ti._ We desire you would. _Eu._ Blessed be thou, O God, who has fed me from my Youth up, and providest Food for all Flesh: Fill thou our Hearts with Joy and Gladness, that partaking plentifully of thy Bounty, we may abound to every good Work, through _Christ Jesus_ our Lord, with whom, to thee and the Holy Ghost, be Glory, Honour, and Power, World without End. _Amen._ _Eu._ Now sit down, and let every Man take his Friend next him: The first Place is yours, _Timothy_, in Right of your Grey Hairs. _Ti._ The only Thing in the World that gives a Title to it. _Eu._ We can only judge of what we see, and must leave the rest to God. _Sophronius_, keep you close to your Principal. _Theophilus_ and _Eulalius_, do you take the right Side of the Table; _Chrysoglottus_ and _Theodidactus_ they shall have the left. _Uranius_ and _Nephalius_ must make a Shift with what is left. I'll keep this Corner. _Ti._ This must not be, the Master of the House ought to take the first Place. _Eu._ The House is as much yours as mine, Gentlemen; however, if I may rule within my own Jurisdiction, I'll sit where I please, and I have made my Choice already. Now may Christ, the Enlivener of all, and without whom nothing can be pleasant, vouchsafe to be with us, and exhilarate our Minds by his Presence. _Ti._ I hope he will be pleased so to do; but where shall he sit, for the Places are all taken up? _Eu._ I would have him in every Morsel and Drop that we eat and drink; but especially, in our Minds. And the better to fit us for the Reception of so divine a Guest, if you will, you shall have some Portion of Scripture read in the Interim; but so that you shall not let that hinder you from eating your Dinner heartily. _Ti._ We will eat heartily, and attend diligently. _Eu._ This Entertainment pleases me so much the better, because it diverts vain and frivolous Discourse, and affords Matter of profitable Conversation: I am not of their Mind, who think no Entertainment diverting, that does not abound with foolish wanton Stories, and bawdy Songs. There is pure Joy springs from a clear and pure Conscience; and those are the happy Conversations, where such Things are mentioned, that we can reflect upon afterwards with Satisfaction and Delight; and not such as we shall afterwards be ashamed of, and have Occasion to repent of. _Ti._ It were well if we were all as careful to consider those Things as we are sure they are true. _Eu._ And besides, these Things have not only a certain and valuable Profit in them, but one Month's Use of them, would make them become pleasant too. _Ti._ And therefore it is the best Course we can take to accustom ourselves to that which is best. _Eu._ Read us something, Boy, and speak out distinctly. _Boy._ Prov. xxi. _The King's Heart is in the Hand of the Lord; as the Rivers of Waters, he turneth it whither soever he will. Every Man is right in his own Eyes, but the Lord pondereth the Hearts. To do Justice and Judgment, is more acceptable to the Lord than Sacrifice_, ver. 1, 2, 3. _Eu._ Hold there, that's enough; for it is better to take down a little with an Appetite, than to devour more than a Man can digest. _Ti._ 'Tis better, I must confess, in more Cases than this: _Pliny_ would have one never have _Tully's_ Offices out of ones Hand; and in my Opinion, it were well if all Persons, but especially Statesmen, had him every Word by Heart: And as for this little Book of Proverbs, I have always look'd upon it the best Manual we can carry about with us. _Eu._ I knew our Dinner would be unsavoury, and therefore I procured this Sauce. _Ti._ Here is nothing but what is very good; but if you had given us this Lecture to a Dish of Beets only, without either Pepper, Wine or Vinegar, it would have been a delicious Treat. _Eu._ I could commend it with a better Grace, if I did but perfectly understand what I have heard. And I would we had some able Divine among us, that did not only understand it, but would thoroughly expound it. But I don't know how far it may be lawful for us Laymen to descant upon these Matters. _Ti._ Indeed, I see no Hurt in't, even for a _Tarpawlin_ to do it, abating the Rashness of passing Sentence in the Case. And who knows but that _Christ_ himself (who has promis'd to be present, where two or three are gathered together in his Name) may vouchsafe his Assistance to us, that are a much larger Congregation. _Eu._ What if we should take these three Verses, and divide 'em among us nine Guests? _Guests._ We like it well, provided the Master of the Feast lead the Way. _Eu._ I would not refuse it; but that I am afraid I shall entertain you worse in my Exposition, than I do in my Dinner: But however, Ceremony apart, that I may not seem to want much Persuasion, omitting other Meanings that Interpreters put upon the Place: This seems to me to be the moral Sense; "That private Men may be wrought upon by Admonition, Reproofs, Laws and Menaces; but Kings who are above Fear, the more they are opposed, the fiercer their Displeasure; and therefore Kings, as often as they are resolutely bent upon any, should be left to themselves: Not in respect of any Confidence of the Goodness of their Inclinations; but because God many Times makes Use of their Follies and Wickedness, as the Instruments for the Punishment of the Wicked." As he forbad that _Nebuchodonosor_ should be resisted, because he had determin'd to chastise his People by him, as an Instrument. And peradventure, that which _Job_ says, looks this Way: _Who maketh the Hypocrite reign for the Sins of his People._ And perhaps, that which _David_ says, bewailing his Sin, has the same Tendency: _Against thee only have I sinned, and done this Evil in thy Sight:_ Not as if the Iniquity of Kings were not fatal to the People; but because there is none that has Authority to condemn them, but God, from whose Judgment there is indeed no Appeal, be the Person never so great. _Ti._ I like the Interpretation well enough thus far; but what is meant by _the Rivers of Waters?_ _Eu._ There is a Similitude made Use of that explains it. The Wrath of a King is impetuous and unruly, and not to be led this Way or that Way, but presses forward with a restless Fury: As the Sea spreads itself over the Land, and flows sometimes this Way, and sometimes that Way, not sparing Pastures nor Palaces, and sometimes buries in its own Bowels all that stands in its Way; and if you should attempt to stop its Course, or to turn it another Way, you may e'en as well let it alone: Whereas, let it but alone, and it will sink of itself, as it happens in many great Rivers, as is storied of _Achelous._ There is less Injury done by quietly yielding, than by violently resisting. _Ti._ Is there no Remedy then against the Unruliness of wicked Kings? _Eu._ The first will be, not to receive a Lion into the City: The second, is to tie him up by parliamentary and municipal Laws, that he can't easily break out into Tyranny: But the best of all would be, to train him up from his Childhood, in the Principles of Piety and Virtue, and to form his Will, before he understands his Power. Good Counsels and Persuasions go a great Way, provided they be seasonable and gentle. But the last Resort must be to beg of God, to incline the King's Heart to those Things that are becoming a Christian King. _Ti._ Do you excuse yourself, because you are a Layman? If I were a Batchelor in Divinity, I should value myself upon this Interpretation. _Eu._ I can't tell whether it is right or wrong, it is enough for me if it were not impious or heretical. However, I have done what you required of me; and now, according to the Rules of Conversation, 'tis my Turn to hear your Opinion. _Ti._ The Compliment you pass'd upon my grey Hairs, gives me some kind of Title to speak next to the Text, which will bear yet a more mysterious Meaning. _Eu._ I believe it may, and I should be glad to hear it. _Ti._ "By the Word King, may be meant, a Man so perfected, as to have wholly subdued his Lusts, and to be led by the Impulse of the Divine Spirit only. Now perhaps it may not be proper to tie up such a Person to the Conditions of human Laws; but to leave him to his Master, by whom he is govern'd: Nor is he to be judg'd according to the Measures by which the Frailty of imperfect Men advances towards true Holiness; but if he steers another Course, we ought to say with St. _Paul, God hath accepted him, and to his own Master he stands or falls. He that is spiritual, judgeth of all Things, but he himself is judged of no Man_." To such, therefore, let no Man prescribe; for the Lord, who hath appointed Bounds to the Seas and Rivers, hath the Heart of the King in his Hand, and inclines it which Way soever it pleases him: What need is there to prescribe to him, that does of his own accord better Things than human Laws oblige him to? Or, how great a Rashness were it, to bind that Person by human Constitutions, who, it is manifest, by evident Tokens, is directed by the Inspirations of the Holy Spirit. _Eu._ O _Timothy_, thou hast not only got grey Hairs on this Head, but you have likewise a Mind venerable for experimental Knowledge. And I would to God, that we had more such Kings as this King of yours among Christians, who, indeed, all of them ought to be such. But we have dwelt long enough upon our Eggs and Herbs; let them be taken away, and something else set in their Room. _Ti._ We have done so well already on this Ovation, that there is no Need of any more, either of Supplication or Triumph. _Eu._ But since, by God's Assistance, we have succeeded so well in the first Verse, I wish your _Umbra_ would explain the other, which seems to me a little more obscure. _Soph._ If you'll put a good Construction upon what I shall say, I will give you my Thoughts upon it. How else can a Shadow pretend to give Light to any Thing? _Eu._ I undertake that for all the Company; such Shadows as you give as much Light as our Eyes will well bear. _Soph._ The same Thing seems to be meant here, that _Paul_ says: _That there are several Ways of Life, that lead to Holiness_. Some affect the Ministry, some Celibacy, others a married State; some a retired Life, others publick Administrations of the Government, according to the various Dispositions of their Bodies and Minds: Again, to one Man all Meats are indifferent, another puts a Difference betwixt this Meat and that; another he makes a Difference of Days, another thinks every Day alike. In these Things St. _Paul_ would have every one enjoy his own Freedom of Mind, without reproaching another; nor should we censure any Man in those Cases, but leave him to be judg'd by him that weigheth the Heart. It oftentimes happens, that he that eats may be more acceptable to God, than he that forbears; and he that breaks a Holy-day, than he that seems to observe it; and he that marries, is more acceptable to God, than a great many that live single. I who am but a Shadow, have spoken my Mind. _Eu._ I wish I could have Conversation with such Shadows often. I think you have hit the Nail on the Head: But here is one that has lived a Batchelor, and not of the Number of Saints, who have made themselves Eunuchs for the Sake of the Kingdom of God but was made so by force, to gratify our Bellies, _till God shall destroy both them and Meats_. It is a Capon of my own feeding. I am a great Lover of boil'd Meats. This is a very good Soop, and these are choice Lettuces that are in it. Pray every one help himself to what he likes best. But that you may not be deceiv'd, I tell you, that we have a Course of Roast a coming, and after that some small Desert, and so conclude. _Ti._ But we exclude your Wife from Table. _Eu._ When you bring your own Wives, mine shall keep them Company. She would, if she were here, be nothing but a Mute in our Company. She talks with more Freedom among the Women, and we are more at Liberty to philosophise. And besides that, there would be Danger, lest we should be serv'd as _Socrates_ was, when he had several Philosophers at Table with him, who took more Pleasure in talking than they did in eating, and held a long Dispute, had all their Meat thrown on the Floor by _Xantippe_, who in a Rage overturn'd the Table. _Ti._ I believe you have nothing of that to be afraid of: She's one of the best-humour'd Women in the World. _Eu._ She is such a one indeed, that I should be loath to change her if I might; and I look upon myself to be very happy upon that Account. Nor do I like their Opinion, who think a Man happy, because he never had a Wife; I approve rather what the _Hebrew_ Sage said, _He that has a good Wife has a good Lot_. _Ti._ It is commonly our own Fault, if our Wives be bad, either for loving such as are bad, or making them so; or else for not teaching them better. _Eu._ You say very right, but all this While I want to hear the third Verse expounded: And methinks the divine _Theophilus_ looks as if he had a Mind to do it. _Theo._ Truly my Mind was upon my Belly; but however, I'll speak my Mind, since I may do it without Offence. _Eu._ Nay, it will be a Favour to us if you should happen to be in any Error, because by that Means you will give us Occasion of finding the Truth. _Th._ The Sentence seems to be of the same Importance with that the Lord expresses by the Prophet _Hosea_, Chap. vi. _I desire Mercy and not Sacrifice, and the Knowledge of God more than Burnt-Offerings_. This is fully explain'd, and to the Life, by the Lord _Jesus_, in St. _Matthew_, Chap. ix. who being at Table in the House of _Levi_ the Publican, with several others of the same Stamp and Profession, the _Pharisees_, who were puff'd up with their external Observance of the Law, without any Regard to the Precepts of it, whereupon the whole Law and Prophets depend, (with a Design to alienate the Affections of his Disciples from him) ask'd them, why their Master sat at the Table of Publicans and Sinners. From whose Conversation those _Jews_, that would be accounted the more holy, abstain'd; to that Degree, that if any of the stricter Sort had met any of them by Chance, as soon as they came Home they would wash themselves. And when the Disciples, being yet but raw, could give no Answer; the Lord answer'd both for himself and them: _They_ (says he) _who are whole need not a Physician, but they that are sick; but go you and learn what that meaneth, I will have Mercy and not Sacrifice; for I came not to call the Righteous but Sinners_. _Eu._ Indeed you have very handsomely explain'd the Matter, by the comparing of Texts, which is the best Way of expounding Scripture. But I would fain know what it is he calls Sacrifice, and what Mercy. For how can we reconcile it, that God should be against Sacrifices, who had commanded so many to be offered? _Th._ How far God is against Sacrifices, he himself teaches us in the first Chapter of the Prophecy of _Isaiah_. There were certain legal Obligations among the _Jews_, which were rather Significations of Holiness, than of the Essence of it; of this Sort are Holy-Days, Sabbatisms, Fasts, Sacrifices; and there were certain other Obligations of perpetual Force, being good in their own Nature, and not meerly by being commanded. Now God was displeased with the _Jews_, not because they did observe the Rites and Ceremonies, but because being vainly puffed up with these, they neglected those Things which God does in a more especial Manner require of us; and wallowing in Avarice, Pride, Rapines, Hatred, Envy, and other Iniquities, they thought they merited Heaven, because that upon Holy-Days, they visited the Temple, offered Sacrifices, abstained from forbidden Meats, and frequently fasted; embracing the Shadow of Religion, and neglecting the Substance. But in that, he says, _I will have Mercy, and not Sacrifice_; I take it to be said according to the Idiom of the _Hebrew_ Tongue; that is to say, _Mercy rather than Sacrifices, as Solomon_ interprets it in this Text, _to do Mercy and Judgment, is more acceptable to the Lord than Sacrifices_. And again, the Scripture expresses all the charitable Offices to our Neighbour, under the Terms of Mercy, and eleemosynary Tenderness, which takes its Name from Pity. By Sacrifices, I suppose is intended, whatsoever respects corporal Ceremonies, and has any Affinity with Judaism, such as are the choice of Meats, appointed Garments, Fasting, Sacrifices, the saying over of Prayers, as a Boy says his Lesson: resting upon Holy-Days. These Things, as they are not to be neglected in their due Season, so they become displeasing to God, if a Man relying too much upon these Observances, shall neglect to do Acts of Mercy, as often as his Brother's Necessity requires it. And it has some Appearance of Holiness in it, to avoid the Conversation of wicked Men: But this ought to give Place as oft as there is an Opportunity offer'd of shewing Charity to our Neighbour. It is a Point of Obedience to rest upon Holy Days: But it would be very impious to make such a Conscience of a Day as to suffer a Brother to perish upon it. Therefore to keep the Lord's Day is a Kind of _Sacrifice_: But to be reconcil'd to my Brother is a Point of _Mercy_. And then, as for _Judgment_, though that may seem to respect Persons in Power; who oftentimes oppress the weak therewith, yet it seems reasonable enough in my Opinion that the poor Man should remind him of that in _Hosea, And the Knowledge of God more than burnt Offerings_. No Man can be said to keep the Law of God, but he that keeps it according to the Mind of God. The _Jews_ could lift up an Ass upon the Sabbath that was fallen into a Pit, and yet calumniated our Saviour for preserving a Man upon that Day. This was a preposterous Judgment, and not according to the Knowledge of God; for they did not consider that these Things were made for Man, and not Man for them. But I should have esteem'd it Presumption in me to have said these Things, if you had not commanded it; and I had rather learn of others Things more _à propos_. _Eu._ This is so far from being a Presumption, that it looks rather like an Inspiration. But while we are thus plentifully feeding our Souls, we must not neglect their Companions. _Ti._ Who are those? _Eu._ Our Bodies; are not they the Soul's Companions? I had rather call them so, than Instruments, Habitations or Sepulchres. _Ti._ This is certainly to be plentifully refresh'd when the whole Man is refresh'd. _Eu._ I see you are very backward to help yourselves; therefore, if you please, I'll order the Roast-Meat to be brought us, lest instead of a good Entertainment I should treat you with a long one. Now you see your Ordinary. Here is a Shoulder of Mutton, but it is a very fine one, a Capon and two Brace of Partridges. These indeed I had from the Market, this little Farm supply'd me with the rest. _Ti._ It is a noble Dinner, fit for a Prince. _Eu._ For a _Carmelite_, you mean. But such as it is you are welcome to it. If the Provision be not very dainty you have it very freely. _Ti._ Your House is so full of Talk, that not only the Walls but the very Cup speaks. _Eu._ What does it say? _Ti. No Man is hurt but by himself._ _Eu._ The Cup pleads for the Cause of the Wine. For it is a common Thing, if Persons get a Fever or the Head-ach by over drinking, to lay it upon the Wine, when they have brought it upon themselves by their Excess. _Soph._ Mine speaks _Greek_. [Greek: En oinô alêtheia.] _In Wine there's Truth_ (when Wine is in the Wit is out.) _Eu._ This gives us to understand that it is not safe for Priests or Privy-Counsellors to give themselves so to Wine, because Wine commonly brings that to the Mouth that lay conceal'd in the Heart. _Soph._ In old Time among the _Egyptians_ it was unlawful for their Priests to drink any Wine at all, and yet in those Days there was no auricular Confession. _Eu._ It is now become lawful for all Persons to drink Wine, but how expedient it is I know not. What Book is that, _Eulalius_, you take out of your Pocket? It seems to be a very neat one, it is all over gilded. _Eulal._ It is more valuable for the Inside than the Out. It is St. _Paul's_ Epistles, that I always carry about me, as my beloved Entertainment, which I take out now upon the Occasion of something you said, which minds me of a Place that I have beat my Brains about a long Time, and I am not come to a full Satisfaction in yet. It is in the 6th Chapter of the first Epistle to the _Corinthians_, _All Things are lawful for me, but all Things are not expedient; all Things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the Power of any_. In the first Place (if we will believe the Stoicks) nothing can be profitable to us, that is not honest: How comes _Paul_ then to distinguish betwixt that which is lawful, and that which is expedient? It is not lawful to whore, or get drunk, how then are all Things lawful? But if _Paul_ speaks of some particular Things only, which he would have to be lawful, I can't guess by the Tenor of the Place, which those particular Things are. From that which follows, it may be gather'd, that he there speaks of the Choice of Meats. For some abstain from Things offer'd to Idols, and others from Meats forbidden by _Moses_'s Law. In the 8th Chapter he treats of Things offer'd to Idols, and in the 10th Chapter explaining the Meaning of this Place, says, _All Things are lawful for me, but all Things are not expedient; all Things are lawful for me, but all Things edify not. Let no Man seek his own, but every Man the Things of another. Whatsoever is sold in the Shambles, eat ye_. And that which St. _Paul_ subjoins, agrees with what he said before: _Meats for the Belly, and the Belly for Meats; but God shall destroy both it and them_. Now that which has Respect to the _Judaical_ Choice of Meats, is in the Close of the 10th Chapter. _Give none Offence, neither to the Jews nor the Gentiles, nor to the Church of God; even as I please all Men in all Things, not seeking my own Profit, but the Profit of many, that they may be sav'd_. Where in that he saith to the _Gentiles_, he seems to have Respect to Things offer'd to Idols; and where he speaketh to the _Jews_ he seems to refer to the Choice of Meats; what he says to the Church of God appertains to the Weak, collected out of both Sorts. It was lawful, it seems, to eat of all Meats whatsoever, and all Things that are Clean to the Clean. But the Question remaining is, Whether it be expedient or no? The Liberty of the Gospel makes all Things lawful; but Charity has always a Regard to my Neighbour's Good, and therefore often abstains from Things lawful, rather chasing to condescend to what is for another's Advantage, than to make Use of its own Liberty. But now here arises a double Difficulty; first, that here is nothing that either precedes or follows in the Context that agrees with this Sense. For he chides the _Corinthians_ for being Seditious, Fornicators, Adulterers, and given to go to Law before wicked Judges. Now what Coherence is there with this to say, _All Things are lawful for me, but all Things are not expedient_? And in the following Matter, he returns to the Case of _Incontinence_, which he had also repeated before, only leaving out the Charge of Contention: _But the Body_, says he, _is not for Fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the Body._ But however, this Scruple may be solv'd too, because a little before, in the Catalogue of Sins, he had made Mention of Idolatry. _Be not deceived, neither Fornicators, nor Idolaters, nor Adulterers_; now the Eating of Things offer'd to Idols is a certain Kind of Idolatry, and therefore he immediately subjoins, _Meat is for the Belly, and the Belly for Meat_. Intimating, that in a Case of Necessity, and for a Season, a Man may eat any Thing, unless Charity towards his Neighbour shall dissuade it: But that Uncleanness is in all Persons, and at all Times to be detested. It is Matter of Necessity that we eat, but that Necessity shall be taken away at the Resurrection of the Dead. But if we are lustful, that proceeds from Wickedness. But there is another Scruple that I can't tell how to solve, or how to reconcile to that Passage: _But I will not be brought under the Power of any_. For he says, he has the Power of all Things, and yet he will not be brought under the Power of any one. If he may be said to be under another Man's Power, that abstains for Fear of offending, it is what he speaks of himself in the ninth Chapter, _For though I be free from all Men, yet have made myself Servant to all, that I may gain all._ St. _Ambrose_ stumbling, I suppose, at this Scruple, takes this to be the Apostle's genuine Sense for the better Understanding of what he says in the 9th Chapter, where he claims to himself the Power of doing that which the rest of the Apostles (either true or false) did, of receiving a Maintenance from them to whom he preach'd the Gospel. But he forbore this, although he might have done it, as a Thing expedient among the _Corinthians_, whom he reprov'd for so many and enormous Iniquities. And moreover, he that receives, is in some Degree in the Power of him from whom he receives, and suffers some Kind of Abatement in his Authority. For he that takes, cannot so freely reprove his Benefactor; and he that gives will not so easily take a Reprehension from him that he has obliged. And in this did the Apostle _Paul_ abstain from that which was lawful, for the Credit of his apostolical Liberty, which in this Case he would not have to be rendered obnoxious to any one, that he might with the greater Freedom and Authority reprehend their Vices. Indeed, I like this Explication of St. _Ambrose_ very well. But yet, if any Body had rather apply this Passage to Meats, St. _Paul_'s, Saying, _but I will not be brought under the Power of any_, may be taken in this Sense: Although I may sometimes abstain from Meats offered to Idols, or forbidden by the _Mosaical_ Law, out of Regard to the Salvation of my Brothers Souls, and the Furtherance of the Gospel; yet my Mind is free, well knowing that it is lawful to eat all Manner of Meats, according to the Necessity of the Body. But there were some false Apostles, who went about to persuade them, that some Meats, were in themselves, by their own Nature unclean, and were to be forborn, not upon Occasion only, but at all Times; and that as strict as Adultery or Murder. Now those that were thus misled, were reduced under another's Power, and fell from their Gospel Liberty. _Theophylact_ (as I remember) is the only Man that advances an Opinion different from all these. _It is lawful_, says he, _to eat all Sorts of Meats; but it is not expedient to eat to Excess; for from Luxury comes Lust._ There is no Impiety, indeed, in this Sense; but it does not seem to me to be the genuine Sense of the Place. I have acquainted you with my Scruples, it will become your Charity to set me to Rights. _Eu._ Your Discourse is, indeed, answerable to your Name, and one that knows how to propound Questions as you do, has no Need of any Body to answer them but himself. For you have so proposed your Doubts, as to put one quite out of doubt, altho' St. _Paul_, in that Epistle, (proposing to handle many Things at once) passes often from one Argument to another, repeating what he had intermitted. _Ch._ If I were not afraid, that by my Loquacity I should divert you from eating your Dinners, and did think it were lawful to intermix any Thing out of profane Authors with sacred Discourses, I would venture to propose something that I read to Day; not so much with Perplexity, as with a singular Delight. _Eu._ Whatsoever is pious, and conduces to good Manners, ought not to be called profane. The first Place must indeed be given to the Authority of the Scriptures; but nevertheless, I sometimes find some Things said or written by the Antients; nay, even by the Heathens; nay, by the Poets themselves, so chastly, so holily, and so divinely, that I cannot persuade myself, but that when they wrote them, they were divinely inspired; and perhaps the Spirit of Christ diffuses itself farther than we imagine; and that there are more Saints than we have in our Catalogue. To confess freely among Friends, I can't read _Tully_ of _Old Age_, of _Friendship_, his _Offices_, or his _Tusculan Questions_, without kissing the Book, and Veneration for that divine Soul. And on the contrary, when I read some of our modern Authors, treating of _Politics, Oeconomics_ and _Ethics_, good God! how cold they are in Comparison of these? Nay, how do they seem to be insensible of what they write themselves? So that I had rather lose _Scotus_ and twenty more such as he, than one _Cicero_ or _Plutarch_. Not that I am wholly against them neither; but because, by the reading of the one, I find myself become better; whereas, I rise from the other, I know not how coldly affected to Virtue, but most violently inclin'd to Cavil and Contention; therefore never fear to propose it, whatsoever it is. _Ch._ Although all _Tully_'s Books of Philosophy seem to breathe out something divine; yet that Treatise of _Old Age_, that he wrote in old Age, seems to me to be according to the _Greek_ Proverb; _the Song of the dying Swan_. I was reading it to Day, and these Words pleasing me above the rest, I got 'em by Heart: _Should it please God to give me a Grant to begin my Life again from my very Cradle, and once more to run over the Course of my Years I have lived, I would not upon any Terms accept of it: Nor would I, having in a Manner finished my Race, run it over again from the starting Place to the Goal: For what Pleasure has this Life in it? nay, rather, what Pain has it not? But if there were not, there would be undoubtedly in it Satiety or Trouble. I am not for bewailing my past Life as a great many, and learned Men too, have done, nor do I repent that I have liv'd; because, I have liv'd so, that I am satisfy'd I have not liv'd in vain. And when I leave this Life, I leave it as an Inn, and not as a Place of Abode. For Nature has given us our Bodies as an Inn to lodge in, and not to dwell in. O! glorious Day will that be, when I shall leave this Rabble-rout and Defilements of the World behind me, to go to that Society and World of Spirits!_ Thus far out of _Cato_. What could be spoken more divinely by a Christian? I wish all the Discourses of our Monks, even with their holy Virgins, were such as the Dialogue of this aged Pagan, with the Pagan Youths of his Time. _Eu._ It may be objected, that this Colloquy of _Tully_'s was but a Fiction. _Ch._ It is all one to me, whether the Honour of these Expressions be given to _Cato_, who thought and spoke them, or to _Cicero_, whose Mind could form such divine Things in Contemplation, and whose Pen could represent such excellent Matter in Words so answerable to it; though indeed I am apt to think that _Cato_, if he did not speak these very Words, yet that in his familiar Conversation he us'd Words of the very same Import. For indeed, _M. Tully_ was not a Man of that Impudence, to draw _Cato_ otherwise than he was. Beside, that such an Unlikeness in a Dialogue would have been a great Indecorum, which is the thing chiefly to be avoided in this Sort of Discourse; and especially, at a Time when his Character was fresh in the Memories of all Men. _Th._ That which you say is very likely: But I'll tell you what came into my Mind upon your Recital. I have often admired with myself, that considering that all Men wish for long Life, and are afraid of Death; that yet, I have scarce found any Man so happy, (I don't speak of old, but of middle-aged Men); but that if the Question were put to him, whether or no, if it should be granted him to grow young again, and run over the same good and ill Fortune that he had before, he would not make the same Answer that _Cato_ did; especially passing a true Reflection upon the Mixture of Good and Ill of his past Life. For the Remembrance even of the pleasantest Part of it is commonly attended with Shame, and Sting of Conscience, insomuch that the Memory of past Delights is more painful to us, than that of past Misfortunes. Therefore it was wisely done of the ancient Poets in the Fable of _Lethe_, to represent the Dead drinking largely of the Waters of Forgetfulness, before their Souls were affected with any Desire of the Bodies they had left behind them. _Ur._ It is a Thing well worthy of our Admiration, and what I myself have observ'd in some Persons. But that in _Cato_ that pleases me the most is his Declaration. _Neither am I sorry that I have liv'd._ Where is the _Christian_, that has so led his Life, as to be able to say as much as this old Man? It is a common Thing for Men, who have scrap'd great Estates together by Hook or by Crook, when they are upon their Death Beds, and about to leave them, then to think they have not liv'd in vain. But _Cato_ therefore thought, that he had not liv'd in vain, upon the Conscience of his having discharg'd all the Parts of an honest and useful Citizen, and an uncorrupted Magistrate; and that he should leave to Posterity, Monuments of his Virtue and Industry. And what could be spoken more divinely than this, _I depart as from an Inn, and not an Habitation_. So long we may stay in an Inn till the Host bids us be gone, but a Man will not easily be forc'd from his own House. And yet from hence the Fall of the House, or Fire, or some Accident drives us. Or if nothing of these happen, the Structure falls to Pieces with old Age, thereby admonishing us that we must change our Quarters. _Neph._ That Expression of _Socrates_ in _Plato_ is not less elegant: _Methinks_, says he, _the Soul of a Man is in the Body as in a Garrison, there is no quitting of it without the Leave of the Generals, nor no staying any longer in it, than during the Pleasure of him that plac'd him there._ This Allusion of _Plato'_s, of a Garrison instead of a House, is the more significant of the two. For in a House is only imply'd Abode, in a Garrison we are appointed to some Duty by our Governor. And much to the same Purpose is it, that in Holy Writ the Life of Man is sometimes call'd a Warfare, and at other times a Race. _Ur._ But _Cato_'s Speech, methinks, seems to agree very well with that of St. _Paul_, who writing to the _Corinthians_, calls that heavenly Mansion, which we look for after this Life in one Place [Greek: oikian] a House, in another [Greek: oikêtêrion] a Mansion, and moreover (besides that) he calls the Body [Greek: skênos] a Tabernacle. For _we also_, (says he) _who are in this Tabernacle, groan, being burthened._ _Neph._ Much after this Manner says St. _Peter; And I think it meet_ (says he) _as long as I am in this Tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in Mind, being assured that I shall shortly put off this Tabernacle._ And what else does _Christ_ himself say to us, but that we should live and watch, as if we were presently to die: And so apply ourselves to honest Things, as if we were to live for ever? And when we hear these excellent Words of _Cato, O that glorious Day_, do we not seem to hear St. _Paul_ himself saying, _I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ_? _Ch._ How happy are they that wait for Death with such a Frame of Mind? But as for _Cato_'s Speech, altho' it be an excellent one, methinks there is more Boldness and Arrogance in it, than becomes a Christian. Indeed, I never read anything in a Heathen, that comes nearer to a Christian, than what _Socrates_ said to _Crito_, a little before he drank his Poison; _Whether I shall be approv'd or not in the Sight of God, I cannot tell; but this I am certain of, that I have most affectionately endeavoured to please him; and I have a good Hope, that he will accept of my Endeavours._ This great Man was diffident of his own Performances; but so, that being conscious to himself of the Propensity of his Inclination to obey the divine Will, he conceived a good Hope, that God, of his Goodness, would accept him for the Honesty of his Intentions. _Neph._ Indeed, it was a wonderful Elevation of Mind in a Man, that knew not Christ, nor the holy Scriptures: And therefore, I can scarce forbear, when I read such Things of such Men, but cry out, _Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis; Saint_ Socrates, _pray for us._ _Ch._ And I have much ado sometimes to keep myself from entertaining good Hopes of the Souls of _Virgil_ and _Horace._ _Neph._ But how unwillingly have I seen many Christians die? Some put their Trust in Things not to be confided in; others breathe out their Souls in Desperation, either out of a Consciousness of their lewd Lives, or by Reason of Scruples that have been injected into their Minds, even in their dying Hours, by some indiscreet Men. _Ch._ It is no wonder to find them die so, who have spent their Time in philosophizing about Ceremonies all their Lives. _Neph._ What do you mean by Ceremonies? _Ch._ I'll tell you, but with Protestation over and over beforehand, that I don't find Fault with the Sacraments and Rites of the Church, but rather highly approve of them; but I blame a wicked and superstitious Sort of People, or (to put it in the softest Term) the simple and unlearned Persons, who teach People to put their Confidence in these Things, omitting those Things which make them truly Christians. _Neph._ I don't yet clearly understand what it is you aim at. _Ch._ I'll be plainer then. If you look into Christians in common, don't you find they live as if the whole Sum of Religion consisted in Ceremonies? With how much Pomp are the antient Rites of the Church set forth in Baptism? The Infant waits without the Church Door, the Exorcism is performed, the Catechizing is performed, Vows are made, Satan is abjured, with all his Pomps and Pleasures; then the Child is anointed, sign'd, season'd with Salt, dipt, a Charge given to his Sureties to see it well brought up; and the Oblation-Money being paid, they are discharged, and by this Time the Child passes for a Christian, and in some Sense is so. A little Time after, it is anointed again, and in Time learns to confess, receives the Sacrament, is accustom'd to rest upon Holy-Days, to hear Divine Service, to fast sometimes, to abstain from Flesh; and if he observes all these, he passes for an absolute Christian. He marries a Wife, and then comes on another Sacrament; he enters into Holy Orders, is anointed again, and consecrated, his Habit is chang'd, and then to Prayers. Now I approve of the doing of all this well enough; but the doing of them more out of Custom than Conscience, I don't approve; but to think that nothing else is requisite for the making a Christian, I absolutely disapprove: For the greatest Part of Men in the World trust to these Things, and think they have nothing else to do, but get Wealth by Right or Wrong, to gratify their Passions of Rage, Lust, Malice, Ambition: And this they do till they come upon their Death Bed; and then there follows more Ceremonies; Confession upon Confession, more Unction still, the Eucharist is administred; Tapers, the Cross, holy Water are brought in; Indulgencies are procured, if they are to be had for Love or Money; Orders are given for a magnificent Funeral; and then comes on another solemn Contract: When the Man is in the Agony of Death, there's one stands by bawling in his Ear, and now and then dispatches him before his Time, if he chance to be a little in Drink, or have better Lungs than ordinary. Now although these Things may be well enough, as they are done in Conformity to ecclesiastical Customs; yet there are some more internal Impressions, which have an Efficacy to fortify us against the Assaults of Death, by filling our Hearts with Joy, and helping us to go out of the World with a Christian Assurance. _Eu._ You speak very piously and truly; but in the mean Time here is no Body eats; I told you before, that you must expect nothing after the second Course, and that a Country one too, lest any Body should look for Pheasants, Moorhens, and fine Kickshaws. Here, Boy! take away these Things, and bring up the rest. You see, not the Affluence, but the Straitness of my Fortune. This is the Product of my Gardens you have seen; don't spare, if you like any Thing. _Ti._ There's so great a Variety, it does a Man good to look upon it. _Eu._ That you mayn't altogether despise my Thriftiness, this Dish would have chear'd up the Heart of old _Hilarion_, the evangelical Monk, with a hundred more of his Fellows, the Monks of that Age. But _Paul_ and _Anthony_ would have lived a Month upon it. _Ti._ Yes, and Prince _Peter_ too, I fancy would have leap'd at it, when he lodg'd at _Simon_ the Tanner's. _Eu._ Yes; and _Paul_ too, I believe, when by Reason of Poverty he sat up a-Nights to make Tents. _Ti._ How much do we owe to the Goodness of God! But yet, I had rather suffer Hunger with _Peter_ and _Paul_, upon Condition, that what I wanted for my Body, might be made up by the Satisfaction of my Mind. _Eu._ Let us learn of St. _Paul_, both how to abound, and how to suffer Want. When we want, let us praise God, that he has afforded us Matter to exercise our Frugality and Patience upon: When we abound, let us be thankful for his Munificence, who by his Liberality, invites and provokes us to love him; and using those Things the divine Bounty has plentifully bestowed upon us, with Moderation and Temperance; let us be mindful of the Poor, whom God has been pleas'd to suffer to want what he has made abound to us, that neither Side may want an Occasion of exercising Virtue: For he bestows upon us sufficient for the Relief of our Brother's Necessity, that we may obtain his Mercy, and that the Poor on the other Hand, being refresh'd by our Liberality, may give him Thanks for putting it into our Hearts, and recommend us to him in their Prayers; and, very well remember'd! Come hither, Boy; bid my Wife send _Gudula_ some of the roast Meat that's left, 'tis a very good poor Woman in the Neighbourhood big with Child, her Husband is lately dead, a profuse, lazy Fellow, that has left nothing but a Stock of Children. _Ti._ Christ has commanded _to give to every one that asks_; but if I should do so, I should go a begging myself in a Month's Time. _Eu._ I suppose Christ means only such as ask for Necessaries: For to them who ask, nay, who importune, or rather extort great Sums from People to furnish voluptuous Entertainments, or, which is worse, to feed Luxury and Lust, it is Charity to deny; nay, it is a Kind of Rapine to bestow that which we owe to the present Necessity of our Neighbours, upon those that will abuse it; upon this Consideration it is, that it seems to me, that they can scarcely be excus'd from being guilty of a mortal Sin, who at a prodigious Expence, either build or beautify Monasteries or Churches, when in the mean Time so many living Temples of Christ are ready to starve for Want of Food and Clothing, and are sadly afflicted with the Want of other Necessaries. When I was in _England_, I saw St. _Thomas_'s, Tomb all over bedeck'd with a vast Number of Jewels of an immense Price, besides other rich Furniture, even to Admiration; I had rather that these Superfluities should be apply'd to charitable Uses, than to be reserv'd for Princes, that shall one Time or other make a Booty of them. The holy Man, I am confident, would have been better pleas'd, to have his Tomb adorn'd with Leaves and Flowers. When I was in _Lombardy_, I saw a Cloyster of the _Carthusians_, not far from _Pavia_; the Chapel is built from Top to Bottom, within and without, of white Marble, and almost all that is in it, as Altars, Pillars, and Tombs, are all Marble. To what Purpose was it to be at such a vast Expence upon a Marble Temple, for a few solitary Monks to sing in? And 'tis more Burthen to them than Use too, for they are perpetually troubled with Strangers, that come thither, only out of mere Curiosity, to see the Marble Temple. And that, which is yet more ridiculous, I was told there, that there is an Endowment of three thousand Ducats a Year for keeping the Monastery in Repair. And there are some that think that it is Sacrilege, to convert a Penny of that Money to any other pious Uses, contrary to the Intention of the Testator; they had rather pull down, that they may rebuild, than not go on with building. I thought meet to mention these, being something more remarkable than ordinary; tho' we have a World of Instances of this Kind up and down in our Churches. This, in my Opinion, is rather Ambition than Charity. Rich Men now-a-Days will have their Monuments in Churches, whereas in Times past they could hardly get Room for the Saints there: They must have their Images there, and their Pictures, forsooth, with their Names at length, their Titles, and the Inscription of their Donation; and this takes up a considerable Part of the Church; and I believe in Time they'll be for having their Corpse laid even in the very Altars themselves. But perhaps, some will say, would you have their Munificence be discourag'd? I say no, by no Means, provided what they offer to the Temple of God be worthy of it. But if I were a Priest or a Bishop, I would put it into the Heads of those thick-scull'd Courtiers or Merchants, that if they would atone for their Sins to Almighty God, they should privately bestow their Liberality upon the Relief of the Poor. But they reckon all as lost, that goes out so by Piece-meal, and is privily distributed toward the Succour of the Needy, that the next Age shall have no Memorial of the Bounty. But I think no Money can be better bestow'd, than that which Christ himself would have put to his Account, and makes himself Debtor for. _Ti._ Don't you take that Bounty to be well plac'd that is bestow'd upon Monasteries? _Eu._ Yes, and I would be a Benefactor myself, if I had an Estate that would allow it; but it should be such a Provision for Necessaries, as should not reach to Luxury. And I would give something too, wheresoever I found a religious Man that wanted it. _Ti._ Many are of Opinion, that what is given to common Beggars, is not well bestowed. _Eu._ I would do something that Way too; but with Discretion: But in my Opinion, it were better if every City were to maintain their own Poor; and Vagabonds and sturdy Beggars were not suffer'd to strole about, who want Work more than Money. _Ti._ To whom then would you in an especial Manner give? How much? And to what Purposes? _Eu._ It is a hard Matter for me to answer to all these Points exactly: First of all, there should be an Inclination to be helpful to all, and after that, the Proportion must be according to my Ability, as Opportunity should offer; and especially to those whom I know to be poor and honest; and when my own Purse fail'd me, I would exhort others to Charity. _Ti._ But will you give us Leave now to discourse freely in your Dominions? _Eu._ As freely as if you were at Home at your own Houses. _Ti._ You don't love vast Expences upon Churches, you say, and this House might have been built for less than it was. _Eu._ Indeed, I think this House of mine to be within the Compass of cleanly and convenient, far from Luxury, or I am mistaken. Some that live by begging, have built with more State; and yet, these Gardens of Mine, such as they are, pay a Tribute to the Poor; and I daily lessen my Expence, and am the more frugal in Expence upon myself and Family, that I may contribute the more plentifully to them. _Ti._ If all Men were of your Mind, it would be better than it is with a good many People who deserve better, that are now in extreme Want; and on the other Hand, many of those pamper'd Carcases would be brought down, who deserve to be taught Sobriety and Modesty by Penury. _Eu._ It may be so: but shall I mend your mean Entertainment now, with the best Bit at last? _Ti._ We have had more than enough of Delicacies already. _Eu._ That which I am now about to give you, let your Bellies be never so full, won't over-charge your Stomachs. _Ti._ What is it? _Eu._ The Book of the four Evangelists, that I may treat you with the best at last. Read, Boy, from the Place where you left off last. _Boy. No Man can serve two Masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other: You cannot serve God and Mammon. Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your Life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink: Nor yet for your Body, what you shall put on. Is not the Life more than Meat, and the Body than Raiment?_ _Eu._ Give me the Book. In this Place _Jesus Christ_ seems to me, to have said the same Thing twice: For instead of what he had said in the first Place, _i.e._ _he will hate_; he says immediately, _he will despise_. And for what he had said before, _he will love_, he by and by turns it, _he will hold to_. The Sense is the same, tho' the Persons are chang'd. _Ti._ I do not very well apprehend what you mean. _Eu._ Let me, if you please, demonstrate it mathematically. In the first Part, put _A_ for the one, and _B_ for the other. In the latter Part, put _B_ for one, and _A_ for the other, inverting the Order; for either _A_ will hate, and _B_ will love, or _B_ will hold to, and _A_ will despise. Is it not plain now, that _A_ is twice hated, and _B_ twice beloved? _Ti._ 'Tis very clear. _Eu._ This Conjunction, _or_, especially repeated, has the Emphasis of a contrary, or at least, a different Meaning. Would it not be otherwise absurd to say, _Either_ Peter _shall overcome me, and I'll yield; or I'll yield, and_ Peter _shall overcome me?_ _Ti._ A pretty Sophism, as I'm an honest Man. _Eu._ I shall think it so when you have made it out, not before. _The._ I have something runs in my Mind, and I'm with Child to have it out: I can't tell what to make on't, but let it be what it will, you shall have it if you please; if it be a Dream, you shall be the Interpreters, or midwife it into the World. _Eu._ Although it is looked upon to be unlucky to talk of Dreams at Table, and it is immodest to bring forth before so many Men; but this Dream, or this Conception of thy Mind, be it what it will, let us have it. _The._ In my Judgment it is rather the Thing than the Person that is chang'd in this Text. And the Words _one_ and _one_ do not refer to _A_ and _B_; but either Part of them, to which of the other you please; so that chuse which you will, it must be opposed to that, which is signified by the other; as if you should say, you _shall either exclude_ A _and admit_ B, _or you shall admit_ A _and exclude_ B. Here's the Thing chang'd, and the Person the same: And it is so spoken of _A_, that it is the same Case, if you should say the same Thing of _B_; as thus, either you shall exclude _B_ or admit _A_, or admit _B_ or exclude _A_. _Eu._ In Truth, you have very artificially solv'd this Problem: No Mathematician could have demonstrated it better upon a Slate. _Soph._ That which is the greatest Difficulty to me is this; that we are forbidden to take Thought for to Morrow; when yet, _Paul_ himself wrought with his own Hands for Bread, and sharply rebukes lazy People, and those that live upon other Men's Labour, exhorting them to take Pains, and get their Living by their Fingers Ends, that they may have wherewith to relieve others in their Necessities. Are not they holy and warrantable Labours, by which a poor Husband provides for his dear Wife and Children? _Ti._ This is a Question, which, in my Opinion, may be resolv'd several Ways. First of all, This Text had a particular Respect to those Times. The Apostles being dispers'd far and wide for the Preaching of the Gospel, all sollicitous Care for a Maintenance was to be thrown aside, it being to be supply'd otherwise, having not Leisure to get their Living by their Labour; and especially, they having no Way of getting it, but by Fishing. But now the World is come to another Pass, and we all love to live at Ease, and shun Painstaking. Another Way of expounding it may be this; Christ had not forbid Industry, but Anxiety of Thought, and this Anxiety of Thought is to be understood according to the Temper of Men in common, who are anxious for nothing more than getting a Livelihood; that setting all other Things aside, this is the only Thing they mind. And our Saviour does in a Manner intimate the same himself, when he says, that one Man cannot serve two Masters. For he that wholly gives himself up to any Thing, is a Servant to it. Now he would have the Propagation of the Gospel be our chief, but yet, not our only Care. For he says, _Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and these Things shall be added unto you_. He does not say, seek only; but seek first. And besides, I take the Word to Morrow, to be hyperbolical, and in that, signifies a Time to come, a great While hence, it being the Custom of the Misers of this World, to be anxiously scraping together, and laying up for Posterity. _Eu._ We allow of your Interpretation; but what does he mean, when he says, _Be not sollicitous for your Life, what you shall eat_? The Body is cloth'd, but the Soul does not eat. _Ti._ By _Anima_, is meant Life, which can't subsist without Meat (or is in Danger, if you take away its Food): But it is not so, if you take away the Garment, which is more for Modesty than Necessity. If a Person is forc'd to go naked, he does not die presently; but Want of Food is certain Death. _Eu._ I do not well understand how this Sentence agrees with that which follows; _Is not the Life more than Meat, and the Body than Raiment_? For if Life be so precious, we ought to take the more Care of it. _Ti._ This Argument does rather increase our Sollicitousness than lessen it. _Eu._ But this is none of our Saviour's Meaning; who, by this Argument, creates in us a stronger Confidence in the Father: For if a bountiful Father hath given us _gratis_ that which is the more valuable, he will also bestow upon us what is less valuable: He that has given us Life, will not deny us Food: And he that has given us Bodies, will by some Means or other give us Cloaths too: Therefore, relying upon his Bounty, we have no Reason to disquiet ourselves with Anxiety of Thought, for Things of smaller Moment. What remains then, but using this World, as though we used it not, we transfer our whole Study and Application to the Love of heavenly Things, and rejecting the World and the Devil universally, with all his crafty Delusions, we chearfully serve God alone, who will never forsake his Children? But all this While, here's no Body touches the Fruits. Certainly you may eat this with Joy, for this is the Product of my own Farm, and did not cost much Care to provide it. _Ti._ We have very plentifully satisfied our Bodies. _Eu._ I should be glad if you had satisfied your Minds too. _Ti._ Our Minds have been satisfy'd more plentifully than our Bodies. _Eu._ Boy, take away, and bring some Water; now, my Friends, let us wash, that if we have in eating contracted any Guilt, being cleansed, we may conclude with a Hymn: If you please, I'll conclude with what I begun out of St. _Chrysostom_. _Ti._ We entreat you that you would do it. _Eu. Glory to thee, O Lord; Glory to thee, O holy One; Glory to thee, O King; as thou hast given us Meat for our Bodies, so replenish our Souls with Joy and Gladness in thy holy Spirit, that we may be found acceptable in thy Sight, and may not be made asham'd, when thou shalt render to every one according to his Works_. Boy. _Amen_. _Ti._ In Truth, it is a pious and elegant Hymn. _Eu._ Of St. _Chrysostom_'s Translation too. _Ti._ Where is it to be found? _Eu._ In his 56th Homily on St. _Matthew_. _Ti._ I'll be sure to read it to Day: But I have a Mind to be informed of one Thing, why we thrice wish Glory to Christ under these three Denominations, of _Lord, Holy, and King_. _Eu._ Because all Honour is due to him, and especially in these three Respects. We call him Lord, because he hath redeem'd us by his holy Blood from the Tyranny of the Devil, and hath taken us to himself. Secondly, We stile him Holy, because he being the Sanctifier of all Men, not being content alone to have freely pardoned us all our Sins _gratis_ by his holy Spirit, hath bestow'd upon us his Righteousness, that we might follow Holiness. Lastly, We call him King, because we hope for the Reward of a heavenly Kingdom, from him who sits at the Right-Hand of God the Father. And all this Felicity we owe to his gratuitous Bounty, that we have _Jesus Christ_ for our Lord, rather than the Devil to be a Tyrant over us; that we have Innocence and Sanctity, instead of the Filth and Uncleanness of our Sins; and instead of the Torments of Hell, the Joys of Life everlasting. _Ti._ Indeed it is a very pious Sentence. _Eu._ This is your first Visit, Gentlemen, and I must not dismiss you without Presents; but plain ones, such as your Entertainment has been. Boy, bring out the Presents: It is all one to me, whether you will draw Lots, or every one chuse for himself, they are all of a Price; that is to say, of no Value. You will not find _Heliogabatus_'s Lottery, a hundred Horses for one, and as many Flies for another. Here are four little Books, two Dials, a Lamp, and a Pen-Case: These I suppose will be more agreeable to you than Balsams, Dentrifices, or Looking-Glasses. _Ti._ They are all so good, that it is a hard Matter to chuse; but do you distribute them according to your own Mind, and they'll come the welcomer where they fall. _Eu._ This little Book contains _Solomon_'s Proverbs in Parchment, it teaches Wisdom, and it is gilded, because Gold is a Symbol of Wisdom. This shall be given to our grey-headed _Timothy_; that according to the Doctrine of the Gospel, to him that has Wisdom, Wisdom shall be given and abound. _Ti._ I will be sure to make it my Study, to stand in less Need of it. _Eu. Sophronius_, this Dial will suit you very well, whom I know to be so good a Husband of your Time, that you won't let a Moment of that precious Thing be lost. It came out of the furthest Part of _Dalmatia_, and that's all the Commendation I shall give it. _Sophr._ You indeed admonish a Sluggard to be diligent. _Eu._ You have in this little Book the Gospel written on Vellum; it deserv'd to be set with Diamonds, except that the Heart of a Man were a fitter Repository for it. Lay it up there, _Theophilus_, that you may be more and more like to your Name. _The._ I will do my Endeavour, that you may not think your Present ill bestow'd. _Eu._ There are St. _Paul_'s Epistles; your constant Companions, _Eulalius_, are in this Book; you use to have _Paul_ constantly in your Mouth, and he would not be there, if he were not in your Heart too: And now for the Time to come, you may more conveniently have him in your Hand, and in your Eye. This is a Gift with good Counsel into the Bargain. And there is no Present more precious than good Counsel. _Eu._ This Lamp is very fit for _Chrysoglottus_, who is an insatiable Reader; and as M. _Tully_ says, a Glutton of Books. _Ch._ I give you double Thanks; first, for so choice a Present, and in the next Place, for admonishing a drowsy Person of Vigilance. _Eu. Theodidactus_ must have this Pen-Case, who writes much, and to excellent Purposes; and I dare pronounce these Pens to be happy, by which the Honour of our Lord _Jesus Christ_ shall be celebrated, and that by such an Artist. _The._ I would you could as well have supply'd me with Abilities, as you have with Instruments. _Eu._ This contains some of the choicest of _Plutarch's_ Books of Morals, and very fairly written by one very well skill'd in the _Greek_; I find in them so much Purity of Thought, that it is my Amazement, how such evangelical Notions should come into the Heart of a Heathen. This I will present to young _Uranius_, that is a Lover of the _Greek_ Language. Here is one Dial left, and that falls to our _Nephalius_, as a thrifty Dispenser of his Time. _Neph._ We give you Thanks, not only for your Presents, but your Compliments too. For this is not so much a making of Presents, as Panegyricks. _Eu._ I give you double Thanks, Gentlemen: First for taking these small Matters in so good Part; and secondly, for the Comfort I have receiv'd by your learned and pious Discourses. What Effect my Entertainment may have upon you I know not; but this I am sure of, you'll leave me wiser and better for it. I know you take no Pleasure in Fiddles or Fools, and much less in Dice: Wherefore, if you please, we will pass away an Hour in seeing the rest of the Curiosities of my little Palace. _Ti._ That's the very Thing we were about to desire of you. _Eu._ There is no Need of entreating a Man of his Word. I believe you have seen enough of this Summer Hall. It looks three Ways, you see; and which Way soever you turn your Eye, you have a most delicate Green before you. If we please, we can keep out the Air or Rain, by putting down the Sashes, if either of them be troublesome; and if the Sun is incommodious, we have thick folding Shutters on the out-Side, and thin ones within, to prevent that. When I dine here, I seem to dine in my Garden, not in my House, for the very Walls have their Greens and their Flowers intermix'd; and 'tis no ill Painting neither. Here's our Saviour celebrating his last Supper with his elect Disciples. Here's _Herod_ a keeping his Birth-Day with a bloody Banquet. Here's _Dives_, mention'd in the Gospel, in the Height of his Luxury, by and by sinking into Hell. And here is _Lazarus_, driven away from his Doors, by and by to be receiv'd into _Abraham's_ Bosom. _Ti._ We don't very well know this Story. _Eu._ It is _Cleopatra_ contending with _Anthony_, which should be most luxurious; she has drunk down the first Pearl, and now reaches forth her Hand for the other. Here is the Battel of the _Centaurs_; and here _Alexander_ the Great thrusts his Launce through the Body of _Clytus_. These Examples preach Sobriety to us at Table, and deter a Man from Gluttony and Excess. Now let us go into my Library, it is not furnish'd with very many Books, but those I have, are very good ones. _Ti._ This Place carries a Sort of Divinity in it, every Thing is so shining. _Eu._ You have now before you my chiefest Treasure: You see nothing at the Table but Glass and Tin, and I have in my whole House but one Piece of Plate, and that is a gilt Cup, which I preserve very carefully for the Sake of him that gave it me. This hanging Globe gives you a Prospect of the whole World. And here upon the Wall, are the several Regions of it describ'd more at large. Upon those other Walls, you have the Pictures of the most eminent Authors: There would be no End of Painting them all. In the first Place, here is _Christ_ sitting on the Mount, and stretching forth his Hand over his Head; the Father sends a Voice, saying, _Hear ye him_: the Holy Ghost, with outstretch'd Wings, and in a Glory, embracing him. _Ti._ As God shall bless me, a Piece of Work worthy of _Apelles_. _Eu._ Adjoining to the Library, there is a little Study, but a very neat one; and 'tis but removing a Picture, and there is a Chimney behind it, if the Cold be troublesome. In Summer-Time it passes for solid Wall. _Ti._ Every Thing here looks like Jewels; and here's a wonderful pretty Scent. _Eu._ Above all Things, I love to have my House neat and sweet, and both these may be with little Cost. My Library has a little Gallery that looks into the Garden, and there is a Chapel adjoining to it. _Ti._ The Place itself deserves a Deity. _Eu._ Let us go now to those three Walks above the other that you have seen, that look into the Kitchen Garden. These upper Walks have a Prospect into both Gardens; but only by Windows with Shutters; especially, in the Walls that have no Prospect into the inner Garden, and that's for the Safety of the House. Here upon the Left-Hand, because there is more Light, and fewer Windows, is painted the whole Life of _Jesus_, out of the History of the four Evangelists, as far as to the Mission of the Holy Ghost, and the first Preaching of the Apostles out of the Acts; and there are Notes upon the Places, that the Spectator may see near what Lake, or upon what Mountain such or such a Thing was done. There are also Titles to every Story, with an Abstract of the Contents, as that of our Saviour, _I will, Be thou clean_. Over against it you have the Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament; especially, out of the Prophets and Psalms, which are little else but the Life of Christ and Apostles related another Way. Here I sometimes walk, discoursing with myself, and meditating upon the unspeakable Counsel of God, in giving his Son for the Redemption of Mankind. Sometimes my Wife bears me Company, or sometimes a Friend that takes Delight in pious Things. _Ti._ Who could be tired with this House? _Eu._ No Body that has learn'd to live by himself. Upon the upper Border (as though not fit to be among the rest) are all the Popes Heads with their Titles, and over against them the Heads of the _Cæsars_, for the better taking in the Order of History. At each Corner, there is a Lodging Room, where I can repose myself, and have a Prospect of my Orchard, and my little Birds. Here, in the farthest Nook of the Meadow, is a little Banquetting House; there I sup sometimes in Summer, and I make Use of it, as an Infirmary, if any of my Family be taken ill, with any infectious Disease. _Ti._ Some People are of Opinion, that those Diseases are not to be avoided. _Eu._ Why then do Men shun a Pit or Poison? Or do they fear this the less, because they don't see it? No more is the Poison seen, that a Basilisk darts from his Eyes. When Necessity calls for it, I would not stick to venture my Life: But to do it without any Necessity, is Rashness. There are some other Things worth your seeing; but my Wife shall shew you them: Stay here this three Days if you please, and make my House your Home; entertain your Eyes and your Minds, I have a little Business abroad: I must ride out to some of the Neighbouring Towns. _Ti._ What, a Money Business? _Eu._ I would not leave such Friends for the Sake of receiving a little Money. _Ti._ Perhaps you have appointed a hunting Match. _Eu._ It is a Kind of Hunting indeed, but it is something else I hunt, than either Boars or Stags. _Ti._ What is it then? _Eu._ I'll tell you: I have a Friend in one Town lies dangerously ill; the Physician fears his Life, but I am afraid of his Soul: For I don't think he's so well prepar'd for his End as a Christian should be: I'll go and give him some pious Admonitions that he may be the better for, whether he lives or dies. In another Town there are two Men bitterly at odds, they are no ill Men neither, but Men of a very obstinate Temper. If the Matter should rise to a greater Height, I am afraid it would be of ill Consequence to more than themselves: I will do all I can in the World, to reconcile them; they are both my Kinsmen. This is my hunting Match, and if I shall have good Success in it, we'll drink their Healths. _Ti._ A very pious Hunting, indeed; we pray heartily, that not _Delia_ but _Christ_ would give you good Success. _Eu._ I had rather obtain this Prey, than have two thousand Ducats left me for a Legacy. _Ti._ Will you come back quickly? _Eu._ Not till I have try'd every Thing; therefore, I can't set a Time. In the mean Time, be as free with any Thing of mine, as though it were your own, and enjoy yourselves. _Ti._ God be with you, forward and backward. _The APOTHEOSIS of CAPNIO._ The ARGUMENT. _Canonizing, or entring the incomparable Man_, John Reuclin, _into the Number of the Saints, teaches how much Honour is due to famous Men, who have by their Industry improv'd the liberal Sciences_. None that has liv'd Well, dies Ill. POMPILIUS, BRASSICANUS. _Po._ Where have you been, with your Spatter-Lashes? _Br._ At _Tubinga_. _Po._ Is there no News there? _Br._ I can't but admire, that the World should run so strangely a gadding after News. I heard a _Camel_ preach at _Lovain_, that we should have nothing to do with any Thing that is new. _Po._ Indeed, it is a Conceit fit for a Camel. That Man, (if he be a Man,) ought never to change his old Shoes, or his Shirt, and always to feed upon stale Eggs, and drink nothing but sour Wine. _Br._ But for all this, you must know, the good Man does not love old Things so well, but that he had rather have his Porridge fresh than stale. _Po._ No more of the Camel; but prithee tell me, what News have you? _Br._ Nay, I have News in my Budget too; but News which he says is naught. _Po._ But that which is new, will be old in Time. Now if all old Things be good, and all new Things be bad, then it follows of Consequence, that that which is good at present, has been bad heretofore, and that which is now bad, will in Time come to be good. _Br._ According to the Doctrine of the Camel, it must be so; and therefore, hence it follows, that he that was a young wicked Fool in Time past, because he was new, will come to be a good One, because he is grown old. Po. But prithee, let's have the News, be it what it will. _Br._ The famous triple-tongu'd Phoenix of Learning, _John Reuclin_, is departed this Life. _Po._ For certain? _Br._ Nay, it is too certain. _Po._ Why, pray, what Harm is that, for a Man to leave an immortal Memory of a good Name and Reputation behind him, and to pass out of this miserable World, into the Society of the Blessed? _Br._ How do you know that to be the Case? _Po._ It is plain, for he can't die otherwise, who has liv'd as he did. _Br._ You would say so, indeed, if you knew what I know. _Po._ What's that, I pray? _Br._ No, no, I must not tell you. _Po._ Why so? _Br._ Because he that entrusted me with the Secret, made me promise Silence. _Po._ Do you entrust me with it upon the same Condition, and, upon my honest Word, I'll keep Counsel. _Br._ That honest Word has often deceived me; but however, I'll venture; especially, it being a Matter of that Kind, that it is fit all honest Men should know it. There is at _Tubinge_, a certain _Franciscan_, a Man accounted of singular Holiness in every Bodies Opinion but his own. _Po._ That you mention, is the greatest Argument in the World of true Piety. _Br._ If I should tell you his Name, you'd say as much, for you know the Man. _Po._ What if I shall guess at him? _Br._ Do, if you will. _Po._ Hold your Ear then. _Br._ What needs that, when here's no Body within Hearing? _Po._ But however, for Fashion Sake. _Br._ 'Tis the very same. _Po._ He is a Man of undoubted Credit. If he says a Thing, it is to me, as true as the Gospel. _Br._ Mind me then, and I'll give you the naked Truth of the Story. My Friend _Reuclin_ was sick, indeed very dangerously; but yet, there was some Hopes of his Recovery; he was a Man worthy never to grow old, be sick, or die. One Morning I went to visit my Franciscan, that he might ease my Mind of my Trouble by his Discourse. For when my Friend was sick, I was sick too, for I lov'd him as my own Father. _Po._ Phoo! There's no Body but lov'd him, except he were a very bad Man indeed. _Br._ My Franciscan says to me, _Brassicanus_, leave off grieving, our _Reuclin_ is well. What, said I, Is he well all on a sudden then? For but two Days ago, the Doctors gave but little Hopes of him. Then, says he, he is so well recover'd, that he will never be sick again. Don't weep, says he, (for he saw the Tears standing in my Eyes) before you have heard the Matter out. I have not indeed seen the Man this six Days, but I pray for him constantly every Day that goes over my Head. This Morning after Mattins, I laid myself upon my Couch, and fell into a gentle pleasant Slumber. _Po._ My Mind presages some joyful Thing. _Br._ You have no bad Guess with you. Methought, says he, I was standing by a little Bridge, that leads into a wonderful pleasant Meadow; the emerald Verdure of the Grass and Leaves affording such a charming Prospect; the infinite Beauty, and Variety of the Flowers, like little Stars, were so delightful, and every Thing so fragrant, that all the Fields on this Side the River, by which that blessed Field was divided from the rest, seem'd neither to grow, nor to be green; but look'd dead, blasted, and withered. And in the Interim, while I was wholly taken up with the Prospect, _Reuclin_, as good Luck would have it, came by; and as he past by, gave me his Blessing in _Hebrew_. He was gotten half Way over the Bridge before I perceived him, and as I was about to run to him, he look'd back, and bid me keep off. You must not come yet, says he, but five Years hence, you shall follow me. In the mean Time, do you stand by a Spectator, and a Witness of what is done. Here I put in a Word, says I, was _Reuclin_ naked, or had he Cloaths on; was he alone, or had he Company? He had, says he, but one Garment, and that was a very white one; you would have said, it had been a Damask, of a wonderful shining White, and a very pretty Boy with Wings followed him, which I took to be his good Genius. _Po._ But had he no evil Genius with him? _Br._ Yes, the Franciscan told me he thought he had. For there followed him a great Way off, some Birds, that were all over Black, except, that when they spread their Wings, they seem'd to have Feathers, of a Mixture of White and Carnation. He said, that by their Colour and Cry, one might have taken them for Magpies, but that they were sixteen Times as big; about the size of Vultures, having Combs upon their Heads, with crooked Beaks and Gorbellies. If there had been but three of them, one would have taken them for Harpyes. _Po._ And what did these Devils attempt to do? _Br._ They kept at a Distance, chattering and squalling at the Hero _Reuclin_, and were ready to set upon him, if they durst. _Po._ What hindred them? _Br._ Turning upon them, and making the Sign of the Cross with his Hand at them, he said, _Be gone, ye cursed Fiends to a Place that's fitter for you. You have Work enough to do among Mortals, your Madness has no Power over me, that am now lifted in the Roll of Immortality._ The Words were no sooner out of his Mouth, says the Franciscan, but these filthy Birds took their Flight, but left such a Stink behind them, that a House of Office would have seem'd Oyl of sweet Marjoram, or Ointment of Spikenard to it. He swore, he had rather go to Hell, than snuff up such a Perfume again. _Po._ A Curse upon these Pests. _Br._ But, hear what the Franciscan told me besides: While I was intent upon these Things, says he, St. _Jerome_ was come close to the Bridge, and saluted _Reuclin_ in these Words, _God save thee, my most holy Companion, I am ordered to conduct thee to the Mansions of the blessed Souls above, which the divine Bounty has appointed thee as a Reward for thy most pious Labours._ With that he took out a Garment, and put it upon _Reuclin_. Then, said I, tell me in what Habit or Form St. _Jerome_ appear'd, was he so old as they paint him? Did he wear a Cowl or a Hat, or the Garb of a Cardinal? Or had he a Lion by his Side? Nothing of all these, said he; but his Person was comely, which made his Age appear such as carried in it much Comeliness, but no Deformity. What Need had he to have a Lion by his Side, as he is commonly painted? His Gown came down to his Heels, as transparent as Crystal, and of the same Fashion of that he gave to _Reuclin_. It was all over painted with Tongues of three several Colours; some imitated Rubies, some Emeralds, and others Sapphires; and beside the Clearness of it, the Order set it off very much. _Po._ An Intimation, I suppose, of the three Tongues that he profess'd. _Br._ Without doubt: For he said, that upon the very Borders of the Garments were the Characters of these three Languages inscrib'd in their different Colours. _Po._ Had _Jerome_ no Company with him? _Br._ No Company, do you say? The whole Field swarm'd with Myriads of Angels, that fill'd the Air as thick, as those little Corpuscles they call Atoms, fly in the Sun Beams; pardon the Meanness of the Comparison. If they had not been as transparent as Glass, there would have been no Heaven nor Earth to have been seen. _Po._ O brave, I am glad with all my Heart, for _Reuclin_'s, Sake; but what follow'd? _Br. Jerome_, (says he) for Honour's Sake, giving _Reuclin_ the Right-Hand, and embracing him, conducts him into the Meadow, and up a Hill that was in the middle of it, where they kiss'd and embrac'd one another again: In the mean Time, the Heavens open'd over their Heads to a prodigious Wideness, and there appear'd a Glory so unutterable, as made every Thing else, that pass'd for wonderful before, to look mean and sordid. _Po._ Can't you give us some Representation of it? Br. No, how should I, that did not see it? He who did see it, says, that he was not able to express the very Dream of it. He said, he would die a thousand Deaths to see it over again, if it were but for one Moment. _Po._ How then? _Br._ Out of this Overture of the Heavens, there was let down a great Pillar of Fire that was transparent, and of a very pleasant Form: By this the two holy Souls were carried into Heaven, in one anothers Embraces; a Choir of Angels all the While accompanying them, with so charming a Melody, that the Franciscan says, he is never able to think of the Delight of it without weeping. And after this there follow'd a wonderful fragrant Smell. When he waked out of his Dream, if you will call it a Dream, he was just like a mad Man. He would not believe he was in his Cell; he called for his Bridge and his Meadow; he could not speak or think of any Thing else but them. The Seniors of the Convent, when they found the Story to be no Fable, for it is certain that _Reuclin_ dy'd at the very Instant that the holy Man had this Vision, they unanimously gave Thanks to God, that abundantly rewards good Men for their good Deeds. _Po._ What have we to do, but to set down this holy Man's Name in the Calendar of Saints? _Br._ I should have done that if the Franciscan had seen nothing at all of this, and in Gold Letters too, I'll assure you, next to St. _Jerome_ himself. _Po._ And let me die if I don't put him down in my Book so too. _Br._ And besides that, I'll set him in Gold in my little Chapel, among the choicest of my Saints. _Po._ And if I had a Fortune to my Mind, I'd have him in Diamonds. _Br._ He shall stand in my Library, the very next to St. _Jerome_. _Po._ And I'll have him in mine too. _Br._ If they were grateful, every one who loves Learning and Languages, especially, the holy Tongues, would do so too. _Po._ Truly it is no more than he deserves. But han't you some Scruple upon your Mind, in as much as he is not yet canoniz'd by the Authority of the Bishop of _Rome_? _Br._ Why, pray, who canoniz'd (for that's the Word) St. _Jerome_? Who canoniz'd St. _Paul_, or the Virgin _Mary_? Pray tell me whose Memory is most sacred among all good Men? Those that by their eminent Piety, and the Monuments of their Learning and good Life, have entitled themselves to the Veneration of all Men; or _Catherine_ of _Sien_, that was sainted by _Pius_ the Second, in favour of the Order and the City? _Po._ You say true: That's the right Worship, that by the Will of Heaven, is paid to the Merits of the Dead, whose Benefits are always sensibly felt. _Br._ And can you then deplore the Death of this Man? If long Life be a Blessing, he enjoyed it. He has left behind him immortal Monuments of his Vertue, and by his good Works, consecrated his Name to Immortality. He is now in Heaven, out of the Reach of Misfortunes, conversing with St. _Jerome_ himself. _Po._ But he suffer'd a great Deal tho' in his Life. _Br._ But yet St. _Jerome_ suffered more. It is a Blessing to be persecuted by wicked Men for being good. _Po._ I confess so, and St. _Jerome_ suffer'd many unworthy Things from the worst of Men, for the best of Deeds. _Br._ That which Satan did formerly by the Scribes and Pharisees against the Lord Jesus, he continues still to do by Pharisaical Men, against good Men, who have deserved well from the World by their Studies. He now reaps the blessed Harvest of the Seed he has been sowing. In the mean Time, it will be our Duty, to preserve his Memory sacred; to honour his Name, and to address him often in some such Manner as follows. _O holy Soul, be thou propitious to Languages, and to those that cultivate them: Favour the holy Tongues, and destroy evil Tongues that are infected with the Poison of Hell._ _Po._ I'll do't myself, and earnestly persuade all my Friends to do it. I make no Question but there will be those that will desire to have some little Form of Prayer, according to Custom, to celebrate the Memory of this most holy Hero. _Br._ Do you mean that which they call a Collect? _Po._ Yes. _Br._ I have one ready, that I provided before his Death. _Po._ I pray let's hear it. _Br. O God, that art the Lover of Mankind, that hast by thy chosen Servant_ John Reuclin, _renew'd to Mankind the Gift of Tongues, by which thy holy Spirit from above, did formerly furnish thy Apostles for their Preaching the Gospel; grant that all thy People may every where, in all Languages, preach the Glory of thy Son Jesus Christ, to the confounding of the Tongues of false Apostles; who being in a Confederacy to uphold the impious Tower of_ Babel, _endeavour to obscure thy Glory, and to advance their own, when to thee alone, together with thy only Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the holy Spirit, is due all Glory to eternal Ages._ Amen. _Po._ A most elegant and holy Prayer. As I live, it shall be mine daily. And I account this a happy Opportunity, that has brought me to the Knowledge of so joyful a Story. _Br._ Mayst thou long enjoy that Comfort, and so farewell. _Po._ Fare you well too. _Br._ I will fare well, but not be a Cook. _A LOVER and MAIDEN._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy presents you with a very chaste Wooing, mingling many philosophical Notions with pleasant Jokes. Of not being hasty in marrying; of chusing, not only for the Sake of the outward Person, but the inward Endowments of the Mind; of the Firmness of Wedlock; of not contracting Matrimony without the Consent of Parents; of living chastly in Matrimony; of bringing up Children piously; that the Soul is not where it animates, but where it loves. The Description of a deformed Man. That Wedlock is to be preferr'd before a single Life, and is not, as it is vulgarly called, a Halter. That we must not consult our Affections so much as Reason._ PAMPHILUS _and_ MARY. _PA._ Good Morrow, Madam, cruel, hard Heart, inflexible. _Ma._ Good Morrow to you too, Mr. _Pamphilus_, as often, and as much, and by what Names you please: But you seem to have forgotten my Name, 'tis _Mary_. _Pa._ It should rather have been _Martia_. _Ma._ Why so, pray, what is _Mars_ to me? _Pa._ Because just as _Mars_ makes a Sport of killing Men, so do you; saving that you do it the more cruelly of the two, because you kill one that loves you. _Ma._ Say you so! pray where's the great Slaughter of Men that I have made? Where's the Blood of the Slain? _Pa._ You may see one dead Corpse before your Face, if you look upon me. _Ma._ What strange Story is this? Does a dead Man talk and walk? I wish I may never meet with more frightful Ghosts than you are. _Pa._ Ay, indeed, you make a Jest of it; but for all that, you kill poor me, and more cruelly too, than if you stuck a Dagger in my Breast. For now I, poor Wretch as I am, die a lingering Death. _Ma._ Prithee tell me, how many Women with Child have miscarried at the Sight of thee? _Pa._ My Paleness shews I have no more Blood in my Body than a Ghost. _Ma._ Indeed you are as pale as a Violet; You are as pale as a ripe Cherry, or purple Grape. _Pa._ You coquet it with my Misery. _Ma._ If you can't believe me, look in the Glass. _Pa._ I would never desire a better Glass, nor do I believe there is a better in the World than I am a looking in already. _Ma._ What Looking-Glass do you mean? _Pa._ Your Eyes. _Ma._ You Banterer! that's like you. But how do you prove yourself to be dead? Do dead Folks eat? _Pa._ Yes, they do; but Things that have no Relish, as I do. _Ma._ What do they feed upon? _Pa._ Mallows, Leeks, and Lupines. _Ma._ But you feed upon Capons and Partridges. _Pa._ If I do, I relish them no more than Beets without Pepper or Vinegar. _Ma._ Poor Creature! but yet you're in pretty good Case, for all that. And do dead Folks talk too? _Pa._ Just as I do, with a weak Voice. _Ma._ But when I heard you rallying your Rival a little While ago, your Voice was not very low then. But, prithee, do Ghosts walk, wear Cloaths, and sleep? _Pa._ Yes, and enjoy one another too, after their Manner. _Ma._ Thou art a merry Fellow. _Pa._ But what will you say, if I prove it by undeniable Arguments, that I am dead, and that you have kill'd me too. _Ma._ God forbid, _Pamphilus_; but let's hear your Arguments, however. _Pa._ In the first Place, I think you will grant me this, that Death is only a Separation of Soul and Body. _Ma._ I grant it. _Pa._ But you must grant it so as not to eat your Words. _Ma._ No, I will not. _Pa._ You will not deny, I suppose, that the Person that takes away another's Life, is a Murtherer. _Ma._ I grant that too. _Pa._ I suppose you will grant that which has been allow'd by the greatest Men of many Ages, that the Soul of a Man is not really where it animates, but where it loves. _Ma._ Make that a little plainer, I can't well understand it then. _Pa._ You might as well bid me make an Adamant sensible of it. _Ma._ I am a Maid, not a Stone. _Pa._ Tis true, but harder than an Adamant Stone. _Ma._ Go on with your Inferences. _Pa._ Those that are in a Trance, do neither hear, nor see, nor smell, nor feel, if you kill them outright. _Ma._ Indeed I have heard so. _Pa._ What do you think is the Reason? _Ma._ Do you, Philosopher, tell that. _Pa._ Because their Mind is in Heaven, where it enjoys what it dearly loves; and therefore is absent from the Body. _Ma._ Well, what then? _Pa._ What then, hard-hearted Creature? Then it follows, that I am dead, and you have killed me. _Ma._ Where is your Soul then? _Pa._ Where it loves. _Ma._ Who took this Soul of yours away? What do you Sigh for? Tell me freely: There's no Hurt in it. _Pa._ A cruel Maid, that I could not be angry with if she kill'd me outright. _Ma._ You're very good-humour'd; but why don't you take her Soul from her too, and pay her in her own Coin, according to the old Proverb. _Pa._ I should be the happiest Man in the World, if I could make that Exchange, that her Heart would pass as wholly into my Breast, as mine has into hers. _Ma._ But may I play the Sophister with you now? _Pa._ The Sophistress. _Ma._ Can one and the same Body be both alive and dead? _Pa._ Not at the same Time. _Ma._ Is the Body dead, when the Soul is out of it? _Pa._ Yes. _Ma._ Nor does it animate it, but when it is in it? _Pa._ No, it does not. _Ma._ How comes it to pass then, that when it is there where it loves, it yet animates the Body it is gone out of? And if it animates when it loves any where, how is that called a dead Body which it animates? _Pa._ Indeed, you argue very cunningly, but you shan't catch me there. That Soul, which after some Sort governs the Body of the Lover, is but improperly call'd a Soul, when it is but some small Remains of the Soul; just as the Smell of a Rose remains in the Hand, when the Rose is gone. _Ma._ I see it is a hard Matter to catch a Fox in a Trap. But answer me this Question, does not the Person that kills, act? _Pa._ Yes. _Ma._ And does not he suffer who is kill'd? _Pa._ Yes. _Ma._ And how comes it about then, that when he that loves, acts, and she that is lov'd, suffers, she that is lov'd should be said to kill, when he that loves, rather kills himself? _Pa._ Nay, on the Contrary, 'tis he that loves that suffers, and she is lov'd, that acts. _Ma._ You will never prove that by all your Grammar. _Pa._ Well, I'll prove it by Logic then. _Ma._ But do so much as answer me this one Question, do you love voluntarily, or against your Will? _Pa._ Voluntarily. _Ma._ Then since a Person is at Liberty, whether he will love or no; he that does love, is guilty of _Felo de se_, and accuses a Maid wrongfully. _Pa._ A Maid does not kill in being lov'd, but in not loving again. He is guilty of killing, that can save and don't save. _Ma._ What if a young Man should fall into an unlawful Love, as suppose with another Man's Wife, or a Vestal Virgin? Must she love him again, to save the Lover? _Pa._ But the young Man, meaning myself, loves one whom he ought to love, and by Right and good Reason, and yet am murthered. If Murther be a light Matter, I could indict you for Witchcraft too. _Ma._ God forbid, do you make a _Circe_ of me? _Pa._ You are more barbarous than _Circe_ herself, I had rather be a Hog or a Bear, than as I now am, half dead. _Ma._ By what Sort of Enchantments do I kill Men? _Pa._ By the Witchcraft of your Eyes. _Ma._ Would you have me take my noxious Eyes off of you then. _Pa._ No, by no Means, rather look more upon me. _Ma._ If my Eyes are so infectious, how comes it about they don't throw others I look upon into a Consumption too? I therefore rather believe the Infection is in your own Eyes than mine. _Pa._ Is it not enough for you to kill poor _Pamphilus_, but you must insult him too. _Ma._ O pretty dead Creature! but when must I come to your Funeral? _Pa._ Sooner than you think for, if you don't relieve me. _Ma._ Can I perform such a wonderful Cure? _Pa._ You can raise a dead Man to Life again with the greatest Ease imaginable. _Ma._ Ay, if I had the Grand-Elixir. _Pa._ You have no Need of any Medicine, do but love me again. And what's easier than that? Nay, what's more just? You can no other Way in the World get clear of the Crime of Murther. _Ma._ In what Court must I be try'd? In the Court of Chancery? _Pa._ No, in the Court of _Venus_. _Ma._ They say, she is a very merciful Goddess. _Pa._ Nay, the most severe in the World. _Ma._ Has she any Thunderbolts? _Pa._ No. _Ma._ Has she got a Trident? _Pa._ No. _Ma._ Has she got a Spear? _Pa._ No; but she is the Goddess of the Sea. _Ma._ But I don't go to Sea. _Pa._ But she has a Son. _Ma._ Youth is not very formidable. _Pa._ But he is very revengeful and resolute. _Ma._ What will he do to me? _Pa._ What will he do? That which I can't wish to be done to one I wish so well to. God forbid I should. _Ma._ Tell me what it is, for I an't afraid to hear it. _Pa._ Well, I'll tell you then; if you slight me that love you, and am no Way unworthy of your Love; I shall be much mistaken if he don't by his Mother's Order shoot you with a venomous Dart, and make you fall deeply in Love with some sorry Fellow or other, that would not love you again. _Ma._ That's a most horrid Punishment indeed. I had rather die a thousand Deaths than to be so bitterly in Love with an ugly Man, and one that won't love me neither. _Pa._ But we had a notable Example of this not long since upon a certain Maid. _Ma._ Where did she live? _Pa._ At _Orleans_. _Ma._ How many Years ago was it? _Pa._ How many Years! not ten Months. _Ma._ What was her Name? What do you stick at? _Pa._ Nothing at all. I know her as well as I know you. _Ma._ Why don't you tell me her Name then? _Pa._ Because I am afraid it is ominous. I wish she had been of some other Name. She was your own Namesake. _Ma._ Who was her Father? _Pa._ Her Father is alive at this Time, and is a topping Lawyer, and a rich Man. _Ma._ Tell me his Name. _Pa. Mauritius._ _Ma._ His Sirname. _Pa. Aglaius._ _Ma._ Is her Mother alive? _Pa._ No, she died lately. _Ma._ What did she die of, say you? _Pa._ Why of Grief, and it had like to have cost her Father his Life too, for all he was a Man of a strong Constitution. _Ma._ Mayn't a Body know her Mother's Name. _Pa._ Yes, _Sophrona_, every Body knows her Name. What do you mean by that Question? Do you think I invent a Lye? _Ma._ Why should I think so of you? Our Sex is most to be suspected for that. But tell me what became of the Maid? _Pa._ The Maid, as I told you before, came of very honest Parents, had a good Fortune, was very handsome, and in few Words, was a Match for a Prince; a certain Gentleman of an equal Fortune courted her. _Ma._ What was his Name? _Pa._ Ah me, I can't bear the Thoughts of it, his Name was _Pamphilus_ as well as mine. He try'd all the Ways in the World to gain her good Will; but she slighted all his Offers. The young Man pines away with Grief. Presently after she fell deep in Love with one more like an Ape than a Man. _Ma._ How! _Pa._ Ay, so wretchedly in Love, that 'tis impossible to relate it. _Ma._ Such a pretty Maid to fall in Love with such an ugly Fellow? _Pa._ Ay, with a long-visag'd, scald-headed, bald-pated, hollow-ey'd, snub-nos'd, wide-mouth'd, rotton-tooth'd, stuttering, scabby-bearded, hump-back'd, gor-belly'd, bandy-legg'd Fellow. _Ma._ You tell me of a mere _Thersites_. _Pa._ Nay, they said he had but one Ear, neither. _Ma._ It may be he had lost the other in the War. _Pa._ No, he lost it in Peace. _Ma._ Who dar'd to cut it off? _Pa. Jack Ketch._ _Ma._ It may be his Riches made Amends. _Pa._ Over Head and Ears in Debt. And with this Husband this charming Girl now spends her Days, and is now and then drubb'd into the Bargain. _Ma._ That is a miserable Story indeed. _Pa._ But it is a true one. It is a just Retaliation upon her, for slighting the young Gentleman. _Ma._ I should rather chuse to be thunder-struck than ty'd to endure such a Husband. _Pa._ Then don't provoke Justice, but love him that loves you. _Ma._ Well, if that will do, I do love you again. _Pa._ Ay, But I would have that Love constant as mine own. I court a Wife, not a Mistress. _Ma._ I suppose so, but yet we ought to be very deliberate in that which being once done, can never be undone again. _Pa._ I have been deliberating too long already. _Ma._ Love is none of the best Advisers; see that he han't impos'd upon you, for they say he is blind. _Pa._ But that Love has Eyes in his Head, that proceeds from Judgment; you don't appear so amiable, only because I love you, but you are really so, and therefore I love you. _Ma._ But perhaps you don't know me thoroughly. When once a Shoe is on, then you'll know where it pinches. _Pa._ I'll venture it, but I gather from many Conjectures, that it will be happy for me. _Ma._ What, are you an Augur then? _Pa._ Yes, I am. _Ma._ Pray by what Auguries do you prognosticate all this? What, hath the Night Owl appear'd luckily? _Pa._ She flies for Fools. _Ma._ Did you see a pair of Pigeons on your right Hand? _Pa._ Nothing of all this. But have for some Years been satisfy'd of the Honesty of your Father and Mother; and in the first Place, that's no bad Sign. Nor am I ignorant how modestly and religiously you have been brought up by them, and it is a greater Advantage to be honestly educated, than honourably born. And then there's another good Circumstance besides, that as my Parents are none of the worst, so yours and mine have been very intimate for many Years, and you and I have known one another from our very Childhood, as they use to say; and besides all this, our Humours agree very well together. Our Age, Fortunes, Quality, and Parentage are pretty equal. And last of all, that which is the chief Thing in Friendship, your Temper seems to agree very well with mine. There are some Things that may be very good in themselves that may not agree with others. How acceptable my Temper may be to yours, I don't know. These are the Auguries, my Dear, that make me prognosticate that a Marriage between you and me would be happy, lasting, comfortable and pleasant, unless you shall prevent it by a Denial. _Ma._ What would you have me say? _Pa._ I will sing _I am thine_ first, and you shall sing _I am thine_ after me. _Ma._ That indeed is but a short Song, but it has a long Chorus. _Pa._ What signifies it how long it is, so it be a merry one. _Ma._ I have that Respect for you, I would not have you do what you should repent of when done. _Pa._ Leave off teasing me. _Ma._ Perhaps I shall not appear so amiable in your Eye, when Age or Sickness have spoil'd my Beauty. _Pa._ No more, my Dear, shall I myself be always so young and lusty. I don't only look at that blooming, lovely Body of yours, but it is your Guest within it I am most in Love with. _Ma._ What Guest do you mean? _Pa._ This Soul of yours, whose Beauty will grow as Years increase. _Ma._ In Truth you have a very penetrating Sight, if you can see that through so many Coverings. _Pa._ It is with the Eyes of my Mind that I see your Mind, and then besides we shall be ever and anon renewing our Age by our Children. _Ma._ But then I shall lose my Maidenhead. _Pa._ Right enough; but prithee tell me, if you had a fine Orchard, would you rather chuse never to have nothing but Blossoms on the Trees; or would you rather, that the Blossoms should fall off, and see the Boughs laden with ripe Apples? _Ma._ Oh, how cunningly you can argue! _Pa._ Answer me but this one Question, which is the finest Sight, a Vine lying along upon the Ground and rotting, or twining round a Stake or an Elm-Tree, loaden with ripe Grapes of a curious purple Colour? _Ma._ And pray do you answer me this Question; which is the most pleasant Sight, a Rose fresh and fair upon the Tree, or one gathered and withering in the Hand? _Pa._ I look upon that the happier Rose that dies in a Man's Hand; there delighting the Sight and Smell, than that which withers away upon the Bush, for it would die there, if it were let alone. As that Wine has the most Honour done it; that is drank before it grows dead: Though this is to be said, that the Flower of a Maid does not presently fade, as soon as she is married: Nay, I have seen a great many, that before Marriage look'd pale and languid, and just as if they were dropping into the Ground: but having been in the Embraces of a Husband, they have brightened up, just as if they just then began to bloom. _Ma._ But for all that, a Maidenhead is accounted a fine Thing. _Pa._ A young Virgin is indeed a pretty Thing: But what's more monstrous than an old Maid? If your Mother had not shed that Blossom, we should never have had this fine Flower, yourself. And if we don't make a barren Match, as I hope we shan't, there will be never a Maid the less for us. _Ma._ But they say Chastity is very well pleasing to God. _Pa._ And for that Reason I would marry a chaste Maid, that I may live chastly with her. The Union of Minds will be more than that of Bodies. We'll get Subjects for the King, and Servants for Christ, and where will the Unchastity of this Matrimony be? And who can tell but we may live together like _Joseph_ and _Mary_? And in the mean Time, we'll learn to be Virgins, we don't arrive at Perfection all at once. _Ma._ What do you talk of? Is Virginity to be violated, that it may be learned? _Pa._ Why not? As by little and little drinking Wine sparingly, we learn to be abstemious. Which do you think is the most temperate Person, he that is sitting at a Table full of Delicacies, and abstains from them, or he who is out of the Reach of those Things that incite Intemperance? _Ma._ I think he is the most temperate Person, that the greatest Plenty can't debauch. _Pa._ Which is the most laudable for Chastity, he that castrates himself, or he that having his Members entire, forbears Venery? _Ma._ The latter, in my Opinion: I should call the former a Madman. _Pa._ Don't they in a Manner castrate themselves, that abjure Matrimony? _Ma._ I think they do. _Pa._ Then it is no Virtue to forbear Coition. _Ma._ Is it not? _Pa._ I prove it thus; if it were of itself a Virtue not to copulate, it were a Sin to do it: so that it follows of Consequence, it is a Fault not to copulate, and a Virtue to do it. _Ma._ When does this Case happen? _Pa._ As often as the Husband requires his due of his Wife; especially if he would embrace her for the Sake of Procreation. _Ma._ But if it be out of Wantonness? Is it not lawful to deny him? _Pa._ He may be admonish'd or dissuaded by soft Language to forbear; but if he insists upon it, he ought not to be refus'd. But I hear very few Husbands complain of their Wives upon this Account. _Ma._ But Liberty is a very sweet Thing. _Pa._ Virginity is rather a greater Burthen. I will be your King, and you shall be my Queen, and we'll govern the Family according to our Pleasure: And do you think that a Bondage? _Ma._ Marriage is called a Halter. _Pa._ They deserve a Halter that call it so. Pray tell me, is not your Soul and Body bound together? _Ma._ Yes, I think they are. _Pa._ Just like a Bird in a Cage; and yet, ask it if it would be freed from it, I believe it will say, no: And what's the Reason of that? Because it is bound by its own Consent. _Ma._ But we have neither of us got much of Portion. _Pa._ We are the safer for that, you shall add to it at Home by good Housewifery, and that is not without good Reason said to be a great Revenue, and I'll increase it abroad by my Industry. _Ma._ But Children bring a great many Cares along with them. _Pa._ Have done with Scruples. _Ma._ Would you have me marry a dead Man? _Pa._ No, but I shall come to Life again then. _Ma._ Well, you have removed my Objection. My _Pamphilus_, farewell. _Pa._ Do you take Care of that. _Ma._ I wish you a good Night. Why do you sigh? _Pa._ A good Night, say you, I wish you would give me what you wish me. _Ma._ Soft and fair, you are a little too hasty. _Pa._ Must I not carry nothing of you along with me? _Ma._ This sweet Ball; it will cheer your Heart. _Pa._ But give me a Kiss too. _Ma._ No, I have a Mind to keep my Maidenhead for you entire and untouch'd. _Pa._ Will a Kiss take any Thing from your Virginity? _Ma._ Will you give me leave to kiss other Folks? _Pa._ No, by no Means, I'd have my Kisses kept for myself. _Ma._ Well, I'll keep 'em for you: But there is another Reason why I dare not give you a Kiss, as Things are at present. _Pa._ What is that? _Ma._ You say your Soul is gone out of your Body into mine, so that there is but very little left. I am afraid that in Kissing, the little that is left in you, should jump out of you into me, and so you should be quite dead. Shake Hands as a Pledge of my Love, and so farewell. Do you see that you manage the Matter vigorously, and I'll pray to God in the mean Time, that whatsoever be done, may be for both our good. _The VIRGIN AVERSE TO MATRIMONY._ The ARGUMENT. _A Virgin averse to Matrimony, will needs be a Nun. She is dissuaded from it, and persuaded to moderate her Inclination in that Matter, and to do nothing against her Parents Consent, but rather to marry. That Virginity may be maintain'd in a conjugal Life. The Monks Way of living in Celibacy is rally'd. Children, why so call'd. He abhors those Plagiaries who entice young Men and Maids into Monasteries, as though Salvation was to be had no other Way; whence it comes to pass, that many great Wits are as it were buried alive._ EUBULUS, CATHERINE. _Eub._ I am glad with all my Heart, that Supper is over at last, that we may have an Opportunity to take a Walk, which is the greatest Diversion in the World. _Ca._ And I was quite tir'd of sitting so long at Table. _Eu._ How green and charming does every Thing in the World look! surely this is its Youth. _Ca._ Ay, so it is. _Eu._ But why is it not Spring with you too? _Ca._ What do you mean? _Eu._ Because you look a little dull. _Ca._ Why, don't I look as I use to do? _Eu._ Shall I show you how you look? _Ca._ With all my Heart. _Eu._ Do you see this Rose, how it contracts itself, now towards Night? _Ca._ Yes, I do see it: And what then? _Eu._ Why, just so you look. _Ca._ A very fine Comparison. _Eu._ If you won't believe me, see your own Face in this Fountain here. What was the Meaning you sat sighing at Supper so? _Ca._ Pray don't ask Questions about that which don't concern you. _Eu._ But it does very much concern me, since I can't be chearful myself, without you be so too. See now, there's another Sigh, and a deep one too! _Ca._ There is indeed something that troubles my Mind. But I must not tell it. _Eu._ What, won't you tell it me, that love you more dearly than I do my own Sister: My _Katy_, don't be afraid to speak; be it what it will you are safe. _Ca._ If I should be safe enough, yet I'm afraid I shall be never the better in telling my Tale to one that can do me no good. _Eu._ How do you know that? If I can't serve you in the Thing itself, perhaps I may in Counsel or Consolation. _Ca._ I can't speak it out. _Eu._ What is the Matter? Do you hate me? _Ca._ I love you more dearly than my own Brother, and yet for all that my Heart won't let me divulge it. _Eu._ Will you tell me, if I guess it? Why do you quibble now? Give me your Word, or I'll never let you alone till I have it out. _Ca._ Well then, I do give you my Word. _Eu._ Upon the whole of the Matter, I can't imagine what you should want of being compleatly happy. _Ca._ I would I were so. _Eu._ You are in the very Flower of your Age: If I'm not mistaken, you are now in your seventeenth Year. _Ca._ That's true. _Eu._ So that in my Opinion the Fear of old Age can't yet be any Part of your Trouble. _Ca._ Nothing less, I assure you. _Eu._ And you are every Way lovely, and that is the singular Gift of God. _Ca._ Of my Person, such as it is, I neither glory nor complain. _Eu._ And besides the Habit of your Body and your Complexion bespeak you to be in perfect Health, unless you have some hidden Distemper. _Ca._ Nothing of that, I thank God. _Eu._ And besides, your Credit is fair. _Ca._ I trust it is. _Eu._ And you are endow'd with a good Understanding suitable to the Perfections of your Body, and such a one as I could wish to myself, in order to my Attainment of the liberal Sciences. _Ca._ If I have, I thank God for it. _Eu._ And again, you are of a good agreeable Humour, which is rarely met with in great Beauties, they are not wanting neither. _Ca._ I wish they were such as they should be. _Eu._ Some People are uneasy at the Meanness of their Extraction, but your Parents are both of them well descended, and virtuous, of plentiful Fortunes, and very kind to you. _Ca._ I have nothing to complain of upon that Account. _Eu._ What Need of many Words? Of all the young Women in the Country you are the Person I would chuse for a Wife, if I were in Condition to pretend to't. _Ca._ And I would chuse none but you for a Husband, if I were dispos'd to marry. _Eu._ It must needs be some extraordinary Matter that troubles your Mind so. _Ca._ It is no light Matter, you may depend upon it. _Eu._ You won't take it ill I hope if I guess at it. _Ca._ I have promis'd you I won't. _Eu._ I know by Experience what a Torment Love is. Come, confess now, is that it? You promis'd to tell me. _Ca._ There's Love in the Case, but not that Sort of Love that you imagine. _Eu._ What Sort of Love is it that you mean? _Ca._ Guess. _Eu._ I have guess'd all the Guesses I can guess; but I'm resolv'd I'll never let go this Hand till I have gotten it out of you. _Ca._ How violent you are. _Eu._ Whatever your Care is, repose it in my Breast. _Ca._ Since you are so urgent, I will tell you. From my very Infancy I have had a very strong Inclination. _Eu._ To what, I beseech you? _Ca._ To put myself into a Cloyster. _Eu._ What, to be a Nun? _Ca._ Yes. _Eu._ Ho! I find I was out in my Notion; to leave a Shoulder of Mutton for a Sheep's Head. _Ca._ What's that you say, _Eubulus_? _Eu._ Nothing, my Dear, I did but cough. But, go on, tell me it out. _Ca._ This was my Inclination; but my Parents were violently set against it. _Eu._ I hear ye. _Ca._ On the other Hand, I strove by Intreaties, fair Words, and Tears, to overcome that pious Aversion of my Parents. _Eu._ O strange! _Ca._ At Length when they saw I persisted in Intreaties, Prayers, and Tears, they promis'd me that if I continu'd in the same Mind till I was seventeen Years of Age, they would leave me to my own Liberty: The Time is now come, I continue still in the same Mind, and they go from their Words. This is that which troubles my Mind. I have told you my Distemper, do you be my Physician, and cure me, if you can. _Eu._ In the first Place, my sweet Creature, I would advise you to moderate your Affections; and if you can't do all you would, do all that you can. _Ca._ It will certainly be the Death of me, if I han't my Desire. _Eu._ What was it that gave the first Rise to this fatal Resolution? _Ca._ Formerly, when I was a little Girl, they carried me into one of those Cloysters of Virgins, carry'd me all about it, and shew'd me the whole College. I was mightily taken with the Virgins, they look'd so charming pretty, just like Angels; the Chapels were so neat, and smelt so sweet, the Gardens look'd so delicately well order'd, that in short which Way soever I turn'd my Eye every Thing seem'd delightful. And then I had the prettiest Discourse with the Nuns. And I found two or three that had been my Play-Fellows when I was a Child, and I have had a strange Passion for that Sort of Life ever since. _Eu._ I have no Dislike to the Nunneries themselves, though the same Thing can never agree with all Persons: But considering your Genius, as far as I can gather from your Complexion and Manners, I should rather advise you to an agreeable Husband, and set up a College in your own House, of which he should be the Abbot and you the Abbess. _Ca._ I will rather die than quit my Resolution of Virginity. _Eu._ Nay, it is indeed an admirable Thing to be a pure Virgin, but you may keep yourself so without running yourself into a Cloyster, from which you never can come out. You may keep your Maidenhead at Home with your Parents. _Ca._ Yes, I may, but it is not so safe there. _Eu._ Much safer truly in my Judgment there, than with those brawny, swill-belly'd Monks. They are no Capons, I'll assure you, whatever you may think of them. They are call'd Fathers, and they commonly make good their Calling to the very Letter. Time was when Maids liv'd no where honester than at home with their Parents, when the only spiritual Father they had was the Bishop. But, prithee, tell me, what Cloyster hast thou made Choice of among 'em all, to be a Slave in? _Ca._ The _Chrysertian_. _Eu._ Oh! I know it, it is a little Way from your Father's House. _Ca._ You're right. _Eu._ I am very well acquainted with the whole Gang. A sweet Fellowship to renounce Father and Mother, Friends, and a worthy Family for! For the Patriarch himself, what with Age, Wine, and a certain natural Drowsiness, has been mop'd this many a Day, he can't now relish any Thing but Wine; and he has two Companions, _John_ and _Jodocus_, that match him to a Hair. And as for _John_, indeed I can't say he is an ill Man, for he has nothing at all of a Man about him but his Beard, not a Grain of Learning in him, and not much more common Prudence. And _Jodocus_ he's so arrant a Sot, that if he were not ty'd up to the Habit of his Order, he would walk the Streets in a Fool's Cap with Ears and Bells at it. _Ca._ Truly they seem to me to be very good Men. _Eu._ But, my _Kitty_, I know 'em better than you do. They will do good Offices perhaps between you and your Parents, that they may gain a Proselyte. _Ca. Jodocus_ is very civil to me. _Eu._ A great Favour indeed. But suppose 'em good and learned Men to Day, you'll find 'em the contrary perhaps to Morrow; and let them be what they will then, you must bear with them. _Ca._ I am troubled to see so many Entertainments at my Father's House, and marry'd Folks are so given to talk smutty; I'm put to't sometimes when Men come to kiss me, and you know one can't well deny a Kiss. _Eu._ He that would avoid every Thing that offends him, must go out of the World; we must accustom our Ears to hear every Thing, but let nothing enter the Mind but what is good. I suppose your Parents allow you a Chamber to yourself. _Ca._ Yes, they do. _Eu._ Then you may retire thither, if you find the Company grow troublesome; and while they are drinking and joking, you may entertain yourself with Christ your Spouse, praying, singing, and giving Thanks: Your Father's House will not defile you, and you will make it the more pure. _Ca._ But it is a great Deal safer to be in Virgins Company. _Eu._ I do not disapprove of a chaste Society: Yet I would not have you delude yourself with false Imaginations. When once you come to be throughly acquainted there, and see Things nearer Hand, perhaps Things won't look with so good a Face as they did once. They are not all Virgins that wear Vails; believe me. _Ca._ Good Words, I beseech you. _Eu._ Those are good Words that are true Words. I never read of but one Virgin that was a Mother, _i.e._ the Virgin _Mary_, unless the Eulogy we appropriate to the Virgin be transferr'd to a great many to be call'd Virgins after Childbearing. _Ca._ I abhor the Thoughts on't. _Eu._ Nay, and more than that, those Maids, I'll assure you, do more than becomes Maids to do. _Ca._ Ay! why so, pray? _Eu._ Because there are more among 'em that imitate _Sappho_ in Manners, than are like her in Wit. _Ca._ I don't very well understand you. _Eu._ My dear _Kitty_, I therefore speak in Cypher that you may not understand me. _Ca._ But my Mind runs strangely upon this Course of Life, and I have a strong Opinion that this Disposition comes from God, because it hath continu'd with me so many Years, and grows every Day stronger and stronger. _Eu._ Your good Parents being so violently set against it, makes me suspect it. If what you attempt were good, God would have inclined your Parents to favour the Motion. But you have contracted this Affection from the gay Things you saw when you were a Child; the Tittle-tattles of the Nuns, and the Hankering you have after your old Companions, the external Pomp and specious Ceremonies, and the Importunities of the senseless Monks which hunt you to make a Proselyte of you, that they may tipple more largely. They know your Father to be liberal and bountiful, and they'll either give him an Invitation to them, because they know he'll bring Wine enough with him to serve for ten lusty Soaks, or else they'll come to him. Therefore let me advise you to do nothing without your Parents Consent, whom God has appointed your Guardians. God would have inspired their Minds too, if the Thing you were attempting were a religious Matter. _Ca._ In this Matter it is Piety to contemn Father and Mother. _Eu._ It is, I grant, sometimes a Piece of Piety to contemn Father or Mother for the Sake of Christ; but for all that, he would not act piously, that being a Christian, and had a Pagan to his Father, who had nothing but his Son's Charity to support him, should forsake him, and leave him to starve. If you had not to this Day profess'd Christ by Baptism, and your Parents should forbid you to be baptis'd, you would indeed then do piously to prefer Christ before your impious Parents; or if your Parents should offer to force you to do some impious, scandalous Thing, their Authority in that Case were to be contemned. But what is this to the Case of a Nunnery? You have Christ at home. You have the Dictates of Nature, the Approbation of Heaven, the Exhortation of St. _Paul_, and the Obligation of human Laws, for your Obedience to Parents; and will you now withdraw yourself from under the Authority of good and natural Parents, to give yourself up a Slave to a fictitious Father, rather than to your real Father, and a strange Mother instead of your true Mother, and to severe Masters and Mistresses rather than Parents? For you are so under your Parents Direction, that they would have you be at Liberty wholly. And therefore Sons and Daughters are call'd [_liberi_] Children, because they are free from the Condition of Servants. You are now of a free Woman about to make yourself voluntarily a Slave. The Clemency of the Christian Religion has in a great Measure cast out of the World the old Bondage, saving only some obscure Foot-Steps in some few Places. But there is now a Days found out under pretence of Religion a new Sort of Servitude, as they now live indeed in many Monasteries. You must do nothing there but by a Rule, and then all that you lose they get. If you offer to step but one Step out of the Door, you're lugg'd back again just like a Criminal that had poison'd her Father. And to make the Slavery yet the more evident, they change the Habit your Parents gave you, and after the Manner of those Slaves in old Time, bought and sold in the Market, they change the very Name that was given you in Baptism, and _Peter_ or _John_ are call'd _Francis_, or _Dominic_, or _Thomas_. _Peter_ first gives his Name up to Christ, and being to be enter'd into _Dominic's_ Order, he's called _Thomas_. If a military Servant casts off the Garment his Master gave him, is he not look'd upon to have renounc'd his Master? And do we applaud him that takes upon him a Habit that Christ the Master of us all never gave him? He is punish'd more severely for the changing it again, than if he had a hundred Times thrown away the Livery of his Lord and Emperor, which is the Innocency of his Mind. _Ca._ But they say, it is a meritorious Work to enter into this voluntary Confinement. _Eu._ That is a pharisaical Doctrine. St. _Paul_ teacheth us otherwise, _and will not have him that is called free, make himself a Servant, but rather endeavour that he may be more free:_ And this makes the Servitude the worse, that you must serve many Masters, and those most commonly Fools too, and Debauchees; and besides that, they are uncertain, being every now and then new. But answer me this one Thing, I beseech you, do any Laws discharge you from your Duty to your Parents? _Ca._ No. _Eu._ Can you buy or sell an Estate against your Parents Consent? _Ca._ No, I can't. _Eu._ What Right have you then to give away yourself to I know not whom, against your Parents Consent? Are you not their Child, the dearest and most appropriate Part of their Possession? _Ca._ In the Business of Religion, the Laws of Nature give Place. _Eu._ The great Point of our Religion lies in our Baptism: But the Matter in Question here is, only the changing of a Habit, or of such a Course of Life, which in itself is neither Good nor Evil. And now consider but this one Thing, how many valuable Privileges you lose, together with your Liberty. Now, if you have a Mind to read, pray, or sing, you may go into your own Chamber, as much and as often as you please. When you have enough of Retirement, you may go to Church, hear Anthems, Prayers and Sermons; and if you see any Matron or Virgin remarkable for Piety, in whose Company you may get good; if you see any Man that is endow'd with singular Probity, from whom you may learn what will make for your bettering, you may have their Conversation; and you may chuse that Preacher that preaches Christ most purely. When once you come into a Cloyster, all these Things, that are the greatest Assistances in the Promotion of true Piety, you lose at once. _Ca._ But in the mean Time I shall not be a Nun. _Eu._ What signifies the Name? Consider the Thing itself. They make their boast of Obedience, and won't you be praise-worthy, in being obedient to your Parents, your Bishop and your Pastor, whom God has commanded you to obey? Do you profess Poverty? And may not you too, when all is in your Parents Hands? Although the Virgins of former Times were in an especial Manner commended by holy Men, for their Liberality towards the Poor; but they could never have given any Thing, if they had possessed nothing. Nor will your Charity be ever the less for living with your Parents. And what is there more in a Convent than these? A Vail, a Linnen-Shift turned into a Stole, and certain Ceremonies, which of themselves signify nothing to the Advancement of Piety, and make no Body more acceptable in the Eyes of Christ, who only regards the Purity of the Mind. _Ca._ This is News to me. _Eu._ But it is true News. When you, not being discharg'd from the Government of your Parents, can't dispose of, or sell so much as a Rag, or an Inch of Ground, what Right can you pretend to for disposing of yourself into the Service of a Stranger? _Ca._ They say, that the Authority of a Parent does not hinder a Child from entering into a religious Life. _Eu._ Did you not make Profession of Religion in your Baptism? _Ca._ Yes. _Eu._ And are not they religious Persons that conform to the Precepts of Christ? _Ca._ They are so. _Eu._ What new Religion is that then, which makes that void, that the Law of Nature had establish'd? What the old Law hath taught, and the Gospel approv'd, and the Apostles confirm'd? That is an Ordinance that never came from Heaven, but was hatch'd by a Company of Monks in their Cells. And after this Manner, some of them undertake to justify a Marriage between a Boy and a Girl, though without the Privity, and against the Consent of their Parents; if the Contract be (as they phrase it) in Words of the present Tense. And yet that Position is neither according to the Dictate of Nature, the Law of _Moses_, or the Doctrine of _Christ_ or his Apostles. _Ca._ Do you think then, that I may not espouse myself to Christ without my Parents Consent? _Eu._ I say, you have espous'd him already, and so we have all. Where is the Woman that marries the same Man twice? The Question is here only about Places, Garments and Ceremonies. I don't think Duty to Parents is to be abandon'd for the Sake of these Things; and you ought to look to it, that instead of espousing Christ, you don't espouse some Body else. _Ca._ But I am told, that in this Case it is a Piece of the highest Sanctity, even to contemn ones Parents. _Eu._ Pray, require these Doctors to shew you a Text for it, out of the holy Scriptures, that teach this Doctrine; but if they can't do this, bid them drink off a good large Bumper of _Burgundian_ Wine: That they can do bravely. It is indeed a Piece of Piety to fly from wicked Parents to Christ: But to fly from pious Parents to a Monkery, that is (as it too often proves) to fly from ought to stark naught. What Pity is that I pray? Although in old Time, he that was converted from Paganism to Christianity, paid yet as great a Reverence to his idolatrous Parents, as it was possible to do without prejudice to Religion itself. _Ca._ Are you then against the main Institution of a monastick Life? _Eu._ No, by no Means: But as I will not persuade any Body against it, that is already engag'd in this Sort of Life, to endeavour to get out of it, so I would most undoubtedly caution all young Women; especially those of generous Tempers, not to precipitate themselves unadvisedly into that State from whence there is no getting out afterwards: And the rather, because their Chastity is more in Danger in a Cloyster than out of it; and beside that, you may do whatsoever is done there as well at Home. _Ca._ You have indeed urg'd many, and very considerable Arguments; yet this Affection of mine can't be removed. _Eu._ If I can't dissuade you from it, as I wish heartily I could, however, remember this one Thing, that _Eubulus_ told you before Hand. In the mean Time, out of the Love I bear you, I wish your Inclinations may succeed better than my Counsel. _The PENITENT VIRGIN._ The ARGUMENT. _A Virgin repenting before she had profess'd herself, goes Home again to her Parents. The crafty Tricks of the Monks are detected, who terrify and frighten unexperienced Minds into their Cloysters, by feign'd Apparitions and Visions_. EUBULUS, CATHERINE. _Eu._ I could always wish to have such a Porter. _Ca._ And I to have such Visitors. _Eu._ But fare you well, _Kitty_. _Ca._ What's the Matter, do you take Leave before you salute? _Eu._ I did not come hither to see you cry: What's the Matter, that as soon as ever you see me, the Tears stand in your Eyes? _Ca._ Why in such Haste? Stay a little; pray stay. I'll put on my better Looks, and we'll be merry together. _Eu._ What Sort of Cattle have we got here? _Ca._ 'Tis the Patriarch of the College: Don't go away, they have had their Dose of Fuddle: Stay but a little While, and as soon as he is gone, we will discourse as we use to do. _Eu._ Well, I'll be so good natur'd as to hearken to you, though you would not to me. Now we are alone, you must tell me the whole Story, I would fain have it from your Mouth. _Ca._ Now I have found by Experience, of all my Friends, which I took to be very wise Men too, that no Body gave more wise and grave Advice than you, that are the youngest of 'em all. _Eu._ Tell me, how did you get your Parents Consent at last? _Ca._ First, by the restless Sollicitations of the Monks and Nuns, and then by my own Importunities and Tears, my Mother was at length brought over; but my Father stood out stiffly still: But at last being ply'd by several Engines, he was prevail'd upon to yield; but yet, rather like one that was forced, than that consented. The Matter was concluded in their Cups, and they preach'd Damnation to him, if he refus'd to let Christ have his Spouse. _Eu._ O the Villany of Fools! But what then? _Ca._ I was kept close at Home for three Days; but in the mean Time there were always with me some Women of the College that they call _Convertites_, mightily encouraging me to persist in my holy Resolution, and watching me narrowly, lest any of my Friends or Kindred should come at me, and make me alter my Mind. In the mean While, my Habit was making ready, and the Provision for the Feast. _Eu._ How did you find yourself? Did not your Mind misgive you yet? _Ca._ No, not at all; and yet I was so horridly frighted, that I had rather die ten Times over, than suffer the same again. _Eu._ What was that, pray? _Ca._ It is not to be uttered. _Eu._ Come, tell me freely, you know I'm your Friend. _Ca._ Will you keep Counsel? _Eu._ I should do that without promising, and I hope you know me better than to doubt of it. _Ca._ I had a most dreadful Apparition. _Eu._ Perhaps it was your evil Genius that push'd you on to this. _Ca._ I am fully persuaded it was an evil Spirit. _Eu._ Tell me what Shape it was in. Was it such as we use to paint with a crooked Beak, long Horns, Harpies Claws, and swinging Tail? _Ca._ You make a Game of it, but I had rather sink into the Earth, than see such another. _Eu._ And were your Women Sollicitresses with you then? _Ca._ No, nor I would not so much as open my Lips of it to them, though they sifted me most particularly about it, when they found me almost dead with the Surprise. _Eu._ Shall I tell you what it was? _Ca._ Do if you can. _Eu._ Those Women had certainly bewitch'd you, or conjur'd your Brain out of your Head rather. But did you persist in your Resolution still, for all this? _Ca._ Yes, for they told me, that many were thus troubled upon their first consecrating themselves to Christ; but if they got the better of the Devil that Bout, he'd let them alone for ever after. _Eu._ Well, what Pomp were you carried out with? _Ca._ They put on all my Finery, let down my Hair, and dress'd me just as if it had been for my Wedding. _Eu._ To a fat Monk, perhaps; Hem! a Mischief take this Cough. _Ca._ I was carried from my Father's House to the College by broad Day-Light, and a World of People staring at me. _Eu._ O these Scaramouches, how they know to wheedle the poor People! How many Days did you continue in that holy College of Virgins, forsooth? _Ca._ Till Part of the twelfth Day. _Eu._ But what was it that changed your Mind, that had been so resolutely bent upon it? _Ca._ I must not tell you what it was, but it was something very considerable. When I had been there six Days, I sent for my Mother; I begged of her, and besought her, as she lov'd my Life, to get me out of the College again. She would not hear on't, but bad me hold to my Resolution. Upon that I sent for my Father, but he chid me too, telling me, that I had made him master his Affections, and that now he'd make me master mine, and not disgrace him, by starting from my Purpose. At last, when I saw that I could do no good with them this Way, I told my Father and Mother both, that to please them, I would submit to die, and that would certainly be my Fate, if they did not take me out, and that very quickly too; and upon this, they took me Home. _Eu._ It was very well that you recanted before you had profess'd yourself for good and all: But still, I don't hear what it was changed your Mind so suddenly. _Ca._ I never told any Mortal yet, nor shall. _Eu._ What if I should guess? _Ca._ I'm sure you can't guess it; and if you do, I won't tell you. _Eu._ Well, for all that, I guess what it was. But in the mean Time, you have been at a great Charge. _Ca._ Above 400 Crowns. _Eu._ O these guttling Nuptials! Well, but I am glad though the Money is gone, that you're safe: For the Time to come, hearken to good Counsel when it is given you. _Ca._ So I will. _The burnt Child dreads the Fire._ _The UNEASY WIFE._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy, entitled_, The uneasy Wife: _Or_, Uxor [Greek: Mempsigamos], _treats of many Things that relate to the mutual Nourishment of conjugal Affection. Concerning the concealing a Husband's Faults; of not interrupting conjugal Benevolence; of making up Differences; of mending a Husband's Manners; of a Woman's Condescension to her Husband. What is the Beauty of a Woman; she disgraces herself, that disgraces her Husband; that the Wife ought to submit to the Husband; that the Husband ought not to be out of Humour when the Wife is; and on the Contrary; that they ought to study mutual Concord, since there is no Room for Advice; that they ought to conceal one another's Faults, and not expose one another; that it is in the Power of the Wife to mend her Husband; that she ought to carry herself engagingly, learn his Humour, what provokes him or appeases him; that all Things be in Order at Home; that he have what he likes best to eat; that if the Husband be vext, the Wife don't laugh; if he be angry, that she should speak pleasantly to him, or hold her Tongue; that what she blames him for, should be betwixt themselves; the Method of admonishing; that she ought to make her Complaint to no Body but her Husband's Parents; or to some peculiar Friends that have an Influence upon him. The Example of a prudent Man, excellently managing a young morose Wife, by making his Complaint to her Father. Another of a prudent Wife, that by her good Carriage reformed a Husband that frequented leud Company, Another of a Man that had beaten his Wife in his angry Fit; that Husbands are to be overcome, brought into Temper by Mildness, Sweetness, and Kindness; that there should be no Contention in the Chamber or in the Bed; but that Care should be taken, that nothing but Pleasantness and Engagingness be there. The Girdle of_ Venus _is Agreeableness of Manners. Children make a mutual Amity. That a Woman separated from her Husband, is nothing: Let her always be mindful of the Respect that is due to a Husband._ EULALIA, XANTIPPE. _EU._ Most welcome _Xantippe_, a good Morning to you. _Xa._ I wish you the same, my dear _Eulalia_. Methinks you look prettier than you use to do. _Eu._ What, do you begin to banter me already? _Xa._ No, upon my Word, for you seem so to me. _Eu._ Perhaps then my new Cloaths may set me off to Advantage. _Xa._ You guess right, it is one of the prettiest Suits I ever beheld in all my Life. It is _English_ Cloth, I suppose. _Eu._ It is indeed of _English_ Wool, but it is a _Venetian_ Dye. _Xa._ It is as soft as Silk, and 'tis a charming Purple. Who gave you this fine Present? _Eu._ My Husband. From whom should a virtuous Wife receive Presents but from him? _Xa._ Well, you are a happy Woman, that you are, to have such a good Husband. For my Part, I wish I had been married to a Mushroom when I was married to my _Nick_. _Eu._ Why so, pray? What! is it come to an open Rupture between you already? _Xa._ There is no Possibility of agreeing with such a one as I have got. You see what a ragged Condition I am in; so he lets me go like a Dowdy! May I never stir, if I an't asham'd to go out of Doors any whither, when I see how fine other Women are, whose Husbands are nothing nigh so rich as mine is. _Eu._ The Ornament of a Matron does not consist in fine Cloaths or other Deckings of the Body, as the Apostle _Peter_ teaches, for I heard that lately in a Sermon; but in chaste and modest Behaviour, and the Ornaments of the Mind. Whores are trick'd up to take the Eyes of many but we are well enough drest, if we do but please our own Husbands. _Xa._ But mean while this worthy Tool of mine, that is so sparing toward his Wife, lavishly squanders away the Portion I brought along with me, which by the Way was not a mean one. _Eu._ In what? _Xa._ Why, as the Maggot bites, sometimes at the Tavern, sometimes upon his Whores, sometimes a gaming. _Eu._ O fie, you should never say so of your Husband. _Xa._ But I'm sure 'tis too true; and then when he comes Home, after I have been waiting for him till I don't know what Time at Night, as drunk as _David's_ Sow, he does nothing but lye snoring all Night long by my Side, and sometimes bespues the Bed too, to say nothing more. _Eu._ Hold your Tongue: You disgrace yourself in disgracing your Husband. _Xa._ Let me dye, if I had not rather lye with a Swine than such a Husband as I have got. _Eu._ Don't you scold at him then? _Xa._ Yes, indeed, I use him as he deserves. He finds I have got a Tongue in my Head. _Eu._ Well, and what does he say to you again? _Xa._ At first he used to hector at me lustily, thinking to fright me with his big Words. _Eu._ Well, and did your Words never come to downright Blows? _Xa._ Once, and but once, and then the Quarrel rose to that Height on both Sides, that we were within an Ace of going to Fisty-Cuffs. _Eu._ How, Woman! say you so? _Xa._ He held up his Stick at me, swearing and cursing like a Foot-Soldier, and threatening me dreadfully. _Eu._ Were not you afraid then? _Xa._ Nay, I snatch'd up a three legg'd Stool, and if he had but touch'd me with his Finger, he should have known he had to do with a Woman of Spirit. _Eu._ Ah! my _Xantippe_, that was not becoming. _Xa._ What becoming? If he does not use me like a Wife, I won't use him like a Husband. _Eu._ But St. _Paul_ teaches, that Wives ought to be subject to their own Husbands with all Reverence. And St. _Peter_ proposes the Example of _Sarah_ to us, who call'd her Husband _Abraham_ Lord. _Xa._ I have heard those Things, but the same _Paul_ likewise teaches that _Men should love their Wives as Christ lov'd his Spouse the Church_. Let him remember his Duty and I'll remember mine. _Eu._ But nevertheless when Things are come to that Pass that one must submit to the other, it is but reasonable that the Wife submit to her Husband. _Xa._ Yes indeed, if he deserves the Name of a Husband who uses me like a Kitchen Wench. _Eu._ But tell me, _Xantippe_, did he leave off threatening after this? _Xa._ He did leave off, and it was his Wisdom so to do, or else he would have been thresh'd. _Eu._ But did not you leave off Scolding at him? _Xa._ No, nor never will. _Eu._ But what does he do in the mean Time? _Xa._ What! Why sometimes he pretends himself to be fast asleep, and sometimes does nothing in the World but laugh at me; sometimes he catches up his Fiddle that has but three Strings, scraping upon it with all his Might, and drowns the Noise of my Bawling. _Eu._ And does not that vex you to the Heart? _Xa._ Ay, so that it is impossible to be express'd, so that sometimes I can scarce keep my Hands off of him. _Eu._ Well, my _Xantippe_, give me Leave to talk a little freely with you. _Xa._ I do give you Leave. _Eu._ Nay, you shall use the same Freedom with me. Our Intimacy, which has been in a Manner from our very Cradles, requires this. _Xa._ You say true, nor was there any of my Playfellows that I more dearly lov'd than you. _Eu._ Let your Husband be as bad as bad can be, think upon this, That there is no changing. Heretofore, indeed, Divorce was a Remedy for irreconcilable Disagreements, but now this is entirely taken away: He must be your Husband and you his Wife to the very last Day of Life. _Xa._ The Gods did very wrong that depriv'd us of this Privilege. _Eu._ Have a Care what you say. It was the Will of Christ. _Xa._ I can scarce believe it. _Eu._ It is as I tell you. Now you have nothing left to do but to study to suit your Tempers and Dispositions one to another, and agree together. _Xa._ Do you think, I can be able to new-make him? _Eu._ It does not a little depend upon the Wives, what Men Husbands shall be. _Xa._ Do you and your Husband agree very well together? _Eu._ All is quiet with us now. _Xa._ Well then, you had some Difference at first. _Eu._ Never any Thing of a Storm; but yet, as it is common with human Kind, sometimes a few small Clouds would rise, which might have produc'd a Storm, if it had not been prevented by Condescention. Every one has his Humours, and every one their Fancies, and if we would honestly speak the Truth, every one his Faults, more or less, which if in any State, certainly in Matrimony we ought to connive at, and not to hate. _Xa._ You speak very right. _Eu._ It frequently happens that that mutual Love that ought to be between the Husband and Wife is cooled before they come to be throughly acquainted one with another. This is the first Thing that ought to be provided against; for when a Spirit of Dissention is once sprung up, it is a difficult Matter to bring them to a Reconciliation, especially if it ever proceeded so far as to come to reproachful Reflections. Those Things that are joined together with Glue, are easily pull'd one from another if they be handled roughly as soon as done, but when once they have been fast united together, and the Glue is dry, there is nothing more firm. For this Reason, all the Care possible is to be taken that good Will between Man and Wife be cultivated and confirmed even in the Infancy of Matrimony. This is principally effected by Obsequiousness, and an Agreeableness of Tempers. For that Love that is founded only upon Beauty, is for the most part but short-liv'd. _Xa._ But prithee tell me by what Arts you brought your Husband to your Humour. _Eu._ I'll tell you for this End, that you may copy after me. _Xa._ Well, I will, if I can. _Eu._ It will be very easy to do, if you will; nor is it too late yet; for he is in the Flower of his Youth, and you are but a Girl; and as I take it, have not been married this Twelve Months yet. _Xa._ You are very right. _Eu._ Then I'll tell you; but upon Condition, that you'll not speak of it. _Xa._ Well, I will not. _Eu._ It was my first Care that I might please my Husband in every Respect, that nothing might give him Offence. I diligently observed his Inclinations and Temper, and also observed what were his easiest Moments, what Things pleas'd him, and what vex'd him, as they use to do who tame _Elephants_ and _Lions_, or such Sort of Creatures, that can't be master'd by downright Strength. _Xa._ And such an Animal have I at Home. _Eu._ Those that go near Elephants, wear no Garment that is white; nor those who manage Bulls, red; because it is found by Experience, that these Creatures are made fierce by these Colours, just as Tygers are made so raging mad by the Sound of a Drum, that they will tear their own selves; and Jockies have particular Sounds, and Whistles, and Stroakings, and other Methods to sooth Horses that are mettlesome: How much more does it become us to use these Acts towards our Husbands, with whom, whether we will or no, we must live all our Lives at Bed and Board? _Xa._ Well, go on with what you have begun. _Eu._ Having found out his Humour, I accommodated myself to him, taking Care that nothing should offend him. _Xa._ How could you do that? _Eu._ I was very diligent in the Care of my Family, which is the peculiar Province of Women, that nothing was neglected, and that every Thing should be suitable to his Temper, altho' it were in the most minute Things. _Xa._ What Things? _Eu._ Suppose my Husband peculiarly fancied such a Dish of Meat, or liked it dress'd after such a Manner; or if he lik'd his Bed made after such or such a Manner. _Xa._ But how could you humour one who was never at Home, or was drunk? _Eu._ Have Patience, I was coming to that Point. If at any Time my Husband seem'd to be melancholy, and did not much care for talking, I did not laugh, and put on a gay Humour, as some Women are us'd to do; but I put on a grave demure Countenance, as well as he. For as a Looking-glass, if it be a true one, represents the Face of the Person that looks into it, so a Wife ought to frame herself to the Temper of her Husband, not to be chearful when he is melancholy, nor be merry when he is in a Passion. And if at any Time he was in a Passion, I either endeavoured to sooth him with fair Words, or held my Tongue till his Passion was over; and having had Time to cool, Opportunity offered, either of clearing myself, or of admonishing him. I took the same Method, if at any Time he came Home fuddled, and at such a Time never gave him any Thing but tender Language, that by kind Expressions, I might get him to go to Bed. _Xa._ That is indeed a very unhappy Portion for Wives, if they must only humour their Husbands, when they are in a Passion, and doing every Thing that they have a Mind to do. _Eu._ As tho' this Duty were not reciprocal, and that our Husbands are not forc'd to bear with many of our Humours: However, there is a Time, when a Wife may take the Freedom in a Matter of some Importance to advise her Husband; but as for small Faults, it is better to wink at them. _Xa._ But what Time is that? _Eu._ When his Mind is serene; when he's neither in a Passion, nor in the Hippo, nor in Liquor; then being in private, you may kindly advise him, but rather intreat him, that he would act more prudently in this or that Matter, relating either to his Estate, Reputation, or Health. And this very Advice is to be season'd with witty Jests and Pleasantries. Sometimes by Way of Preface, I make a Bargain with him before-Hand, that he shall not be angry with me, if being a foolish Woman, I take upon me to advise him in any Thing, that might seem to concern his Honour, Health, or Preservation. When I have said what I had a Mind to say, I break off that Discourse, and turn it into some other more entertaining Subject. For, my _Xantippe_, this is the Fault of us Women, that when once we have begun, we don't know when to make an End. _Xa._ Why, so they say, indeed. _Eu._ This chiefly I observed as a Rule, never to chide my Husband before Company, nor to carry any Complaints out of Doors. What passes between two People, is more easily made up, than when once it has taken Air. Now if any Thing of that kind shall happen, that cannot be born with, and that the Husband can't be cur'd by the Admonition of his Wife, it is more prudent for the Wife to carry her Complaints to her Husband's Parents and Kindred, than to her own; and so to soften her Complaint, that she mayn't seem to hate her Husband, but her Husband's Vices: And not to blab out all neither, that her Husband may tacitly own and love his Wife for her Civility. _Xa._ A Woman must needs be a Philosopher, who can be able to do this. _Eu._ By this Deportment we invite our Husbands to return the Civility. _Xa._ But there are some Brutes in the World, whom you cannot amend, by the utmost good Carriage. _Eu._ In Truth, I don't think it: But put the Case there are: First, consider this; a Husband must be born with, let him be as bad as he will. It is better therefore to bear with him as he is, or made a little better by our courteous Temper, than by our Outrageousness to make him grow every Day worse and worse. What if I should give Instances of Husbands, who by the like civil Treatment have altered their Spouses much for the better? How much more does it become us to use our Husbands after this Manner? _Xa._ You will give an Instance then of a Man, that is as unlike my Husband, as black is from white. _Eu._ I have the Honour to be acquainted with a Gentleman of a noble Family; Learned, and of singular Address and Dexterity; he married a young Lady, a Virgin of seventeen Years of Age, that had been educated all along in the Country in her Father's House, as Men of Quality love to reside in the Country, for the Sake of Hunting and Fowling: He had a Mind to have a raw unexperienc'd Maid, that he might the more easily form her Manners to his own Humour. He began to instruct her in Literature and Musick, and to use her by Degrees to repeat the Heads of Sermons, which she heard, and to accomplish her with other Things, which would afterwards be of Use to her. Now these Things being wholly new to the Girl, which had been brought up at Home, to do nothing but gossip and play, she soon grew weary of this Life, she absolutely refus'd to submit to what her Husband requir'd of her; and when her Husband press'd her about it, she would cry continually, sometimes she would throw herself flat on the Ground, and beat her Head against the Ground, as tho' she wish'd for Death. Her Husband finding there was no End of this, conceal'd his Resentment, gave his Wife an Invitation to go along with him into the Country to his Father-in-Law's House, for the Sake of a little Diversion. His Wife very readily obey'd him in this Matter. When they came there, the Husband left his Wife with her Mother and Sisters, and went a Hunting with his Father-in-Law; there having taken him aside privately, he tells his Father-in-law, that whereas he was in good Hopes to have had an agreeable Companion of his Daughter, he now had one that was always a crying, and fretting herself; nor could she be cured by any Admonitions, and intreats him to lend a helping Hand to cure his Daughter's Disorder. His Father-in-Law made him answer, that he had once put his Daughter into his Hand, and if she did not obey him, he might use his Authority, and cudgel her into a due Submission. The Son-in-Law replies, I know my own Power, but I had much rather she should be reform'd by your Art or Authority, than to come to these Extremities. The Father-in-Law promis'd him to take some Care about the Matter: So a Day or two after, he takes a proper Time and Place, when he was alone with his Daughter, and looking austerely upon her, begins in telling her how homely she was, and how disagreeable as to her Disposition, and how often he had been in Fear that he should never be able to get her a Husband: But after much Pains, says he, I found you such a one, that the best Lady of the Land would have been glad of; and yet, you not being sensible what I have done for you, nor considering that you have such a Husband, who if he were not the best natur'd Man in the World, would scarce do you the Honour to take you for one of his Maid Servants, you are disobedient to him: To make short of my Story, the Father grew so hot in his Discourse, that he seem'd to be scarce able to keep his Hands off her; for he was so wonderful cunning a Man, that he would act any Part, as well as any Comedian. The young Lady, partly for Fear, and partly convinc'd by the Truth of what was told her, fell down at her Father's Feet, beseeching him to forget past Faults, and for the Time to come, she would be mindful of her Duty. Her Father freely forgave her, and also promised, that he would be to her a very indulgent Father, provided she perform'd what she promis'd. _Xa._ Well, what happened after that? _Eu._ The young Lady going away, after her Fathers Discourse was ended, went directly into her Chamber, and finding her Husband alone, she fell down on her Knees, and said, Husband, till this very Moment, I neither knew you nor myself; but from this Time forward, you shall find me another Sort of Person; only, I intreat you to forget what is past. The Husband receiv'd this Speech with a Kiss, and promised to do every Thing she could desire, if she did but continue in that Resolution. _Xa._ What! Did she continue in it? _Eu._ Even to her dying Day; nor was any Thing so mean, but she readily and chearfully went about it, if her Husband would have it so. So great a Love grew, and was confirm'd between them. Some Years after, the young Lady would often congratulate herself, that she had happen'd to marry such a Husband, which had it not happen'd, said she, I had been the most wretched Woman alive. _Xa._ Such Husbands are as scarce now a Days as white Crows. _Eu._ Now if it will not be tedious to you, I'll tell you a Story, that lately happen'd in this City, of a Husband that was reclaimed by the good Management of his Wife. _Xa._ I have nothing to do at present, and your Conversation is very diverting. _Eu._ There is a certain Gentleman of no mean Descent; he, like the rest of his Quality, used often to go a Hunting: Being in the Country, he happen'd to see a young Damsel, the Daughter of a poor old Woman, and began to fall desperately in love with her. He was a Man pretty well in Years; and for the Sake of this young Maid, he often lay out a Nights, and his Pretence for it was Hunting. His Wife, a Woman of an admirable Temper, suspecting something more than ordinary, went in search to find out her Husband's Intrigues, and having discover'd them, by I can't tell what Method, she goes to the Country Cottage, and learnt all the Particulars where he lay, what he drank, and what Manner of Entertainment he had at Table. There was no Furniture in the House, nothing but naked Walls. The Gentlewoman goes Home, and quickly after goes back again, carrying with her a handsome Bed and Furniture, some Plate and Money, bidding them to treat him with more Respect, if at any Time he came there again. A few Days after, her Husband steals an Opportunity to go thither, and sees the Furniture increas'd, and finds his Entertainment more delicate than it us'd to be; he enquir'd from whence this unaccustomed Finery came: They said, that a certain honest Gentlewoman of his Acquaintance, brought these Things; and gave them in Charge, that he should be treated with more Respect for the future. He presently suspected that this was done by his Wife. When he came Home, he ask'd her if she had been there. She did not deny it. Then he ask'd her for what Reason she had sent thither that household Furniture? My Dear, says she, you are us'd to a handsomer Way of Living: I found that you far'd hardly there, I thought it my Duty, since you took a Fancy to the Place, that your Reception should be more agreeable. _Xa._ A Wife good even to an Excess. I should sooner have sent him a Bundle of Nettles and Thorns, than furnish'd him with a fine Bed. _Eu._ But hear the Conclusion of my Story; the Gentleman was so touch'd, seeing so much good Nature and Temper in his Wife, that he never after that violated her Bed, but solaced himself with her at Home. I know you know _Gilbert_ the _Dutchman_. _Xa._ I know him. _Eu._ He, you know, in the prime of his Age, marry'd a Gentlewoman well stricken in Years, and in a declining Age. _Xa._ It may be he marry'd the Portion, and not the Woman. _Eu._ So it was. He having an Aversion to his Wife, was over Head and Ears in Love with a young Woman, with whom he us'd ever and anon to divert himself abroad. He very seldom either din'd or supp'd at home. What would you have done, if this had been your Case, _Xantippe_? _Xa._ Why I would have torn his beloved Strumpet's Headcloths off, and I would have wash'd him well with a Chamber-Pot, when he was going to her, that he might have gone thus perfum'd to his Entertainment. _Eu._ But how much more prudently did this Gentlewoman behave herself. She invited his Mistress home to her House, and treated her with all the Civility imaginable. So she kept her Husband without any magical Charms. And if at any Time he supp'd abroad with her, she sent them thither some Nicety or other, desiring them to be merry together. _Xa._ As for me, I would sooner chuse to lose my Life than to be Bawd to my own Husband. _Eu._ But in the mean Time, pray consider the Matter soberly and coolly. Was not this much better, than if she had by her ill Temper totally alienated her Husband's Affections from her, and spent her whole Life in quarrelling and brawling. _Xa._ I believe, that of two Evils it was the least, but I could never have submitted to it. _Eu._ I will add one more, and then I'll have done with Examples. A next Door Neighbour of ours is a very honest, good Man, but a little too subject to Passion. One Day he beat his Wife, a Woman of commendable Prudence. She immediately withdrew into a private Room, and there gave Vent to her Grief by Tears and Sighs. Soon after upon some Occasion her Husband came into the Room, and found his Wife all in Tears. What's the Matter, says he, that you're crying and sobbing like a Child? To which she prudently reply'd, Why, says she, is it not much better to lament my Misfortune here, than if I should make a Bawling in the Street, as other Women do? The Man's Mind was so overcome and mollified by this Answer, so like a Wife, that giving her his Hand, he made a solemn Promise to his Wife, he would never lay his Hand upon her after, as long as he liv'd. Nor did he ever do it. _Xa._ I have obtain'd as much from my Husband, but by a different Conduct. _Eu._ But in the mean Time there are perpetual Wars between you. _Xa._ What then would you have me to do? _Eu._ If your Husband offers you any Affront, you must take no Notice of it, but endeavour to gain his good Will by all good Offices, courteous Carriage, and Meekness of Spirit, and by these Methods, you will in Time, either wholly reclaim him, or at least you will live with him much more easy than now you do. _Xa._ Ay, but he's too ill-natur'd to be wrought upon by all the kind Offices in the World. _Eu._ Hold, don't say so, there is no Beast that is so savage but he may be tam'd by good Management; therefore don't despair of it as to a Man. Do but make the Experiment for a few Months, and if you do not find that this Advice has been of Benefit to you, blame me. And there are also some Faults that you must wink at; but above all Things, it is my Opinion, you ought to avoid ever to begin any Quarrel either in the Bed-Chamber, or in Bed, and to take a special Care that every Thing there be chearful and pleasant. For if that Place which is consecrated for the wiping out old Miscarriages and the cementing of Love, comes to be unhallowed by Contention and Sourness of Temper, all Remedy for the Reconcilement is taken away. For there are some Women of so morose Tempers that they will be querulous, and scold even while the Rites of Love are performing, and will by the Uneasiness of their Tempers render that Fruition itself disagreeable which is wont to discharge the Minds of Men from any Heart-burning, that they may have had; and by this Means they spoil that Cordial, by which Misunderstandings in Matrimony might be cured. _Xa._ That has been often my Case. _Eu._ And tho' it ought always to be the Care of a Wife, not to make her Husband uneasy in any Thing; yet that ought to be especially her Care to study, in conjugal Embraces to render herself by all ways possible, agreeable and delightful to her Husband. _Xa._ To a Man, indeed! But I have to do with an untractable Beast. _Eu._ Come, come, leave off Railing. For the most part Husbands are made bad, by our bad Conduct. But to return to our Argument, those that are conversant in the antient Fables of the Poets, tell you that _Venus_, (whom they make a Goddess, that presides over Matrimony) had a Girdle or _Cestus_ which was made for her by _Vulcan's_ Art, in which were interwoven all bewitching Ingredients of an amorous Medicament, and that she put this on whenever she went to bed to her Husband. _Xa._ I hear a Fable. _Eu._ It is true: But hear the Moral of it. _Xa._ Tell it me. _Eu._ That teaches that a Wife ought to use all the Care imaginable to be so engaging to her Husband in conjugal Embraces, that matrimonial Affection may be retain'd and renew'd, and if there has been any Distaste or Aversion, it may be expell'd the Mind. _Xa._ But where can a Body get this Girdle? _Eu._ There is no Need of Witchcrafts and Spells to procure one. There is no Enchantment so effectual as Virtue, join'd with a Sweetness of Disposition. _Xa._ I can't be able to bring myself to humour such a Husband as I have got. _Eu._ But this is for your Interest, that he would leave off to be such a bad Husband. If you could by _Circe_'s Art transform your Husband into a Swine or a Bear, would you do it? _Xa._ I can't tell, whether I should or no. _Eu._ Which had you rather have, a Swine to your Husband, or a Man? _Xa._ In Truth, I had rather have a Man. _Eu._ Well, come on. What if you could by _Circe_'s Arts make him a sober Man of a Drunkard, a frugal Man of a Spendthrift, a diligent Man of an idle Fellow, would you not do it? _Xa._ To be sure, I would do it. But how shall I attain the Art? _Eu._ You have the Art in yourself, if you would but make Use of it. Whether you will or no he must be your Husband, and the better Man you make him, the more you consult your own Advantage. You only keep your Eyes fix'd upon his Faults, and those aggravate your Aversion to him; and only hold him by this Handle, which is such a one that he cannot be held by; but rather take Notice of what good Qualities he has, and hold him by this Handle, which is a Handle he may be held by: Before you married him, you had Time of considering what his Defects were. A Husband is not to be chosen by the Eyes only, but by the Ears too. Now 'tis your Time to cure him, and not to find Fault with him. _Xa._ What Woman ever made Choice of a Husband by her Ears? _Eu._ She chuses a Husband by her Eyes, which looks at nothing else but his Person and bare Outside: She chuses him by her Ears, who carefully observes what Reputation he has in the World. _Xa._ This is good Advice, but it is too late. _Eu._ But it is not too late to endeavour to amend your Husband. It will contribute something to the Matter, if you could have any Children by him. _Xa._ I have had one. _Eu._ When? _Xa._ A long Time ago. _Eu._ How many Months? _Xa._ Why, about Seven. _Eu._ What do I hear! You put me in Mind of the Joke of the three Months Lying in. _Xa._ By no Means. _Eu._ It must be so, if you reckon from the Day of Marriage. _Xa._ But I had some private Discourse with him before Marriage. _Eu._ Are Children got by Talking? _Xa._ He having by Chance got me into a Room by myself, began to play with me, tickling me about the Arm-pits and Sides, to make me laugh, and I not being able to bear being tickled any longer, threw myself flat upon the Bed, and he lying upon me, kiss'd me, and I don't know what he did to me besides; but this is certain, within a few Days after, my Belly began to swell. _Eu._ Get you gone now, and slight a Husband, who if he can get Children jesting, what will he do if he sets about it in earnest? _Xa._ I suspect that I am now with Child by him again. _Eu._ O brave! to a good Soil, here's a good Ploughman to till it. _Xa._ As to this Affair, he's better than I wish he was. _Eu._ Very few Wives have this Complaint to make: But, I suppose, the Marriage Contract was made between you, before this happened. _Xa._ It was made. _Eu._ Then the Sin was so much the less. Is your Child a Boy? _Xa._ It is. _Eu._ That will reconcile you both, if you will but qualify yourself a little for it. What Sort of Character do your Husband's Companions give him? And what Company does he keep when he is abroad? _Xa._ They give him the Character of an exceeding good-humour'd, courteous, generous Man, and a true Friend to his Friend. _Eu._ These Things give me great Hopes, that he will become such as we would have him be. _Xa._ But I am the only Person he is not so to. _Eu._ Do you but be to him what I have told you, and if he does not begin to be so to you, instead of _Eulalia_ (a good Speaker), call me _Pseudolalia_ (a prating Liar); and besides, consider this, that he's but a young Man yet, I believe not above twenty-four Years of Age, and does not yet know what it is to be the Master of a Family. You must never think of a Divorce now. _Xa._ But I have thought on it a great many Times. _Eu._ But if ever that Thought comes into your Mind again, first of all consider with yourself, what an insignificant Figure a Woman makes when she is parted from her Husband. It is the greatest Glory of a Matron, to be obedient to her Husband. This Nature dictates, and it is the Will of God, that the Woman should wholly depend upon her Husband: Only think, as it really is, he is your Husband, you cannot have another. Then call to Mind that the little Boy belongs to you both. What would you do with him? Would you take him away with you? Then will you defraud your Husband of his own. Will you leave him to him? Then you will deprive yourself of that, than which nothing is more dear. Last of all, tell me, is there any Body that wishes you ill? _Xa._ I have a Step-Mother, and a Mother-in-Law, as like her as may be. _Eu._ And they wish you ill, do they? _Xa._ They wish me in my Grave. _Eu._ Then think of them likewise. What can you be able to do, that would be more grateful to them, than if they should see you divorc'd from your Husband; a Widow, nay, to live, a Widow bewitcht, worse than a Widow? For Widows may marry again. _Xa._ I approve of your Advice; but can't bear the Thoughts of being always a Slave. _Eu._ Recount what Pains you took before you could teach that Parrot to prattle. _Xa._ A great Deal indeed. _Eu._ And yet you think much to bestow a little Pains to mould your Husband, with whom you may live a pleasant Life all your Days. What a Deal of Pains do Men take to render a Horse tractable to them: And shall we think much to take a little Pains to render our Husbands more agreeable? _Xa._ What must I do? _Eu._ I have told you already, take Care that all Things be neat, and in Order at Home, that there be nothing discomposing, to make him go out of Doors; behave yourself easy and free to him, always remembring that Respect which is due from a Wife to a Husband. Let all Melancholy and ill-tim'd Gaiety be banished out of Doors; be not morose nor frolicksome. Let your Table be handsomely provided. You know your Husband's Palate, dress that which he likes best. Behave yourself courteously and affably to those of his Acquaintance he respects. Invite them frequently to Dinner; let all Things be pleasant and chearful at Table. Lastly, if at any Time he happens to come Home a little merry with Wine, and shall fall to playing on his Fiddle, do you sing, to him, so you will gradually inure your Husband to keep at Home, and also lessen his Expences: For he will thus reason with himself; was not I mad with a Witness, who live abroad with a nasty Harlot, to the apparent Prejudice of my Estate and Reputation, when I have at Home a Wife much more entertaining and affectionate to me, with whom I may be entertained more handsomely and more plentifully? _Xa._ Do you think I shall succeed, if I try? _Eu._ Look to me for that. I engage that you will: In the mean Time I'll talk to your Husband, and put him in Mind of his Duty. _Xa._ I approve of your Design; but take Care that he mayn't discover any Thing of what has past between us two, for he would throw the House out of the Windows. _Eu._ Don't fear, I'll order my Discourse so by Turnings and Windings, that he shall tell me himself, what Quarrels have happened between you. When I have brought this about, I'll treat him after my Way, as engagingly as can be, and I hope, shall render him to you better temper'd: I'll likewise take Occasion to tell a Lie or two in your Favour, how lovingly and respectfully you spoke of him. _Xa._ Heaven prosper both our Undertakings. _Eu._ It will, I doubt not, if you are not wanting to yourself. _The SOLDIER and CARTHUSIAN._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy sets out to the Life, the Madness of young Men that run into the Wars, and the Life of a pious Carthusian, which without the love of Study, can't but be melancholy and unpleasant. The Manners of Soldiers, the Manners and Diet of Carthusians. Advice in chusing a Way of getting a Livelihood. The Conveniency of a single Life, to be at Leisure for Reading and Meditation. Wicked Soldiers oftentimes butcher Men for a pitiful Reward. The daily Danger of a Soldier's Life._ _The_ SOLDIER _and_ CARTHUSIAN. _Sol._ Good Morrow, my Brother. _Cart._ Good Morrow to you, dear Cousin. _Sol._ I scarce knew you. _Cart._ Am I grown so old in two Years Time? _Sol._ No; but your bald Crown, and your new Dress, make you look to me like another Sort of Creature. _Cart._ It may be you would not know your own Wife, if she should meet you in a new Gown. _Sol._ No; not if she was in such a one as yours. _Cart._ But I know you very well, who are not altered as to your Dress; but your Face, and the whole Habit of your Body: Why, how many Colours are you painted with? No Bird had ever such a Variety of Feathers. How all is cut and slash'd! Nothing according to Nature or Fashion! your cut Hair, your half-shav'd Beard, and that Wood upon your upper Lip, entangled and standing out straggling like the Whiskers of a Cat. Nor is it one single Scar that has disfigured your Face, that you may very well be taken for one of the _Samian literati_, [q.d. burnt in the Cheek] concerning whom there is a joking Proverb. _Sol._ Thus it becomes a Man to come back from the Wars. But, pray, tell me, was there so great a Scarcity of good Physicians in this Quarter of the World? _Cart._ Why do you ask? _Sol._ Because you did not get the Distemper of your Brain cur'd, before you plung'd yourself into this Slavery. _Cart._ Why, do you think I was mad then? _Sol._ Yes, I do. What Occasion was there for you to be buried here, before your Time, when you had enough in the World to have lived handsomely upon? _Cart._ What, don't you think I live in the World now? _Sol._ No, by _Jove_. _Cart._ Tell me why. _Sol._ Because you can't go where you list. You are confin'd in this Place as in a Coop. Besides, your bald Pate, and your prodigious strange Dress, your Lonesomeness, your eating Fish perpetually, so that I admire you are not turn'd into a Fish. _Cart._ If Men were turn'd into what they eat, you had long ago been turn'd into a Hog, for you us'd to be a mighty Lover of Pork. _Sol._ I don't doubt but you have repented of what you have done, long enough before now, for I find very few that don't repent of it. _Cart._ This usually happens to those who plunge themselves headlong into this Kind of Life, as if they threw themselves into a Well; but I have enter'd into it warily and considerately, having first made Trial of myself, and having duly examined the whole Ratio of this Way of Living, being twenty-eight Years of Age, at which Time, every one may be suppos'd to know himself. And as for the Place, you are confined in a small Compass as well as I, if you compare it to the Extent of the whole World. Nor does it signify any Thing how large the Place is, as long as it wants nothing of the Conveniences of Life. There are many that seldom stir out of the City in which they were born, which if they were prohibited from going out, would be very uneasy, and would be wonderfully desirous to do it. This is a common Humour, that I am not troubled with. I fancy this Place to be the whole World to me, and this Map represents the whole Globe of the Earth, which I can travel over in Thought with more Delight and Security than he that sails to the new-found Islands. _Sol._ What you say as to this, comes pretty near the Truth. _Cart._ You can't blame me for shaving my Head, who voluntarily have your own Hair clipp'd, for Conveniency Sake. Shaving, to me, if it does nothing else, certainly keeps my Head more clean, and perhaps more healthful too. How many Noblemen at _Venice_ shave their Heads all over? What has my Garment in it that is monstrous? Does it not cover my Body? Our Garments are for two Uses, to defend us from the Inclemency of the Weather, and to cover our Nakedness. Does not this Garment answer both these Ends? But perhaps the Colour offends you. What Colour is more becoming Christians than that which was given to all in Baptism? It has been said also, _Take a white Garment_; so that this Garment puts me in Mind of what I promised in Baptism, that is, the perpetual Study of Innocency. And besides, if you call that Solitude which is only a retiring from the Crowd, we have for this the Example, not only of our own, but of the ancient Prophets, the _Ethnick_ Philosophers, and all that had any Regard to the keeping a good Conscience. Nay, Poets, Astrologers, and Persons devoted to such-like Arts, whensoever they take in Hand any Thing that's great and beyond the Sphere of the common People, commonly betake themselves to a Retreat. But why should you call this Kind of Life Solitude? The Conversation of one single Friend drives away the Tædium of Solitude. I have here more than sixteen Companions, fit for all Manner of Conversation. And besides, I have Friends who come to visit me oftner than I would have them, or is convenient Do I then, in your Opinion, live melancholy? _Sol._ But you cannot always have these to talk with. _Cart._ Nor is it always expedient: For Conversation is the pleasanter, for being something interrupted. _Sol._ You don't think amiss; for even to me myself, Flesh relishes much better after Lent. _Cart._ And more than that, when I seem to be most alone, I don't want Companions, which are by far more delightful and entertaining than those common Jesters. _Sol._ Where are they? _Cart._ Look you, here are the four Evangelists. In this Book he that so pleasantly commun'd with the two Disciples in the Way going to _Emaus_, and who by his heavenly Discourse caus'd them not to be sensible of the Fatigue of their Journey, but made their Hearts burn within them with a divine Ardour of hearing his sweet Words, holds Conversation with me. In this I converse with _Paul_, with _Isaiah_, and the rest of the Prophets. Here the most sweet _Chrysostom_ converses with me, and _Basil_, and _Austin_, and _Jerome_, and _Cyprian_, and the rest of the Doctors that are both learned and eloquent. Do you know any such pleasant Companions abroad in the World, that you can have Conversation with? Do you think I can be weary of Retirement, in such Society as this? And I am never without it. _Sol._ But they would speak to me to no Purpose, who do not understand them. _Cart._ Now for our Diet, what signifies it with what Food this Body of ours is fed which is satisfied with very little, if we live according to Nature? Which of us two is in the best Plight? You who live upon Partridges, Pheasants and Capons; or I who live upon Fish? _Sol._ If you had a Wife as I have, you would not be so lusty. _Cart._ And for that Reason, any Food serves us, let it be never so little. _Sol._ But in the mean Time, you live the Life of a _Jew_. _Cart._ Forbear Reflections: If we cannot come up to Christianity, at least we follow after it. _Sol._ You put too much Confidence in Habits, Meats, Forms of Prayer, and outward Ceremonies, and neglect the Study of Gospel Religion. _Cart._ It is none of my Business to judge what others do: As to myself, I place no Confidence in these Things, I attribute nothing to them; but I put my Confidence in Purity of Mind, and in _Christ_ himself. _Sol._ Why do you observe these Things then? _Cart._ That I may be at Peace with my Brethren, and give no Body Offence. I would give no Offence to any one for the Sake of these trivial Things, which it is but a very little Trouble to observe. As we are Men, let us wear what Cloaths we will. Men are so humoursome, the Agreement or Disagreement in the most minute Matters, either procures or destroys Concord. The shaving of the Head, or Colour of the Habit does not indeed, of themselves, recommend me to God: But what would the People say, if I should let my Hair grow, or put on your Habit? I have given you my Reasons for my Way of Life; now, pray, in your Turn, give me your Reasons for yours, and tell me, were there no good Physicians in your Quarter, when you listed yourself for a Soldier, leaving a young Wife and Children at Home, and was hired for a pitiful Pay to cut Men's Throats, and that with the Hazard of your own Life too? For your Business did not lie among Mushrooms and Poppies, but armed Men. What do you think is a more unhappy Way of living, for a poor Pay, to murder a Fellow Christian, who never did you Harm, and to run yourself Body and Soul into eternal Damnation? _Sol._ Why, it is lawful to kill an Enemy. _Cart._ Perhaps it may be so, if he invades your native Country: Nay, and it is pious too, to fight for your Wife, Children, your Parents and Friends, your Religion and Liberties, and the publick Peace. But what is all that to your fighting for Money? If you had been knocked on the Head, I would not have given a rotten Nut to redeem the very Soul of you. _Sol._ No? _Cart._ No, by Christ, I would not. Now which do you think is the harder Task, to be obedient to a good Man, which we call Prior, who calls us to Prayers, and holy Lectures, the Hearing of the saving Doctrine, and to sing to the Glory of God: Or, to be under the Command of some barbarous Officer, who often calls you out to fatiguing Marches at Midnight, and sends you out, and commands you back at his Pleasure, exposes you to the Shot of great Guns, assigns you a Station where you must either kill or be killed? _Sol._ There are more Evils than you have mentioned yet. _Cart._ If I shall happen to deviate from the Discipline of my Order, my Punishment is only Admonition, or some such slight Matter: But in War, if you do any Thing contrary to the General's Orders, you must either be hang'd for it, or run the Gantlope; for it would be a Favour to have your Head cut off. _Sol._ I can't deny what you say to be true. _Cart._ And now your Habit bespeaks, that you han't brought much Money Home, after all your brave Adventures. _Sol._ As for Money, I have not had a Farthing this good While; nay, I have gotten a good Deal into Debt, and for that Reason I come hither out of my Way, that you might furnish me with some Money to bear my Charges. _Cart._ I wish you had come out of your Way hither, when you hurried yourself into that wicked Life of a Soldier. But how come you so bare? _Sol._ Do you ask that? Why, whatsoever I got of Pay, Plunder, Sacrilege, Rapine and Theft, was spent in Wine, Whores and Gaming. _Cart._ O miserable Creature! And all this While your Wife, for whose Sake God commanded you to leave Father and Mother, being forsaken by you, sat grieving at Home with her young Children. And do you think this is Living, to be involved in so many Miseries, and to wallow in so great Iniquities? _Sol._ The having so many Companions of my Wickedness, made me insensible of my Evil. _Cart._ But I'm afraid your Wife won't know you again. _Sol._ Why so? _Cart._ Because your Scars have made you the Picture of quite another Man. What a Trench have you got here in your Forehead? It looks as if you had had a Horn cut out. _Sol._ Nay, if you did but know the Matter, you would congratulate me upon this Scar. _Cart._ Why so? _Sol._ I was within a Hair's Breadth of losing my Life. _Cart._ Why, what Mischief was there? _Sol._ As one was drawing a Steel Cross-bow, it broke, and a Splinter of it hit me in the Forehead. _Cart._ You have got a Scar upon your Cheek that is above a Span long. _Sol._ I got this Wound in a Battel. _Cart._ In what Battel, in the Field? _Sol._ No, but in a Quarrel that arose at Dice. _Cart._ And I see I can't tell what Sort of Rubies on your Chin. _Sol._ O they are nothing. _Cart._ I suspect that you have had the Pox. _Sol._ You guess very right, Brother. It was the third Time I had that Distemper, and it had like to have cost me my Life. _Cart._ But how came it, that you walk so stooping, as if you were ninety Years of Age; or like a Mower, or as if your Back was broke? _Sol._ The Disease has contracted my Nerves to that Degree. _Cart._ In Truth you have undergone a wonderful Metamorphosis: Formerly you were a Horseman, and now of a Centaur, you are become a Kind of semi-reptile Animal. _Sol._ This is the Fortune of War. _Cart._ Nay, 'tis the Madness of your own Mind. But what Spoils will you carry Home to your Wife and Children? The Leprosy? for that Scab is only a Species of the Leprosy; and it is only not accounted so, because it is the Disease in Fashion, and especially among Noblemen: And for this very Reason, it should be the more carefully avoided. And now you will infect with it those that ought to be the dearest to you of any in the World, and you yourself will all your Days carry about a rotten Carcass. _Sol._ Prithee, Brother, have done chiding me. I have enough upon me without Chiding. _Cart._ As to those Calamities, I have hitherto taken Notice of, they only relate to the Body: But what a Sort of a Soul do you bring back with you? How putrid and ulcered? With how many Wounds is that sore? _Sol._ Just as clean as a _Paris_ common Shore in _Maburtus_'s Road, or a common House of Office. _Cart._ I am afraid it stinks worse in the Nostrils of God and his Angels. _Sol._ Well, but I have had Chiding enough, now speak to the Matter, of something to bear my Charges. _Cart._ I have nothing to give you, but I'll go and try what the Prior will do. _Sol._ If any Thing was to be given, your Hands would be ready to receive it; but now there are a great many Difficulties in the Way, when something is to be paid. _Cart._ As to what others do, let them look to that, I have no Hands, either to give or take Money: But we'll talk more of these Matters after Dinner, for it is now Time to sit down at Table. _PHILETYMUS and PSEUDOCHEUS._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy sets forth the Disposition and Nature of a Liar, who seems to be born to lie for crafty Gain. A Liar is a Thief. Gain got by Lying, is baser than that which is got by a Tax upon Urine. An egregious Method of deceiving is laid open. Cheating Tradesmen live better than honest ones._ _PHILETYMUS and PSEUDOCHEUS._ _Phil._ From what Fountain does this Flood of Lies flow? _Pseud._ From whence do Spiders Webs proceed? _Phil._ Then it is not the _Product_ of Art, but of Nature. _Pseud._ The Seeds indeed proceed from Nature; but Art and Use have enlarg'd the Faculty. _Phil._ Why, are you not asham'd of it? _Pseud._ No more than a Cuckow is of her Singing. _Phil._ But you can alter your Note upon every Occasion. The Tongue of Man was given him to speak the Truth. _Pseud._ Ay, to speak those Things that tend to his Profit: The Truth is not to be spoken at all Times. _Phil._ It is sometimes for a Man's Advantage to have pilfering Hands; and the old Proverb is a Witness, that that is a Vice that is Cousin-German to yours of Lying. _Pseud._ Both these Vices are supported by good Authorities: One has _Ulysses_, so much commended by _Homer_, and the other has _Mercury_, that was a God, for its Example, if we believe the Poets. _Phil._ Why then do People in common curse Liars, and hang Thieves? _Pseud._ Not because they lie or steal, but because they do it bunglingly or unnaturally, not rightly understanding the Art. _Phil._ Is there any Author that teaches the Art of Lying? _Pseud._ Your Rhetoricians have instructed in the best Part of the Art. _Phil._ These indeed present us with the Art of well speaking. _Pseud._ True: and the good Part of speaking well, is to lie cleverly. _Phil._ What is clever Lying? _Pseud._ Would you have me define it? _Phil._ I would have you do it. _Pseud._ It is to lie so, that you may get Profit by it, and not be caught in a Lie. _Phil._ But a great many are caught in lying every Day. _Pseud._ That's because they are not perfect Masters of the Art. _Phil._ Are you a perfect Master in it? _Pseud._ In a Manner. _Phil._ See, if you can tell me a Lie, so as to deceive me. _Pseud._ Yes, best of Men, I can deceive you yourself, if I have a Mind to it. _Phil._ Well, tell me some Lie or other then. _Pseud._ Why, I have told one already, and did you not catch me in it? _Phil._ No. _Pseud._ Come on, listen attentively; now I'll begin to lie then. _Phil._ I do listen attentively; tell one. _Pseud._ Why, I have told another Lie, and you have not caught me. _Phil._ In Truth, I hear no Lie yet. _Pseud._ You would have heard some, if you understood the Art. _Phil._ Do you shew it me then. _Pseud._ First of all, I call'd you the best of Men, is not that a swinging Lie, when you are not so much as good? And if you were good, you could not be said to be the best, there are a thousand others better than you. _Phil._ Here, indeed, you have deceiv'd me. _Pseud._ Well, now try if you can catch me again in another Lie. _Phil._ I cannot. _Pseud._ I want to have you shew that Sharpness of Wit, that you do in other Things. _Phil._ I confess, I am deficient. Shew me. _Pseud._ When I said, now I will begin to lie, did I not tell you a swinging Lie then, when I had been accustomed to lie for so many Years, and I had also told a Lie, just the Moment before. _Phil._ An admirable Piece of Witchcraft. _Pseud._ Well, but now you have been forewarn'd, prick up your Ears, listen attentively, and see if you can catch me in a Lie. _Phil._ I do prick them up; say on. _Pseud._ I have said already, and you have imitated me in lying. _Phil._ Why, you'll persuade me I have neither Ears nor Eyes by and by. _Pseud._ When Mens Ears are immoveable, and can neither be prick'd up nor let down, I told a Lie in bidding you prick up your Ears. _Phil._ The whole Life of Man is full of such Lies. _Pseud._ Not only such as these, O good Man, for these are but Jokes: But there are those that bring Profit. _Phil._ The Gain that is got by Lying, is more sordid, than that which is got by laying a Tax on Urine. _Pseud._ That is true, I own; but then 'tis to those that han't the Art of lying. _Phil._ What Art is this that you understand? _Pseud._ It is not fit I should teach you for nothing; pay me, and you shall hear it. _Phil._ I will not pay for bad Arts. _Pseud._ Then will you give away your Estate? _Phil._ I am not so mad neither. _Pseud._ But my Gain by this Art is more certain than yours from your Estate. _Phil._ Well, keep your Art to yourself, only give me a Specimen that I may understand that what you say is not all Pretence. _Pseud._ Here's a Specimen for you: I concern myself in all Manner of Business, I buy, I sell, I receive, I borrow, I take Pawns. _Phil._ Well, what then? _Pseud._ And in these Affairs I entrap those by whom I cannot easily be caught. _Phil._ Who are those? _Pseud._ The soft-headed, the forgetful, the unthinking, those that live a great Way off, and those that are dead. _Phil._ The Dead, to be sure, tell no Tales. _Pseud._ If I sell any Thing upon Credit, I set it down carefully in my Book of Accounts. _Phil._ And what then? _Pseud._ When the Money is to be paid, I charge the Buyer with more than he had. If he is unthinking or forgetful, my Gain is certain. _Phil._ But what if he catches you? _Pseud._ I produce my Book of Accounts. _Phil._ What if he informs you, and proves to your Face he has not had the Goods you charge him with? _Pseud._ I stand to it stiffly; for Bashfulness is altogether an unprofitable Qualification in this Art. My last Shift is, I frame some Excuse or other. _Phil._ But when you are caught openly? _Pseud._ Nothing's more easy, I pretend my Servant has made a Mistake, or I myself have a treacherous Memory: It is a very pretty Way to jumble the Accounts together, and this is an easy Way to impose on a Person: As for Example, some are cross'd out, the Money being paid, and others have not been paid; these I mingle one with another at the latter End of the Book, nothing being cross'd out. When the Sum is cast up, we contend about it, and I for the most Part get the better, tho' it be by forswearing myself. Then besides, I have this Trick, I make up my Account with a Person when he is just going a Journey, and not prepared for the Settling it. For as for me, I am always ready. If any Thing be left with me, I conceal it, and restore it not again. It is a long Time before he can come to the Knowledge of it, to whom it is sent; and, after all, if I can't deny the receiving of a Thing, I say it is lost, or else affirm I have sent that which I have not sent, and charge it upon the Carrier. And lastly, if I can no Way avoid restoring it, I restore but Part of it. _Phil._ A very fine Art. _Pseud._ Sometimes I receive Money twice over, if I can: First at Home, afterwards there where I have gone, and I am every where. Sometimes Length of Time puts Things out of Remembrance: The Accounts are perplexed, one dies, or goes a long Journey: And if nothing else will hit, in the mean Time I make Use of other People's Money. I bring some over to my Interest, by a Shew of Generosity, that they may help me out in lying; but it is always at other People's Cost; of my own, I would not give my own Mother a Doit. And tho' the Gain in each Particular may be but small; but being many put together, makes a good round Sum; for as I said, I concern myself in a great many Affairs; and besides all, that I may not be catch'd, as there are many Tricks, this is one of the chief. I intercept all the Letters I can, open them, and read them. If any Thing in them makes against me, I destroy them, or keep them a long Time before I deliver them: And besides all this, I sow Discord between those that live at a great Distance one from another. _Phil._ What do you get by that? _Pseud._ There is a double Advantage in it. First of all, if that is not performed that I have promised in another Person's Name, or in whose Name I have received any Present, I lay it to this or that Man's Door, that it was not performed, and so these Forgeries I make turn to a considerable Account. _Phil._ But what if he denies it? _Pseud._ He's a great Way off, as suppose at _Basil_; and I promise to give it in _England._ And so it is brought about, that both being incensed, neither will believe the one the other, if I accuse them of any Thing. Now you have a Specimen of my Art. _Phil._ But this Art is what we Dullards call Theft; who call a Fig a Fig, and a Spade a Spade. _Pseud._ O Ignoramus in the Law! Can you bring an Action of Theft for Trover or Conversion, or for one that having borrow'd a Thing forswears it, that puts a Trick upon one, by some such Artifice? _Phil._ He ought to be sued for Theft. _Pseud._ Do but then see the Prudence of Artists. From these Methods there is more Gain, or at least as much, and less Danger. _Phil._ A Mischief take you, with your cheating Tricks and Lies, for I han't a Mind to learn 'em. Good by to ye. _Pseud._ You may go on, and be plagu'd with your ragged Truth. In the mean Time, I'll live merrily upon my thieving, lying Tricks, with Slight of Hand. _The SHIPWRECK._ The ARGUMENT. Naufragium _exposes the Dangers of those that go to Sea; the various and foolish Superstition of Mariners. An elegant Description of a Storm. They indeed run a Risque that throw their valuable Commodities into the Sea. Mariners impiously invoke the Virgin_ Mary, _St._ Christopher, _and the Sea itself. Saints are not to be pray'd to, but God alone._ ANTONY _and_ ADOLPH. _Ant._ You tell dreadful Stories: Is this going to Sea? God forbid that ever any such Thing should come into my Mind. _Adol._ That which I have related, is but a Diversion, in Comparison to what you'll hear presently. _Ant._ I have heard Calamities enough already, my Flesh trembles to hear you relate them, as if I were in Danger myself. _Adol._ But Dangers that are past, are pleasant to be thought on. One thing happen'd that Night, that almost put the Pilot out of all Hopes of Safety. _Ant._ Pray what was that? _Adol._ The Night was something lightish, and one of the Sailors was got into the Skuttle (so I think they call it) at the Main-Top-Mast, looking out if he could see any Land; a certain Ball of Fire began to stand by him, which is the worst Sign in the World to Sailors, if it be single; but a very good one, if double. The Antients believed these to be _Castor_ and _Pollux_. _Ant._ What have they to do with Sailors, one of which was a Horseman, and the other a Prize-Fighter? _Adol._ It was the Pleasure of Poets, so to feign. The Steersman who sat at the Helm, calls to him, Mate, says he, (for so Sailors call one another) don't you see what a Companion you have by your Side? I do see, says he, and I pray that he may be a lucky one. By and by this fiery Ball glides down the Ropes, and rolls itself over and over close to the Pilot. _Ant._ And was not he frighted out of his Wits? _Adol._ Sailors are us'd to terrible Sights. It stopp'd a little there, then roll'd itself all round the Sides of the Ship; after that, slipping through the Hatches, it vanished away. About Noon the Storm began to increase. Did you ever see the _Alps_? _Ant._ I have seen them. _Adol._ Those Mountains are Mole Hills, if they be compar'd to the Waves of the Sea. As oft as we were toss'd up, one might have touch'd the Moon with his Finger; and as oft as we were let fall down into the Sea, we seem'd to be going directly down to Hell, the Earth gaping to receive us. _Ant._ O mad Folks, that trust themselves to the Sea! _Adol._ The Mariners striving in Vain with the Storm, at length the Pilot, all pale as Death comes to us. _Ant._ That Paleness presages some great Evil. _Adol._ My Friends, says he, I am no longer Master of my Ship, the Wind has got the better of me; all that we have now to do is to place our Hope in God, and every one to prepare himself for Death. _Ant._ This was cold Comfort. _Adol._ But in the first Place, says he, we must lighten the Ship; Necessity requires it, tho' 'tis a hard Portion. It is better to endeavour to save our Lives with the Loss of our Goods, than to perish with them. The Truth persuaded, and a great many Casks of rich Merchandize were thrown over-Board. _Ant._ This was casting away, according to the Letter. _Adol._ There was in the Company, a certain _Italian_, that had been upon an Embassy to the King of _Scotland_. He had a whole Cabinet full of Plate, Rings, Cloth, and rich wearing Apparel. _Ant._ And he, I warrant ye, was unwilling to come to a Composition with the Sea. _Adol._ No, he would not; he had a Mind either to sink or swim with his beloved Riches. _Ant._ What said the Pilot to this? _Adol._ If you and your Trinkets were to drown by yourselves, says he, here's no Body would hinder you; but it is not fit that we should run the Risque of our Lives, for the Sake of your Cabinet: If you won't consent, we'll throw you and your Cabinet into the Sea together. _Ant._ Spoken like a Tarpawlin. _Adol._ So the Italian submitted, and threw his Goods over-Board, with many a bitter Curse to the Gods both above and below, that he had committed his Life to so barbarous an Element. _Ant._ I know the Italian Humour. _Adol._ The Winds were nothing the less boisterous for our Presents, but by and by burst our Cordage, and threw down our Sails. _Ant._ Lamentable! _Adol._ Then the Pilot comes to us again. _Ant._ What, with another Preachment? _Adol._ He gives us a Salute; my Friends, says he, the Time exhorts us that every one of us should recommend himself to God, and prepare for Death. Being ask'd by some that were not ignorant in Sea Affairs, how long he thought the Ship might be kept above Water, he said, he could promise nothing, but that it could not be done above three Hours. _Ant._ This was yet a harder Chapter than the former. _Adol._ When he had said this, he orders to cut the Shrouds and the Mast down by the Board, and to throw them, Sails and all, into the Sea. _Ant._ Why was this done? _Adol._ Because, the Sail either being gone or torn, it would only be a Burden, but not of Use; all our Hope was in the Helm. _Ant._ What did the Passengers do in the mean Time? _Adol._ There you might have seen a wretched Face of Things; the Mariners, they were singing their _Salve Regina_, imploring the Virgin Mother, calling her the Star of the Sea, the Queen of Heaven, the Lady of the World, the Haven of Health, and many other flattering Titles, which the sacred Scriptures never attributed to her. _Ant._ What has she to do with the Sea, who, as I believe, never went a Voyage in her Life? _Adol._ In ancient Times, _Venus_ took Care of Mariners, because she was believ'd to be born of the Sea and because she left off to take Care of them, the Virgin Mother was put in her Place, that was a Mother, but not a Virgin. _Ant._ You joke. _Adol._ Some were lying along upon the Boards, worshipping the Sea, pouring all they had into it, and flattering it, as if it had been some incensed Prince. _Ant._ What did they say? _Adol._ O most merciful Sea! O most generous Sea! O most rich Sea! O most beautiful Sea, be pacified, save us; and a Deal of such Stuff they sung to the deaf Ocean. _Ant._ Ridiculous Superstition! What did the rest do? _Adol._ Some did nothing but spew, and some made Vows. There was an _Englishman_ there, that promis'd golden Mountains to our Lady of _Walsingham_, so he did but get ashore alive. Others promis'd a great many Things to the Wood of the Cross, which was in such a Place; others again, to that which was in such a Place; and the same was done by the Virgin _Mary_, which reigns in a great many Places, and they think the Vow is of no Effect, unless the Place be mentioned. _Ant._ Ridiculous! As if the Saints did not dwell in Heaven. _Adol._ Some made Promises to become _Carthusians_. There was one who promised he would go a _Pilgrimage_ to St. _James_ at _Compostella_, bare Foot and bare Head, cloth'd in a Coat of Mail, and begging his Bread all the Way. _Ant._ Did no Body make any Mention of St. _Christopher_? _Adol._ Yes, I heard one, and I could not forbear laughing, who bawling out aloud, lest St. _Christopher_ should not hear him, promised him, who is at the Top of a Church at _Paris_, rather a Mountain than a Statue, a wax Taper as big as he was himself: When he had bawl'd out this over and over as loud as he could, an Acquaintance of his jogg'd him on the Elbow, and caution'd him: Have a Care what you promise, for if you should sell all you have in the World, you will not be able to pay for it. He answer'd him softly, lest St. _Christopher_ should hear him, you Fool, says he, do you think I mean as I speak, if I once got safe to Shore, I would not give him so much as a tallow Candle. _Ant._ O Blockhead! I fancy he was a _Hollander_. _Adol._ No, he was a _Zealander_. _Ant._ I wonder no Body thought of St. _Paul_, who has been at Sea, and having suffered Shipwreck, leapt on Shore. For he being not unacquainted with the Distress, knows how to pity those that are in it. _Adol._ He was not so much as named. _Ant._ Were they at their Prayers all the While? _Adol._ Ay, as if it had been for a Wager. One sung his _Hail Queen_; another, _I believe in God_. There were some who had certain particular Prayers not unlike magical Charms against Dangers. _Ant._ How Affliction makes Men religious! In Prosperity we neither think of God nor Saint. But what did you do all this While? Did you not make Vows to some Saints? _Adol._ No, none at all. _Ant._ Why so? _Adol._ I make no Bargains with Saints. For what is this but a Bargain in Form? I'll give you, if you do so and so; or I will do so and so, if you do so and so: I'll give you a wax Taper, if I swim out alive; I'll go to _Rome_, if you save me. _Ant._ But did you call upon none of the Saints for Help? _Adol._ No, not so much as that neither. _Ant._ Why so? _Adol._ Because Heaven is a large Place, and if I should recommend my Safety to any Saint, as suppose, to St. _Peter_, who perhaps, would hear soonest, because he stands at the Door; before he can come to God Almighty, or before he could tell him my Condition, I may be lost. _Ant._ What did you do then? _Adol._ I e'en went the next Way to God the Father, saying, _Our Father which art in Heaven_. There's none of the Saints hears sooner than he does, or more readily gives what is ask'd for. _Ant._ But in the mean Time did not your Conscience check you? Was you not afraid to call him Father, whom you had offended with so many Wickednesses? _Adol._ To speak ingenuously, my Conscience did a little terrify me at first, but I presently took Heart again, thus reasoning with myself; There is no Father so angry with his Son, but if he sees him in Danger of being drowned in a River or Pond, he will take him, tho' it be by the Hair of the Head, and throw him out upon a Bank. There was no Body among them all behaved herself more composed than a Woman, who had a Child sucking at her Breast. _Ant._ What did she do? _Adol._ She only neither bawl'd, nor wept, nor made Vows, but hugging her little Boy, pray'd softly. In the mean Time the Ship dashing ever and anon against the Ground, the Pilot being afraid she would be beat all to Pieces, under-girded her with Cables from Head to Stern. _Ant._ That was a sad Shift! _Adol._ Upon this, up starts an old Priest about threescore Years of Age, his Name was _Adam_. He strips himself to his Shirt, throws away his Boots and Shoes, and bids us all in like Manner to prepare ourselves for swimming. Then standing in the middle of the Ship, he preach'd a Sermon to us, upon the five Truths of the Benefit of Confession, and exhorted every Man to prepare himself, for either Life or Death. There was a _Dominican_ there too, and they confess'd those that had a Mind to it. _Ant._ What did you do? _Adol._ I seeing that every thing was in a Hurry, confess'd privately to God, condemning before him my Iniquity, and imploring his Mercy. _Ant._ And whither should you have gone, do you think, if you had perished? _Adol._ I left that to God, who is my Judge; I would not be my own Judge. But I was not without comfortable Hopes neither. While these Things were transacting, the Steersman comes to us again all in Tears; Prepare your selves every one of you, says he, for the Ship will be of no Service to us for a quarter of an Hour. For now she leak'd in several Places. Presently after this he brings us Word that he saw a Steeple a good Way off, and exhorts us to implore the Aid of that Saint, whoever it was, who had the protection of that Temple. They all fall down and pray to the unknown Saint. _Ant._ Perhaps he would have heard ye, if ye had call'd upon him by his Name. _Adol._ But that we did not know. In the mean Time the Pilate steers the Ship, torn and leaking every where, and ready to fall in Pieces, if she had not been undergirt with Cables, as much as he could toward that Place. _Ant._ A miserable Condition. _Adol._ We were now come so near the Shoar, that the Inhabitants of the Place could see us in Distress, and ran down in Throngs to the utmost Edge of the Shoar, and holding up Gowns and Hats upon Spears, invited us to make towards them, and stretching out their Arms towards Heaven, signified to us that they pitied our Misfortune. _Ant._ I long to know what happened. _Adol._ The Ship was now every where full of Water, that we were no safer in the Ship than if we had been in the Sea. _Ant._ Now was your Time to betake yourself to divine Help. _Adol._ Ay, to a wretched one. The Sailors emptied the Ship's Boat of Water, and let it down into the Sea. Every Body was for getting into it, the Mariners cry'd out amain, they'll sink the Boat, it will not hold so many; that every one should take what he could get, and swim for it. There was no Time now for long Deliberation. One gets an Oar, another a Pole, another a Gutter, another a Bucket, another a Plank, and every one relying upon their Security, they commit themselves to the Billows. _Ant._ But what became of the Woman that was the only Person that made no Bawling? _Adol._ She got to Shoar the first of them all. _Ant._ How could she do that? _Adol._ We set her upon a broad Plank, and ty'd her on so fast that she could not easily fall off, and we gave her a Board in her Hand to make Use of instead of an Oar, and wishing her good Success, we set her afloat, thrusting her off from the Ship with Poles, that she might be clear of it, whence was the greatest Danger. And she held her Child in her left Hand, and row'd with her right Hand. _Ant._ O _Virago_! _Adol._ Now when there was nothing else left, one pull'd up a wooden Image of the Virgin _Mary_, rotten, and rat-eaten, and embracing it in his Arms, try'd to swim upon it. _Ant._ Did the Boat get safe to Land? _Adol._ None perish'd sooner than they that were in that, and there were above thirty that had got into it. _Ant._ By what bad Accident was that brought about? _Adol._ It was overset by the rolling of the Ship, before they could get clear of it. _Ant._ A sad Accident: But how then? _Adol._ While I was taking Care for others, I had like to have been lost myself. _Ant._ How so? _Adol._ Because there was nothing left that was fit for swimming. _Ant._ There Corks would have been of good Use. _Adol._ In that Condition I would rather have had a sorry Cork than a gold Candlestick. I look'd round about me, at Length I bethought myself of the Stump of the Mast, and because I could not get it out alone, I took a Partner; upon this we both plac'd ourselves, and committed ourselves to the Sea. I held the right End, and my Companion the left End. While we lay tumbling and tossing, the old preaching Sea-Priest threw himself upon our Shoulders. He was a huge Fellow. We cry out, who's that third Person? He'll drown us all. But he very calmly bids us be easy, for there was Room enough, God will be with us. _Ant._ How came he to be so late? _Adol._ He was to have been in the Boat with the _Dominican_. For they all paid him this Deference. But tho' they had confess'd themselves in the Ship, yet having forgotten I know not what Circumstances, they confess'd over again at the Ship-Side, and each lays his Hand upon the other, and while this was doing the Boat was over-turn'd. This I had from _Adam_ himself. _Ant._ What became of the _Dominican_? _Adol._ As the same Man told me, having implor'd the Help of his Saints, and stript himself, he threw himself naked into the Sea. _Ant._ What Saints did he call upon? _Adol._ St. _Dominick_, St. _Thomas_, St. _Vincent_, and one of the _Peters_, but I can't tell which: But his chief Reliance was upon _Catherinea Senensis_. _Ant._ Did he not remember _Christ_? _Adol._ Not, as the old Priest told me. _Ant._ He would have swam better if he had thrown off his sanctified Coul: But if that had been laid aside, how should _Catherine_ of _Siena_ have known him? But go on and tell me about yourself. _Adol._ While we were yet tumbling and tossing near the Ship, which roll'd hither and thither at the Mercy of the Waves, the Thigh of him that held the left End of the Stump of the Mast was broken by a great Spike, and so that made him let go his Hold. The old Priest wishing him everlasting Rest, took his Place, encouraging me to maintain my Post on the right Hand resolutely, and to strike out my Feet stoutly. In the mean Time we drank in abundance of salt Water. For _Neptune_ had provided us not only a salt Bath, but a salt Potion too, altho' the old Priest prescribed a Remedy for it. _Ant._ What was that? _Adol._ Why, as often as a Billow met us, he turn'd his Head and shut his Mouth. _Ant._ You tell me of a brave old Fellow. _Adol._ When we had been some Time swimming at this Rate, and had made some Way, the old Priest being a very tall Man, cries out, Be of good Heart, I feel Ground; but I durst not hope for such a Blessing. No, no, says I, we are too far from Shoar to hope to feel Ground. Nay, says he, I feel the Ground with my Feet. Said I, perhaps it is some of the Chests that have been roll'd thither by the Sea. Nay, says he, I am sure I feel Ground by the Scratching of my Toes. Having floated thus a little longer, and he had felt the Bottom again, Do you do what you please, says he, I'll leave you the whole Mast, and wade for it. And so he took his Opportunity, at the Ebbing of the Billows, he made what Haste he could on his Feet, and when the Billows came again, he took Hold of his Knees with his Hands, and bore up against the Billows, hiding himself under them as Sea Gulls and Ducks do, and at the Ebbing of the Wave, he would start up and run for it. I seeing that this succeeded so well to him, followed his Example. There stood upon the Shoar Men, who had long Pikes handed from one to another, which kept them firm against the Force of the Waves, strong bodied Men, and accustom'd to the Waves, and he that was last of them held out a Pike to the Person swimming towards him. All that came to Shoar, and laying hold of that, were drawn safely to dry Land. Some were sav'd this Way. _Ant._ How many? _Adol._ Seven. But two of these fainted away being brought to the Fire. _Ant._ How many were in the Ship? _Adol._ Fifty-eight. _Ant._ O cruel Sea. At least it might have been content with the Tithes, which are enough for Priests. Did it restore so few out of so great a Number? _Adol._ There we had Experience of the wonderful Humanity of the Nation, that supply'd us with all Necessaries with exceeding Chearfulness; as Lodging, Fire, Victuals, Cloaths, and Money to bear our Charges when we went away. _Ant._ What Country was it? _Adol. Holland._ _Ant._ There's no Nation more human, altho' they are encompass'd with such fierce Nations. I fancy you won't be for going to Sea again. _Adol._ No, unless God shall please to deprive me of my Reason. _Ant._ I would rather hear such Stories than feel them. _DIVERSORIA._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy shews the various Customs of Nations and their Civility in treating Strangers. An Inn at_ Leyden _where are nothing but Women. The Manners of the_ French _Inns, who are us'd to tell Stories, and break Jests. The_ Germans, _far more uncivil in treating Travellers, being rude, and wholly inhospitable: The Guests look after their own Horses: The Method of receiving them into the Stove: They provide no Supper, till they know how many Guests they shall have: All that come that Night, sit down to Supper together: All pay alike, tho' one drinks twice as much Wine as another does._ BERTULPH and WILLIAM. _Bert._ I wonder what is the Fancy of a great many, for staying two or three Days at _Lyons_? When I have once set out on a Journey, I an't at Rest till I come to my Journey's End. _Will._ Nay, I wonder as much, that any Body can get away from thence. _Bert._ But why so? _Will._ Because that's a Place the Companions of _Ulysses_ could not have got away from. There are _Sirens_. No Body is better entertain'd at his own House, than he is there at an Inn. _Bert._ What is done there? _Will._ There's a Woman always waiting at Table, which makes the Entertainment pleasant with Railleries, and pleasant Jests. And the Women are very handsome there. First the Mistress of the House came and bad us Welcome, and to accept kindly what Fare we should have; after her, comes her Daughter, a very fine Woman, of so handsome a Carriage, and so pleasant in Discourse, that she would make even _Cato_ himself merry, were he there: And they don't talk to you as if you were perfect Strangers, but as those they have been a long Time acquainted with, and familiar Friends. _Bert._ O, I know the _French_ Way of Civility very well. _Will._ And because they can't be always with you, by Reason of the other Affairs of the House, and the welcoming of other Guests, there comes a Lass, that supplies the Place of the Daughter, till she is at Leisure to return again. This Lass is so well instructed in the Knack of Repartees, that she has a Word ready for every Body, and no Conceit comes amiss to her. The Mother, you must know, was somewhat in Years. _Bert._ But what was your Table furnish'd with? For Stories fill no Bellies. _Will._ Truly, so splendid, that I was amaz'd that they could afford to entertain their Guests so, for so small a Price. And then after Dinner, they entertain a Man with such facetious Discourse, that one cannot be tired; that I seemed to be at my own House, and not in a strange Place. _Bert._ And how went Matters in your Chambers? _Will._ Why, there was every where some pretty Lass or other, giggling and playing wanton Tricks? They ask'd us if we had any foul Linnen to wash; which they wash and bring to us again: In a word, we saw nothing there but young Lasses and Women, except in the Stable, and they would every now and then run in there too. When you go away, they embrace ye, and part with you with as much Affection, as if you were their own Brothers, or near Kinsfolks. _Bert._ This Mode perhaps may become the _French_, but methinks the Way of the _Germans_ pleases me better, which is more manly. _Will._ I never have seen _Germany_; therefore, pray don't think much to tell how they entertain a Traveller. _Bert._ I can't tell whether the Method of entertaining be the same every where; but I'll tell you what I saw there. No Body bids a Guest welcome, lest he should seem to court his Guests to come to him, for that they look upon to be sordid and mean, and not becoming the German Gravity. When you have called a good While at the Gate, at Length one puts his Head out of the Stove Window (for they commonly live in Stoves till Midsummer) like a Tortoise from under his Shell: Him you must ask if you can have any Lodging there; if he does not say no, you may take it for granted, that there is Room for you. When you ask where the Stable is, he points to it; there you may curry your Horse as you please yourself, for there is no Servant will put a Hand to it. If it be a noted Inn, there is a Servant shews you the Stable, and a Place for your Horse, but incommodious enough; for they keep the best Places for those that shall come afterwards; especially for Noblemen. If you find Fault with any Thing, they tell you presently, if you don't like, look for another Inn. In their Cities, they allow Hay, but very unwillingly and sparingly, and that is almost as dear as Oats. When you have taken Care of your Horse, you come whole into the Stove, Boots, Baggage, Dirt and all, for that is a common Room for all Comers. _Will._ In _France_, they appoint you a separate Chamber, where you may change your Cloaths, clean and warm your self, or take Rest if you have a Mind to it. _Bert._ There's nothing of that here. In the Stove, you pull off your Boots, put on your Shoes, and if you will, change your Shirt, hang up your wet Cloths near the Stove Iron, and get near it to dry yourself. There's Water provided for you to wash your Hands, if you will; but as for the Cleanness of it, it is for the most Part such that you will want another Water to wash that off. _Will._ I commend this Sort of People, that have nothing of Effeminacy in them. _Bert._ If you come in at four a-Clock in the Afternoon, you must not go to Supper till nine, and sometimes not till ten. _Will._ Why so? _Bert._ They never make any Thing ready till they see all their Company together, that one Trouble may serve for all. _Will._ They are for taking the shortest Way. _Bert._ You are right; so that oftentimes, there come all together into the same Stove, eighty or ninety Foot-Men, Horse-Men, Merchants, Marriners, Waggoners, Husband-Men, Children, Women, sick and sound. _Will._ This is having all Things in common. _Bert._ There one combs his Head, another wipes off his Sweat, another cleans his Spatterdashes or Boots, another belches Garlick; and in short, there is as great a Confusion of Tongues and Persons, as there was at the Building the Tower of _Babel_. And if they see any Body of another Country, who by his Habit looks like a Man of Quality, they all stare at him so wistfully, as if he was a Sort of strange Animal brought out of _Africa_. And when they are set at Table, and he behind them, they will be still looking back at him, and be staring him in the Face, till they have forgot their Suppers. _Will._ At _Rome_, _Paris_ or _Venice_, there's no Body thinks any Thing strange. _Bert._ In the mean Time, 'tis a Crime for you to call for any Thing. When it is grown pretty late, and they don't expect any more Guests, out comes an old grey-bearded Servant, with his Hair cut short, and a crabbed Look, and a slovenly Dress. _Will._ Such Fellows ought to be Cup-Bearers to the Cardinals at _Rome_. _Bert._ He having cast his Eyes about, counts to himself, how many there are in the Stove; the more he sees there, the more Fire he makes in the Stove although it be at a Time when the very Heat of the Sun would be troublesome; and this with them, is accounted a principal Part of good Entertainment, to make them all sweat till they drop again. If any one who is not used to the Steam, shall presume to open the Window never so little, that he be not stifled, presently they cry out to shut it again: If you answer you are not able to bear it, you'll presently hear, get you another Inn then. _Will._ But in my Opinion, nothing is more dangerous, than for so many to draw in the same Vapour; especially when their Bodies are opened with the Heat; and to eat in the same Place, and to stay there so many Hours, not to mention the belching of Garlick, the Farting, the stinking Breaths, for many have secret Distempers, and every Distemper has its Contagion; and without doubt, many have the _Spanish_, or as it is call'd, the _French_ Pox, although it is common to all Nations. And it is my Opinion, there is as much Danger from such Persons, as there is from those that have the Leprosy. Tell me now, what is this short of a Pestilence? _Bert._ They are Persons of a strong Constitution, and laugh at, and disregard those Niceties. _Will._ But in the mean Time, they are bold at the Perils of other Men. _Bert._ What would you do in this Case? 'Tis what they have been used to, and it is a Part of a constant Mind, not to depart from a Custom. _Will._ And yet, within these five and twenty Years, nothing was more in Vogue in _Brabant_, than hot Baths, but now they are every where grown out of Use; but the new Scabbado has taught us to lay them down. _Bert._ Well, but hear the rest: By and by, in comes our bearded _Ganymede_ again, and lays on the Table as many Napkins as there are Guests: But, good God! not Damask ones, but such as you'd take to have been made out of old Sails. There are at least eight Guests allotted to every Table. Now those that know the Way of the Country, take their Places, every one as he pleases, for there's no Difference between Poor or Rich, between the Master and Servant. _Will._ This was that ancient Equality which now the Tyrant Custom has driven quite out of the World. I suppose Christ liv'd after this Manner with his Disciples. _Bert._ After they are all plac'd, out comes the sour-look'd _Ganymede_ again, and counts his Company over again; by and by he comes in again, and brings every Man a Wooden Dish, and a Spoon of the same Silver, and then a Glass; and then a little after he brings Bread, which the Guests may chip every one for themselves at Leisure, while the Porridge is boiling. For sometimes they sit thus for near an Hour. _Will._ Do none of the Guests call for Meat in the mean Time? _Bert._ None who knows the Way of the Country. At last the Wine is set upon the Table: Good God! how far from being tasteless? So thin and sharp, that Sophisters ought to drink no other. And if any of the Guests should privately offer a Piece of Money to get a little better Wine some where else; at first they'll say nothing to you, but give you a Look, as if they were going to murder you; and if you press it farther, they answer you, there have been so many Counts and Marquisses that have lodg'd here, and none of them ever found fault with this Wine: If you don't like it, get you another Inn. They account only the Noblemen of their own Nation to be Men, and where-ever you come, they are shewing you their Arms. By this time, comes a Morsel to pacify a barking Stomach: And by and by follow the Dishes in great Pomp; commonly the first has Sippits of Bread in Flesh Broth, or if it be a Fish Day, in a Soup of Pulse. After that comes in another Soup, and then a Service of Butcher's Meat, that has been twice boil'd, or salt Meats warm'd again, and then Pulse again, and by and by something of more solid Food, until their Stomachs being pretty well staid, they bring roast Meat or stewed Fish, which is not to be at all contemn'd; but this they are sparing of, and take it away again quickly. This is the Manner they order the Entertainment, as Comedians do, who intermingle Dances among their Scenes, so do they their Chops and Soups by Turns: But they take Care that the last Act shall be the best. _Will._ This is the Part of a good Poet. _Bert._ And it would be a heinous Offence, if in the mean Time any Body should say, Take away this Dish, there's no Body eats. You must sit your Time appointed, which I think they measure by the Hour-Glass. At length, out comes that bearded Fellow, or the Landlord himself, in a Habit but little differing from his Servants, and asks how cheer you? And by and by some better Wine is brought. And they like those best that drink most, tho' he that drinks most pays no more than he that drinks least. _Will._ A strange Temper of the Nation! _Bert._ There are some of them that drink twice as much Wine as they pay for their Ordinary. But before I leave this Entertainment, it is wonderful what a Noise and Chattering there is, when once they come to be warm with Wine. In short, it deafens a Man. They oftentimes bring in a Mixture of Mimicks, which these People very much delight in, tho' they are a detestable Sort of Men. There's such a singing, prating, bawling, jumping, and knocking, that you would think the Stove were falling upon your Head, and one Man can't hear another speak. And this they think is a pleasant Way of living, and there you must sit in Spight of your Heart till near Midnight. _Will._ Make an End of your Meal now, for I myself am tir'd with such a tedious one. _Bert._ Well, I will. At length the Cheese is taken away, which scarcely pleases them, except it be rotten and full of Maggots. Then the old bearded Fellow comes again with a Trencher, and a many Circles and semi-Circles drawn upon it with Chalk, this he lays down upon the Table, with a grim Countenance, and without speaking. You would say he was some _Charon_. They that understand the Meaning of this lay down their Money one after another till the Trencher is fill'd. Having taken Notice of those who lay down, he reckons it up himself, and if all is paid, he gives you a Nod. _Will._ But what if there should be any Thing over and above? _Bert._ Perhaps he'll give it you again, and they oftentimes do so. _Will._ Does no Body find fault with the Reckoning? _Bert._ No Body that is wise. For they will say, what Sort of a Fellow are you? You pay no more than the rest. _Will._ This is a frank Sort of Men, you are speaking of. _Bert._ If any one is weary with his Journey, and desires to go to Bed as soon as he has supp'd, he is bid to stay till the rest go too. _Will._ This seems to me to be _Plato_'s City. _Bert._ Then every one is shew'd to his Chamber, and truly 'tis nothing else but a Chamber, there is only a Bed there, and nothing else that you can either make Use of or steal. _Will._ Are Things very clean there? _Bert._ As clean as they were at the Table. Sheets wash'd perhaps six Months ago. _Will._ What becomes of your Horses all this While? _Bert._ They are treated after the Manner that the Men are. _Will._ But is there the same Treatment every where. _Bert._ It is a little more civil in some Places, and worse in others, than I have told you; but in general it is thus. _Will._ What if I should now tell you how they treat their Guests in that Part of _Italy_ call'd _Lombardy_, and in _Spain_, and in _England_, and in _Wales_, for the _English_ have the Manners both of the _French_ and the _Germans_, being a Mixture of those two Nations. The _Welsh_ boast themselves to be the original _English_. _Bert._ Pray relate it. I never had the Opportunity of travelling in them. _Will._ I have not Leisure now, and the Master of the Ship bid me be on board by three a Clock, unless I would lose my Passage. Another Time we shall have an Opportunity of prating our Bellies full. _The YOUNG MAN and HARLOT._ The ARGUMENT. _This is certainly a divine Colloquy, that makes even a Bawdy-House a chaste Place! God can't be deceiv'd, his Eyes penetrate into the most secret Places. That young Persons ought in an especial Manner to take Care of their Chastity. A young Woman, who made herself common to get a Livelihood, is recovered from that Course of Life, as wretched as it is scandalous._ LUCRETIA, SOPHRONIUS. _Lu._ O brave! My pretty _Sophronius_, have I gotten you again? It is an Age methinks since I saw you. I did not know you at first Sight. _So._ Why so, my _Lucretia_? _Lu._ Because you had no Beard when you went away, but you're come back with something of a Beard. What's the Matter, my little Heart, you look duller than you use to do? _So._ I want to have a little Talk with you in private. _Lu._ Ah, ah, are we not by ourselves already, my Cocky? _So._ Let us go out of the Way somewhere, into a more private Place. _Lu._ Come on then, we'll go into my inner Bed-Chamber, if you have a Mind to do any Thing. _So._ I don't think this Place is private enough yet. _Lu._ How comes it about you're so bashful all on a sudden? Well, come, I have a Closet where I lay up my Cloaths, a Place so dark, that we can scarce see one another there. _So._ See if there be no Chink. _Lu._ There is not so much as a Chink. _So._ Is there no Body near to hear us? _Lu._ Not so much as a Fly, my Dear; Why do you lose Time? _So._ Can we escape the Eye of God here? _Lu._ No, he sees all Things clearly. _So._ And of the Angels? _Lu._ No, we cannot escape their Sight. _So._ How comes it about then, that Men are not asham'd to do that in the Sight of God, and before the Face of the holy Angels, that they would be ashamed to do before Men? _Lu._ What Sort of an Alteration is this? Did you come hither to preach a Sermon? Prithee put on a _Franciscan_'s Hood, and get up into a Pulpit, and then we'll hear you hold forth, my little bearded Rogue. _So._ I should not think much to do that, if I could but reclaim you from this Kind of Life, that is the most shameful and miserable Life in the World. _Lu._ Why so, good Man? I am born, and I must be kept; every one must live by his Calling. This is my Business; this is all I have to live on. _So._ I wish with all my Heart, my _Lucretia_, that setting aside for a While that Infatuation of Mind, you would seriously weigh the Matter. _Lu._ Keep your Preachment till another Time; now let us enjoy one another, my _Sophronius_. _So._ You do what you do for the Sake of Gain. _Lu._ You are much about the Matter. _So._ Thou shalt lose nothing by it, do but hearken to me, and I'll pay you four Times over. _Lu._ Well, say what you have a Mind to say. _So._ Answer me this Question in the first Place: Are there any Persons that owe you any ill Will? _Lu._ Not one. _So._ Is there any Body that you have a Spleen against? _Lu._ According as they deserve. _So._ And if you could do any Thing that would gratify them, would you do it? _Lu._ I would poison 'em sooner. _So._ But then do but consider with yourself; is there any Thing that you can do that gratifies them more than to let them see you live this shameful and wretched Life? And what is there thou canst do that would be more afflicting to them that wish thee well? _Lu._ It is my Destiny. _So._ Now that which uses to be the greatest Hardship to such as are transported, or banish'd into the most remote Parts of the World, this you undergo voluntarily. _Lu._ What is that? _So._ Hast thou not of thy own Accord renounc'd all thy Affections to Father, Mother, Brother, Sisters, Aunts, (by Father's and Mother's Side) and all thy Relations? For thou makest them all asham'd to own thee, and thyself asham'd to come into their Sight. _Lu._ Nay, I have made a very happy Exchange of Affections; for instead of a few, now I have a great many, of which you are one, and whom I have always esteem'd as a Brother. _So._ Leave off Jesting, and consider the Matter seriously, as it really is. Believe me, my _Lucretia_, she who has so many Friends, has never a one, for they that follow thee do it not as a Friend, but as a House of Office rather. Do but consider, poor Thing, into what a Condition thou hast brought thyself. _Christ_ lov'd thee so dearly as to redeem thee with his own Blood, and would have thee be a Partaker with him in an heavenly Inheritance, and thou makest thyself a common Sewer, into which all the base, nasty, pocky Fellows resort, and empty their Filthiness. And if that leprous Infection they call the _French_ Pox han't yet seiz'd thee, thou wilt not escape it long. And if once thou gettest it, how miserable wilt thou be, though all things should go favourably on thy Side? I mean thy Substance and Reputation. Thou wouldest be nothing but a living Carcase. Thou thoughtest much to obey thy Mother, and now thou art a mere Slave to a filthy Bawd. You could not endure to hear your Parents Instructions; and here you are often beaten by drunken Fellows and mad Whoremasters. It was irksome to thee to do any Work at Home, to get a Living; but here, how many Quarrels art thou forc'd to endure, and how late a Nights art thou oblig'd to sit up? _Lu._ How came you to be a Preacher? _So._ And do but seriously consider, this Flower of thy Beauty that now brings thee so many Gallants, will soon fade: And then, poor Creature, what wilt thou do? Thou wilt be piss'd upon by every Body. It may be, thou thinkest, instead of a Mistress, I'll then be a Bawd. All Whores can't attain to that, and if thou shouldst, what Employment is more impious, and more like the Devil himself? _Lu._ Why, indeed, my _Sophronius_, almost all you say is very true. But how came you to be so religious all of a sudden? Thou usedst to be the greatest Rake in the World, one of 'em. No Body used to come hither more frequently, nor at more unseasonable Hours than you did. I hear you have been at _Rome_. _So._ I have so. _Lu._ Well, but other People use to come from thence worse than they went: How comes it about, it is otherwise with you? _So._ I'll tell you, because I did not go to _Rome_ with the same Intent, and after the same Manner that others do. Others commonly go to _Rome_, on purpose to come Home worse, and there they meet with a great many Opportunities of becoming so. I went along with an honest Man, by whose Advice, I took along with me a Book instead of a Bottle: The New Testament with _Erasmus_'s Paraphrase. _Lu._ _Erasmus_'s? They say that he's Half a Heretick. _So._ Has his Name reached to this Place too? _Lu._ There's no Name more noted among us. _So._ Did you ever see him? _Lu._ No, I never saw him; but I should be glad to see him; I have heard so many bad Reports of him. _So._ It may be you have heard 'em, from them that are bad themselves. _Lu._ Nay, from Men of the Gown. _So._ Who are they? _Lu._ It is not convenient to name Names. _So._ Why so? _Lu._ Because if you should blab it out, and it should come to their Ears, I should lose a great many good Cullies. _So._ Don't be afraid, I won't speak a Word of it. _Lu._ I will whisper then. _So._ You foolish Girl, what Need is there to whisper, when there is no Body but ourselves? What, lest God should hear? Ah, good God! I perceive you're a religious Whore, that relievest Mendicants. _Lu._ I get more by them Beggars than by you rich Men. _So._ They rob honest Women, to lavish it away upon naughty Strumpets. _Lu._ But go on, as to your Book. _So._ So I will, and that's best. In that Book, Paul, that can't lie, told me, that _neither Whores nor Whore-mongers shall obtain the Kingdom of Heaven_. When I read this, I began thus to think with myself: It is but a small Matter that I look for from my Father's Inheritance, and yet I can renounce all the Whores in the World, rather than be disinherited by my Father; how much more then ought I to take Care, lest my heavenly Father should disinherit me? And human Laws do afford some Relief in the Case of a Father's disinheriting or discarding a Son: But here is no Provision at all made, in case of God's disinheriting; and upon that, I immediately ty'd myself up from all Conversation with lewd Women. _Lu._ It will be well if you can hold it. _So._ It is a good Step towards Continence, to desire to be so. And last of all, there is one Remedy left, and that is a Wife. When I was at _Rome_, I empty'd the whole Jakes of my Sins into the Bosom of a Confessor. And he exhorted me very earnestly to Purity, both of Mind and Body, and to the reading of the holy Scripture, to frequent Prayer, and Sobriety of Life, and enjoin'd me no other Penance, but that I should upon my bended Knees before the high Altar say this Psalm, _Have Mercy upon me, O God_: And that if I had any Money, I should give one Penny to some poor Body. And I wondring that for so many whoring Tricks he enjoin'd me so small a Penance, he answer'd me very pleasantly, My Son, says he, if you truly repent and change your Life, I don't lay much Stress upon the Penance; but if thou shalt go on in it, the very Lust itself will at last punish thee very severely, although the Priest impose none upon thee. Look upon me, I am blear-ey'd, troubled with the Palsy, and go stooping: Time was I was such a one as you say you have been heretofore. And thus I repented. _Lu._ Then as far as I perceive, I have lost my _Sophronius_. _So._ Nay, you have rather gain'd him, for he was lost before, and was neither his own Friend nor thine: Now he loves thee in Reality, and longs for the Salvation of thy Soul. _Lu._ What would you have me to do then, my _Sophronius_? _So._ To leave off that Course of Life out of Hand: Thou art but a Girl yet, and that Stain that you have contracted may be wip'd off in Time. Either marry, and I'll give you something toward a Portion, or go into some Cloyster, that takes in crakt Maids, or go into some strange Place and get into some honest Family, I'll lend you my Assistance to any of these. _Lu._ My _Sophronius_, I love thee dearly, look out for one for me, I'll follow thy Advice. _So._ But in the mean Time get away from hence. _Lu._ Whoo! what so suddenly! _So._ Why not to Day rather than to Morrow, if Delays are dangerous? _Lu._ Whither shall I go? _So._ Get all your Things together, give 'em to me in the Evening, my Servant shall carry 'em privately to a faithful Matron: And I'll come a little after and take you out as if it were to take a little Walk; you shall live with her some Time upon my Cost till I can provide for you, and that shall be very quickly. _Lu._ Well, my _Sophronius_, I commit myself wholly to thy Management. _So._ In Time to come you'll be glad you have done so. _The POETICAL FEAST._ The ARGUMENT. _The Poetical Feast teaches the Studious how to banquet. That Thriftiness with Jocoseness, Chearfulness without Obscenity, and learned Stories, ought to season their Feasts. Iambics are bloody. Poets are Men of no great Judgment. The three chief Properties of a good Maid Servant. Fidelity, Deformity, and a high Spirit. A Place out of the Prologue of_ Terence's Eunuchus _is illustrated. Also_ Horace's _Epode to_ Canidia. _A Place out of_ Seneca. Aliud agere, nihil agere, male agere. _A Place out of the Elenchi of_ Aristotle _is explain'd. A Theme poetically varied, and in a different Metre. Sentences are taken from Flowers and Trees in the Garden. Also some Verses are compos'd in_ Greek. HILARY, LEONARD, CRATO, GUESTS, MARGARET, CARINUS, EUBULUS, SBRULIUS, PARTHENIUS, MUS, _Hilary_'s Servant. Hi. _Levis apparatus, animus est lautissimus._ Le. _Cænam sinistro es auspicatus omine._ Hi. _Imo absit omen triste. Sed cur hoc putas?_ Le. _Cruenti Iambi haud congruent convivio._ Hi. _I have but slender Fare, but a very liberal Mind._ Le. _You have begun the Banquet with a bad Omen._ Hi. _Away with bad Presages. But why do you think so?_ Le. _Bloody Iambics are not fit for a Feast._ _Cr._ O brave! I am sure the Muses are amongst us, Verses flow so from us, when we don't think of 'em. _Si rotatiles trochaeos mavelis, en, accipe: Vilis apparatus heic est, animus est lautissimus._ If you had rather have whirling Trochees, lo, here they are for you: Here is but mean Provision, but I have a liberal Mind. Although Iambics in old Time were made for Contentions and Quarrels, they were afterwards made to serve any Subject whatsoever. O Melons! Here you have Melons that grew in my own Garden. These are creeping Lettuces of a very milky Juice, like their Name. What Man in his Wits would not prefer these Delicacies before Brawn, Lampreys, and Moor-Hens? _Cr._ If a Man may be allow'd to speak Truth at a Poetic Banquet, those you call Lettuces are Beets. _Hi._ God forbid. _Cr._ It is as I tell you. See the Shape of 'em, and besides where is the milky Juice? Where are their soft Prickles? _Hi._ Truly you make me doubt. Soho, call the Wench. _Margaret_, you Hag, what did you mean to give us Beets instead of Lettuces? _Ma._ I did it on Purpose. _Hi._ What do you say, you Witch? _Ma._ I had a Mind to try among so many Poets if any could know a Lettuce from a Beet. For I know you don't tell me truly who 'twas that discover'd 'em to be Beets. _Guests._ _Crato_. _Ma._ I thought it was no Poet who did it. _Hi._ If ever you serve me so again, I'll call you _Blitea_ instead of _Margarita_. _Gu._ Ha, ha, ha. _Ma._ Your calling me will neither make me fatter nor leaner. He calls me by twenty Names in a Day's Time: When he has a Mind to wheedle me, then I'm call'd _Galatea, Euterpe, Calliope, Callirhoe, Melissa, Venus, Minerva_, and what not? When he's out of Humour at any Thing, then presently I'm _Tisiphone_, _Megaera_, _Alecto_, _Medusa_, _Baucis_, and whatsoever comes into his Head in his mad Mood. _Hi._ Get you gone with your Beets, _Blitea_. _Ma._ I wonder what you call'd me for. _Hi._ That you may go whence you came. _Ma._ 'Tis an old Saying and a true, 'tis an easier Matter to raise the Devil, than 'tis to lay him. _Gu._ Ha, ha, ha: Very well said. As the Matter is, _Hilary_, you stand in Need of some magic Verse to lay her with. _Hi._ I have got one ready. [Greek: Pheugete, kantharides lukos agrios umme diôkei.] Be gone ye Beetles, for the cruel Wolf pursues you. _Ma._ What says _Æsop?_ _Cr._ Have a Care, _Hilary_, she'll hit you a Slap on the Face: This is your laying her with your _Greek_ Verse. A notable Conjurer indeed! _Hi._ _Crato_, What do you think of this Jade? I could have laid ten great Devils with such a Verse as this. _Ma._ I don't care a Straw for your _Greek_ Verses. _Hi._ Well then, I must make use of a magical Spell, or, if that won't do, _Mercury's_ Mace. _Cr._ My _Margaret_, you know we Poets are a Sort of Enthusiasts, I won't say Mad-Men; prithee let me intreat you to let alone this Contention 'till another Time, and treat us with good Humour at this Supper for my Sake. _Ma._ What does he trouble me with his Verses for? Often when I am to go to Market he has never a Penny of Money to give me, and yet he's a humming of Verses. _Cr._ Poets are such Sort of Men. But however, prithee do as I say. _Ma._ Indeed I will do it for your Sake, because I know you are an honest Gentleman, that never beat your Brain about such Fooleries. I wonder how you came to fall into such Company. _Cr._ How come you to think so? _Ma._ Because you have a full Nose, sparkling Eyes, and a plump Body. Now do but see how he leers and sneers at me. _Cr._ But prithee, Sweet-Heart, keep your Temper for my Sake. _Ma._ Well, I will go, and 'tis for your Sake and no Body's else. _Hi._ Is she gone? _Ma._ Not so far but she can hear you. _Mus._ She is in the Kitchen, now, muttering something to herself I can't tell what. _Cr._ I'll assure you your Maid is not dumb. _Hi._ They say a good Maid Servant ought especially to have three Qualifications; to be honest, ugly, and high-spirited, which the Vulgar call evil. An honest Servant won't waste, an ugly one Sweet-Hearts won't woo, and one that is high-spirited will defend her Master's Right; for sometimes there is Occasion for Hands as well as a Tongue. This Maid of mine has two of these Qualifications, she's as ugly as she's surly; as to her Honesty I can't tell what to say to that. _Cr._ We have heard her Tongue, we were afraid of her Hands upon your Account. _Hi._ Take some of these Pompions: We have done with the Lettuces. For I know if I should bid her bring any Lettuces, she would bring Thistles. Here are Melons too, if any Body likes them better. Here are new Figs too just gather'd, as you may see by the Milk in the Stalks. It is customary to drink Water after Figs, lest they clog the Stomach. Here is very cool clear Spring Water that runs out of this Fountain, that is good to mix with Wine. _Cr._ But I can't tell whether I had best to mix Water with my Wine, or Wine with Water; this Wine seems to me so likely to have been drawn out of the Muses Fountain. _Hi._ Such Wine as this is good for Poets to sharpen their Wits. You dull Fellows love heavy Liquors. _Cr._ I wish I was that happy _Crassus_. _Hi._ I had rather be _Codrus_ or _Ennius_. And seeing I happen to have the Company of so many learned Guests at my Table, I won't let 'em go away without learning something of 'em. There is a Place in the Prologue of _Eunuchus_ that puzzles many. For most Copies have it thus: _Sic existimet, sciat, Responsum, non dictum esse, quid laesit prior, Qui bene vertendo, et ects describendo male, &c. Let him so esteem or know, that it is an Answer, not a common Saying; because he first did the Injury, who by well translating and ill describing them, &c._ In these Words I want a witty Sense, and such as is worthy of _Terence_. For he did not therefore do the Wrong first, because he translated the _Greek_ Comedies badly, but because he had found Fault with _Terence's._ Eu. According to the old Proverb, _He that sings worst let him begin first._ When I was at _London_ in _Thomas Linacre's_ House, who is a Man tho' well skill'd in all Manner of Philosophy, yet he is very ready in all Criticisms in Grammar, he shew'd me a Book of great Antiquity which had it thus: _Sic existimet, stiat, Responsum, non dictum esse, quale sit prius Qui bene vertendo, et eas describendo male, Ex Graecis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas: Idem Menandri Phasma nunc nuper dedit._ The Sentence is so to be ordered, that _quale sit_ may shew that an Example of that which is spoken before is to be subjoin'd. He threatened that he would again find Fault with something in his Comedies who had found Fault with him, and he here denies that it ought to seem a Reproach but an Answer. He that provokes begins the Quarrel; he that being provok'd, replies, only makes his Defence or Answer. He promises to give an Example thereof, _quale sit_, being the same with [Greek: oion] in _Greek_, and _quod genus, veluti_, or _videlicet_, or _puta_ in Latin. Then afterwards he brings a reproof, wherein the Adverb _prius_ hath Relation to another Adverb, as it were a contrary one, which follows, _viz. nuper_ even as the Pronoun _qui_ answers to the Word _idem_. For he altogether explodes the old Comedies of _Lavinius_, because they were now lost out of the Memory of Men. In those which he had lately published, he sets down the certain Places. I think that this is the proper Reading, and the true Sense of the Comedian: If the chief and ordinary Poets dissent not from it. _Gu._ We are all entirely of your Opinion. _Eu._ But I again desire to be inform'd by you of one small and very easy Thing, how this Verse is to be scann'd. _Ex Græcis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas._ Scan it upon your Fingers. _Hi._ I think that according to the Custom of the Antients _s_ is to be cut off, so that there be an _Anapaestus_ in the second Place. _Eu._ I should agree to it, but that the Ablative Case ends in _is_, and is long by Nature. Therefore though the Consonant should be taken away, yet nevertheless a long Vowel remains. _Hi._ You say right. _Cr._ If any unlearned Person or Stranger should come in, he would certainly think we were bringing up again among ourselves the Countrymens Play of holding up our Fingers (_dimicatione digitorum_, _i.e._ the Play of Love). _Le._ As far as I see, we scan it upon our Fingers to no Purpose. Do you help us out if you can. _Eu._ To see how small a Matter sometimes puzzles Men, though they be good Scholars! The Preposition _ex_ belongs to the End of the foregoing Verse. _Qui bene vertendo, et eas describendo male, ex Graecis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas._ Thus there is no Scruple. _Le._ It is so, by the Muses. Since we have begun to scan upon our Fingers, I desire that somebody would put this Verse out of _Andria_ into its Feet. Sine invidia laudem invenias, et amicos pares. For I have often tri'd and could do no good on't. _Le. Sine in_ is an Iambic, _vidia_ an Anapæstus, _Laudem in_ is a Spondee, _venias_ an Anapæstus, _et ami_ another Anapæstus. _Ca._ You have five Feet already, and there are three Syllables yet behind, the first of which is long; so that thou canst neither make it an _Iambic_ nor a _Tribrach._ _Le._ Indeed you say true. We are aground; who shall help us off? _Eu._ No Body can do it better than he that brought us into it. Well, _Carinus_, if thou canst say any Thing to the Matter, don't conceal it from your poor sincere Friends. _Ca._ If my Memory does not fail me, I think I have read something of this Nature in _Priscian_, who says, that among the Latin Comedians _v_ Consonant is cut off as well as the Vowel, as oftentimes in this Word _enimvero;_ so that the part _enime_ makes an Anapæstus. _Le._ Then scan it for us. _Ca._ I'll do it. _Sine inidi_ is a proseleusmatic Foot, unless you had rather have it cut off _i_ by Syneresis, as when _Virgil_ puts _aureo_ at the End of an heroick Verse for _auro._ But if you please let there be a Tribrach in the first Place, _a lau_ is a Spondee, _d'inveni_ a Dactyl, _as et a_ a Dactyl, _micos_ a Spondee, _pares_ an Iambic. _Sb. Carinus_ hath indeed got us out of these Briars. But in the same Scene there is a Place, which I can't tell whether any Body has taken Notice of or not. _Hi._ Prithee, let us have it. _Sb._ There _Simo_ speaks after this Manner. Sine ut eveniat, quod volo, In Pamphilo ut nihil sit morae, restat Chremes. _Suppose it happen, as I desire, that there be no delay in_ Pamphilus; Chremes _remains._ What is it that troubles you in these Words? _Sb. Sine_ being a Term of Threatning, there is nothing follows in this Place that makes for a Threatning. Therefore it is my Opinion that the Poet wrote it, _Sin eveniat, quod volo;_ that _Sin_ may answer to the _Si_ that went before. _Si propter amorem uxorem nolit ducere._ For the old Man propounds two Parts differing from one another: _Si, &c. If_ Pamphilus _for the Love of_ Glycerie _refuseth to marry, I shall have some Cause to chide him; but if he shall not refuse, then it remains that I must intreat_ Chremes. Moreover the Interruption of _Sosia_, and _Simo_'s Anger against _Davus_ made too long a Transposition of the Words. _Hi._ _Mouse_, reach me that Book. _Cr._ Do you commit your Book to a Mouse? _Hi._ More safely than my Wine. Let me never stir, if _Sbrulius_ has not spoken the Truth. _Ca._ Give me the Book, I'll shew you another doubtful Place. This Verse is not found in the Prologue of _Eunuchus_: _Habeo alia multa, quæ nunc condonabuntur._ _I have many other Things, which shall now be delivered._ Although the _Latin_ Comedians especially take great Liberty to themselves in this Kind of Verse, yet I don't remember that they any where conclude a Trimetre with a Spondee, unless it be read _Condonabitur_ impersonally, or _Condonabimus_, changing the Number of the Person. _Ma._ Oh, this is like Poets Manners indeed! As soon as ever they are set down to Dinner they are at Play, holding up their Fingers, and poring upon their Books. It were better to reserve your Plays and your Scholarship for the second Course. _Cr. Margaret_ gives us no bad Counsel, we'll humour her; when we have fill'd our Bellies, we'll go to our Play again; now we'll play with our Fingers in the Dish. _Hi._ Take Notice of Poetick Luxury. You have three Sorts of Eggs, boil'd, roasted, and fry'd; they are all very new, laid within these two Days. _Par._ I can't abide to eat Butter; if they are fry'd with Oil, I shall like 'em very well. _Hi._ Boy, go ask _Margaret_ what they are fry'd in. _Mo._ She says they are fry'd in neither. _Hi._ What! neither in Butter nor Oil. In what then? _Mo._ She says they are fry'd in Lye. _Cr._ She has given you an Answer like your Question. What a great Difficulty 'tis to distinguish Butter from Oil. _Ca._ Especially for those that can so easily know a Lettuce from a Beet. _Hi._ Well, you have had the Ovation, the Triumph will follow in Time. Soho, Boy, look about you, do you perceive nothing to be wanting? _Mo._ Yes, a great many Things. _Hi._ These Eggs lack Sauce to allay their Heat. _Mo._ What Sauce would you have? _Hi._ Bid her send us some Juice of the Tendrels of a Vine pounded. _Mo._ I'll tell her, Sir. _Hi._ What, do you come back empty-handed? _Mo._ She says, Juice is not used to be squeez'd out of Vine Tendrels. _Le._ A fine Maid Servant, indeed! _Sb._ Well, we'll season our Eggs with pleasant Stories. I found a Place in the Epodes of _Horace_, not corrupted as to the Writing, but wrong interpreted, and not only by _Mancinellus_, and other later Writers; but by _Porphyry_ himself. The Place is in the Poem, where he sings a Recantation to the Witch _Canidia_. _tuusque venter pactumeius, et tuo cruore rubros obstetrix pannos lavit, utcunque fortis exilis puerpera._ For they all take _exilis_ to be a Noun in this Place, when it is a Verb. I'll write down _Porphyry_'s Words, if we can believe 'em to be his: She is _exilis_, says he, under that Form, as though she were become deform'd by Travel; by Slenderness of Body, he means a natural Leanness. A shameful Mistake, if so great a Man did not perceive that the Law of the Metre did contradict this Sense. Nor does the fourth Place admit of a Spondee: but the Poet makes a Jest of it; that she did indeed bear a Child, though she was not long weak, nor kept her Bed long after her Delivery; but presently jumpt out of Bed, as some lusty lying-in Women used to do. _Hi._ We thank you _Sbrulius_, for giving us such fine Sauce to our Eggs. _Le._ There is another Thing in the first Book of _Odes_ that is not much unlike this. The _Ode_ begins thus: _Tu ne quæ sieris._ Now the common Reading is thus, _Neu Babylonios Tentaris numeros, ut melius quicquid erit pati_. The antient Interpreters pass this Place over, as if there were no Difficulty in it. Only _Mancinettus_ thinking the Sentence imperfect, bids us add _possis_. _Sb._ Have you any Thing more that is certain about this Matter? _Le._ I don't know whether I have or no; but in my Opinion, _Horace_ seems here to have made Use of the _Greek_ Idiom; and this he does more than any other of the Poets. For it is a very common Thing with the _Greeks_, to join an infinitive Mood with the Word [Greek: hôs] and [Greek: hôste]. And so _Horace_ uses _ut pati_, for _ut patiaris_: Although what _Mancinellus_ guesses, is not altogether absurd. _Hi._ I like what you say very well. Run, _Mouse_, and bring what is to come, if there be any Thing. _Cr._ What new dainty Dish is this? _Hi._ This is a Cucumber sliced; this is the Broth of the Pulp of a Gourd boil'd, it is good to make the Belly loose. _Sb._ Truly a medical feast. _Hi._ Take it in good Part. There's a Fowl to come out of our Hen-Coop. _Sb._ We will change thy Name, and call thee _Apicius_, instead of _Hilary_. _Hi._ Well, laugh now as much as you will, it may be you'll highly commend this Supper to Morrow. _Sb._ Why so? _Hi._ When you find that your Dinner has been well season'd. _Sb._ What, with a good Stomach? _Hi._ Yes, indeed. _Cr._ _Hilary_, do you know what Task I would have you take upon you? _Hi._ I shall know when you have told me. _Cr._ The Choir sings some Hymns, that are indeed learned ones; but are corrupted in many Places by unlearned Persons. I desire that you would mend 'em; and to give you an Example, we sing thus: _Hostis Herodes impie, Christum venire quid times?_ _Thou wicked Enemy_ Herod, _why dost thou dread the Coming of Christ?_ The mis-placing of one Word spoils the Verse two Ways. For the Word _hostis_, making a Trochee, has no Place in an _Iambick Verse_, and _Hero_ being a _Spondee_ won't stand in the second Place. Nor is there any doubt but the Verse at first was thus written, _Herodes hostis impie._ For the Epithete _impie_ better agrees with _Hostis_ than with _Herod_. Besides _Herodes_ being a _Greek_ Word [Greek: ê or ae] is turned into [Greek: e] in the vocative; as [Greek: Sôkrataes, ô Sokrates]; and so [Greek: Agamemnôn [Transcribers Note: this word appears in Greek with the ô represented by the character omega.]] in the nominative Case is turned into _[Greek: o]_. So again we sing the Hymn, _Jesu corona virginum, Quem mater ilia concepit, Quæ sola virgo parturit. O Jesus the Crown of Virgins, Whom she the Mother conceiv'd, Which was the only Person of a Virgin that brought forth._ There is no Doubt but the Word should be pronounc'd _concipit._ For the Change of the Tense sets off a Word. And it is ridiculous for us to find Fault with _concipit_ when _parlurit_ follows. _Hi._ Truly I have been puzzled at a great many such Things; nor will it be amiss, if hereafter we bestow a little Time upon this Matter. For methinks _Ambrose_ has not a little Grace in this Kind of Verse, for he does commonly end a Verse of four Feet with a Word of three Syllables, and commonly places a _cæsura_ in the End of a Word. It is so common with him that it cannot seem to have been by Chance. If you would have an Example, _Deus Creator_. Here is a _Penthemimeris_, it follows, _omnium; Polique rector_, then follows, _vestiens; diem decoro_, and then _lumine; noctem soporis_, then follows _gratia_. _Hi._ But here's a good fat Hen that has laid me Eggs, and hatch'd me Chickens for ten Years together. _Cr._ It is Pity that she should have been kill'd. _Ca._ If it were fit to intermingle any Thing of graver Studies, I have something to propose. _Hi._ Yes, if it be not too crabbed. _Ca._ That it is not. I lately began to read _Seneca's_ Epistles, and stumbled, as they say, at the very Threshold. The Place is in the first Epistle; _And if_, says he, _thou wilt but observe it, great Part of our Life passes away while we are doing what is ill; the greatest Part, while we are doing nothing, and the whole of it while we are doing that which is to no Purpose_. In this Sentence, he seems to affect I can't tell what Sort of Witticism, which I do not well understand. _Le._ I'll guess, if you will. _Ca._ Do so. _Le._ No Man offends continually. But, nevertheless, a great Part of one's Life is lost in Excess, Lust, Ambition, and other Vices; but a much greater Part is lost in doing of nothing. Moreover they are said to do nothing, not who live in Idleness, but they who are busied about frivolous Things which conduce nothing at all to our Happiness: And thence comes the Proverb, _It is better to be idle, than to be doing, but to no Purpose_. But the whole Life is spent in doing another Thing. He is said, _aliud agere_, who does not mind what he is about. So that the whole of Life is lost: Because when we are vitiously employ'd we are doing what we should not do; when we are employ'd about frivolous Matters we do that we should not do; and when we study Philosophy, in that we do it negligently and carelesly, we do something to no Purpose. If this Interpretation don't please you, let this Sentence of _Seneca_ be set down among those Things of this Author that _Aulus Gellius_ condemns in this Writer as frivolously witty. _Hi._ Indeed I like it very well. But in the mean Time, let us fall manfully upon the Hen. I would not have you mistaken, I have no more Provision for you. It agrees with what went before. _That is the basest Loss that comes by Negligence_, and he shews it by this Sentence consisting of three Parts. But methinks I see a Fault a little after: _We foresee not Death, a great Part of it is past already._ It is my Opinion it ought to be read; _We foresee Death._ For we foresee those Things which are a great Way off from us, when Death for the most Part is gone by us. _Le._ If Philosophers do sometimes give themselves Leave to go aside into the Meadows of the Muses, perhaps it will not be amiss for us, if we, to gratify our Fancy, take a Turn into their Territories. _Hi._ Why not? _Le._ As I was lately reading over again _Aristotle_'s Book that he entitles [Greek: Peri tôn elenchôn], the Argument of which is for the most Part common both to Rhetoricians and Philosophers, I happen'd to fall upon some egregious Mistakes of the Interpreters. And there is no Doubt but that they that are unskill'd in the _Greek_ have often miss'd it in many Places. For _Aristotle_ proposes a Sort of such Kind of Ambiguity as arises from a Word of a contrary Signification. [Greek: ho ti manthanousin oi epistamenoi ta gar apostomatizomena manthanousin oi grammatikoi to gar manthanein omônymon, to te xunienai chrômenon tê epistêmê, kai to lambanein tên epistêmên.] And they turn it thus. _Because intelligent Persons learn; for Grammarians are only tongue-learn'd; for to learn is an equivocal Word, proper both to him that exerciseth and to him that receiveth Knowledge._ _Hi._ Methinks you speak _Hebrew_, and not _English_. _Le._ Have any of you heard any equivocal Word? _Hi._ No. _Le._ What then can be more foolish than to desire to turn that which cannot possibly be turn'd. For although the _Greek_ Word [Greek: manthanein], signifies as much as [Greek: mathein] and [Greek: mathêteuein], so among the _Latins_, _discere_, to learn, signifies as much as _doctrinam accipere_, or _doctrinam tradere._ But whether this be true or no I can't tell. I rather think [Greek: manthanein], is of doubtful Signification with the _Greeks_, as _cognoscere_ is among the _Latins._ For he that informs, and the Judge that learns, both of them know the Cause. And so I think among the _Greeks_ the Master is said [Greek: manthanein] whilst he hears his Scholars, as also the Scholars who learn of him. But how gracefully hath he turn'd that [Greek: ta gar apostomatizomena manthanousin oi grammatikoi], _nam secundum os grammatici discunt: For the Grammarians are tongue-learn'd_; since it ought to be translated, _Nam grammatici, quæ dictitant, docent: Grammarians teach what they dictate_. Here the Interpreters ought to have given another Expression, which might not express the same Words, but the same Kind of Thing. Tho' I am apt to suspect here is some Error in the _Greek_ Copy, and that it ought to be written [Greek: homônumon tô te xunienai kai tô lambanein]. And a little after he subjoins another Example of Ambiguity, which arises not from the Diversity of the Signification of the same Word, but from a different Connection, [Greek: to boulesthai labein me tous polemious], _velleme accipere pugnantes. To be willing that I should receive the fighting Men_: For so he translates it, instead of _velle me capere hostes, to be willing that I take the Enemies;_ and if one should read [Greek: boulesthe], it is more perspicuous. _Vultis ut ego capiam hostes? Will ye that I take the Enemies?_ For the Pronoun may both go before and follow the Verb _capere_. If it go before it, the Sense will be this, _Will ye that I take the Enemies?_ If it follows, then this will be the Sense, _Are ye willing that the Enemies should take me?_ He adds also another Example of the same Kind, [Greek: ara ho tis ginôskei, touto ginôskei]. i.e. _An quod quis novit hoc novit._ The Ambiguity lies in [Greek: touto]. If it should be taken in the accusative Case, the Sense will be this; _Whatsoever it is that any Body knows, that Thing he knows to be._ But if in the nominative Case, the Sense will be this, _That Thing which any Body knows, it knows;_ as though that could not be known that knows not again by Course. Again he adds another Example. [Greek: apa ho tis hora, touto hora; hora de ton kiona hôste hora ho kiôn]. _That which any one sees, does that Thing see; but he sees a Post, does the Post therefore see?_ The Ambiguity lies again in [Greek: touto], as we shew'd before. But these Sentences may be render'd into _Latin_ well enough; but that which follows cannot possibly by any Means be render'd, [Greek: Ara ho sy phês einai, touto sy phês einai; phês de lithon einai sy ara phês lithos einai]. Which they thus render, _putas quod tu dicis esse, hoc tu dicis esse: dicis autem lapidem esse, tu ergo lapis dicis esse._ Pray tell me what Sense can be made of these Words? For the Ambiguity lies partly in the Idiom of the _Greek_ Phrase, which is in the major and minor. Although in the major there is another Ambiguity in the two Words [Greek: o] and [Greek: touto], which if they be taken in the nominative Case, the Sense will be, _That which thou sayest thou art, that thou art._ But if in the accusative Case the Sense will be, _Whatsoever thou sayst is, that thou sayst is;_ and to this Sense he subjoins [Greek: lithon phês einai], but to the former Sense he subjoins [Greek: sy ara phês lithos einai]. _Catullus_ once attempted to imitate the Propriety of the _Greek_ Tongue: _Phaselus iste, quem videtis, hospites, Ait fuisse navium celerrimus. My Guests, that Gally which you see The most swift of the Navy is, says he._ For so was this Verse in the old Edition. Those who write Commentaries on these Places being ignorant of this, must of Necessity err many Ways. Neither indeed can that which immediately follows be perspicuous in the _Latin_. [Greek: Kai ara eoti sigônta legein; ditton gar esti to sigonta legein, to te ton legonta sigan, kai to ta legomena.] That they have render'd thus; _Et putas, est tacentem dicere? Duplex enim est, tacentem dicere; et hunc dicere tacentem, et quæ dicuntur._ Are not these Words more obscure than the Books of the _Sibyls_? _Hi._ I am not satisfy'd with the _Greek_. _Le._ I'll interpret it as well as I can. _Is it possible for a Man to speak while he is silent?_ This Interrogation has a two-Fold Sense, the one of which is false and absurd, and the other may be true; for it cannot possibly be that he who speaks, should not speak what he does speak; that is that he should be silent while he is speaking; but it is possible, that he who speaks may be silent of him who speaks. Although this Example falls into another Form that he adds a little after. And again, I admire, that a little after, in that kind of Ambiguity that arises from more Words conjoin'd, the _Greeks_ have chang'd the Word _Seculum_ into the Letters, [Greek: epistasthai ta grammata], seeing that the _Latin_ Copies have it, _scire seculum_. For here arises a double Sense, either _that the Age itself might know something_, or _that somebody might know the Age_. But this is an easier Translation of it into [Greek: aiôna] or [Greek: kosmon], than into [Greek: grammata]. For it is absurd to say that Letters know any Thing; but it is no absurdity to say, _something is known to our Age_, or _that any one knows his Age_. And a little after, where he propounds an Ambiguity in the Accent, the Translator does not stick to put _Virgil's_ Words instead of _Homer's_, when there was the same Necessity in that Example, _quicquid dicis esse, hoc est_, _What thou sayst is, it is_. _Aristotle_ out of _Homer_ says, [Greek: ou kataputhetai ombrô], if [Greek: ou] should be aspirated and circumflected, it sounds in _Latin_ thus; _Cujus computrescit pluviâ_; _by whose Rain it putrifies_; but if [Greek: ou] be acuted and exile, it sounds, _Non computrescit pluviâ; it does not putrify with Rain_; and this indeed is taken out of the _Iliad_ [Greek: ps]. Another is, [Greek: didomen de oi euchos aresthai]: the Accent being placed upon the last Syllable but one, signifies, _grant to him_; but plac'd upon the first Syllable [Greek: didomen], signifies, _we grant_. But the Poet did not think _Jupiter_ said, _we grant to him_; but commands the Dream itself to grant him, to whom it is sent to obtain his Desire. For [Greek: didomen], is used for [Greek: didonai]. For these two of _Homer_, these two are added out of our Poets; as that out of the Odes of _Horace_. _Me tuo longas pereunte noctes, Lydia, dormis._ For if the Accent be on _me_ being short, and _tu_ be pronounc'd short, it is one Word _metuo_; that is, _timeo, I am afraid_: Although this Ambiguity lies not in the Accent only, but also arises from the Composition. They have brought another Example out of _Virgil_: _Heu quia nam tanti cinxerunt aethera nymbi!_ Although here also the Ambiguity lies in the Composition. _Hi._ _Leonard_, These Things are indeed Niceties, worthy to be known; but in the mean Time, I'm afraid our Entertainment should seem rather a Sophistical one, than a Poetical one: At another Time, if you please, we'll hunt Niceties and Criticisms for a whole Day together. _Le._ That is as much as to say, we'll hunt for Wood in a Grove, or seek for Water in the Sea. _Hi._ Where is my Mouse? _Mou._ Here he is. _Hi._ Bid _Margaret_ bring up the Sweet-Meats. _Mus._ I go, Sir. _Hi._ What! do you come again empty-handed? _Mus._ She says, she never thought of any Sweet-Meats, and that you have sat long enough already. _Hi._ I am afraid, if we should philosophize any longer, she'll come and overthrow the Table, as _Xantippe_ did to _Socrates_; therefore it is better for us to take our Sweet-Meats in the Garden; and there we may walk and talk freely; and let every one gather what Fruit he likes best off of the Trees. _Guests._ We like your Motion very well. _Hi._ There is a little Spring sweeter than any Wine. _Ca._ How comes it about, that your Garden is neater than your Hall? _Hi._ Because I spend most of my Time here. If you like any Thing that is here, don't spare whatever you find. And now if you think you have walk'd enough, what if we should sit down together under this Teil Tree, and rouze up our Muses. _Pa._ Come on then, let us do so. _Hi._ The Garden itself will afford us a Theme. _Pa._ If you lead the Way, we will follow you. _Hi._ Well, I'll do so. He acts very preposterously, who has a Garden neatly trimm'd up, and furnish'd with various Delicacies, and at the same Time, has a Mind adorn'd with no Sciences nor Virtues. _Le._ We shall believe the Muses themselves are amongst us, if thou shalt give us the same Sentence in Verse. _Hi._ That's a great Deal more easy to me to turn Prose into Verse, than it is to turn Silver into Gold. _Le._ Let us have it then: _Hi. Cui renidet hortus undiquaque flosculis, Animumque nullis expolitum dotibus Squalere patitur, is facit praepostere. Whose Garden is all grac'd with Flowers sweet, His Soul mean While being impolite, Is far from doing what is meet._ Here's Verses for you, without the _Muses_ or _Apollo_; but it will be very entertaining, if every one of you will render this Sentence into several different Kinds of Verse. _Le._ What shall be his Prize that gets the Victory? _Hi._ This Basket full, either of Apples, or Plumbs, or Cherries, or Medlars, or Pears, or of any Thing else he likes better. _Le._ Who should be the Umpire of the Trial of Skill? _Hi._ Who shall but _Crato_? And therefore he shall be excused from versifying, that he may attend the more diligently. _Cr._ I'm afraid you'll have such a Kind of Judge, as the Cuckoo and Nightingal once had, when they vy'd one with the other, who should sing best. _Hi._ I like him if the rest do. _Gu._ We like our Umpire. Begin, _Leonard_. _Le. Cui tot deliciis renidet hortus, Herbis, fioribus, arborumque foetu, Et multo et vario, nec excolendum Curat pectus et artibus probatis, Et virtutibus, is mihi videtur Lævo judicio, parumque recto. Who that his Garden shine doth mind With Herbs and Flowers, and Fruits of various kind; And in mean While, his Mind neglected lies Of Art and Virtue void, he is not wise._ I have said. _Hi. Carinus_ bites his Nails, we look for something elaborate from him. _Ca._ I'm out of the poetical Vein. _Cura cui est, ut niteat hortus flosculis ac foetibus, Negligenti excolere pectus disciplinis optimis; Hic labore, mihi ut videtur, ringitur praepostero. Whose only Care is that his Gardens be With Flow'rs and Fruits furnish'd most pleasantly, But disregards his Mind with Art to grace, Bestows his Pains and Care much like an Ass._ _Hi._ You han't bit your Nails for nothing. _Eu._ Well, since my Turn is next, that I may do something, _Qui studet ut variis niteat cultissimus hortus Deliciis, patiens animum squalere, nec ullis Artibus expoliens, huic est praepostera cura. Who cares to have his Garden neat and rare. And doth of Ornaments his Mind leave bare, Acts but with a preposterous Care._ We have no Need to spur _Sbrulius_ on, for he is so fluent at Verses, that he oftentimes tumbles 'em out, before he is aware. Sb. _Cui vernat hortus cultus et elegans, Nee pectus uttis artibus excolit; Praepostera is mra laborat. Sit ratio tibiprima mentis. Who to make his Garden spring, much Care imparts, And yet neglects his Mind to grace with Arts, Acts wrong: Look chiefly to improve thy Parts._ Pa. _Quisquis accurat, variis ut hortus Floribus vernet, neque pectus idem Artibus sanctis colit, hunc habet praepostera cura. Who to his Soul prefers a Flower or worse, May well be said to set the Cart before the Horse._ _Hi._ Now let us try to which of us the Garden will afford the most Sentences. _Le._ How can so rich a Garden but do that? even this Rose-Bed will furnish me with what to say. _As the Beauty of a Rose is fading, so is Youth soon gone; you make haste to gather your Rose before it withers; you ought more earnestly to endeavour that your Youth pass not away without Fruit._ _Hi._ It is a Theme very fit for a Verse. _Ca. As among Trees, every one hath its Fruits: So among Men, every one hath his natural Gift._ _Eu. As the Earth, if it be till'd, brings forth various Things for human Use; and being neglected, is covered with Thorns and Briars: So the Genius of a Man, if it be accomplish'd with honest Studies, yields a great many Virtues; but if it be neglected, is over-run with various Vices._ _Sb. A Garden ought to be drest every Year, that it may look handsome: The Mind being once furnish'd with good Learning, does always flourish and spring forth._ _Pa. As the Pleasantness of Gardens does not draw the Mind off from honest Studies, but rather invites it to them: So we ought to seek for such Recreations and Divertisements, as are not contrary to Learning._ _Hi._ O brave! I see a whole Swarm of Sentences. Now for Verse: But before we go upon that, I am of the Mind, it will be no improper nor unprofitable Exercise to turn the first Sentence into _Greek_ Verse, as often as we have turn'd it into _Latin._ And let _Leonard_ begin, that has been an old Acquaintance of the _Greek_ Poets. _Le._ I'll begin if you bid me. _Hi._ I both bid and command you. _Le._ [Greek: Hôi kêpos estin anthesin gelôn kalois, Ho de nous mal auchmôn tois kalois muthêmasin, Ouk esti kompsos outos, ouk orthôs phronei, Peri pleionos poiôn ta phaul, ê kreittona]. He never entered Wisdom's Doors Who delights himself in simple Flowers, And his foul Soul neglects to cleanse. This Man knows not what Virtue means. I have begun, let him follow me that will. _Hi. Carinus._ _Ca._ Nay, _Hilary._ _Le._ But I see here's _Margaret_ coming upon us of a sudden, she's bringing I know not what Dainties. _Hi._ If she does so, my Fury'll do more than I thought she'd do. What hast brought us? _Ma._ Mustard-Seed, to season your Sweet-Meats. An't you ashamed to stand prating here till I can't tell what Time of Night? And yet you Poets are always reflecting against Womens Talkativeness. _Cr. Margaret_ says very right, it is high Time for every one to go Home to Bed: At another Time we'll spend a Day in this commendable Kind of Contest. _Hi._ But who do you give the Prize to? _Cr._ For this Time I allot it to myself. For no Body has overcome but I. _Hi._ How did you overcome that did not contend at all. _Cr._ Ye have contended, but not try'd it out. I have overcome _Marget_, and that is more than any of you could do. _Ca. Hilary._ He demands what's his Right, let him have the Basket. _An ENQUIRY CONCERNING FAITH._ The ARGUMENT. _This Inquisition concerning Faith, comprehends the Sum and Substance of the Catholick Profession. He here introduces a_ Lutheran _that by the Means of the orthodox Faith, he may bring either Party to a Reconciliation. Concerning Excommunication, and the Popes Thunderbolts. And also that we ought to associate ourselves with the Impious and Heretical, if we have any Hope of amending them._ Symbolum _is a military Word. A most divine and elegant Paraphrase upon the Apostles Creed._ AULUS, BARBATUS. _AU._ _Salute freely_, is a Lesson for Children. But I can't tell whether I should bid you be well or no. _Ba._ In Truth I had rather any one would make me well, than bid me be so. _Aulus_, Why do you say that? _Au._ Why? Because if you have a Mind to know, you smell of Brimstone, or _Jupiter's_ Thunderbolt. _Ba._ There are mischievous Deities, and there are harmless Thunderbolts, that differ much in their Original from those that are ominous. For I fancy you mean something about Excommunication. _Au._ You're right. _Ba._ I have indeed heard dreadful Thunders, but I never yet felt the Blow of the Thunderbolt. _Au._ How so? _Ba._ Because I have never the worse Stomach, nor my Sleep the less sound. _Au._ But a Distemper is commonly so much the more dangerous, the less it is felt. But these brute Thunderbolts as you call 'em, strike the Mountains and the Seas. _Ba._ They do strike 'em indeed, but with Strokes that have no effect upon 'em. There is a Sort of Lightning that proceeds from a Glass or a Vessel of Brass. _Au._ Why, and that affrights too. _Ba._ It may be so, but then none but Children are frighted at it. None but God has Thunderbolts that strike the Soul. _Au._ But suppose God is in his Vicar. _Ba._ I wish he were. _Au._ A great many Folks admire, that you are not become blacker than a Coal before now. _Ba._ Suppose I were so, then the Salvation of a lost Person were so much the more to be desired, if Men followed the Doctrine of the Gospel. _Au._ It is to be wished indeed, but not to be spoken of. _Ba._ Why so? _Au._ That he that is smitten with the Thunderbolt may be ashamed and repent. _Ba._ If God had done so by us, we had been all lost. _Au._ Why so? _Ba._ Because when we were Enemies to God, and Worshippers of Idols, fighting under Satan's Banner, that is to say, every Way most accursed; then in an especial Manner he spake to us by his Son, and by his treating with us restored us to Life when we were dead. _Au._ That thou say'st is indeed very true. _Ba._ In Truth it would go very hard with all sick Persons, if the Physician should avoid speaking to 'em, whensoever any poor Wretch was seized with a grievous Distemper, for then he has most Occasion for the Assistance of a Doctor. _Au._ But I am afraid that you will sooner infect me with your Distemper than I shall cure you of it. It sometimes falls out that he that visits a sick Man is forced to be a Fighter instead of a Physician. _Ba._ Indeed it sometimes happens so in bodily Distempers: But in the Diseases of the Mind you have an Antidote ready against every Contagion. _Au._ What's that? _Ba._ A strong Resolution not to be removed from the Opinion that has been fixed in you. But besides, what Need you fear to become a Fighter, where the Business is managed by Words? _Au._ There is something in what you say, if there be any Hope of doing any good. _Ba._ While there is Life there is Hope, and according to St. _Paul, Charity can't despair, because it hopes all Things_. _Au._ You observe very well, and upon this Hope I may venture to discourse with you a little; and if you'll permit me, I'll be a Physician to you. _Ba._ Do, with all my Heart. _Au._ Inquisitive Persons are commonly hated, but yet Physicians are allowed to be inquisitive after every particular Thing. _Ba._ Ask me any Thing that you have a Mind to ask me. _Au._ I'll try. But you must promise me you'll answer me sincerely. _Ba._ I'll promise you. But let me know what you'll ask me about. _Au._ Concerning the Apostles Creed. _Ba._ _Symbolum_ is indeed a military Word. I will be content to be look'd upon an Enemy to Christ, if I shall deceive you in this Matter. _Au._ Dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty, who made the Heaven and Earth. _Ba._ Yes, and whatsoever is contained in the Heaven and Earth, and the Angels also which are Spirits. _Au._ When thou say'st God, what dost thou understand by it? _Ba._ I understand a certain eternal Mind, which neither had Beginning nor shall have any End, than which nothing can be either greater, wiser, or better. _Au._ Thou believest indeed like a good Christian. _Ba._ Who by his omnipotent Beck made all Things visible or invisible; who by his wonderful Wisdom orders and governs all Things; who by his Goodness feeds and maintains all Things, and freely restored Mankind when fallen. _Au._ These are indeed three especial Attributes in God: But what Benefit dost thou receive by the Knowledge of them? _Ba._ When I conceive him to be Omnipotent, I submit myself wholly to him, in comparison of whose Majesty, the Excellency of Men and Angels is nothing. Moreover, I firmly believe whatsoever the holy Scriptures teach to have been done, and also that what he hath promised shall be done by him, seeing he can by his single Beck do whatsoever he pleases, how impossible soever it may seem to Man. And upon that Account distrusting my own Strength, I depend wholly upon him who can do all Things. When I consider his Wisdom, I attribute nothing at all to my own, but I believe all Things are done by him righteously and justly, although they may seem to human Sense absurd or unjust. When I animadvert on his Goodness, I see nothing in myself that I do not owe to free Grace, and I think there is no Sin so great, but he is willing to forgive to a true Penitent, nor nothing but what he will freely bestow on him that asks in Faith. _Au._ Dost thou think that it is sufficient for thee to believe him to be so? _Ba._ By no Means. But with a sincere Affection I put my whole Trust and Confidence in him alone, detesting Satan, and all Idolatry, and magic Arts. I worship him alone, preferring nothing before him, nor equalling nothing with him, neither Angel, nor my Parents, nor Children, nor Wife, nor Prince, nor Riches, nor Honours, nor Pleasures; being ready to lay down my Life if he call for it, being assur'd that he can't possibly perish who commits himself wholly to him. _Au._ What then, dost thou worship nothing, fear nothing, love nothing but God alone? _Ba._ If I reverence any Thing, fear any Thing, or love any Thing, it is for his Sake I love it, fear it, and reverence it; referring all Things to his Glory, always giving Thanks to him for whatsoever happens, whether prosperous or adverse, Life or Death. _Au._ In Truth your Confession is very sound so far. What do you think concerning the second Person? _Ba._ Examine me. _Au._ Dost thou believe Jesus was God and Man? _Ba._ Yes. _Au._ Could it be that the same should be both immortal God and mortal Man? _Ba._ That was an easy Thing for him to do who can do what he will: And by Reason of his divine Nature, which is common to him with the Father, whatsoever Greatness, Wisdom, and Goodness I attribute to the Father, I attribute the same to the Son; and whatsoever I owe to the Father, I owe also to the Son, but only that it hath seemed good to the Father to bestow all Things on us through him. _Au._ Why then do the holy Scriptures more frequently call the Son Lord than God? _Ba._ Because God is a Name of Authority, that is to say, of Sovereignty, which in an especial Manner belongeth to the Father, who is absolutely the Original of all Things, and the Fountain even of the Godhead itself. Lord is the Name of a Redeemer and Deliverer, altho' the Father also redeemed us by his Son, and the Son is God, but of God the Father. But the Father only is from none, and obtains the first Place among the divine Persons. _Au._ Then dost thou put thy Confidence in _Jesus_? _Ba._ Why not? _Au._ But the Prophet calls him accursed who puts his Trust in Man. _Ba._ But to this Man alone hath all the Power in Heaven and Earth been given, that at his Name every Knee should bow, both of Things in Heaven, Things in Earth, and Things under the Earth. Although I would not put my chief Confidence and Hope in him, unless he were God. _Au._ Why do you call him Son? _Ba._ Lest any should imagine him to be a Creature. _Au._ Why an only Son? _Ba._ To distinguish the natural Son from the Sons by Adoption, the Honour of which Sirname he imputes to us also, that we may look for no other besides this Son. _Au._ Why would he have him to be made Man, who was God? _Ba._ That being Man, he might reconcile Men to God. _Au._ Dost thou believe he was conceived without the Help of Man, by the Operation of the holy Ghost, and born of the undented Virgin _Mary_, taking a mortal Body of her Substance? _Ba._ Yes. _Au._ Why would he be so born? _Ba._ Because it so became God to be born, because it became him to be born in this Manner, who was to cleanse away the Filthiness of our Conception and Birth. God would have him to be born the Son of Man, that we being regenerated into him, might be made the Sons of God. _Au._ Dost thou believe that he lived here upon Earth, did Miracles, taught those Things that are recorded to us in the Gospel? _Ba._ Ay, more certainly than I believe you to be a Man. _Au._ I am not an _Apuleius_ turned inside out, that you should suspect that an Ass lies hid under the Form of a Man. But do you believe this very Person to be the very Messiah whom the Types of the Law shadowed out, which the Oracle of the Prophets promised, which the _Jews_ looked for so many Ages? _Ba._ I believe nothing more firmly. _Au._ Dost thou believe his Doctrine and Life are sufficient to lead us to perfect Piety? _Ba._ Yes, perfectly sufficient. _Au._ Dost thou believe that the same was really apprehended by the _Jews_, bound, buffeted, beaten, spit upon, mock'd, scourg'd under _Pontius Pilate_; and lastly, nailed to the Cross, and there died? _Ba._ Yes, I do. _Au._ Do you believe him to have been free from all the Law of Sin whatsoever? _Ba._ Why should I not? A Lamb without Spot. _Au._ Dost thou believe he suffered all these Things of his own accord? _Ba._ Not only willingly, but even with great Desire; but according to the Will of his Father. _Au._ Why would the Father have his only Son, being innocent and most dear to him, suffer all these Things? _Ba._ That by this Sacrifice he might reconcile to himself us who were guilty, we putting our Confidence and Hope in his Name. _Au._ Why did God suffer all Mankind thus to fall? And if he did suffer them, was there no other Way to be found out to repair our Fall? _Ba._ Not human Reason, but Faith hath persuaded me of this, that it could be done no Way better nor more beneficially for our Salvation. _Au._ Why did this Kind of Death please him best? _Ba._ Because in the Esteem of the World it was the most disgraceful, and because the Torment of it was cruel and lingring, because it was meet for him who would invite all the Nations of the World unto Salvation, with his Members stretch'd out into every Coast of the World, and call off Men, who were glew'd unto earthly Cares, to heavenly Things; and, last of all, that he might represent to us the brazen Serpent that _Moses_ set up upon a Pole, that whoever should fix his Eyes upon it, should be heal'd of the Wounds of the Serpent, and fulfil the Prophet's Promise, who prophesied, _say ye among the Nations, God hath reign'd from a Tree_. _Au._ Why would he be buried also, and that so curiously, anointed with Myrrh and Ointments, inclosed in a new Tomb, cut out of a hard and natural Rock, the Door being seal'd, and also publick Watchmen set there? _Ba._ That it might be the more manifest that he was really dead. _Au._ Why did he not rise again presently? _Ba._ For the very same Reason; for if his Death had been doubtful, his Resurrection had been doubtful too; but he would have that to be as certain as possible could be. _Au._ Do you believe his Soul descended into Hell? _Ba._ St. _Cyprian_ affirms that this Clause was not formerly inserted either in the _Roman_ Creed or in the Creed of the Eastern Churches, neither is it recorded in _Tertullian_, a very ancient Writer. And yet notwithstanding, I do firmly believe it, both because it agrees with the Prophecy of the Psalm, _Thou wilt not leave my Soul in Hell_; and again, _O Lord, thou hast brought my Soul out of Hell_. And also because the Apostle _Peter_, in the third Chapter of his first Epistle (of the Author whereof no Man ever doubted,) writes after this Manner, _Being put to Death in the Flesh, but quickned by the Spirit, in which also he came and preach'd by his Spirit to those that were in Prison_. But though I believe he descended into Hell, yet I believe he did not suffer anything there. For he descended not to be tormented there, but that he might destroy the Kingdom of Satan. _Au._ Well, I hear nothing yet that is impious; but he died that he might restore us to Life again, who were dead in Sin. But why did he rise to live again? _Ba._ For three Reasons especially. _Au._ Which are they? _Ba._ First of all, to give us an assur'd Hope of our Resurrection. Secondly, that we might know that he in whom we have plac'd the Safety of our Resurrection is immortal, and shall never die. Lastly, that we being dead in Sins by Repentance, and buried together with him by Baptism, should by his Grace be raised up again to Newness of Life. _Au._ Do you believe that the very same Body that died upon the Cross, which reviv'd in the Grave, which was seen and handled by the Disciples, ascended into Heaven? _Ba._ Yes, I do. _Au._ Why would he leave the Earth? _Ba._ That we might all love him spiritually, and that no Man should appropriate Christ to himself upon the Earth, but that we should equally lift up our Minds to Heaven, knowing that our Head is there. For if Men now so much please themselves in the Colour and Shape of the Garment, and do boast so much of the Blood or the Foreskin of Christ, and the Milk of the Virgin _Mary_, what do you think would have been, had he abode on the Earth, eating and discoursing? What Dissentions would those Peculiarities of his Body have occasioned? _Au._ Dost thou believe that he, being made immortal, sitteth at the right Hand of the Father? _Ba._ Why not? As being Lord of all Things, and Partaker of all his Father's Kingdom. He promised his Disciples that this should be, and he presented this Sight to his Martyr _Stephen_. _Au._ Why did he shew it? _Ba._ That we may not be discouraged in any Thing, well knowing what a powerful Defender and Lord we have in Heaven. _Au._ Do you believe that he will come again in the same Body, to judge the Quick and the Dead? _Ba._ As certain as I am, that those Things the Prophets have foretold concerning Christ hitherto have come to pass, so certain I am, that whatsoever he would have us look for for the future, shall come to pass. We have seen his first Coming, according to the Predictions of the Prophets, wherein he came in a low Condition, to instruct and save. We shall also see his second, when he will come on high, in the Glory of his Father, before whose Judgment-Seat all Men of every Nation, and of every Condition, whether Kings or Peasants, _Greeks_, or _Scythians_, shall be compell'd to appear; and not only those, whom at that Coming he shall find alive, but also all those who have died from the Beginning of the World, even until that Time, shall suddenly be raised, and behold his Judge every one in his own Body. The blessed Angels also shall be there as faithful Servants, and the Devils to be judg'd. Then he will, from on high, pronounce that unvoidable Sentence, which will cast the Devil, together with those that have taken his Part, into eternal Punishments, that they may not after that, be able to do Mischief to any. He will translate the Godly, being freed from all Trouble, to a Fellowship with him in his heavenly Kingdom: Although he would have the Day of his coming unknown to all. _Au._ I hear no Error yet. Let us now come to the third Person. _Ba._ As you please. _Au._ Dost thou believe in the holy Spirit? _Ba._ I do believe that it is true God, together with the Father, and the Son. I believe they that wrote us the Books of the Old and New Testament were inspired by it, without whose Help no Man attains Salvation. _Au._ Why is he called a Spirit? _Ba._ Because as our Bodies do live by Breath, so our Minds are quicken'd by the secret Inspiration of the holy Spirit. _Au._ Is it not lawful to call the Father a Spirit? _Ba._ Why not? _Au._ Are not then the Persons confounded? _Ba._ No, not at all, for the Father is called a Spirit, because he is without a Body, which Thing is common to all the Persons, according to their divine Nature: But the third Person is called a Spirit, because he breathes out, and transfuses himself insensibly into our Minds, even as the Air breathes from the Land, or the Rivers. _Au._ Why is the Name of Son given to the second Person? _Ba._ Because of his perfect Likeness of Nature and Will. _Au._ Is the Son more like the Father, than the holy Spirit? _Ba._ Not according to the divine Nature, except that he resembles the Property of the Father the more in this, that the Spirit proceeds from him also. _Au._ What hinders then, but that the holy Spirit may be called Son. _Ba._ Because, as St. _Hilary_ saith, I no where read that he was begotten, neither do I read of his Father: I read of the _Spirit, and that proceeding from_. _Au._ Why is the Father alone called God in the Creed? _Ba._ Because he, as I have said before, is simply the Author of all Things that are, and the Fountain of the whole Deity. _Au._ Speak in plainer Terms. _Ba._ Because nothing can be nam'd which hath not its Original from the Father: For indeed, in this very Thing, that the Son and Holy Spirit is God, they acknowledge that they received it from the Father; therefore the chief Authority, that is to say, the Cause of Beginning, is in the Father alone, because he alone is of none: But yet, in the Creed it may be so taken, that the Name of God may not be proper to one Person, but used in general; because, it is distinguish'd afterwards by the Terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, into one God; which Word of Nature comprehends the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that is to say, the three Persons. _Au._ Dost thou believe in the holy Church? _Ba._ No. _Au._ What say you? Do you not believe in it? _Ba._ I believe the holy Church, which is the Body of Christ; that is to say, a certain Congregation of all Men throughout the whole World, who agree in the Faith of the Gospel, who worship one God the Father, who put their whole Confidence in his Son, who are guided by the same Spirit of him; from whose Fellowship he is cut off that commits a deadly Sin. _Au._ But why do you stick to say, I believe in the holy Church? _Ba._ Because St. _Cyprian_ hath taught me, that we must believe in God alone, in whom we absolutely put all our Confidence. Whereas the Church, properly so called, although it consists of none but good Men; yet it consists of Men, who of good may become bad, who may be deceived, and deceive others. _Au._ What do you think of the Communion of Saints? _Ba._ This Article is not all meddled with by _Cyprian_, when he particularly shews what in such and such Churches is more or less used; for he thus connects them: _For there followeth after this Saying, the holy Church, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of this Flesh_. And some are of Opinion, that this Part does not differ from the former; but that it explains and enforces what before was called _the holy Church_; so that the Church is nothing else but the Profession of one God, one Gospel, one Faith, one Hope, the Participation of the same Spirit, and the same Sacraments: To be short, such a Kind of Communion of all good Things, among all godly Men, who have been from the Beginning of the World, even to the End of it, as the Fellowship of the Members of the Body is between one another. So that the good Deeds of one may help another, until they become lively Members of the Body. But out of this Society, even one's own good Works do not further his Salvation, unless he be reconcil'd to the holy Congregation; and therefore it follows, _the Forgiveness of Sins_; because out of the Church there is no Remission of Sins, although a Man should pine himself away with Repentance, and exercise Works of Charity. In the Church, I say, not of Hereticks, but the holy Church; that is to say, gathered by the Spirit of Christ, there is Forgiveness of Sins by Baptism, and after Baptism, by Repentence, and the Keys given to the Church. _Au._ Thus far they are the Words of a Man that is sound in the Faith. Do you believe that there will be a Resurrection of the Flesh? _Ba._ I should believe all the rest to no Purpose, if I did not believe this, which is the Head of all. _Au._ What dost thou mean, when thou say'st the Flesh? _Ba._ An human Body animated with a human Soul. _Au._ Shall every Soul receive its own Body which is left dead? _Ba._ The very same from whence it went out; and therefore, in Cyprian's Creed, it is added, _of this Flesh_. _Au._ How can it be, that the Body which hath been now so often chang'd out of one Thing into another, can rise again the same? _Ba._ He who could create whatsoever he would out of nothing, is it a hard Matter for him to restore to its former Nature that which hath been changed in its Form? I don't dispute anxiously which Way it can be done; it is sufficient to me, that he who hath promised that it shall be so, is so true, that he can't lye, and so powerful, as to be able to bring to pass with a Beck, whatsoever he pleases. _Au._ What need will there be of a Body then? _Ba._ That the whole Man may be glorified with Christ, who, in this World, was wholly afflicted with Christ. _Au._ What means that which he adds, _and Life everlasting_. _Ba._ Lest any one should think that we shall so rise again, as the Frogs revive at the Beginning of the Spring, to die again. For here is a twofold Death of the Body, that is common to all Men, both good and bad; and of the Soul, and the Death of the Soul is Sin. But after the Resurrection, the godly shall have everlasting Life, both of Body and Soul: Nor shall the Body be then any more obnoxious to Diseases, old Age, Hunger, Thirst, Pain, Weariness, Death, or any Inconveniences; but being made spiritual, it shall be mov'd as the Spirit will have it: Nor shall the Soul be any more sollicited with any Vices or Sorrows; but shall for ever enjoy the chiefest Good, which is God himself. On the contrary, eternal Death, both of Body and Soul, shall seize upon the wicked. For their Body shall be made immortal, in order to the enduring everlasting Torments, and their Soul to be continually vexed with the Gripes of their Sins, without any Hope of Pardon. _Au._ Dost thou believe these things from thy very Heart, and unfeignedly? _Ba._ I believe them so certainly, I tell you, that I am not so sure that you talk with me. _Au._ When I was at _Rome_, I did not find all so sound in the Faith. _Ba._ Nay; but if you examine thoroughly, you'll find a great many others in other Places too, which do not so firmly believe these Things. _Au._ Well then, since you agree with us in so many and weighty Points, what hinders that you are not wholly on our Side? _Ba._ I have a mind to hear that of you: For I think that I am orthodox. Although I will not warrant for my Life yet I endeavour all I can, that it may be suitable to my Profession. _Au._ How comes it about then, that there is so great a War between you and the orthodox? _Ba._ Do you enquire into that: But hark you, Doctor, if you are not displeased with this Introduction, take a small Dinner with me; and after Dinner, you may enquire of every Thing at Leisure: I'll give you both Arms to feel my Pulse, and you shall see both Stool and Urine; and after that, if you please, you shall anatomize this whole Breast of mine, that you may make a better Judgment of me. _Au._ But I make it a matter of Scruple to eat with thee. _Ba._ But Physicians use to eat with their Patients, that they might better observe what they love, and wherein they are irregular. _Au._ But I am afraid, lest I should seem to favour Hereticks. _Ba._ Nay, but there is nothing more religious than to favour Hereticks. _Au._ How so? _Ba._ Did not _Paul_ wish to be made an _Anathema_ for the _Jews_, which were worse than Hereticks? Does not he favour him that endeavours that a Man may be made a good Man of a bad Man? _Au._ Yes, he does so. _Ba._ Well then, do you favour me thus, and you need not fear any Thing. _Au._ I never heard a sick Man answer more to the Purpose. Well, come on, let me dine with you then. _Ba._ You shall be entertain'd in a physical Way, as it becomes a Doctor by his Patient, and we will so refresh our Bodies with Food, that the Mind shall be never the less fit for Disputation. _Au._ Well, let it be so, with good Birds (_i.e._ with good Success). _Ba._ Nay, it shall be with bad Fishes, unless you chance to have forgot that it is _Friday._ _Au._ Indeed, that is beside our Creed. _The OLD MENS DIALOGUE._ The ARGUMENT. [Greek: Terontologia], or, [Greek: Ochêma], _shews, as tho' it were in a Looking-glass, what Things are to be avoided in Life, and what Things contribute to the Tranquillity of Life. Old Men that were formerly intimate Acquaintance when Boys, after forty Years Absence, one from the other, happen to meet together, going to_ Antwerp. _There seems to be a very great Inequality in them that are equal in Age._ Polygamus, _he is very old:_ Glycion _has no Signs of Age upon him, tho' he is sixty six; he proposes a Method of keeping off old Age. I. He consults what Sort of Life to chuse, and follows the Advice of a prudent old Man, who persuades him to marry a Wife that was his equal, making his Choice with Judgment, before he falls in Love. 2. He has born a publick Office, but not obnoxious to troublesome Affairs. 3. He transacts Affairs that do not expose him to Envy. 4. He bridles his Tongue. 5. He is not violently fond of, nor averse to any Thing. He moderates his Affections, suffers no Sorrow to abide with him all Night. 6. He abstains from Vices, and renews his Patience every Day. 7. He is not anxiously thoughtful of Death. 8. He does not travel into foreign Countries. 9. He has nothing to do with Doctors. 10. He diverts himself with Study, but does not study himself lean. On the other hand_, Polygamus _has brought old Age upon him, by the Intemperance of his Youth, by Drinking, Whoring, Gaming, running in Debt; he had had eight Wives._ Pampirus, _he becomes a Merchant; but consumes all he has by Gaming; then he becomes a Canon; then a Carthusian; after that a Benedictine; and last of all, turns Soldier._ Eusebius, _he gets a good Benefice and preaches._ EUSEBIUS, PAMPIRUS, POLYGAMUS, GLYCION, HUGUITIO, _and_ HARRY _the Coachman._ _Euseb._ What new Faces do I see here? If I am not mistaken, or do not see clear, I see three old Companions sitting by me; _Pampirus, Polygamus_ and _Glycion;_ they are certainly the very same. _Pa._ What do you mean, with your Glass Eyes, you Wizard? Pray come nearer a little, _Eusebius._ _Po._ Hail, heartily, my wish'd for _Eusebius._ _Gl._ All Health to you, the best of Men. _Eu._ One Blessing upon you all, my dear Friends. What God, or providential Chance has brought us together now, for I believe none of us have seen the one the other, for this forty Years. Why _Mercury_ with his Mace could not have more luckily brought us together into a Circle; but what are you doing here? _Pa._ We are sitting. _Eu._ I see that, but what do you sit for? _Po._ We wait for the _Antwerp_ Waggon. _Eu._ What, are you going to the Fair? _Po._ We are so: but rather Spectators, than Traders, tho' one has one Business, and another has another. _Eu._ Well, and I am going thither myself too. But what hinders you, that you are not going? _Po._ We han't agreed with the Waggoner yet. _Eu._ These Waggoners are a surly Sort of People; but are you willing that we put a Trick upon them? _Po._ With all my Heart, if it can be done fairly. _Eu._ We will pretend that we will go thither a-Foot together. _Po._ They'll sooner believe that a Crab-Fish will fly, than that such heavy Fellows as we will take such a Journey on Foot. _Eu._ Will you follow good wholsome Advice? _Po._ Yes, by all Means. _Gl._ They are a drinking, and the longer they are fuddling, the more Danger we shall be in of being overturned in the Dirt. _Po._ You must come very early, if you find a Waggoner sober. _Gl._ Let us hire the Waggon for us four by ourselves, that we may get to _Antwerp_ the sooner: It is but a little more Charge, not worth minding, and this Expence will be made up by many Advantages; we shall have the more Room, and shall pass the Journey the more pleasantly in mutual Conversation. _Po._ _Glycion_ is much in the Right on't. For good Company in a Journey does the Office of a Coach; and according to the _Greek_ Proverb, we shall have more Liberty of talking, not about a Waggon, but in a Waggon. _Gl._ Well, I have made a Bargain, let us get up. Now I've a Mind to be merry, seeing I have had the good Luck to see my old dear Comrades after so long a Separation. _Eu._ And methinks I seem to grow young again. _Po._ How many Years do you reckon it, since we liv'd together at Paris? _Eu._ I believe it is not less than two and forty Years. _Pa._ Then we seem'd to be all pretty much of an Age. _Eu._ We were so, pretty near the Matter, for if there was any Difference it was very little. _Pa._ But what a great Difference does there seem to be now? For Glycion has nothing of an old Man about him, and Polygamus looks old enough to be his Grandfather. _Eu._ Why truly he does so, but what should be the Reason of it? _Pa._ What? Why either the one loiter'd and stopp'd in his Course, or the other run faster (out-run him). _Eu._ Oh! Time does not stay, how much soever Men may loiter. _Po._ Come, tell us, _Glycion_ truly, how many Years do you number? _Gl._ More than Ducats in my Pocket. _Po._ Well, but how many? _Gl._ Threescore and six. _Eu._ Why thou'lt never be old. _Po._ But by what Arts hast thou kept off old Age? for you have no grey Hairs, nor Wrinkles in your Skin, your Eyes are lively, your Teeth are white and even, you have a fresh Colour, and a plump Body. _Gl._ I'll tell you my Art, upon Condition you'll tell us your Art of coming to be old so soon. _Po._ I agree to the Condition. I'll do it. Then tell us whither you went when you left _Paris._ _Gl._ I went directly into my own Country, and by that Time I had been there almost a Year, I began to bethink myself what Course of Life to chuse; which I thought to be a Matter of great Importance, as to my future Happiness; so I cast my Thoughts about what had been successful to some, and what had been unsuccessful to others. _Po._ I admire you had so much Prudence, when you were as great a Maggot as any in the World, when you were at _Paris._ _Gl._ Then my Age did permit a little Wildness. But, my good Friend, you must know, I did not do all this neither of my own mother-Wit. _Po._ Indeed I stood in Admiration. _Gl._ Before I engaged in any Thing, I applied to a certain Citizen, a Man of Gravity, of the greatest Prudence by long Experience, and of a general Reputation with his fellow Citizens, and in my Opinion, the most happy Man in the World. _Eu._ You did wisely. _Gl._ By this Man's Advice I married a Wife. _Po._ Had she a very good Portion? _Gl._ An indifferent good one, and according to the Proverb, in a competent Proportion to my own: For I had just enough to do my Business, and this Matter succeeded to my Mind. _Po._ What was your Age then? _Gl._ Almost two and twenty. _Po._ O happy Man! _Gl._ But don't mistake the Matter; all this was not owing to Fortune neither. _Po._ Why so? _Gl._ I'll tell you; some love before they chuse, I made my Choice with Judgment first, and then lov'd afterwards, and nevertheless I married this Woman more for the Sake of Posterity than for any carnal Satisfaction. With her I liv'd a very pleasant Life, but not above eight Years. _Po._ Did she leave you no children? _Gl._ Nay, I have four alive, two Sons and two Daughters. _Po._ Do you live as a private Person, or in some publick Office? _Gl._ I have a publick Employ. I might have happen'd to have got into a higher Post, but I chose this because it was creditable enough to secure me from Contempt, and is free from troublesome Attendance: And it is such, that no Body need object against me that I live only for myself, I have also something to spare now and then to assist a Friend. With this I live content, and it is the very Height of my Ambition. And then I have taken Care so to execute my Office, to give more Reputation to my Office than I receiv'd from it; this I account to be more honourable, than to borrow my Dignity from the Splendor of my Office. _Eu._ Without all Controversy. _Gl._ By this Means I am advanced in Years, and the Affections of my fellow Citizens. _Eu._ But that's one of the difficultest Things in the World, when with very good Reason there is this old Saying: _He that has no Enemies has no Friends_; and _Envy is always an Attendant on Felicity_. _Gl._ Envy always is a Concomitant of a pompous Felicity, but a Mediocrity is safe; this was always my Study, not to make any Advantage to myself from the Disadvantages of other People. I embraced as much as I could, that which the _Greeks_ call Freedom from the Encumbrance of Business. I intermeddled with no one's Affairs; but especially I kept myself clear from those that could not be meddled with without gaining the ill Will of a great many. If a Friend wants my Assistance, I so serve him, as thereby not to procure any Enemies to myself. In Case of any Misunderstanding between me and any Persons, I endeavour to soften it by clearing myself of Suspicion, or to set all right again by good Offices, or to let it die without taking Notice of it: I always avoid Contention, but if it shall happen, I had rather lose my Money than my Friend. Upon the Whole, I act the Part of _Mitio_ in the Comedy, I affront no Man, I carry a chearful Countenance to all, I salute and resalute affably, I find no Fault with what any Man purposes to do or does, I don't prefer myself before other People; I let every one enjoy his Opinion; what I would have kept as a Secret, I tell to no Body: I never am curious to pry in the Privacies of other Men. If I happen to come to the Knowledge of any thing, I never blab it. As for absent Persons, I either say nothing at all of them, or speak of them with Kindness and Civility. Great Part of the Quarrels that arise between Men, come from the Intemperance of the Tongue. I never breed Quarrels or heighten them; but where-ever Opportunity happens, I either moderate them, or put an End to them. By these Methods I have hitherto kept clear of Envy, and have maintained the Affections of my fellow Citizens. _Pa._ Did you not find a single Life irksome to you? _Gl._ Nothing happened to me in the whole Course of my Life, more afflicting than the Death of my Wife, and I could have passionately wish'd that we might have grown old together, and might have enjoy'd the Comfort of the common Blessing, our Children: But since Providence saw it meet it should be otherwise, I judged that it was best for us both, and therefore did not think there was Cause for me to afflict myself with Grief, that would do no good, neither to me nor the Deceased. _Pol._ What, had you never an Inclination to marry again, especially the first having been so happy a Match to you? _Gl._ I had an Inclination so to do, but as I married for the Sake of Children, so for the Sake of my Children I did not marry again. _Pol._ But 'tis a miserable Case to lie alone whole Nights without a Bedfellow. _Gl._ Nothing is hard to a willing Mind. And then do but consider the Benefits of a single Life: There are some People in the World, who will be for making the worst of every Thing; such a one _Crates_ seemed to be, or an Epigram under his Name, summing up the Evils of human Life. And the Resolution is this, that it is best not to be born at all. Now _Metrodorus_ pleases me a great Deal better, who picks out what is good in it; this makes Life the pleasanter. And I brought my Mind to that Temper of Indifference never to have a violent Aversion or Fondness for any thing. And by this it comes to pass, that if any good Fortune happens to me, I am not vainly transported, or grow insolent; or if any thing falls out cross, I am not much perplex'd. _Pa._ Truly if you can do this, you are a greater Philosopher than _Thales_ himself. _Gl._ If any Uneasiness in my Mind rises, (as mortal Life produces many of them) I cast it immediately out of my Thoughts, whether it be from the Sense of an Affront offered, or any Thing done unhandsomly. _Pol._ Well, but there are some Provocations that would raise the Anger of the most patient Man alive: As the Saucinesses of Servants frequently are. _Gl._ I suffer nothing to stay long enough in my Mind to make an Impression. If I can cure them I do it, if not, I reason thus with myself, What good will it do me to torment myself about that which will be never the better for it? In short, I let Reason do that for me at first, which after a little While, Time itself would do. And this I be sure take Care of, not to suffer any Vexation, be it never so great, to go to Bed with me. _Eu._ No wonder that you don't grow old, who are of that Temper. _Gl._ Well, and that I mayn't conceal any thing from Friends, in an especial Manner I have kept this Guard upon myself, never to commit any Thing that might be a Reflection either on my own Honour or that of my Children. For there is nothing more troublesome than a guilty Conscience. And if I have committed a Fault I don't go to Bed before I have reconcil'd myself to God. To be at Peace with God is the Fountain of true Tranquillity of Mind, or, as the Greeks call it, [Greek: euthymia]. For they who live thus, Men can do them no great Injury. _Eu._ Have you never any anxious Thoughts upon the Apprehension of Death? _Gl._ No more than I have for the Day of my Birth. I know I must die, and to live in the Fear of it may possibly shorten my Life, but to be sure it would never make it longer. So that I care for nothing else but to live piously and comfortably, and leave the rest to Providence; and a Man can't live happily that does not live piously. _Pa._ But I should grow old with the Tiresomeness of living so long in the same Place, tho' it were _Rome_ itself. _Gl._ The changing of Place has indeed something of Pleasure in it; but then, as for long Travels, tho' perhaps they may add to a Man's Experience, yet they are liable to a great many Dangers. I seem to myself to travel over the whole World in a Map, and can see more in Histories than if I had rambled through Sea and Land for twenty Years together, as _Ulysses_ did. I have a little Country-House about two Miles out of Town, and there sometimes, of a Citizen I become a Country-Man, and having recreated my self there, I return again to the City a new Comer, and salute and am welcom'd as if I had return'd from the new-found Islands. _Eu._ Don't you assist Nature with a little Physick? _Gl._ I never was let Blood, or took Pills nor Potions in my Life yet. If I feel any Disorder coming upon me, I drive it away with spare Diet or the Country Air. _Eu._ Don't you study sometimes? _Gl._ I do. In that is the greatest Pleasure of my Life: But I make a Diversion of it, but not a Toil. I study either for Pleasure or Profit of my Life, but not for Ostentation. After Meat I have a Collation of learned Stories, or else somebody to read to me, and I never sit to my Books above an Hour at a Time: Then I get up and take my Violin, and walk about in my Chamber, and sing to it, or else ruminate upon what I have read; or if I have a good Companion with me, I relate it, and after a While I return to my Book again. _Eu._ But tell me now, upon the Word of an honest Man; Do you feel none of the Infirmities of old Age, which are said to be a great many? _Gl._ My Sleep is not so sound, nor my Memory so good, unless I fix any thing deeply in it. Well, I have now acquitted myself of my Promise. I have laid open to you those magical Arts by which I have kept myself young, and now let _Polygamus_ tell us fairly, how he brought old Age upon him to that Degree. _Po._ Indeed, I will hide nothing from such trusty Companions. _Eu._ You will tell it to those that will not make a Discourse of it. _Po._ You very well know I indulg'd my Appetite when I was at _Paris_. _Eu._ We remember it very well. But we thought that you had left your rakish Manners and your youthful Way of Living at _Paris_. _Po._ Of the many Mistresses I had there I took one Home, who was big with Child. _Eu._ What, into your Father's House? _Po._ Directly thither; but I pretended she was a Friend's Wife, who was to come to her in a little Time. _Gl._ Did your Father believe it? _Po._ He smelt the Matter out in three or four Days time, and then there was a cruel Scolding. However, in this Interim I did not leave off Feasting, Gaming, and other extravagant Diversions. And in short, my Father continuing to rate me, saying he would have no such cackling Gossips under his Roof, and ever and anon threatning to discard me, I march'd off, remov'd to another Place with my Pullet, and she brought me some young Chickens. _Pa._ Where had you Money all the While? _Po._ My Mother gave me some by Stealth, and I ran over Head and Ears in Debt. _Eu._ Had any Body so little Wit as to lend you? _Po._ There are some Persons who will trust no Body more readily than they will a Spendthrift. _Pa._ And what next? _Po._ At last my Father was going about to disinherit me in good earnest. Some Friends interpos'd, and made up the Breach upon this Condition; that I should renounce the _French_ Woman, and marry one of our own Country. _Eu._ Was she your Wife? _Po._ There had past some Words between us in the future Tense, but there had been carnal Copulation in the present Tense. _Eu._ How could you leave her then? _Po._ It came to be known afterwards, that my _French_ Woman had a _French_ Husband that she had elop'd from some Time before. _Eu._ But it seems you have a Wife now. _Po._ None besides this which is my Eighth. _Eu._ The Eighth! Why then you were named _Polygamus_ by Way of Prophecy. Perhaps they all died without Children. _Po._ Nay, there was not one of them but left me a Litter which I have at Home. _Eu._ I had rather have so many Hens at Home, which would lay me Eggs. An't you weary of wifeing? _Po._ I am so weary of it, that if this Eighth should die to Day, I would marry the Ninth to-Morrow. Nay, it vexes me that I must not have two or three, when one Cock has so many Hens. _Eu._ Indeed I don't wonder, Mr. Cock, that you are no fatter, and that you have brought old Age upon you to that Degree; for nothing brings on old Age faster, than excessive and hard Drinking, keeping late Hours, and Whoring, extravagant Love of Women, and immoderate Venery. But who maintains your Family all this While? _Po._ A small Estate came to me by the Death of my Father, and I work hard with my Hands. _Eu._ Have you given over Study then? _Po._ Altogether. I have brought a Noble to Nine Pence, and of a Master of seven Arts, I am become a Workman of but one Art. _Eu._ Poor Man! So many Times you were obliged to be a Mourner, and so many Times a Widower. _Po._ I never liv'd single above ten Days, and the new Wife always put an End to the Mourning for the old one. So, you have in Truth the Epitome of my Life; and I wish _Pampirus_ would give us a Narration of his Life; he bears his Age well enough: For if I am not mistaken, he is two or three Years older than I. _Pa._ Truly I'll tell it ye, if you are at Leisure to hear such a Romance. _Eu._ Nay, it will be a Pleasure to hear it. _Pa._ When I went Home my antient Father began to press me earnestly to enter into some Course of Life, that might make some Addition to what I had; and after long Consultation Merchandizing was what I took to. _Po._ I admire this Way of Life pleas'd you more than any other. _Pa._ I was naturally greedy to know new Things, to see various Countries and Cities, to learn Languages, and the Customs and Manners of Men, and Merchandize seem'd the most apposite to that Purpose. From which a general Knowledge of Things proceeds. _Po._ But a wretched one, which is often purchas'd with Inconveniencies. _Pa._ It is so, therefore my Father gave me a good large Stock, that I might begin to trade upon a good Foundation: And at the same Time I courted a Wife with a good Fortune, but handsome enough to have gone off without a Portion. _Eu._ Did you succeed? _Pa._ No. Before I came Home, I lost all, Stock and Block. _Eu._ Perhaps by Shipwreck. _Pa._ By Shipwreck indeed. For we run upon more dangerous Rocks than those of _Scilly_. _Eu._ In what Sea did you happen to run upon that Rock? Or what is the Name of it? _Pa._ I can't tell what Sea 'tis in, but it is a Rock that is infamous for the destruction of a great many, they call it _Alea_ [Dice, the Devil's Bones] in _Latin_, how you call it in _Greek_ I can't tell. _Eu._ O Fool! _Pa._ Nay, my Father was a greater Fool, to trust a young Fop with such a Sum of Money. _Gl._ And what did you do next? _Pa._ Why nothing at all, but I began to think of hanging myself. _Gl._ Was your Father so implacable then? For such a Loss might be made up again; and an Allowance is always to be made to one that makes the first Essay, and much more it ought to be to one that tries all Things. _Pa._ Tho' what you say may be true, I lost my Wife in the mean Time. For as soon as the Maid's Parents came to understand what they must expect, they would have no more to do with me, and I was over Head and Ears in Love. _Gl._ I pity thee. But what did you propose to yourself after that? _Pa._ To do as it is usual in desperate Cases. My Father had cast me off, my Fortune was consum'd, my Wife was lost, I was every where call'd a Sot, a Spendthrift, a Rake and what not? Then I began to deliberate seriously with myself, whether I should hang myself or no, or whether I should throw myself into a Monastery. _Eu._ You were cruelly put to it! I know which you would chuse, the easier Way of Dying. _Pa._ Nay, sick was I of Life itself; I pitched upon that which seem'd to me the most painful. _Gl._ And yet many People cast themselves into Monasteries, that they may live more comfortably there. _Pa._ Having got together a little Money to bear my Charges, I stole out of my own Country. _Gl._ Whither did you go at last? _Pa._ Into _Ireland_, there I became a Canon Regular of that Order that wear Linnen outwards and Woollen next their Skin. _Gl._ Did you spend your Winter in _Ireland_? _Pa._ No. But by that Time I had been among them two Months I sail'd into _Scotland_. _Gl._ What displeas'd you among them? _Pa._ Nothing, but that I thought their Discipline was not severe enough for the Deserts of one, that once Hanging was too good for. _Gl._ Well, what past in _Scotland_? _Pa._ Then I chang'd my Linnen Habit for a Leathern one, among the Carthusians. _Eu._ These are the Men, that in Strictness of Profession, are dead to the World. _Pa._ It seem'd so to me, when I heard them Singing. _Gl._ What? Do dead Men sing? But how many Months did you spend among the _Scots_? _Pa._ Almost six. _Gl._ A wonderful Constancy. _Eu._ What offended you there? _Pa._ Because it seem'd to me to be a lazy, delicate Sort of Life; and then I found there, many that were not of a very sound Brain, by Reason of their Solitude. I had but a little Brain myself, and I was afraid I should lose it all. _Po._ Whither did you take your next Flight? _Pa._ Into France: There I found some cloath'd all in Black, of the Order of St. Benedict, who intimate by the Colour of their Cloaths, that they are Mourners in this World; and among these, there were some, that for their upper Garment wore Hair-Cloth like a Net. _Gl._ A grievous Mortification of the Flesh. _Pa._ Here I stay'd eleven Months. _Eu._ What was the Matter that you did not stay there for good and all? _Pa._ Because I found there were more Ceremonies than true Piety: And besides, I heard that there were some who were much holier, which _Bernard_ had enjoin'd a more severe Discipline, the black Habit being chang'd into a white one; with these I liv'd ten Months. _Eu._ What disgusted you here? _Pa._ I did not much dislike any Thing, for I found them very good Company; but the _Greek_ Proverb ran in my Mind; [Greek: Dei tas chelônas ê phagein ê mê phagein.] _One must either eat Snails, or eat nothing at all._ Therefore I came to a Resolution, either not to be a Monk, or to be a Monk to Perfection. I had heard there were some of the Order of St. _Bridget_, that were really heavenly Men, I betook myself to these. _Eu._ How many Months did you stay there? _Pa._ Two Days; but not quite that. _Gl._ Did that Kind of Life please you no better than so? _Pa._ They take no Body in, but those that will profess themselves presently; but I was not yet come to that Pitch of Madness, so easily to put my Neck into such a Halter, that I could never get off again. And as often as I heard the Nuns singing, the Thoughts of my Mistress that I had lost, tormented my Mind. _Gl._ Well, and what after this? _Pa._ My Mind was inflamed with the Love of Holiness; nor yet had I met with any Thing that could satisfy it. At last, as I was walking up and down, I fell in among some Cross-Bearers. This Badge pleas'd me at first Sight; but the Variety hindered me from chusing which to take to. Some carried a white Cross, some a red Cross, some a green Cross, some a party-colour'd Cross, some a single Cross, some a double one, some a quadruple, and others some of one Form, and some of another; and I, that I might leave nothing untry'd, I carried some of every Sort. But I found in reality, that there was a great Difference between carrying a Cross on a Gown or a Coat, and carrying it in the Heart. At last, being tired with Enquiry, it came into my Mind, that to arrive at universal Holiness all at once, I would take a Journey to the holy Land, and so would return Home with a Back-Load of Sanctimony. _Po._ And did you go thither? _Pa._ Yes. _Po._ Where did you get Money to bear your Charges? _Pa._ I wonder it never came into your Head, to ask that before now, and not to have enquir'd after that a great While ago: But you know the old Proverb; _a Man of Art will live any where_. _Gl._ What Art do you carry with you? _Pa._ Palmistry. _Gl._ Where did you learn it? _Pa._ What signifies that? _Gl._ Who was your Master? _Pa._ My Belly, the great Master of all Arts: I foretold Things past, present, and to come. _Gl._ And did you know any Thing of the Matter? _Pa._ Nothing at all; but I made bold Guesses, and run no Risque neither, having got my Money first. _Po._ And was so ridiculous an Art sufficient to maintain you? _Pa._ It was, and two Servants too: There is every where such a Number of foolish young Fellows and Wenches. However, when I came to _Jerusalem_, I put myself into the Train of a rich Nobleman, who being seventy Years of Age, said he could never have died in Peace, unless he had first visited _Jerusalem_. _Eu._ What, did he leave a Wife at Home? _Pa._ Yes, and six Children. _Eu._ O impious, pious, old Man! Well, and did you come back holy from thence? _Pa._ Shall I tell you the Truth? Somewhat worse than I went. _Eu._ So, as I hear, your Religion was grown cool. _Pa._ Nay, it grew more hot: So I went back into _Italy_, and enter'd into the Army. _Eu._ What, then, did you look for Religion in the Camp. Than which, what is there that can be more impious? _Pa._ It was a holy War. _Eu._ Perhaps against the _Turks_. _Pa._ Nay, more holy than that, as they indeed gave out at that Time. _Eu._ What was that? _Pa._ Pope _Julius_ the Second made War upon the _French_. And the Experience of many Things that it gives a Man, made me fancy a Soldier's Life. _Eu._ Of many Things indeed; but wicked ones. _Pa._ So I found afterwards: But however, I liv'd harder here, than I did in the Monasteries. _Eu._ And what did you do after this? _Pa._ Now my Mind began to be wavering, whether I should return to my Business of a Merchant, that I had laid aside, or press forward in Pursuit of Religion that fled before me. In the mean Time it came into my Mind, that I might follow both together. _Eu._ What, be a Merchant and a Monk both together? _Pa._ Why not? There is nothing more religious than the Orders of Mendicants, and there is nothing more like to Trading. They fly over Sea and Land, they see many Things, they hear many Things, they enter into the Houses of common People, Noblemen, and Kings. _Eu._ Ay, but they don't Trade for Gain. _Pa._ Very often, with better Success than we do. _Eu._ Which of these Orders did you make Choice of? _Pa._ I try'd them all. _Eu._ Did none of them please you? _Pa._ I lik'd them all well enough, if I might but presently have gone to Trading; but I consider'd in my Mind, I must labour a long Time in the Choir, before I could be qualified for the Trust: So now I began to think how I might get to be made an Abbot: But, I thought with myself, _Kissing goes by Favour_, and it will be a tedious Pursuit: So having spent eight Years after this Manner, hearing of my Father's Death, I return'd Home, and by my Mother's Advice, I marry'd, and betook myself to my old Business of Traffick. _Gl._ Prithee tell me, when you chang'd your Habit so often, and were transform'd, as it were, into another Sort of Creature, how could you behave yourself with a proper Decorum? _Pa._ Why not, as well as those who in the same Comedy act several Parts? _Eu._ Tell us now in good earnest, you that have try'd every Sort of Life, which you most approve of. _Pa. So many Men, so many Minds:_ I like none better than this which I follow. _Eu._ But there are a great many Inconveniences attend it. _Pa._ There are so. But seeing there is no State of Life, that is entirely free from Incommodities, this being my Lot, I make the best on't: But now here is _Eusebius_ still, I hope he will not think much to acquaint his Friends with some Scenes of his Course of Life. _Eu._ Nay, with the whole Play of it, if you please to hear it, for it does not consist of many Acts. _Gl._ It will be a very great Favour. _Eu._ When I return'd to my own Country, I took a Year to deliberate what Way of Living to chuse, and examin'd myself, to what Employment my Inclination led me, and I was fit for. In the mean Time a Prebendary was offered me, as they call it; it was a good fat Benefice, and I accepted it. _Gl._ That Sort of Life has no good Reputation among People. _Eu._ As human Affairs go, I thought it was a Thing well worth the accepting. Do you look upon it a small Happiness to have so many Advantages to fall into a Man's Mouth, as tho' they dropt out of Heaven; handsome Houses well furnish'd, a large Revenue, an honourable Society, and a Church at Hand, to serve God in, when you have a Mind to it? _Pa._ I was scandaliz'd at the Luxury of the Persons, and the Infamy of their Concubines; and because a great many of that Sort of Men have an Aversion to Learning. _Eu._ I don't mind what others do, but what I ought to do myself, and associate myself with the better Sort, if I cannot make them that are bad better. _Po._ And is that the State of Life you have always liv'd in? _Eu._ Always, except four Years, that I liv'd at _Padua_. _Po._ What did you do there? _Eu._ These Years I divided in this Manner; I studied Physick a Year and a half, and the rest of the Time Divinity. _Po._ Why so? _Eu._ That I might the better manage both Soul and Body, and also sometimes be helpful by Way of Advice to my Friends. I preached sometimes according to my Talent. And under these Circumstances, I have led a very quiet Life, being content with a single Benefice, not being ambitiously desirous of any more, and should have refus'd it, if it had been offered me. _Pa._ I wish we could learn how the rest of our old Companions have liv'd, that were our Familiars. _Eu._ I can tell you somewhat of some of them: but I see we are not far from the City; therefore, if you are willing, we will all take up the same Inn, and there we will talk over the rest at Leisure. _Hugh. [a Waggoner.]_ You blinking Fellow, where did you take up this Rubbish? _Harry the Waggoner._ Where are you carrying that Harlottry, you Pimp? _Hugh._ You ought to throw these frigid old Fellows somewhere into a Bed of Nettles, to make them grow warm again. _Harry._ Do you see that you shoot that Herd of yours somewhere into a Pond to cool them, to lay their Concupiscence, for they are too hot. _Hugh._ I am not us'd to overturn my Passengers. _Harry._ No? but I saw you a little While ago, overturn Half a Dozen Carthusians into the Mire, so that tho' they went in white, they came out black, and you stood grinning at it, as if you had done some noble Exploit. _Hugh._ I was in the Right of it, they were all asleep, and added a dead Weight to my Waggon. _Harry._ But these old Gentlemen, by talking merrily all the Way, have made my Waggon go light. I never had a better Fare. _Hugh._ But you don't use to like such Passengers. _Harry._ But these are good old Men. _Hugh._ How do you know that? _Harry._ Because they made me drink humming Ale, three Times by the Way. _Hugh._ Ha, ha, ha, then they are good to you. _The FRANCISCANS,_ [Greek: Ptôchoplousioi], _or RICH BEGGARS._ The ARGUMENT. _The_ Franciscans, _or rich poor Persons, are not admitted into the House of a Country Parson_. Pandocheus _jokes wittily upon them. The Habit is not to be accounted odious. The Life and Death of the_ Franciscans. _Of the foolish Pomp of Habits. The Habits of Monks are not in themselves evil. What Sort of Persons Monks ought to be. The Use of Garments is for Necessity and Decency. What Decency is. Whence arose the Variety of Habits and Garments among the Monks. That there was in old Time no Superstition in the Habits._ CONRADE, _a Bernardine_ Monk, _a_ Parson, _an_ Inn-Keeper _and his_ Wife. _Con._ Hospitality becomes a Pastor. _Pars._ But I am a Pastor of Sheep; I don't love Wolves. _Con._ But perhaps you don't hate a Wench so much. But what Harm have we done you, that you have such an Aversion to us, that you won't so much as admit us under your Roof? We won't put you to the Charge of a Supper. _Pars._ I'll tell ye, because if you spy but a Hen or a Chicken in a Body's House, I should be sure to hear of it to-Morrow in the Pulpit. This is the Gratitude you shew for your being entertain'd. _Con._ We are not all such Blabs. _Pars._ Well, be what you will, I'd scarce put Confidence in St. _Peter_ himself, if he came to me in such a Habit. _Con._ If that be your Resolution, at least tell us where is an Inn. _Pars._ There's a publick Inn here in the Town. _Con._ What Sign has it? _Pars._ Upon a Board that hangs up, you will see a Dog thrusting his Head into a Porridge-Pot: This is acted to the Life in the Kitchen; and a Wolf sits at the Bar. _Con._ That's an unlucky Sign. _Pars._ You may e'en make your best on't. _Ber._ What Sort of a Pastor is this? we might be starv'd for him. _Con._ If he feeds his Sheep no better than he feeds us, they must needs be very lean. _Ber._ In a difficult Case, we had Need of good Counsel: What shall we do? _Con._ We must set a good Face on't. _Ber._ There's little to be gotten by Modesty, in a Case of Necessity. _Con._ Very right, St. _Francis_ will be with us. _Ber._ Let's try our Fortune then. _Con._ We won't stay for our Host's Answer at the Door, but we'll rush directly into the Stove, and we won't easily be gotten out again. _Ber._ O impudent Trick! _Con._ This is better than to lie abroad all Night, and be frozen to Death. In the mean Time, put Bashfulness in your Wallet to Day, and take it out again to-Morrow. _Ber._ Indeed, the Matter requires it. _Innk._ What Sort of Animals do I see here? _Con._ We are the Servants of God, and the Sons of St. _Francis_, good Man. _Innk._ I don't know what Delight God may take in such Servants; but I would not have many of them in my House. _Con._ Why so? _Innk._ Because at Eating and Drinking, you are more than Men; but you have neither Hands nor Feet to work. Ha, ha! You Sons of St. _Francis_, you use to tell us in the Pulpit, that he was a pure Batchelor, and has he got so many Sons? _Con._ We are the Children of the Spirit, not of the Flesh. _Innk._ A very unhappy Father, for your Mind is the worst Part about you; but your Bodies are too lusty, and as to that Part of you, it is better with you, than 'tis for our Interest, who have Wives and Daughters. _Con._ Perhaps you suspect that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we are strict Observers of them. _Innk._ And I'll observe you too, that you don't do me any Damage, for I have a mortal Aversion for this Sort of Cattle. _Con._ Why so, I pray? _Innk._ Because you carry Teeth in your Head, but no Money in your Pocket; and such Sort of Guests are very unwelcome to me. _Con._ But we take Pains for you. _Innk._ Shall I shew you after what Manner you labour for me? _Con._ Do, shew us. _Innk._ Look upon that Picture there, just by you, on your left Hand, there you'll see a Wolf a Preaching, and behind him a Goose, thrusting her Head out of a Cowl: There again, you'll see a Wolf absolving one at Confession; but a Piece of a Sheep, hid under his Gown, hangs out. There you see an Ape in a _Franciscan_'s Habit, he holds forth a Cross in one Hand, and has the other Hand in the sick Man's Purse. _Con._ We don't deny, but sometimes Wolves, Foxes and Apes are cloathed with this Habit, nay we confess oftentimes that Swine, Dogs, Horses, Lions and Basilisks are conceal'd under it; but then the same Garment covers many honest Men. As a Garment makes no Body better, so it makes no Body worse. It is unjust to judge of a Man by his Cloaths; for if so, the Garment that you wear sometimes were to be accounted detestable, because it covers many Thieves, Murderers, Conjurers, and Whoremasters. _Innk._ Well, I'll dispense with your Habit, if you'll but pay your Reckonings. _Con._ We'll pray to God for you. _Innk._ And I'll pray to God for you, and there's one for t'other. _Con._ But there are some Persons that you must not take Money of. _Innk._ How comes it that you make a Conscience of touching any? _Con._ Because it does not consist with our Profession. _Innk._ Nor does it stand with my Profession to entertain Guests for nothing. _Con._ But we are tied up by a Rule not to touch Money. _Innk._ And my Rule commands me quite the contrary. _Con._ What Rule is yours? _Innk._ Read those Verses: _Guests at this Table, when you've eat while you're able. Rise not hence before you have first paid your Score._ _Con._ We'll be no Charge to you. _Innk._ But they that are no Charge to me are no Profit to me neither. _Con._ If you do us any good Office here, God will make it up to you sufficiently. _Innk._ But these Words won't keep my Family. _Con._ We'll hide ourselves in some Corner of the Stove, and won't be troublesome to any Body. _Innk._ My Stove won't hold such Company. _Con._ What, will you thrust us out of Doors then? It may be we shall be devour'd by Wolves to Night. _Innk._ Neither Wolves nor Dogs will prey upon their own Kind. _Con._ If you do so you will be more cruel than the _Turks_. Let us be what we will, we are Men. _Innk._ I have lost my Hearing. _Con._ You indulge your Corps, and lye naked in a warm Bed behind the Stove, and will you thrust us out of Doors to be perish'd with Cold, if the Wolves should not devour us? _Innk._ _Adam_ liv'd so in Paradise. _Con._ He did so, but then he was innocent. _Innk._ And so am I innocent. _Con._ Perhaps so, leaving out the first Syllable. But take Care, if you thrust us out of your Paradise, lest God should not receive you into his. _Innk._ Good Words, I beseech you. _Wife._ Prithee, my Dear, make some Amends for all your ill Deeds by this small Kindness, let them stay in our House to Night: They are good Men, and thou'lt thrive the better for't. _Innk._ Here's a Reconciler for you. I'm afraid you're agreed upon the Matter. I don't very well like to hear this good Character from a Woman; Good Men! _Wife._ Phoo, there's nothing in it. But think with your self how often you have offended God with Dicing, Drinking, Brawling, Quarrelling. At least, make an Atonement for your Sins by this Act of Charity, and don't thrust these Men out of Doors, whom you would wish to be with you when you are upon your Death-Bed. You oftentimes harbour Rattles and Buffoons, and will you thrust these Men out of Doors? _Innk._ What does this Petticoat-Preacher do here? Get you in, and mind your Kitchen. _Wife._ Well, so I will. _Bert._ The Man softens methinks, and he is taking his Shirt, I hope all will be well by and by. _Con._ And the Servants are laying the Cloth. It is happy for us that no Guests come, for we should have been sent packing if they had. _Bert._ It fell out very happily that we brought a Flaggon of Wine from the last Town we were at, and a roasted Leg of Lamb, or else, for what I see here, he would not have given us so much as a Mouthful of Hay. _Con._ Now the Servants are set down, let's take Part of the Table with them, but so that we don't incommode any Body. _Innk._ I believe I may put it to your Score, that I have not a Guest to Day, nor any besides my own Family, and you good-for-nothing ones. _Con._ Well, put it up to our Score, if it has not happened to you often. _Innk._ Oftner than I would have it so. _Con._ Well, don't be uneasy; Christ lives, and he'll never forsake his Servants. _Innk._ I have heard you are call'd evangelical Men; but the Gospel forbids carrying about Satchels and Bread, but I see you have great Sleeves for Wallets, and you don't only carry Bread, but Wine too, and Flesh also, and that of the best Sort. _Con._ Take Part with us, if you please. _Innk._ My Wine is Hog-Wash to it. _Con._ Eat some of the Flesh, there is more than enough for us. _Innk._ O happy Beggars! My Wife has dress'd nothing to Day, but Coleworts and a little rusty Bacon. _Con._ If you please, let us join our Stocks; it is all one to us what we eat. _Innk._ Then why don't you carry with you Coleworts and dead Wine? _Con._ Because the People where we din'd to Day would needs force this upon us. _Innk._ Did your Dinner cost you nothing? _Con._ No. Nay they thanked us, and when we came away gave us these Things to carry along with us. _Innk._ From whence did you come? _Con._ From _Basil._ _Innk._ Whoo! what so far? _Con._ Yes. _Innk._ What Sort of Fellows are you that ramble about thus without Horses, Money, Servants, Arms, or Provisions? _Con._ You see in us some Footsteps of the evangelical Life. _Innk._ It seems to me to be the Life of Vagabonds, that stroll about with Budgets. _Con._ Such Vagabonds the Apostles were, and such was the Lord Jesus himself. _Innk._ Can you tell Fortunes? _Con._ Nothing less. _Innk._ How do you live then? _Con._ By him, who hath promised. _Innk._ Who is he? _Con._ He that said, _Take no Care, but all Things shall be added unto you_. _Innk._ He did so promise, but it was _to them that seek the Kingdom of God._ _Con._ That we do with all our Might. _Innk._ The Apostles were famous for Miracles; they heal'd the Sick, so that it is no Wonder how they liv'd every where, but you can do no such Thing. _Con._ We could, if we were like the Apostles, and if the Matter requir'd a Miracle. But Miracles were only given for a Time for the Conviction of the Unbelieving; there is no Need of any Thing now, but a religious Life. And it is oftentimes a greater Happiness to be sick than to be well, and more happy to die than to live. _Innk._ What do you do then? _Con._ That we can; every Man according to the Talent that God has given him. We comfort, we exhort, we warn, we reprove, and when Opportunity offers, sometimes we preach, if we any where find Pastors that are dumb: And if we find no Opportunity of doing Good, we take Care to do no Body any Harm, either by our Manners or our Words. _Innk._ I wish you would preach for us to Morrow, for it is a Holy-Day. _Con._ For what Saint? _Innk._ To St. _Antony._ _Con._ He was indeed a good Man. But how came he to have a Holiday? _Innk._ I'll tell you. This Town abounds with Swine-Herds, by Reason of a large Wood hard by that produces Plenty of Acorns; and the People have an Opinion that St. _Antony_ takes Charge of the Hogs, and therefore they worship him, for Fear he should grow angry, if they neglect him. _Con._ I wish they would worship him as they ought to do. _Innk._ How's that? _Con._ Whosoever imitates the Saints in their Lives, worships as he ought to do. _Innk._ To-morrow the Town will ring again with Drinking and Dancing, Playing, Scolding and Boxing. _Con._ After this Manner the Heathens once worshipped their _Bacchus_. But I wonder, if this is their Way of worshipping, that St. _Antony_ is not enraged at this Sort of Men that are more stupid than Hogs themselves. What Sort of a Pastor have you? A dumb one, or a wicked one? _Innk._ What he is to other People, I don't know: But he's a very good one to me, for he drinks all Day at my House, and no Body brings more Customers or better, to my great Advantage. And I wonder he is not here now. _Con._ We have found by Experience he is not a very good one for our Turn. _Innk._ What! Did you go to him then? _Con._ We intreated him to let us lodge with him, but he chas'd us away from the Door, as if we had been Wolves, and sent us hither. _Innk._ Ha, ha. Now I understand the Matter, he would not come because he knew you were to be here. _Con._ Is he a dumb one? _Innk._ A dumb one! There's no Body is more noisy in the Stove, and he makes the Church ring again. But I never heard him preach. But no Need of more Words. As far as I understand, he has made you sensible that he is none of the dumb Ones. _Con._ Is he a learned Divine? _Innk._ He says he is a very great Scholar; but what he knows is what he has learned in private Confession, and therefore it is not lawful to let others know what he knows. What need many Words? I'll tell you in short; _like People, like Priest_; and _the Dish_, as we say, _wears its own Cover_. _Con._ It may be he will not give a Man Liberty to preach in his Place. _Innk._ Yes, I'll undertake he will, but upon this Condition, that you don't have any Flirts at him, as it is a common Practice for you to do. _Con._ They have us'd themselves to an ill Custom that do so. If a Pastor offends in any Thing, I admonish him privately, the rest is the Bishop's Business. _Innk._ Such Birds seldom fly hither. Indeed you seem to be good Men yourselves. But, pray, what's the Meaning of this Variety of Habits? For a great many People take you to be ill Men by your Dress. _Con._ Why so? _Innk._ I can't tell, except it be that they find a great many of you to be so. _Con._ And many again take us to be holy Men, because we wear this Habit. They are both in an Error: But they err less that take us to be good Men by our Habit, than they that take us for base Men. _Innk._ Well, so let it be. But what is the Advantage of so many different Dresses? _Con._ What is your Opinion? _Innk._ Why I see no Advantage at all, except in Processions, or War. For in Processions there are carried about various Representations of Saints, of _Jews_, and Heathens, and we know which is which, by the different Habits. And in War the Variety of Dress is good, that every one may know his own Company, and follow his own Colours, so that there may be no Confusion in the Army. _Con._ You say very well: This is a military Garment, one of us follows one Leader, and another another; but we all fight under one General, Christ. But in a Garment there are three Things to be consider'd. _Innk._ What are they? _Con._ Necessity, Use, and Decency. Why do we eat? _Innk._ That we mayn't be starv'd with Hunger. _Con._ And for the very same Reason we take a Garment that we mayn't be starv'd with Cold. _Innk._ I confess it. _Con._ This Garment of mine is better for that than yours. It covers the Head, Neck, and Shoulders, from whence there is the most Danger. Use requires various Sorts of Garments. A short Coat for a Horseman, a long one for one that sits still, a thin one in Summer, a thick one in Winter. There are some at _Rome_, that change their Cloaths three Times a Day; in the Morning they take a Coat lin'd with Fur, about Noon they take a single one, and towards Night one that is a little thicker; but every one is not furnish'd with this Variety; therefore this Garment of ours is contriv'd so, that this one will serve for various Uses. _Innk._ How is that? _Con._ If the North Wind blow, or the Sun shines hot, we put on our Cowl; if the Heat is troublesome, we let it down behind. If we are to sit still, we let down our Garment about our Heels, if we are to walk, we hold or tuck it up. _Innk._ He was no Fool, whosoever he was, that contriv'd it. _Con._ And it is the chief Thing in living happily, for a Man to accustom himself to be content with a few Things: For if once we begin to indulge ourselves with Delicacies and Sensualities, there will be no End; and there is no one Garment could be invented, that could answer so many Purposes. _Innk._ I allow that. _Con._ Now let us consider the Decency of it: Pray tell me honestly, if you should put on your Wife's Cloaths, would not every one say that you acted indecently? _Innk._ They would say I was mad. _Con._ And what would you say, if she should put on your Cloaths? _Innk._ I should not say much perhaps, but I should cudgel her handsomly. _Con._ But then, how does it signify nothing what Garment any one wears? _Innk._ O yes, in this Case it is very material. _Con._ Nor is that strange; for the Laws of the very Pagans inflict a Punishment on either Man or Woman, that shall wear the Cloaths of a different Sex. _Innk._ And they are in the Right for it. _Con._ But, come on. What if an old Man of fourscore should dress himself like a Boy of fifteen; or if a young Man dress himself like an old Man, would not every one say he ought to be bang'd for it? Or if an old Woman should attire herself like a young Girl, and the contrary? _Innk._ No doubt. _Con._ In like Manner, if a Lay-Man should wear a Priest's Habit, and a Priest a Lay-Man's. _Innk._ They would both act unbecomingly. _Con._ What if a private Man should put on the Habit of a Prince, or an inferior Clergy-Man that of a Bishop? Would he act unhandsomely or no? _Innk._ Certainly he would. _Con._ What if a Citizen should dress himself like a Soldier, with a Feather in his Cap, and other Accoutrements of a hectoring Soldier? _Innk._ He would be laugh'd at. _Con._ What if any _English_ Ensign should carry a white Cross in his Colours, a _Swiss_ a red one, a _French_ Man a black one? _Innk._ He would act impudently. _Con._ Why then do you wonder so much at our Habit? _Innk._ I know the Difference between a private Man and a Prince, between a Man and a Woman; but I don't understand the Difference between a Monk and no Monk. _Con._ What Difference is there between a poor Man and a rich Man? _Innk._ Fortune. _Con._ And yet it would be unbecoming a poor Man to imitate a rich Man in his Dress. _Innk._ Very true, as rich Men go now a-Days. _Con._ What Difference is there between a Fool and a wise Man? _Innk._ Something more than there is between a rich Man and a poor Man. _Con._ Are not Fools dress'd up in a different Manner from wise Men? _Innk._ I can't tell how well it becomes you, but your Habit does not differ much from theirs, if it had but Ears and Bells. _Con._ These indeed are wanting, and we are the Fools of this World, if we really are what we pretend to be. _Innk._ What you are I don't know; but this I know that there are a great many Fools that wear Ears and Bells, that have more Wit than those that wear Caps lin'd with Furs, Hoods, and other Ensigns of wise Men; therefore it seems a ridiculous Thing to me to make a Shew of Wisdom by the Dress rather than in Fact. I saw a certain Man, more than a Fool, with a Gown hanging down to his Heels, a Cap like our Doctors, and had the Countenance of a grave Divine; he disputed publickly with a Shew of Gravity, and he was as much made on by great Men, as any of their Fools, and was more a Fool than any of them. _Con._ Well, what would you infer from that? That a Prince who laughs at his Jester should change Coats with him? _Innk._ Perhaps _Decorum_ would require it to be so, if your Proposition be true, that the Mind of a Man is represented by his Habit. _Con._ You press this upon me indeed, but I am still of the Opinion, that there is good Reason for giving Fools distinct Habits. _Innk._ What Reason? _Con._ That no Body might hurt them, if they say or do any Thing that's foolish. _Innk._ But on the contrary, I won't say, that their Dress does rather provoke some People to do them Hurt; insomuch, that oftentimes of Fools they become Mad-Men. Nor do I see any Reason, why a Bull that gores a Man, or a Dog, or a Hog that kills a Child, should be punish'd, and a Fool who commits greater Crimes should be suffered to live under the Protection of his Folly. But I ask you, what is the Reason that you are distinguished from others by your Dress? For if every trifling Cause is sufficient to require a different Habit, then a Baker should wear a different Dress from a Fisherman, and a Shoemaker from a Taylor, an Apothecary from a Vintner, a Coachman from a Mariner. And you, if you are Priests, why do you wear a Habit different from other Priests? If you are Laymen, why do you differ from us? _Con._ In antient Times, Monks were only the purer Sort of the Laity, and there was then only the same Difference between a Monk and a Layman, as between a frugal, honest Man, that maintains his Family by his Industry, and a swaggering Highwayman that lives by robbing. Afterwards the Bishop of _Rome_ bestow'd Honours upon us; and we ourselves gave some Reputation to the Habit, which now is neither simply laick, or sacerdotal; but such as it is, some Cardinals and Popes have not been ashamed to wear it. _Innk._ But as to the _Decorum_ of it, whence comes that? _Con._ Sometimes from the Nature of Things themselves, and sometimes from Custom and the Opinions of Men. Would not all Men think it ridiculous for a Man to wear a Bull's Hide, with the Horns on his Head, and the Tail trailing after him on the Ground? _Innk._ That would be ridiculous enough. _Con._ Again, if any one should wear a Garment that should hide his Face, and his Hands, and shew his privy Members? _Innk._ That would be more ridiculous than the other. _Con._ The very Pagan Writers have taken Notice of them that have wore Cloaths so thin, that it were indecent even for Women themselves to wear such. It is more modest to be naked, as we found you in the Stove, than to wear a transparent Garment. _Innk._ I fancy that the whole of this Matter of Apparel depends upon Custom and the Opinion of People. _Con._ Why so? _Innk._ It is not many Days ago, since some Travellers lodg'd at my House, who said, that they had travelled through divers Countries lately discovered, which are wanting in the antient Maps. They said they came to an Island of a very temperate Air, where they look'd upon it as the greatest Indecency in the World, to cover their Bodies. _Con._ It may be they liv'd like Beasts. _Innk._ Nay, they said they liv'd a Life of great Humanity, they liv'd under a King, they attended him to Work every Morning daily, but not above an Hour in a Day. _Con._ What Work did they do? _Innk._ They pluck'd up a certain Sort of Roots that serves them instead of Bread, and is more pleasant and more wholsome than Bread; and when this was done, they every one went to his Business, what he had a Mind to do. They bring up their Children religiously, they avoid and punish Vices, but none more severely than Adultery. _Con._ What's the Punishment? _Innk._ They forgive the Women, for it is permitted to that Sex. But for Men that are taken in Adultery, this is the Punishment, that all his Life after, he should appear in publick with his privy Parts covered. _Con._ A mighty Punishment indeed! _Innk._ Custom has made it to them the very greatest Punishment that is. _Con._ When I consider the Force of Persuasion, I am almost ready to allow it. For if a Man would expose a Thief or a Murderer to the greatest Ignominy, would it not be a sufficient Punishment to cut off a Piece of the hinder Part of his Cloaths, and sow a Piece of a Wolf's Skin upon his Buttocks, to make him wear a party-colour'd Pair of Stockings, and to cut the fore Part of his Doublet in the Fashion of a Net, leaving his Shoulders and his Breast bare; to shave off one Side of his Beard, and leave the other hanging down, and curl one Part of it, and to put him a Cap on his Head, cut and slash'd, with a huge Plume of Feathers, and so expose him publickly; would not this make him more ridiculous than to put him on a Fool's Cap with long Ears and Bells? And yet Soldiers dress themselves every Day in this Trim, and are well enough pleased with themselves, and find Fools enough, that like the Dress too, though there is nothing more ridiculous. _Innk._ Nay, there are topping Citizens too, who imitate them as much as they can possibly. _Con._ But now if a Man should dress himself up with Birds Feathers like an _Indian_, would not the very Boys, all of them, think he was a mad Man? _Innk._ Stark mad. _Con._ And yet, that which we admire, savours of a greater Madness still: Now as it is true, that nothing is so ridiculous but Custom will bear it out; so it cannot be denied, but that there is a certain _Decorum_ in Garments, which all wise Men always account a _Decorum_; and that there is also an Unbecomingness in Garments, which will to wise Men always seem unbecoming. Who does not laugh, when he sees a Woman dragging a long Train at her Heels, as if her Quality were to be measured by the Length of her Tail? And yet some Cardinals are not asham'd to follow this Fashion in their Gowns: And so prevalent a Thing is Custom, that there is no altering of a Fashion that has once obtain'd. _Innk._ Well, we have had Talk enough about Custom: But tell me now, whether you think it better for Monks to differ from others in Habit, or not to differ? _Con._ I think it to be more agreeable to Christian Simplicity, not to judge of any Man by his Habit, if it be but sober and decent. _Innk._ Why don't you cast away your Cowls then? _Con._ Why did not the Apostles presently eat of all Sorts of Meat? _Innk._ I can't tell. Do you tell me that. _Con._ Because an invincible Custom hinder'd it: For whatsoever is deeply rooted in the Minds of Men, and has been confirm'd by long Use, and is turn'd as it were into Nature, can never be remov'd on a sudden, without endangering the publick Peace; but must be remov'd by Degrees, as a Horse's Tail is pluck'd off by single Hairs. _Innk._ I could bear well enough with it, if the Monks had all but one Habit: But who can bear so many different Habits? _Con._ Custom has brought in this Evil, which brings in every Thing. _Benedict_ did not invent a new Habit, but the same that he wore himself and his Disciples, which was the Habit of a plain, honest Layman: Neither did _Francis_ invent a new Dress; but it was the Dress of poor Country-Fellows. Their Successors have by new Additions turned it into Superstition. Don't we see some old Women at this Day, that keep to the Dress of their Times, which is more different from the Dress now in Fashion, than my Dress is from yours? _Innk._ We do see it. _Con._ Therefore, when you see this Habit, you see only the Reliques of antient Times. _Innk._ Why then, has your Garment no Holiness in it? _Con._ None at all. _Innk._ There are some of you that make their Boasts that these Dresses were divinely directed by the holy Virgin Mother. _Con._ These Stories are but meer Dreams. _Innk._ Some despair of being able to recover from a Fit of Sickness, unless they be wrapp'd up in a Dominican's Habit: Nay, nor won't be buried but in a Franciscan's Habit. _Con._ They that persuade People of those Things, are either Cheats or Fools, and they that believe them are superstitious. God will know a wicked Man as well in a Franciscan's Habit, as in a Soldier's Coat. _Innk._ There is not so much Variety in the Feathers of Birds of the Air, as there is in your Habits. _Con._ What then, is it not a very good Thing to imitate Nature? But it is a better Thing to out-do it. _Innk._ I wish you would out-do it in the Variety of your Beaks too. _Con._ But, come on. I will be an Advocate for Variety, if you will give me Leave. Is not a _Spaniard_ dressed after one Fashion, an _Italian_ after another, a _Frenchman_ after another, a _German_ after another, a _Greek_ after another, a _Turk_ after another, and a _Sarazen_ after another? _Innk._ Yes. _Con._ And then in the same Country, what Variety of Garments is there in Persons of the same Sex, Age and Degree. How different is the Dress of the _Venetian_ from the _Florentine_, and of both from the _Roman_, and this only within _Italy_ alone? _Innk._ I believe it. _Con._ And from hence also came our Variety. _Dominic_ he took his Dress from the honest Ploughmen in that Part of _Spain_ in which he liv'd; and _Benedict_ from the Country-Fellows of that Part of _Italy_ in which he liv'd; and _Francis_ from the Husbandmen of a different Place, and so for the rest. _Innk._ So that for aught I find, you are no holier than we, unless you live holier. _Con._ Nay, we are worse than you, in that; if we live wickedly, we are a greater Stumbling to the Simple. _Innk._ Is there any Hope of us then, who have neither Patron, nor Habit, nor Rule, nor Profession? _Con._ Yes, good Man; see that you hold it fast. Ask your Godfathers what you promis'd in Baptism, what Profession you then made. Do you want a human Rule, who have made a Profession of the Gospel Rule? Or do you want a Man for a Patron, who have Jesus Christ for a Patron? Consider what you owe to your Wife, to your Children, to your Family, and you will find you have a greater Load upon you, than if you had professed the Rule of _Francis_. _Innk._ Do you believe that any Inn-Keepers go to Heaven? _Con._ Why not? _Innk._ There are a great many Things said and done in this House, that are not according to the Gospel. _Con._ What are they? _Innk._ One fuddles, another talks bawdy, another brawls, and another slanders; and last of all, I can't tell whether they keep themselves honest or not. _Con._ You must prevent these Things as much as you can; and if you cannot hinder them, however, do not for Profit's Sake encourage or draw on these Wickednesses. _Innk._ Sometimes I don't deal very honestly as to my Wine. _Con._ Wherein? _Innk._ When I find my Guests grow a little too hot, I put more Water into the Wine. _Con._ That's a smaller Fault than selling of Wine made up with unwholsome Ingredients. _Innk._ But tell me truly, how many Days have you been in this Journey? _Con._ Almost a Month. _Innk._ Who takes Care of you all the While? _Con._ Are not they taken Care enough of, that have a Wife, and Children, and Parents, and Kindred? _Innk._ Oftentimes. _Con._ You have but one Wife, we have an hundred; you have but one Father, we have an hundred; you have but one House, we have an hundred; you have but a few Children, we have an innumerable Company; you have but a few Kindred, we have an infinite Number. _Innk._ How so? _Con._ Because the Kindred of the Spirit extends more largely, than the Kindred of the Flesh: So Christ has promised, and we experience the Truth of what he has promised. _Innk._ In Troth, you have been a good Companion for me; let me die if I don't like this Discourse better than to drink with our Parson. Do us the Honour to preach to the People to-morrow, and if ever you happen to come this Way again, know that here's a Lodging for you. _Con._ But what if others should come? _Innk._ They shall be welcome, if they be but such as you. _Con._ I hope they will be better. _Innk._ But among so many bad ones, how shall I know which are good? _Con._ I'll tell you in a few Words, but in your Ear. _Innk._ Tell me. _Con._--------- _Innk._ I'll remember it, and do it. _The ABBOT and LEARNED WOMAN._ The ARGUMENT. _A certain Abbot paying a Visit to a Lady, finds her reading_ Greek _and_ Latin _Authors. A Dispute arises, whence Pleasantness of Life proceeds:_ viz. _Not from external Enjoyments, but from the Study of Wisdom. An ignorant Abbot will by no Means have his Monks to be learned; nor has he himself so much as a single Book in his Closet. Pious Women in old Times gave their Minds to the Study of the Scriptures; but Monks that hate Learning, and give themselves up to Luxury, Idleness, and Hunting, are provok'd to apply themselves to other Kinds of Studies, more becoming their Profession._ ANTRONIUS, MAGDALIA. _Ant._ What Sort of Houshold-Stuff do I see? _Mag._ Is it not that which is neat? _Ant._ How neat it is, I can't tell, but I'm sure, it is not very becoming, either a Maid or a Matron. _Mag._ Why so? _Ant._ Because here's Books lying about every where. _Mag._ What have you liv'd to this Age, and are both an Abbot and a Courtier, and never saw any Books in a Lady's Apartment? _Ant._ Yes, I have seen Books, but they were _French_; but here I see _Greek_ and _Latin_ ones. _Mag._ Why, are there no other Books but _French_ ones that teach Wisdom? _Ant._ But it becomes Ladies to have something that is diverting, to pass away their leisure Hours. _Mag._ Must none but Ladies be wise, and live pleasantly? _Ant._ You very improperly connect being wise, and living pleasantly together: Women have nothing to do with Wisdom; Pleasure is Ladies Business. _Mag._ Ought not every one to live well? _Ant._ I am of Opinion, they ought so to do. _Mag._ Well, can any Body live a pleasant Life, that does not live a good Life. _Ant._ Nay, rather, how can any Body live a pleasant Life, that does live a good Life? _Mag._ Why then, do you approve of living illy, if it be but pleasantly? _Ant._ I am of the Opinion, that they live a good Life, that live a pleasant Life. _Mag._ Well, but from whence does that Pleasure proceed? From outward Things, or from the Mind? _Ant._ From outward Things. _Mag._ O subtle Abbot, but thick-skull'd Philosopher! Pray tell me in what you suppose a pleasant Life to consist? _Ant._ Why, in Sleeping, and Feasting, and Liberty of doing what you please, in Wealth, and in Honours. _Mag._ But suppose to all these Things God should add Wisdom, should you live pleasantly then? _Ant._ What is it that you call by the Name of Wisdom? _Mag._ This is Wisdom, to know that a Man is only happy by the Goods of the Mind. That Wealth, Honour, and Descent, neither make a Man happier or better. _Ant._ If that be Wisdom, fare it well for me. _Mag._ Suppose now that I take more Pleasure in reading a good Author, than you do in Hunting, Drinking, or Gaming; won't you think I live pleasantly? _Ant._ I would not live that Sort of Life. _Mag._ I don't enquire what you take most Delight in; but what is it that ought to be most delighted in? _Ant._ I would not have my Monks mind Books much. _Mag._ But my Husband approves very well of it. But what Reason have you, why you would not have your Monks bookish? _Ant._ Because I find they are not so obedient; they answer again out of the Decrees and Decretals of _Peter_ and _Paul._ _Mag._ Why then do you command them the contrary to what _Peter_ and _Paul_ did? _Ant._ I can't tell what they teach; but I can't endure a Monk that answers again: Nor would I have any of my Monks wiser than I am myself. _Mag._ You might prevent that well enough, if you did but lay yourself out, to get as much Wisdom as you can. _Ant._ I han't Leisure. _Mag._ Why so? _Ant._ Because I han't Time. _Mag._ What, not at Leisure to be wise? _Ant._ No. _Mag._ Pray what hinders you? _Ant._ Long Prayers, the Affairs of my Houshold, Hunting, looking after my Horses, attending at Court. _Mag._ Well, and do you think these Things are better than Wisdom? _Ant._ Custom has made it so. _Mag._ Well, but now answer me this one Thing: Suppose God should grant you this Power, to be able to turn yourself and your Monks into any Sort of Animal that you had a Mind: Would you turn them into Hogs, and yourself into a Horse? _Ant._ No, by no Means. _Mag._ By doing so you might prevent any of them from being wiser than yourself? _Ant._ It is not much Matter to me what Sort of Animals my Monks are, if I am but a Man myself. _Mag._ Well, and do you look upon him to be a Man that neither has Wisdom, nor desires to have it? _Ant._ I am wise enough for myself. _Mag._ And so are Hogs wise enough for themselves. _Ant._ You seem to be a Sophistress, you argue so smartly. _Mag._ I won't tell you what you seem to me to be. But why does this Houshold-Stuff displease you? _Ant._ Because a Spinning-Wheel is a Woman's Weapon. _Mag._ Is it not a Woman's Business to mind the Affairs of her Family, and to instruct her Children? _Ant._ Yes, it is. _Mag._ And do you think so weighty an Office can be executed without Wisdom? _Ant._ I believe not. _Mag._ This Wisdom I learn from Books. _Ant._ I have threescore and two Monks in my Cloister, and you will not see one Book in my Chamber. _Mag._ The Monks are finely look'd after all this While. _Ant._ I could dispense with Books; but I can't bear _Latin_ Books. _Mag._ Why so? _Ant._ Because that Tongue is not fit for a Woman. _Mag._ I want to know the Reason. _Ant._ Because it contributes nothing towards the Defence of their Chastity. _Mag._ Why then do _French_ Books that are stuff'd with the most trifling Novels, contribute to Chastity? _Ant._ But there is another Reason. _Mag._ Let it be what it will, tell me it plainly. _Ant._ They are more secure from the Priests, if they don't understand _Latin_. _Mag._ Nay, there's the least Danger from that Quarter according to your Way of Working; because you take all the Pains you can not to know any Thing of _Latin_. _Ant._ The common People are of my Mind, because it is such a rare unusual Thing for a Woman to understand _Latin._ _Mag._ What do you tell me of the common People for, who are the worst Examples in the World that can be follow'd. What have I to do with Custom, that is the Mistress of all evil Practices? We ought to accustom ourselves to the best Things: And by that Means, that which was uncustomary would become habitual, and that which was unpleasant would become pleasant; and that which seemed unbecoming would look graceful. _Ant._ I hear you. _Mag._ Is it becoming a _German_ Woman to learn to speak _French_. _Ant._ Yes it is. _Mag._ Why is it? _Ant._ Because then she will be able to converse with those that speak _French_. _Mag._ And why then is it unbecoming in me to learn _Latin_, that I may be able daily to have Conversation with so many eloquent, learned and wise Authors, and faithful Counsellors? _Ant._ Books destroy Women's Brains, who have little enough of themselves. _Mag._ What Quantity of Brains you have left I cannot tell: And as for myself, let me have never so little, I had rather spend them in Study, than in Prayers mumbled over without the Heart going along with them, or sitting whole Nights in quaffing off Bumpers. _Ant._ Bookishness makes Folks mad. _Mag._ And does not the Rattle of your Pot-Companions, your Banterers, and Drolls, make you mad? _Ant._ No, they pass the Time away. _Mag._ How can it be then, that such pleasant Companions should make me mad? _Ant._ That's the common Saying. _Mag._ But I by Experience find quite the contrary. How many more do we see grow mad by hard drinking, unseasonable feasting, and sitting up all Night tippling, which destroys the Constitution and Senses, and has made People mad? _Ant._ By my Faith, I would not have a learned Wife. _Mag._ But I bless myself, that I have gotten a Husband that is not like yourself. Learning both endears him to me, and me to him. _Ant._ Learning costs a great Deal of Pains to get, and after all we must die. _Mag._ Notable Sir, pray tell me, suppose you were to die to-Morrow, had you rather die a Fool or a wise Man? _Ant._ Why, a wise Man, if I could come at it without taking Pains. _Mag._ But there is nothing to be attained in this Life without Pains; and yet, let us get what we will, and what Pains soever we are at to attain it, we must leave it behind us: Why then should we think much to be at some Pains for the most precious Thing of all, the Fruit of which will bear us Company unto another Life. _Ant._ I have often heard it said, that a wise Woman is twice a Fool. _Mag._ That indeed has been often said; but it was by Fools. A Woman that is truly wise does not think herself so: But on the contrary, one that knows nothing, thinks her self to be wise, and that is being twice a Fool. _Ant._ I can't well tell how it is, that as Panniers don't become an Ox, so neither does Learning become a Woman. _Mag._ But, I suppose, you can't deny but Panniers will look better upon an Ox, than a Mitre upon an Ass or a Sow. What think you of the Virgin _Mary_? _Ant._ Very highly. _Mag._ Was not she bookish? _Ant._ Yes; but not as to such Books as these. _Mag._ What Books did she read? _Ant._ The canonical Hours. _Mag._ For the Use of whom? _Ant._ Of the Order of _Benedictines_. _Mag._ Indeed? What did _Paula_ and _Eustochium_ do? Did not they converse with the holy Scriptures? _Ant._ Ay, but this is a rare Thing now. _Mag._ So was a blockheaded Abbot in old Time; but now nothing is more common. In old Times Princes and Emperors were as eminent for Learning as for their Governments: And after all, it is not so great a Rarity as you think it. There are both in _Spain_ and _Italy_ not a few Women, that are able to vye with the Men, and there are the _Morites_ in _England_, and the _Bilibald-duks_ and _Blaureticks_ in _Germany_. So that unless you take Care of yourselves it will come to that Pass, that we shall be Divinity-Professors in the Schools, and preach in the Churches, and take Possession of your Mitres. _Ant._ God forbid. _Mag._ Nay it is your Business to forbid it. For if you hold on as you have begun, even Geese themselves will preach before they'll endure you a Parcel of dumb Teachers. You see the World is turn'd up-Side down, and you must either lay aside your Dress, or perform your Part. _Ant._ How came I to fall into this Woman's Company? If you'll come to see me, I'll treat you more pleasantly. _Mag._ After what Manner? _Ant._ Why, we'll dance, and drink heartily, and hunt and play, and laugh. _Mag._ I can hardly forbear laughing now. _The EPITHALAMIUM of PETRUS ÆGIDIUS._ The ARGUMENT. _The Muses and Graces are brought in, as singing the Epithalamium of_ Peter Ægidius. Alipius _spies the nine Muses, and the three Graces coming out of a Grove, which_ Balbinus _can't see: They take their Way to_ Antwerp, _to the Wedding of_ Ægidius, _to whom they wish all joy, that nothing of Difference or Uneasiness may ever arise between 'em. How those Marriages prove that are made, the Graces not favouring 'em. Congratulatory Verses._ ALIPIUS, BALBINUS, MUSÆ. _Al._ Good God! What strange glorious Sight do I see here? _Ba._ Either you see what is not to be seen, or I can't see that which is to be seen. _Al._ Nay, I'll assure you, 'tis a wonderful charming Sight. _Ba._ Why do you plague me at this Rate? Tell me, where 'tis you see it. _Al._ Upon the left Hand there in the Grove, under the Side of the Hill. _Ba._ I see the Hill, but I can see nothing else. _Al._ No! don't you see a Company of pretty Maids there? _Ba._ What do you mean, to make a Fool of me at this Rate? I can't see a bit of a Maid any where. _Al._ Hush, they're just now coming out of the Grove. Oh admirable! How neat they are! How charmingly they look! 'Tis a heavenly Sight. _Ba._ What! Are you possess'd? _Al._ Oh, I know who they are; they're the nine Muses and the three Graces, I wonder what they're a-doing. I never in all my Life saw 'em more charmingly dress'd, nor in a gayer Humour; they have every one of 'em got Crowns of Laurel upon their Heads, and their Instruments of Musick in their Hands. And how lovingly the Graces go Side by Side! How becomingly they look in their loose Dress, with their Garments flowing and trailing after 'em. _Ba._ I never heard any Body talk more like a mad Man in all my Days, than you do. _Al._ You never saw a happier Man in all your Life-Time. _Ba._ Pray what's the Matter, that you can see and I can't? _Al._ Because you have never drank of the Muses Fountain; and no Body can see 'em but they that have. _Ba._ I have drank plentifully out of _Scotus's_ Fountain. _Al._ But that is not the Fountain of the Muses, but a Lake of Frogs. _Ba._ But can't you do something to make me see this Sight, as well as you? _Al._ I could if I had a Laurel-Branch here, for Water out of a clear Spring, sprinkled upon one with a Laurel Bough, makes the Eyes capable of such Sights as these. _Ba._ Why, see here is a Laurel and a Fountain too. _Al._ Is there? That's clever, I vow. _Ba._ But prithee, sprinkle me with it. _Al._ Now look, do you see now? _Ba._ As much as I did before. Sprinkle me again. _Al._ Well, now do you see? _Ba._ Just as much; sprinkle me plentifully. _Al._ I believe you can't but see now. _Ba._ Now I can scarce see you. _Al._ Ah poor Man, how total a Darkness has seized your Eyes! This Art would open even the Eyes of an old Coachman: But however, don't plague yourself about it, perhaps 'tis better for you not to see it, lest you should come off as ill by seeing the Muses, as _Actæon_ did by seeing _Diana_: For you'd perhaps be in Danger of being turn'd either into a Hedgehog, or a wild Boar, a Swine, a Camel, a Frog, or a Jackdaw. But however, if you can't see, I'll make you hear 'em, if you don't make a Noise; they are just a-coming this Way. Let's meet 'em. Hail, most welcome Goddesses. _Mu._ And you heartily, Lover of the Muses. _Al._ What makes you pull me so? _Ba._ You an't as good as your Word. _Al._ Why don't you hear 'em? _Ba._ I hear somewhat, but I don't know what it is. _Al._ Well, I'll speak _Latin_ to 'em then. Whither are you going so fine and so brisk? Are you going to _Louvain_ to see the University? _Mu._ No, we assure you, we won't go thither. _Al._ Why not? _Mu._ What Place is for us, where so many Hogs are grunting, Camels and Asses braying, Jackdaws cawing, and Magpies chattering? _Al._ But for all that, there are some there that are your Admirers. _Mu._ We know that, and therefore we'll go thither a few Years hence. The successive Period of Ages has not yet brought on that Time; for there will be one, that will build us a pleasant House there, or a Temple rather, such a one, as there scarce is a finer or more sacred any where else. _Al._ Mayn't a Body know who it will be, that shall do so much Honour to our Country? _Mu._ You may know it, that are one of our Priests. There's no doubt, but you have heard the Name of the _Buslidians_, famous all the World over. _Al._ You have mention'd a noble Family truly, born to grace the Palaces of the greatest Princes in the Universe. For who does not revere the great _Francis Buslidius_, the Bishop of the Church of _Bezancon_, who has approv'd himself more than a single _Nestor_, to _Philip_ the Son of _Maximilian_ the Great, the Father of _Charles_, who will also be a greater Man than his Father? _Mu._ O how happy had we been, if the Fates had not envy'd the Earth the Happiness of so great a Man, What a Patron was he to all liberal Studies! How candid a Favourer of Ingenuity! But he has left two brothers, _Giles_ a Man of admirable Judgment and Wisdom, and _Jerome_. _Al._ We know very well that _Jerome_ is singularly well accomplish'd with all Manner of Literature, and adorn'd with every Kind of Virtue. _Mu._ But the Destinies won't suffer him to be long-liv'd neither, though no Man in the World better deserves to be immortaliz'd. _Al._ How do you know that? _Mu._ We had it from _Apollo_. _Al._ How envious are the Destinies, to take from us all desirable Things so hastily! _Mu._ We must not talk of that at this Time; but this _Jerome_, dying with great Applause, will leave his whole Estate for the building of a College at _Louvain_, in which most learned Men shall profess and teach publickly, and gratis, the three Languages. These Things will bring a great Ornament to Learning, and Glory to _Charles_ himself: Then we'll reside at _Louvain_, with all our Hearts. _Al._ But whither are you going now? _Mu._ To _Antwerp_. _Al._ What, the Muses and Graces going to a Fair? _Mu._ No, we assure you, we are not going to a Fair; but to a Wedding. _Al._ What have Virgins to do at Weddings? _Mu._ 'Tis no indecent Thing at all, for Virgins to be at such a Wedding as this is. _Al._ Pray what Sort of a Marriage is it? _Mu._ A holy, undefiled, and chaste Marriage, such a one as _Pallas_ herself need not be asham'd to be at: Nay, more than that, we believe she will be at it. _Al._ Mayn't a Body know the Bride and Bridegroom's Name? _Mu._ We believe you must needs know that most courteous and accomplish'd Youth in all Kinds of polite Learning, _Peter Ægidius_. _Al._ You have named an Angel, not a Man. _Mu._ The pretty Maid _Cornelia_, a fit Match for _Apollo_ himself, is going to be married to _Ægidius_. _Al._ Indeed he has been a great Admirer of you, even from his Infancy. _Mu._ We are going to sing him an Epithalamium. _Al._ What, and will the Graces dance too? _Mu._ They will not only dance, but they will also unite those two true Lovers, with the indissoluble Ties of mutual Affection, that no Difference or Jarring shall ever happen between 'em. She shall never hear any Thing from him, but my Life; nor he from her, but my Soul: Nay: and even old Age itself, shall be so far from diminishing that, that it shall increase the Pleasure. _Al._ I should admire at it, if those that live so sweetly, could ever be able to grow old. _Mu._ You say very right, for it is rather a Maturity, than an old Age. _Al._ But I have known a great many, to whom these kind Words have been chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. _Mu._ You say very true; but these Marriages were made when the Graces were out of Humour: But in this Marriage, a Sweetness of Temper will always maintain a mutual Affection. _Al._ Indeed you speak of such a happy Marriage as is very seldom seen. _Mu._ An uncommon Felicity is due to such uncommon Virtues. _Al._ But what! Will the Matrimony be without _Juno_ and _Venus_? _Mu._ Indeed _Juno_ won't be there, she's a scolding Goddess, and is but seldom in a good Humour with her own _Jove_. Nor indeed, that earthly drunken _Venus_; but another heavenly one, which makes a Union of Minds. _Al._ Then the Marriage you speak of, is like to be a barren one. _Mu._ No, by no Means, but rather like to be the most happily fruitful. _Al._ What, does that heavenly _Venus_ produce any Thing but Souls then? _Mu._ Yes, she gives Bodies to the Souls; but such Bodies, as shall be exactly conformable to 'em, just as though you should put a choice Ointment into a curious Box of Pearl. _Al._ Where is she then? _Mu._ Look, she is coming towards you, a pretty Way off. _Al._ Oh! I see her now. O good God, how bright she is! How majestical and beautiful she appears! The t'other _Venus_ compar'd with this, is a homely one. _Mu._ Do you see what modest _Cupids_ there are; they are no blind ones, such as that _Venus_ has, that makes Mankind mad? But these are sharp little Rogues, and they don't carry furious Torches, but most gentle Fires; they have no leaden-pointed Darts, to make the belov'd hate the Lover, and torment poor Wretches with the Want of a reciprocal Affection. _Al._ In Truth, they're as like their Mother as can be. Oh, that's a blessed House, and dearly belov'd by the Gods! But may not a Body hear the Marriage-Song that you design to present 'em with? _Mu._ Nay, we were just a-going to ask you to hear it. CLIO. Peter _hath married fair_ Cornelia, _Propitious Heaven! bless the Wedding-Day._ MELPOMENE. _Concord of_ Turtle-Doves _between them be, And of the_ Jack-daw _the Vivacity_. THALIA. _From_ Gracchus _may he win the Prize, And for_ Cornelia's _Life, his own despise._ EUTERPE. _May she in Love exceed_ Admetus' _Wife, Who laid her own down, for her Husband's Life._ TERPSICHORE. _May he love her with stronger Flame, But much more happy Fate, Than_ Plaucius, _who did disdain To out-live his deceas'd Mate._ ERATO. _May she love him with no less Flame, But with much better Fate; Than_ Porcia _chaste, her_ Brutus _did, Whom brave Men celebrate._ CALLIOPE. _For Constancy, I wish the Bridegroom may Be equal to the famous_ Nasica. URANIA. _The Bride in Chastity may she Superior to_ Paterculana _be._ POLYHYMNIA. _May their Offspring like them be, Their Honour equal their Estate; Always from ranc'rous Envy free, Deserved Glory on them wait._ _Al._ I should very much envy _Peter Ægidius_ so much Happiness, but that he is a Man of such Candour, that he himself envies no Body. _Mu._ It is now high Time for us to prosecute our Journey. _Al._ Have you any Service to command me at _Louvain_? _Mu._ That thou wouldst recommend us to all our sincere loving Friends; but especially to our antient Admirers. _John Paludus, Jodocus Gaverius, Martin Dorpius_, and _John Borsalus._ _Al._ Well, I'll be sure to take Care to do your Message. What shall I say to the rest? _Mu._ I'll tell you in your Ear. _Al._ Well, 'tis a Matter that won't cost very much; it shall certainly be done out of Hand. _The EXORCISM or APPARITION._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy detects the Artifices of Impostors, who impose upon the credulous and simple, framing Stories of Apparitions of Daemons and Ghosts, and divine Voices._ Polus _is the Author of a Rumour, that an Apparition of a certain Soul was heard in his Grounds, howling after a lamentable Manner: At another Place he pretends to see a Dragon in the Air, in the middle of the Day, and persuades other Persons that they saw it too; and he prevails upon_ Faunus, _a Parish-Priest of a neighbouring Town, to make Trial of the Truth of the Matters, who consents to do it, and prepares Exorcisms._ Polus _gets upon a black Horse, throws Fire about, and with divers Tricks deceives credulous_ Faunus, _and other Men of none of the deepest Penetration._ THOMAS _and_ ANSELM. _Tho._ What good News have you had, that you laugh to yourself thus, as if you had found a Treasure? _Ans._ Nay, you are not far from the Matter. _Tho._ But won't you impart it to your Companion, what good Thing soever it is? _Ans._ Yes, I will, for I have been wishing a good While, for somebody to communicate my Merriment to. _Tho._ Come on then, let's have it. _Ans._ I was just now told the pleasantest Story, which you'd swear was a Sham, if I did not know the Place, the Persons, and whole Matter, as well as you know me. _Tho._ I'm with Child to hear it. _Ans._ Do you know _Polus, Faunus_'s Son-in-Law? _Tho._ Perfectly well. _Ans._ He's both the Contriver and Actor of this Play. _Tho._ I am apt enough to believe that; for he can Act any Part to the Life. _Ans._ He can so: I suppose too, you know that he has a Farm not far from _London_. _Tho._ Phoo, very well; he and I have drank together many a Time there. _Ans._ Then you know there is a Way between two straight Rows of Trees. _Tho._ Upon the left Hand, about two Flight Shot from the House? _Ans._ You have it. On one Side of the Way there is a dry Ditch, overgrown with Thorns and Brambles; and then there's a Way that leads into an open Field from a little Bridge. _Tho._ I remember it. _Ans._ There went a Report for a long Time among the Country-People, of a Spirit that walk'd near that Bridge, and of hideous Howlings that were every now and then heard there: They concluded it was the Soul of somebody that was miserably tormented. _Tho._ Who was it that raised this Report? _Ans._ Who but _Polus_, that made this the Prologue to his Comedy. _Tho._ What did he mean by inventing such a Flam? _Ans._ I know nothing; but that it is the Humour of the Man, he takes Delight to make himself Sport, by playing upon the Simplicity of People, by such Fictions as these. I'll tell you what he did lately of the same Kind. We were a good many of us riding to _Richmond_, and some of the Company were such that you would say were Men of Judgment. It was a wonderful clear Day, and not so much as a Cloud to be seen there. _Polus_ looking wistfully up into the Air, signed his Face and Breast with the Sign of the Cross, and having compos'd his Countenance to an Air of Amazement, says to himself, O immortal God, what do I see! They that rode next to him asking him what it was that he saw, he fell again to signing himself with a greater Cross. May the most merciful God, says he, deliver me from this Prodigy. They having urg'd him, desiring to know what was the Matter, he fixing his Eyes up to Heaven, and pointing with his Finger to a certain Quarter of it, don't you see, says he, that monstrous Dragon arm'd with fiery Horns, and its Tail turn'd up in a Circle? And they denying they saw it, he bid them look earnestly, every now and then pointing to the Place: At last one of them, that he might not seem to be bad-sighted, affirmed that he saw it. And in Imitation of him, first one, and then another, for they were asham'd that they could not see what was so plain to be seen: And in short, in three Days Time, the Rumour of this portentous Apparition had spread all over _England_. And it is wonderful to think how popular Fame had amplified the Story, and some pretended seriously to expound to what this Portent did predict, and he that was the Contriver of the Fiction, took a mighty Pleasure in the Folly of these People. _Tho._ I know the Humour of the Man well enough. But to the Story of the Apparition. _Ans._ In the mean Time, one _Faunus_ a Priest (of those which in _Latin_ they call _Regulars_, but that is not enough, unless they add the same in _Greek_ too, who was Parson of a neighbouring Parish, this Man thought himself wiser than is common, especially in holy Matters) came very opportunely to pay a Visit to _Polus_. _Tho._ I understand the Matter: There is one found out to be an Actor in this Play. _Ans._ At Supper a Discourse was raised of the Report of this Apparition, and when _Polus_ perceiv'd that _Faunus_ had not only heard of the Report, but believ'd it, he began to intreat the Man, that as he was a holy and a learned Person, he would afford some Relief to a poor Soul that was in such dreadful Torment: And, says he, if you are in any Doubt as to the Truth of it, examine into the Matter, and do but walk near that Bridge about ten a-Clock, and you shall hear miserable Cries; take who you will for a Companion along with you, and so you will hear both more safely and better. _Tho._ Well, what then? _Ans._ After Supper was over, _Polus_, as his Custom was, goes a Hunting or Fowling. And when it grew duskish, the Darkness having taken away all Opportunity of making any certain Judgment of any Thing, _Faunus_ walks about, and at last hears miserable Howlings. _Polus_ having hid himself in a Bramble Hedge hard by, had very artfully made these Howlings, by speaking through an earthen Pot; the Voice coming through the Hollow of it, gave it a most mournful Sound. _Tho._ This Story, as far as I see, out-does _Menander's Phasma_. _Ans._ You'll say more, if you shall hear it out. _Faunus_ goes Home, being impatient to tell what he had heard. _Polus_ taking a shorter Way, had got Home before him. _Faunus_ up and tells _Polus_ all that past, and added something of his own to it, to make the Matter more wonderful. _Tho._ Could _Polus_ keep his Countenance in the mean Time? _Ans._ He keep his Countenance! He has his Countenance in his Hand, you would have said that a serious Affair was transacted. In the End _Faunus_, upon the pressing Importunity of _Polus_, undertakes the Business of Exorcism, and slept not one Wink all that Night, in contriving by what Means he might go about the Matter with Safety, for he was wretchedly afraid. In the first Place he got together the most powerful Exorcisms that he could get, and added some new ones to them, as the Bowels of the Virgin _Mary_, and the Bones of St. _Winifred_. After that, he makes Choice of a Place in the plain Field, near the Bramble Bushes, from whence the Voice came. He draws a very large Circle with a great many Crosses in it, and a Variety of Characters. And all this was perform'd in a set Form of Words; there was also there a great Vessel full of holy Water, and about his Neck he had a holy Stole (as they call'd it) upon which hung the Beginning of the Gospel of _John_. He had in his Pocket a little Piece of Wax, which the Bishop of _Rome_ used to consecrate once a Year, which is commonly call'd _Agnus Dei_. With these Arms in Times past, they were wont to defend themselves against evil Spirits, before the Cowl of St. _Francis_ was found to be so formidable. All these Things were provided, lest if it should be an evil Spirit it should fall foul upon the Exorcist: nor did he for all this, dare to trust himself in the Circle alone, but he determined to take some other Priest along with him. Upon this _Polus_ being afraid, that if he took some sharper Fellow than himself along with him, the whole Plot might come to be discover'd, he got a Parish-Priest there-about, whom he acquainted before-hand with the whole Design; and indeed it was necessary for the carrying on the Adventure, and he was a Man fit for such a Purpose. The Day following, all Things being prepared and in good Order, about ten a-Clock _Faunus_ and the Parish-Priest enter the Circle. _Polus_ had got thither before them, and made a miserable Howling out of the Hedge; Faunus begins his Exorcism, and _Polus_ steals away in the Dark to the next Village, and brings from thence another Person, for the Play could not be acted without a great many of them. _Tho._ Well, what do they do? _Ans._ They mount themselves upon black Horses, and privately carry Fire along with them; when they come pretty near to the Circle, they shew the Fire to affright _Faunus_ out of the Circle. _Tho._ What a Deal of Pains did this _Polus_ take to put a Cheat upon People? _Ans._ His Fancy lies that Way. But this Matter had like to have been mischievous to them. _Tho._ How so? _Ans._ For the Horses were so startled at the sudden flashing of the Fire, that they had like to have thrown their Riders. Here's an End of the first Act of this Comedy. When they were returned and entered into Discourse, _Polus_, as though he had known nothing of the Matter, enquires what was done. _Faunus_ tells him, that two hideous Caco-dæmons appear'd to him on black Horses, their Eyes sparkling with Fire, and breathing Fire out of their Nostrils, making an Attempt to break into the Circle, but that they were driven away with a Vengeance, by the Power and Efficacy of his Words. This Encounter having put Courage into _Faunus_, the next Day he goes into his Circle again with great Solemnity, and after he had provok'd the Spirit a long Time with the Vehemence of his Words, _Polus_ and his Companion appear again at a pretty Distance, with their black Horses, with a most outragious Noise, making a Feint, as if they would break into the Circle. _Tho._ Had they no Fire then? _Ans._ No, none at all; for that had lik'd to have fallen out very unluckily to them. But hear another Device: They drew a long Rope over the Ground, and then hurrying from one Place to another, as though they were beat off by the Exorcisms of _Faunus_, they threw down both the Priest and holy Water-Pot all together. _Tho._ This Reward the Parish-Priest had for playing his Part? _Ans._ Yes, he had; and for all that, he had rather suffer this than quit the Design. After this Encounter, when they came to talk over the Matter again, _Faunus_ tells a mighty Story to _Polus_, what great Danger he had been in, and how couragiously he had driven both the evil Spirits away with his Charms, and now he had arriv'd at a firm Persuasion, that there was no Dæmon, let him be ever so mischievous or impudent, that could possibly break into this Circle. _Tho._ This _Faunus_ was not far from being a Fool. _Ans._ You have heard nothing yet. The Comedy being thus far advanc'd, _Polus_'s Son-in-Law comes in very good Time, for he had married _Polus's_ eldest Daughter; he's a wonderful merry Droll, you know. _Tho._ Know him! Ay, I know him, that he has no Aversion for such Tricks as these. _Ans._ No Aversion, do you say, nay he would leave the most urgent Affair in the World, if such a Comedy were either to be seen or acted. His Father-in-Law tells him the whole Story, and gives him his Part, that was, to act the Ghost. He puts on a Dress, and wraps himself up in a Shrowd, and carrying a live Coal in a Shell, it appear'd through his Shrowd as if something were burning. About Night he goes to the Place where this Play was acted, there were heard most doleful Moans. _Faunus_ lets fly all his Exorcisms. At Length the Ghost appears a good Way off in the Bushes, every now and then shewing the Fire, and making a rueful Groaning. While _Faunus_ was adjuring the Ghost to declare who he was, _Polus_ of a sudden leaps out of the Thicket, dress'd like a Devil, and making a Roaring, answers him, you have nothing to do with this Soul, it is mine; and every now and then runs to the very Edge of the Circle, as if he would set upon the Exorcist, and then retired back again, as if he was beaten back by the Words of the Exorcism, and the Power of the holy Water, which he threw upon him in great Abundance. At last when this guardian Devil was chased away, _Faunus_ enters into a Dialogue with the Soul. After he had been interrogated and abjured, he answers, that he was the Soul of a Christian Man, and being asked his Name, he answered _Faunus_. _Faunus_! replies the other, that's my Name. So then they being Name-Sakes, he laid the Matter more to Heart, that _Faunus_ might deliver _Faunus_. _Faunus_ asking a Multitude of Questions, lest a long Discourse should discover the Fraud, the Ghost retires, saying it was not permitted to stay to talk any longer, because its Time was come, that it must go whither its Devil pleased to carry it; but yet promised to come again the next Day, at what Hour it could be permitted. They meet together again at _Polus's_ House, who was the Master of the Show. There the Exorcist relates what was done, and tho' he added some Lies to the Story, yet he believed them to be true himself, he was so heartily affected with the Matter in Hand. At last it appeared manifestly, that it was the Soul of a Christian who was vexed with the dreadful Torments of an unmerciful Devil: Now all the Endeavours are bent this Way. There happened a ridiculous Passage in the next Exorcism. _Tho._ Prithee what was that? _Ans._ When _Faunus_ had called up the Ghost, _Polus_, that acted the Devil, leap'd directly at him, as if he would, without any more to do, break into the Circle; and _Faunus_ he resisted stoutly with his Exorcisms, and had thrown a power of holy Water, the Devil at last cries out, that he did not value all this of a Rush; you have had to do with a Wench, and you are my own yourself. And tho' _Polus_ said so in Jest, it seemed that he had spoken Truth: For the Exorcist being touched with this Word, presently retreated to the very Centre of the Circle, and whispered something in the Priest's Ear. _Polus_ seeing that, retires, that he might not hear what it was not fit for him to hear. _Tho._ In Truth, _Polus_ was a very modest, religious Devil. _Ans._ He was so, otherwise he might have been blamed for not observing a _Decorum_, but yet he heard the Priest's Voice appointing him Satisfaction. _Tho._ What was that? _Ans._ That he should say the glorious 78th Psalm, three Times over, by which he conjectured he had had to do with her three Times that Night. _Tho._ He was an irregular _Regular_. _Ans._ They are but Men, and this is but human Frailty. _Tho._ Well, proceed: what was done after this? _Ans._ Now _Faunus_ more couragiously advances to the very Edge of the Circle, and challenges the Devil of his own Accord; but the Devil's Heart failed him, and he fled back. You have deceived me, says he, if I had been wise I had not given you that Caution: Many are of Opinion, that what you have once confess'd is immediately struck out of the Devil's Memory, that he can never be able to twit you in the Teeth for it. _Tho._ What a ridiculous Conceit do you tell me of? _Ans._ But to draw towards a Conclusion of the Matter: This Dialogue with the Ghost held for some Days; at last it came to this Issue: The Exorcist asking the Soul, If there was any Way by which it might possibly be delivered from its Torments, it answered, it might, if the Money that it had left behind, being gotten by Cheating, should be restored. Then, says _Faunus_, What if it were put into the Hands of good People, to be disposed of to pious Uses? The Spirit reply'd, That might do. The Exorcist was rejoic'd at this; he enquires particularly, What Sum there was of it? The Spirit reply'd, That it was a vast Sum, and might prove very good and commodious: it told the Place too where the Treasure was hid, but it was a long Way off: And it order'd what Uses it should be put to. _Tho._ What were they? _Ans._ That three Persons were to undertake a Pilgrimage; one to the Threshold of St. _Peter_; another to salute St. _James_ at _Compostella;_ and the third should kiss _Jesus'_s Comb at _Tryers_; and after that, a vast Number of Services and Masses should be performed in several great Monasteries; and as to the Overplus, he should dispose of it as he pleas'd. Now _Faunus'_s Mind was fixed upon the Treasure; he had, in a Manner, swallowed it in his Mind. _Tho._ That's a common Disease; but more peculiarly thrown in the Priests Dish, upon all Occasions. _Ans._ After nothing had been omitted that related to the Affair of the Money, the Exorcist being put upon it by _Polus_, began to put Questions to the Spirit, about several Arts, as Alchymy and Magick. To these Things the Spirit gave Answers, putting off the Resolution of these Questions for the present, promising it would make larger Discoveries as soon as ever, by his Assistance, it should get out of the Clutches of its Keeper, the Devil; and, if you please, you may let this be the third Act of this Play. As to the fourth Act, _Faunus_ began, in good Earnest, everywhere to talk high, and to talk of nothing else in all Companies and at the Table, and to promise glorious Things to Monasteries; and talk'd of nothing that was low and mean. He goes to the Place, and finds the Tokens, but did not dare to dig for the Treasure, because the Spirit had thrown this Caution in the Way, that it would be extremely dangerous to touch the Treasure, before the Masses had been performed. By this Time, a great many of the wiser Sort had smelt out the Plot, while _Faunus_ at the same Time was every where proclaiming his Folly; tho' he was privately cautioned by his Friends, and especially his Abbot, that he who had hitherto had the Reputation of a prudent Man, should not give the World a Specimen of his being quite contrary. But the Imagination of the Thing had so entirely possess'd his Mind, that all that could be said of him, had no Influence upon him, to make him doubt of the Matter; and he dreamt of nothing but Spectres and Devils: The very Habit of his Mind was got into his Face, that he was so pale, and meagre and dejected, that you would say he was rather a Sprite than a Man: And in short, he was not far from being stark mad, and would have been so, had it not been timely prevented. _Tho._ Well, let this be the last Act of the Play. _Ans._ Well, you shall have it. _Polus_ and his Son-in-Law, hammer'd out this Piece betwixt them: They counterfeited an Epistle written in a strange antique Character, and not upon common Paper, but such as Gold-Beaters put their Leaf-Gold in, a reddish Paper, you know. The Form of the Epistle was this: Faunus, _long a Captive, but now free. To_ Faunus, _his gracious Deliverer sends eternal Health. There is no Need, my dear_ Faunus, _that thou shouldest macerate thyself any longer in this Affair. God has respected the pious Intention of thy Mind; and by the Merit of it, has delivered me from Torments, and I now live happily among the Angels. Thou hast a Place provided for thee with St. Austin, which is next to the Choir of the Apostles: When thou earnest to us, I will give thee publick Thanks. In the mean Time, see that thou live merrily._ _From the_ Imperial Heaven, _the Ides of_ September, _Anno_ 1498. _Under the Seal of my own Ring._ This Epistle was laid privately under the Altar where _Faunus_ was to perform divine Service: This being done, there was one appointed to advertise him of it, as if he had found it by Chance. And now he carries the Letter about him, and shews it as a very sacred Thing; and believes nothing more firmly, than that it was brought from Heaven by an Angel. _Tho._ This is not delivering the Man from his Madness, but changing the Sort of it. _Ans._ Why truly, so it is, only he is now more pleasantly mad than before. _Tho._ I never was wont to give much Credit to Stories of Apparitions in common; but for the Time to come, I shall give much less: For I believe that many Things that have been printed and published, as true Relations, were only by Artifice and Imposture, Impositions upon credulous Persons, and such as _Faunus._ _Ans._ And I also believe that a great many of them are of the same Kind. _The ALCHYMIST._ The ARGUMENT. _This Colloquy shews the Dotage of an old Man, otherwise a very prudent Person, upon this Art; being trick'd by a Priest, under Pretence of a two-Fold Method in this Art, the_ long Way _and the_ short Way. _By the long Way he puts an egregious Cheat upon old_ Balbinus: _The Alchymist lays the Fault upon his Coals and Glasses. Presents of Gold are sent to the Virgin_ Mary, _that she would assist them in their Undertakings. Some Courtiers having come to the Knowledge that_ Balbinus _practis'd this unlawful Art, are brib'd. At last the Alchymist is discharg'd, having Money given him to bear his Charges._ PHILECOUS, LALUS. _Phi._ What News is here, that _Lalus_ laughs to himself so that he e'en giggles again, every now and then signing himself with the Sign of the Cross? I'll interrupt his Felicity. God bless you heartily, my very good Friend _Lalus_; you seem to me to be very happy. _La._ But I shall be much happier, if I make you a Partaker of my merry Conceitedness. _Phi._ Prithee, then, make me happy as soon as you can. _La._ Do you know _Balbinus_? _Phi._ What, that learned old Gentleman that has such a very good Character in the World? _La._ It is as you say; but no Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side. This Man, among his many good Qualifications, has some Foibles: He has been a long Time bewitch'd with the Art call'd _Alchymy_. _Phi._ Believe me, that you call only Foible, is a dangerous Disease. _La._ However that is, notwithstanding he had been so often bitten by this Sort of People, yet he has lately suffer'd himself to be impos'd upon again. _Phi._ In what Manner? _La._ A certain Priest went to him, saluted him with great Respect, and accosted him in this Manner: Most learned _Balbinus_, perhaps you will wonder that I, being a Stranger to you, should thus interrupt you, who, I know, are always earnestly engag'd in the most sacred Studies. _Balbinus_ gave him a Nod, as was his Custom; for he is wonderfully sparing of his Words. _Phi._ That's an Argument of Prudence. _La._ But the other, as the wiser of the two, proceeds. You will forgive this my Importunity, when you shall know the Cause of my coming to you. Tell me then, says _Balbinus_, but in as few Words as you can. I will, says he, as briefly as I am able. You know, most learned of Men, that the Fates of Mortals are various; and I can't tell among which I should class myself, whether among the happy or the miserable; for when I contemplate my Fate on one Part, I account myself most happy, but if on the other Part, I am one of the most miserable. _Balbinus_ pressing him to contract his Speech into a narrow Compass; I will have done immediately, most learned _Balbinus_, says he, and it will be the more easy for me to do it, to a Man who understands the whole Affair so well, that no Man understands it better. _Phi._ You are rather drawing an Orator than an Alchymist. _La._ You shall hear the Alchymist by and by. This Happiness, says he, I have had from a Child, to have learn'd that most desirable Art, I mean Alchymy, the very Marrow of universal Philosophy. At the very Mention of the Name Alchymy, _Balbinus_ rais'd himself a little, that is to say, in Gesture only, and fetching a deep Sigh, bid him go forward. Then he proceeds: But miserable Man that I am, said he, by not falling into the right Way! _Balbinus_ asking him what Ways those were he spoke of; Good Sir, says he, you know (for what is there, most learned Sir, that you are ignorant of?) that there are two Ways in this Art, one which is _call'd the Longation, and the other which is call'd the Curtation_. But by my bad Fate, I have fallen upon _Longation. Balbinus_ asking him, what was the Difference of the Ways; it would be impudent in me, says he, to mention this to a Man, to whom all Things are so well known, that Nobody knows them better; therefore I humbly address myself to you, that you would take Pity on me, and vouchsafe to communicate to me that most happy Way of _Curtation_. And by how much the better you understand this Art, by so much the less Labour you will be able to impart it to me: Do not conceal so great a Gift from your poor Brother that is ready to die with Grief. And as you assist me in this, so may _Jesus Christ_ ever enrich you with more sublime Endowments. He thus making no End of his Solemnity of Obtestations, _Balbinus_ was oblig'd to confess, that he was entirely ignorant of what he meant by _Longation_ and _Curtation_, and bids him explain the Meaning of those Words. Then he began; Altho' Sir, says he, I know I speak to a Person that is better skill'd than myself, yet since you command me I will do it: Those that have spent their whole Life in this divine Art, change the Species of Things two Ways, the one is shorter, but more hazardous, the other is longer, but safer. I account myself very unhappy, that I have laboured in that Way that does not suit my Genius, nor could I yet find out any Body who would shew me the other Way that I am so passionately desirous of; but at last God has put it into my Mind to apply myself to you, a Man of as much Piety as Learning; your Learning qualifies you to answer my Request with Ease, and your Piety will dispose you to help a Christian Brother, whose Life is in your Hands. To make the Matter short, when this crafty Fellow, with such Expressions as these, had clear'd himself from all Suspicion of a Design, and had gain'd Credit, that he understood one Way perfectly well, _Balbinus_'s Mind began to have an Itch to be meddling. And at last, when he could hold no longer, Away with your Methods, says he, of _Curtation_, the Name of which I never heard before, I am so far from understanding it. Tell me sincerely, Do you throughly understand Longation? Phoo! says he, perfectly well; but I don't love the Tediousness of it. Then _Balbinus_ asked him, how much Time it wou'd take up. Too much, says he; almost a whole Year; but in the mean Time it is the safest Way. Never trouble yourself about that, says _Balbinus_, although it should take up two Years, if you can but depend upon your Art. To shorten the Story: They came to an Agreement, that the Business should be set on foot privately in _Balbinus_'s, House, upon this Condition, that he should find Art, and _Balbinus_ Money; and the Profit should be divided between them, although the Imposter modestly offered that _Balbinus_ should have the whole Gain. They both took an Oath of Secrecy, after the Manner of those that are initiated into mysterious Secrets; and presently Money is paid down for the Artist to buy Pots, Glasses, Coals, and other Necessaries for furnishing the Laboratory: This Money our Alchymist lavishes away on Whores, Gaming, and Drinking. _Phi._ This is one Way, however, of changing the Species of Things. _La. Balbinus_ pressing him to fall upon the Business; he replies, Don't you very well know, that _what's well begun is half done?_ It is a great Matter to have the Materials well prepar'd. At last he begins to set up the Furnace; and here there was Occasion for more Gold, as a Bait to catch more: For as a Fish is not caught without a Bait, so Alchymists must cast Gold in, before they can fetch Gold out. In the mean Time, _Balbinus_ was busy in his Accounts; for he reckoned thus, if one Ounce made fifteen, what would be the Product of two thousand; for that was the Sum that he determined to spend. When the Alchymist had spent this Money and two Months Time, pretending to be wonderfully busy about the Bellows and the Coals, Balbinus enquired of him, whether the Business went forward? At first he made no Answer; but at last he urging the Question, he made him Answer, As all great Works do; the greatest Difficulty of which is, in entring upon them: He pretended he had made a Mistake in buying the Coals, for he had bought Oaken ones, when they should have been Beechen or Fir ones. There was a hundred Crowns gone; and he did not spare to go to Gaming again briskly. Upon giving him new Cash, he gets new Coals, and then the Business is begun again with more Resolution than before; just as Soldiers do, when they have happened to meet with a Disaster, they repair it by Bravery. When the Laboratory had been kept hot for some Months, and the golden Fruit was expected, and there was not a Grain of Gold in the Vessel (for the Chymist had spent all that too) another Pretence was found out, That the Glasses they used, were not rightly tempered: For, as every Block will not make a Mercury, so Gold will not be made in any Kind of Glass. And by how much more Money had been spent, by so much the lother he was to give it over. _Phi._ Just as it is with Gamesters, as if it were not better to lose some than all. _La._ Very true. The Chymist swore he was never so cheated since he was born before; but now having found out his Mistake, he could proceed with all the Security in the World, and fetch up that Loss with great Interest. The Glasses being changed, the Laboratory is furnished the third Time: Then the Operator told him, the Operation would go on more successfully, if he sent a Present of Crowns to the Virgin Mary, that you know is worshipped at _Paris_; for it was an holy Act: And in Order to have it carried on successfully, it needed the Favour of the Saints. _Balbinus_ liked this Advice wonderfully well, being a very pious Man that never let a Day pass, but he performed some Act of Devotion or other. The Operator undertakes the religious Pilgrimage; but spends this devoted Money in a Bawdy-House in the next Town: Then he goes back, and tells _Balbinus_ that he had great Hope that all would succeed according to their Mind, the Virgin _Mary_ seem'd so to favour their Endeavours. When he had laboured a long Time, and not one Crumb of Gold appearing, _Balbinus_ reasoning the Matter with him, he answered, that nothing like this had ever happened all his Days to him, tho' he had so many Times had Experience of his Method; nor could he so much as imagine what should be the Reason of this Failing. After they had beat their Brains a long Time about the Matter, _Balbinus_ bethought himself, whether he had any Day miss'd going to Chapel, or saying the _Horary Prayers_, for nothing would succeed, if these were omitted. Says the Imposter you have hit it. Wretch that I am, I have been guilty of that once or twice by Forgetfulness, and lately rising from Table, after a long Dinner, I had forgot to say the Salutation of the Virgin. Why then, says _Balbinus_, it is no Wonder, that a Thing of this Moment succeeds no better. The Trickster undertakes to perform twelve Services for two that he had omitted, and to repay ten Salutations for that one. When Money every now and then fail'd this extravagant Operator, and he could not find out any Pretence to ask for more, he at last bethought himself of this Project. He comes Home like one frighted out of his Wits, and in a very mournful Tone cries out, O _Balbinus_ I am utterly undone, undone; I am in Danger of my Life. _Balbinus_ was astonished, and was impatient to know what was the Matter. The Court, says he, have gotten an Inkling of what we have been about, and I expect nothing else but to be carried to Gaol immediately. _Balbinus_, at the hearing of this, turn'd pale as Ashes; for you know it is capital with us, for any Man to practice _Alchymy_ without a License from the Prince: He goes on: Not, says he, that I am afraid of Death myself, I wish that were the worst that would happen, I fear something more cruel. _Balbinus_ asking him what that was, he reply'd, I shall be carried away into some Castle, and there be forc'd to work all my Days, for those I have no Mind to serve. Is there any Death so bad as such a Life? The Matter was then debated, _Balbinus_ being a Man that very well understood the Art of Rhetorick, casts his Thoughts every Way, if this Mischief could be prevented any Way. Can't you deny the Crime, says he? By no Means, says the other; the Matter is known among the Courtiers, and they have such Proof of it that it can't be evaded, and there is no defending of the Fact; for the Law is point-blank against it. Many Things having been propos'd, but coming to no conclusion, that seem'd feasible; says the Alchymist, who wanted present Money, O _Balbinus_ we apply ourselves to slow Counsels, when the Matter requires a present Remedy. It will not be long before they will be here that will apprehend me, and carry me away into Tribulation. And last of all, seeing _Balbinus_ at a Stand, says the Alchymist, I am as much at a Loss as you, nor do I see any Way left, but to die like a Man, unless you shall approve what I am going to propose, which is more profitable than honourable; but Necessity is a hard Chapter. You know these Sort of Men are hungry after Money, and so may be the more easily brib'd to Secrecy. Although it is a hard Case to give these Rascals Money to throw away; but yet, as the Case now stands, I see no better Way. _Balbinus_ was of the same Opinion, and he lays down thirty Guineas to bribe them to hush up the Matter. _Phi. Balbinus_ was wonderful liberal, as you tell the Story. _La._ Nay, in an honest Cause, you would sooner have gotten his Teeth out of his Head than Money. Well, then the Alchymist was provided for, who was in no Danger, but that of wanting Money for his Wench. _Phi._ I admire _Balbinus_ could not smoak the Roguery all this While. _La._ This is the only Thing that he's soft in, he's as sharp as a Needle in any Thing else. Now the Furnace is set to work again with new Money; but first, a short Prayer is made to the Virgin Mary to prosper their Undertakings. By this Time there had been a whole Year spent, first one Obstacle being pretended, and then another, so that all the Expence and Labour was lost. In the mean Time there fell out one most ridiculous Chance. _Phi._ What was that? _La._ The Alchymist had a criminal Correspondence with a certain Courtier's Lady: The Husband beginning to be jealous, watch'd him narrowly, and in the Conclusion, having Intelligence that the Priest was in the Bed-Chamber, he comes Home before he was look'd for, knocks at the Door. _Phi._ What did he design to do to him? _La._ What! Why nothing very good, either kill him or geld him. When the Husband being very pressing to come, threatned he would break open the Door, if his Wife did not open it, they were in bodily Fear within, and cast about for some present Resolution; and Circumstances admitting no better, he pull'd off his Coat, and threw himself out of a narrow Window, but not without both Danger and Mischief, and so got away. Such Stories as these you know are soon spread, and it came to _Balbinus_'s Ear, and the Chymist guess'd it would be so. _Phi._ There was no getting off of this Business. _La._ Yes, he got off better here, than he did out at the Window. Hear the Man's Invention: _Balbinus_ said not a Word to him about the Matter, but it might be read in his Countenance, that he was no Stranger to the Talk of the Town. The Chymist knew _Balbinus_ to be a Man of Piety, and in some Points, I was going to say, superstitious, and such Persons are very ready to forgive one that falls under his Crime, let it be never so great; therefore, he on Purpose begins a Talk about the Success of their Business, complaining, that it had not succeeded as it us'd to do, and as he would have it; and he-wondered greatly, what should be the Reason of it: Upon this Discourse, _Balbinus_, who seemed otherwise to have been bent upon Silence, taking an Occasion, was a little moved: It is no hard Matter, says he, to guess what the Obstacle is. Sins are the Obstacles that hinder our Success, for pure Works should be done by pure Persons. At this Word, the Projector fell down on his Knees, and beating his Breast with a very mournful Tone, and dejected Countenance, says, O _Balbinus_, what you have said is very true, it is Sin, it is Sin that has been the Hinderance; but my Sins, not yours; for I am not asham'd to confess my Uncleanness before you, as I would before my most holy Father Confessor: The Frailty of my Flesh overcame me, and Satan drew me into his Snares; and O miserable Wretch that I am! Of a Priest, I am become an Adulterer; and yet, the Offering that you sent to the Virgin Mother, is not wholly lost neither, for I had perish'd inevitably, if she had not helped me; for the Husband broke open the Door upon me, and the Window was too little for me to get out at; and in this Pinch of Danger, I bethought myself of the blessed Virgin, and I fell upon my Knees, and besought her, that if the Gift was acceptable to her, she would assist me, and in a Minute I went to the Window, (for Necessity forced me so to do) and found it large enough for me to get out at. _Phi._ Well, and did _Balbinus_ believe all this? _La._ Believe it, yes, and pardon'd him too, and admonish'd him very religiously, not to be ungrateful to the blessed Virgin: Nay, there was more Money laid down, upon his giving his Promise, that he would for the future carry on the Process with Purity. _Phi._ Well, what was the End of all this? _La._ The Story is very long; but I'll cut it short. When he had play'd upon _Balbinus_ long enough with these Inventions, and wheedled him out of a considerable Sum of Money, a certain Gentleman happen'd to come there, that had known the Knave from a Child: He easily imagining that he was acting the same Part with _Balbinus_, that he had been acting every where, admonishes _Balbinus_ privately, and acquainted him what Sort of a Fellow he harbour'd, advising him to get rid of him as soon as possible, unless he had a Mind to have him sometime or other, to rifle his Coffers, and then run away. _Phi._ Well, what did _Balbinus_ do then? Sure, he took Care to have him sent to Gaol? _La._ To Gaol? Nay, he gave him Money to bear his Charges, and conjur'd him by all that was sacred, not to speak a Word of what had happened between them. And in my Opinion, it was his Wisdom so to do, rather than to be the common Laughing-stock, and Table-Talk, and run the Risk of the Confiscation of his Goods besides; for the Imposter was in no Danger; he knew no more of the Matter than an Ass, and cheating is a small Fault in these Sort of Cattle. If he had charg'd him with Theft, his Ordination would have say'd him from the Gallows, and no Body would have been at the Charge of maintaining such a Fellow in Prison. _Phi._ I should pity _Balbinus_; but that he took Pleasure in being gull'd. _La._ I must now make haste to the Hall; at another Time I'll tell you Stories more ridiculous than this. _Phi._ When you shall be at Leisure, I shall be glad to hear them, and I'll give you Story for Story. _The HORSE-CHEAT._ The ARGUMENT. _The_ Horse-Cheat _lays open the cheating Tricks of those that sell or let out Horses to hire; and shews how those Cheats themselves are sometimes cheated._ AULUS, PHÆDRUS. Good God! What a grave Countenance our _Phaedrus_ has put on, gaping ever and anon into the Air. I'll attack him. _Phaedrus_, what News to Day? _Ph._ Why do you ask me that Question, _Aulus_? _Aul._ Because, of a _Phaedrus_, you seem to have become a _Cato_, there is so much Sourness in your Countenance. _Ph._ That's no Wonder, my Friend, I am just come from Confession. _Aul._ Nay, then my Wonder's over; but tell me upon your honest Word, did you confess all? _Ph._ All that I could remember, but one. _Aul._ And why did you reserve that one? _Ph._ Because I can't be out of Love with it. _Aul._ It must needs be some pleasant Sin. _Ph._ I can't tell whether it is a Sin or no; but if you are at Leisure, you shall hear what it is. _Aul._ I would be glad to hear it, with all my Heart. _Ph._ You know what cheating Tricks are play'd by our _Jockeys_, who sell and let out Horses. _Aul._ Yes, I know more of them than I wish I did, having been cheated by them more than once. _Ph._ I had Occasion lately to go a pretty long Journey, and I was in great Haste; I went to one that you would have said was none of the worst of 'em, and there was some small Matter of Friendship between us. I told him I had an urgent Business to do, and had Occasion for a strong able Gelding; desiring, that if he would ever be my Friend in any Thing, he would be so now. He promised me, that he would use me as kindly as if I were his own dear Brother. _Aul._ It may be he would have cheated his Brother. _Ph._ He leads me into the Stable, and bids me chuse which I would out of them all. At last I pitch'd upon one that I lik'd better than the rest. He commends my Judgment, protesting that a great many Persons had had a Mind to that Horse; but he resolved to keep him rather for a singular Friend, than sell him to a Stranger. I agreed with him as to the Price, paid him down his Money, got upon the Horse's Back. Upon the first setting out, my Steed falls a prancing; you would have said he was a Horse of Mettle; he was plump, and in good Case: But, by that Time I had rid him an Hour and a half, I perceiv'd he was downright tir'd, nor could I by spurring him, get him any further. I had heard that such Jades had been kept for Cheats, that you would take by their Looks to be very good Horses; but were worth nothing for Service. I says to myself presently, I am caught. But when I come Home again, I will shew him Trick for Trick. _Aul._ But what did you do in this Case, being a Horseman without a Horse? _Ph._ I did what I was oblig'd to do. I turn'd into the next Village, and there I set my Horse up privately, with an Acquaintance, and hired another, and prosecuted my Journey; and when I came back, I return'd my hired Horse, and finding my own in very good Case, and thoroughly rested, I mounted his Back, and rid back to the Horse-Courser, desiring him to set him up for a few Days, till I called for him again. He ask'd me how well he carry'd me; I swore by all that was good, that I never bestrid a better Nag in my Life, that he flew rather than walk'd, nor ever tir'd the least in the World in all so long a Journey, nor was a Hair the leaner for it. I having made him believe that these Things were true, he thought with himself, he had been mistaken in this Horse; and therefore, before I went away, he ask'd me if I would sell the Horse. I refus'd at first; because if I should have Occasion to go such another Journey, I should not easily get the Fellow of him; but however, I valued nothing so much, but I would sell it, if I could have a good Price for it, altho' any Body had a Mind to buy myself. _Aul._ This was fighting a Man with his own Weapons. _Ph._ In short, he would not let me go away, before I had set a Price upon him. I rated him at a great Deal more than he cost me. Being gone, I got an Acquaintance to act for me, and gave him Instructions how to behave himself: He goes to the House, and calls for the Horse-Courser, telling him, that he had Occasion for a very good, and a very hardy Nag. The Horse-Courser shews him a great many Horses, still commending the worst most of all; but says not a Word of that Horse he had sold me, verily believing he was such as I had represented him. My Friend presently ask'd whether that was not to be sold; for I had given him a Description of the Horse, and the Place where he stood. The Horse-Courser at first made no Answer, but commended the rest very highly. The Gentleman lik'd the other Horses pretty well; but always treated about that very Horse: At last thinks the Horse-Courser with himself, I have certainly been out in my Judgment as to this Horse, if this Stranger could presently pick this Horse out of so many. He insisting upon it, He may be sold, says he; but it may be, you'll be frighted at the Price. The Price, says he, is a Case of no great Importance, if the Goodness of the Thing be answerable: Tell me the Price. He told him something more than I had set him at to him, getting the Overplus to himself. At last the Price was agreed on, and a good large Earnest was given, a Ducat of Gold to bind the Bargain. The Purchaser gives the Hostler a Groat, orders him to give his Horse some Corn, and he would come by and by, and fetch him. As soon as ever I heard the Bargain was made so firmly, that it could not be undone again, I go immediately, booted and spurr'd to the Horse-Courser, and being out of Breath, calls for my Horse. He comes and asks what I wanted: Says I, get my Horse ready presently, for I must be gone this Moment, upon an extraordinary Affair: But, says he, you bid me keep the Horse a few Days: That's true, said I, but this Business has happened unexpectedly, and it is the King's Business, and it will admit of no Delay. Says he, take your Choice, which you will of all my Horses; you cannot have your own. I ask'd him, why so? Because, says he, he is sold. Then I pretended to be in a great Passion; God forbid, says I; as this Journey has happen'd, I would not sell him, if any Man would offer me four Times his Price. I fell to wrangling, and cry out, I am ruin'd: At Length he grew a little warm too: What Occasion is there for all this Contention: You set a Price upon your Horse, and I have sold him; if I pay you your Money, you have nothing more to do to me; we have Laws in this City, and you can't compel me to produce the Horse. When I had clamoured a good While, that he would either produce the Horse, or the Man that bought him: He at last pays me down the Money in a Passion. I had bought him for fifteen Guineas, I set him to him at twenty six, and he had valued him at thirty two, and so computed with himself he had better make that Profit of him, than restore the Horse. I go away, as if I was vex'd in my Mind, and scarcely pacified, tho' the Money was paid me: He desires me not to take it amiss, he would make me Amends some other Way: So I bit the Biter: He has a Horse not worth a Groat; he expected that he that had given him the Earnest, should come and pay him the Money; but no Body came, nor ever will come. _Aul._ But in the mean Time, did he never expostulate the Matter with you? _Ph._ With what Face or Colour could he do that? I have met him over and over since, and he complain'd of the Unfairness of the Buyer: But I often reason'd the Matter with him, and told him, he deserv'd to be so serv'd, who by his hasty Sale of him, had depriv'd me of my Horse. This was a Fraud so well plac'd, in my Opinion, that I could not find in my Heart to confess it as a Fault. _Aul._ If I had done such a Thing, I should have been so far from confessing it as a Fault, that I should have requir'd a Statue for it. _Ph._ I can't tell whether you speak as you think or no; but you set me agog however, to be paying more of these Fellows in their own Coin. _The BEGGARS DIALOGUE._ The ARGUMENT. _The Beggars Dialogue paints out the cheating, crafty Tricks of Beggars, who make a Shew of being full of Sores, and make a Profession of Palmistry, and other Arts by which they impose upon many Persons. Nothing is more like Kingship, than the Life of a Beggar._ IRIDES, MISOPONUS. _Ir._ What new Sort of Bird is this I see flying here? I know the Face, but the Cloaths don't suit it. If I'm not quite mistaken, this is _Misoponus_. I'll venture to speak to him, as ragged as I am. God save you, _Misoponus_. _Mis._ Hold your Tongue, I say. _Ir._ What's the Matter, mayn't a Body salute you? _Mis._ Not by that Name. _Ir._ Why, what has happen'd to you? Are you not the same Man that you was? What, have you changed your Name with your Cloaths? _Mis._ No, but I have taken up my old Name again. _Ir._ Who was you then? _Mis._ _Apitius_. _Ir._ Never be asham'd of your old Acquaintance, if any Thing of a better Fortune has happen'd to you. It is not long since you belong'd to our Order. _Mis._ Prithee, come hither, and I'll tell you the whole Story. I am not asham'd of your Order; but I am asham'd of the Order that I was first of myself. _Ir._ What Order do you mean? That of the _Franciscans_? _Mis._ No, by no Means, my good Friend; but the Order of the Spendthrifts. _Ir._ In Truth, you have a great many Companions of that Order. _Mis._ I had a good Fortune, I spent lavishly, and when I began to be in Want, no Body knew _Apitius_. I ran away for Shame, and betook myself to your College: I lik'd that better than digging. _Ir._ Very wisely done; but how comes your Body to be in so good Case of late? For as to your Change of Cloaths, I don't so much wonder at that. _Mis._ Why so? _Ir._ Because the Goddess _Laverna_ makes many rich on a sudden. _Mis._ What! do you think I got an Estate by Thieving then? _Ir._ Nay, perhaps more idly, by Rapine. _Mis._ No, I swear by your Goddess _Penia_, neither by Thieving, nor by Rapine. But first I'll satisfy you as to the State of my Body, which seems to you to be the most admirable. _Ir._ For when you were with us, you were all over full of Sores. _Mis._ But I have since made Use of a very friendly Physician. _Ir._ Who? _Mis._ No other Person but myself, unless you think any Body is more friendly to me, than I am to myself. _Ir._ But I never knew you understood Physick before. _Mis._ Why all that Dress was nothing but a Cheat I had daub'd on with Paints, Frankincense, Brimstone, Rosin, Birdlime, and Clouts dipp'd in Blood; and what I put on, when I pleas'd I took off again. _Ir._ O Impostor! Nothing appear'd more miserable than you were. You might have acted the Part of Job in a Tragedy. _Mis._ My Necessity made me do it, though Fortune sometimes is apt to change the Skin too. _Ir._ Well then, tell me of your Fortune. Have you found a Treasure? _Mis._ No; but I have found out a Way of getting Money that's a little better than yours. _Ir._ What could you get Money out of, that had no Stock? _Mis._ _An Artist will live any where._ _Ir._ I understand you now, you mean the Art of picking Pockets. _Mis._ Not so hard upon me, I pray; I mean the Art of Chymistry. _Ir._ Why 'tis scarce above a Fortnight, since you went away from us, and have you in that Time learn'd an Art, that others can hardly learn in many Years? _Mis._ But I have got a shorter Way. _Ir._ Prithee, what Way? _Mis._ When I had gotten almost four Guineas by your Art, I happened, as good Luck would have it, to fall into the Company of an old Companion of mine, who had manag'd his Matters in the World no better than I had done. We went to drink together; he began, as the common Custom is, to tell of his Adventures. I made a Bargain with him to pay his Reckoning, upon Condition that he should faithfully teach me his Art. He taught it me very honestly, and now 'tis my Livelihood. _Ir._ Mayn't a Body learn it? _Mis._ I'll teach it you for nothing, for old Acquaintance Sake. You know, that there are every where a great many that are very fond of this Art. _Ir._ I have heard so, and I believe it is true. _Mis._ I take all Opportunities of insinuating myself into their Acquaintance, and talk big of my Art, and where-ever I find an hungry Sea-Cob, I throw him out a Bait. _Ir._ How do you do that? _Mis._ I caution him by all Means, not rashly to trust Men of that Profession, for that they are most of them Cheats, that by their _hocus pocus_ Tricks, pick the Pockets of those that are not cautious. _Ir._ That Prologue is not fit for your Business. _Mis._ Nay, I add this further, that I would not have them believe me myself, unless they saw the Matter plainly with their own Eyes, and felt it with their Hands. _Ir._ You speak of a wonderful Confidence you have in your Art. _Mis._ I bid them be present all the While the Metamorphosis is under the Operation, and to look on very attentively, and that they may have the less Reason to doubt, to perform the whole Operation with their own Hands, while I stand at a Distance, and don't so much as put my Finger to it. I put them to refine the melted Matter themselves, or carry it to the Refiners to be done; I tell them beforehand, how much Silver or Gold it will afford: And in the last Place, I bid them carry the melted Mass to several Goldsmiths, to have it try'd by the Touchstone. They find the exact Weight that I told them; they find it to be the finest Gold or Silver, it is all one to me which it is, except that the Experiment in Silver is the less chargeable to me. _Ir._ But has your Art no Cheat in it? _Mis._ It is a mere Cheat all over. _Ir._ I can't see where the Cheat lies. _Mis._ I'll make you see it presently. I first make a Bargain for my Reward, but I won't be paid before I have given a Proof of the Thing itself: I give them a little Powder, as though the whole Business was effected by the Virtue of that; but I never tell them how to make it, except they purchase it at a very great Price. And I make them take an Oath, that for six Months they shall not discover the Secret to any Body living. _Ir._ But I han't heard the Cheat yet. _Mis._ The whole Mystery lies in one Coal, that I have prepared for this Purpose. I make a Coal hollow, and into it I pour melted Silver, to the Quantity I tell them before-Hand will be produc'd. And after the Powder is put in, I set the Pot in such a Manner, that it is cover'd all over, above, beneath, and Sides, with Coals, and I persuade them, that the Art consists in that; among those Coals that are laid at Top, I put in one that has the Silver or Gold in it, that being melted by the Heat of the Fire, falls down among the other Metal, which melts, as suppose Tin or Brass, and upon the Separation, it is found and taken out. _Ir._ A ready Way; but, how do you manage the Fallacy, when another does it all with his own Hands? _Mis._ When he has done every Thing, according to my Direction, before the Crucible is stirr'd, I come and look about, to see if nothing has been omitted, and then I say, that there seems to want a Coal or two at the Top, and pretending to take one out of the Coal-Heap, I privately lay on one of my own, or have laid it there ready before-Hand, which I can take, and no Body know any Thing of the Matter. _Ir._ But when they try to do this without you, and it does not succeed, what Excuse have you to make? _Mis._ I'm safe enough when I have got my Money. I pretend one Thing or other, either that the Crucible was crack'd, or the Coals naught, or the Fire not well tempered. And in the last Place, one Part of the Mystery of my Profession is, never to stay long in the same Place. _Ir._ And is there so much Profit in this Art as to maintain you? _Mis._ Yes, and nobly too: And I would have you, for the future, if you are wise, leave off that wretched Trade of Begging, and follow ours. _Ir._ Nay, I should rather chuse to bring you back to our Trade. _Mis._ What, that I should voluntarily return again to that I have escap'd from, and forsake that which I have found profitable? _Ir._ This Profession of ours has this Property in it, that it grows pleasant by Custom. And thence it is, that tho' many have fallen off from the Order of St. _Francis_ or St. _Benedict_, did you ever know any that had been long in our Order, quit it? For you could scarce taste the Sweetness of Beggary in so few Months as you follow'd it. _Mis._ That little Taste I had of it taught me, that it was the most wretched Life in Nature. _Ir._ Why does no Body quit it then? _Mis._ Perhaps, because they are naturally wretched. _Ir._ I would not change this Wretchedness, for the Fortune of a King. For there is nothing more like a King, than the Life of a Beggar. _Mis._ What strange Story do I hear? Is nothing more like Snow than a Coal? _Ir._ Wherein consists the greatest Happiness of Kings? _Mis._ Because in that they can do what they please. _Ir._ As for that Liberty, than which nothing is sweeter, we have more of it than any King upon Earth; and I don't doubt, but there are many Kings that envy us Beggars. Let there be War or Peace we live secure, we are not press'd for Soldiers, nor put upon Parish-Offices, nor taxed. When the People are loaded with Taxes, there's no Scrutiny into our Way of Living. If we commit any Thing that is illegal, who will sue a Beggar? If we beat a Man, he will be asham'd to fight with a Beggar? Kings can't live at Ease neither in War or in Peace, and the greater they are, the greater are their Fears. The common People are afraid to offend us, out of a certain Sort of Reverence, as being consecrated to God. _Mis._ But then, how nasty are ye in your Rags and Kennels? _Ir._ What do they signify to real Happiness. Those Things you speak of are out of a Man. We owe our Happiness to these Rags. _Mis._ But I am afraid a good Part of your Happiness will fail you in a short Time. _Ir._ How so? _Mis._ Because I have heard a Talk in the Cities, that there will be a Law, that Mendicants shan't be allow'd to stroll about at their Pleasure, but every City shall maintain its own Poor; and that they that are able shall be made to work. _Ir._ What Reason have they for this? _Mis._ Because they find great Rogueries committed under Pretence of Begging, and that there are great Inconveniencies arise to the Publick from your Order. _Ir._ Ay, I have heard these Stones Time after Time, and they'll bring it about when the Devil's blind. _Mis._ Perhaps sooner than you'd have it. _The FABULOUS FEAST._ The ARGUMENT. _The fabulous Feast contains various Stories and pleasant Tales._ Maccus _puts a Trick upon a Shoe-maker. A Fruiterer is put upon about her Figs. A very clever Cheat of a Priest, in relation to Money._ Lewis _the Eleventh, King of_ France, _eats some of a Country-Man's Turnips, and gives him 1000 Crowns for an extraordinary large one that he made a Present of to him. A certain Man takes a Louse off of the King's Garment, and the King gives him 40 Crowns for it. The Courtiers are trick'd. One asks for an Office, or some publick Employment. To deny a Kindness presently, is to bestow a Benefit._ Maximilian _was very merciful to his Debtors. An old Priest Cheats an Usurer._ Anthony _salutes one upon letting a Fart, saying the Backside was the cleanest Part of the Body._ POLYMYTHUS, GELASINUS, EUTRAPELUS, ASTÆUS, PHILYTHLUS, PHILOGELOS, EUGLOTTUS, LEROCHARES, ADOLESCHES, LEVINUS. _Pol._ As it is unfitting for a well order'd City to be without Laws and without a Governor; so neither ought a Feast to be without Orders and a President. _Ge._ If I may speak for the rest, I like it very well. _Po._ Soho, Sirrah! bring hither the Dice, the Matter shall be determin'd by their Votes; he shall be our President that _Jupiter_ shall favour. O brave! _Eutrapelus_ has it, the fittest Man that could be chosen, if we had every individual Man of us thrown. There is an usual Proverb, that has more Truth in't than good Latin, _Novus Rex nova Lex, New Lords new Laws_. Therefore, King, make thou Laws. _Eut._ That this may be a merry and happy Banquet, in the first Place I command, that no Man tell a Story but what is a ridiculous one. He that shall have no Story to tell, shall pay a Groat, to be spent in Wine; and Stories invented extempore shall be allow'd as legitimate, provided Regard be had to Probability and Decency. If no Body shall want a Story, let those two that tell, the one the pleasantest, and the other the dullest, pay for Wine. Let the Master of the Feast be at no Charge for Wine, but only for the Provisions of the Feast. If any Difference about this Matter shall happen, let _Gelasinus_ be Judge. If you agree to these Conditions, let 'em be ratified. He that won't observe the Orders, let him be gone, but with Liberty to come again to a Collation the next Day. _Ge._ We give our Votes for the Passing the Bill our King has brought in. But who must tell the first Story? _Eut._ Who should, but the Master of the Feast? _As._ But, Mr. King, may I have the liberty to speak three Words? _Eut._ What, do you take the Feast to be an unlucky one? _As._ The Lawyers deny that to be Law that is not just. _Eut._ I grant it. _As._ Your Law makes the best and worst Stories equal. _Eut._ Where Diversion is the Thing aim'd at, there he deserves as much Commendation who tells the worst, as he that tells the best Story, because it affords as much Merriment; as amongst Songsters none are admir'd but they that sing very well, or they that sing very ill. Do not more laugh to hear the Cuckoo than to hear the Nightingal? In this Case Mediocrity is not Praise-worthy. _As._ But pray, why must they be punish'd, that carry off the Prize? _Eut._ Lest their too great Felicity should expose them to Envy, if they should carry away the Prize, and go Shot-free too. _As._ By _Bacchus, Minos_ himself never made a juster Law. _Phily._ Do you make no Order as to the Method of Drinking? _Eut._ Having consider'd the Matter, I will follow the Example of _Agesilaus_ King of the _Lacedæmonians_. _Phily._ What did he do? _Eut._ Upon a certain Time, he being by Lot chosen Master of the Feast, when the Marshal of the Hall ask'd him, how much Wine he should set before every Man; If, says he, you have a great Deal of Wine, let every Man have as much as he calls for, but if you're scarce of Wine, give every Man equally alike. _Phily._ What did the _Lacedæmonian_ mean by that? _Eut._ He did this, that it might neither be a drunken Feast, nor a querulous one. _Phily._ Why so? _Eut._ Because some like to drink plentifully, and some sparingly, and some drink no Wine at all; such an one _Romulus_ is said to have been. For if no Body has any Wine but what he asks for, in the first Place no Body is compell'd to drink, and there is no Want to them that love to drink more plentifully. And so it comes to pass that no Body is melancholy at the Table. And again, if of a less quantity of Wine every one has an equal Portion, they that drink moderately have enough; nor can any Body complain in an Equality, and they that would have drank more largely, are contentedly temperate. _Eut._ If you like it, this is the Example I would imitate, for I would have this Feast to be a fabulous, but not a drunken one. _Phily._ But what did _Romulus_ drink then? _Eut._ The same that Dogs drink. _Phily._ Was not that unbeseeming a King? _Eut._ No more than it is unseemly for a King to draw the same Air that Dogs do, unless there is this Difference, that a King does not drink the very same Water that a Dog drank, but a Dog draws in the very same Air that the King breath'd out; and on the contrary, the King draws in the very same Air that the Dog breath'd out. It would have been much more to _Alexander_'s, Glory, if he had drank with the Dogs. For there is nothing worse for a King, who has the Care of so many thousand Persons, than Drunkenness. But the Apothegm that _Romulus_ very wittily made Use of, shews plainly that he was no Wine-Drinker. For when a certain Person, taking Notice of his abstaining from Wine, said to him, that Wine would be very cheap, if all Men drank as he did; nay, says he, in my Opinion it would be very dear, if all Men drank it as I drink; for I drink as much as I please. _Ge._ I wish our _John Botzemus_, the Canon of _Constance_, was here; he'd look like another _Romulus_ to us: For he is as abstemious, as he is reported to have been; but nevertheless, he is a good-humoured, facetious Companion. _Po._ But come on, if you can, I won't say _drink and blow_, which _Plautus_ says is a hard Matter to do, but if you can eat and hear at one and the same Time, which is a very easy Matter, I'll begin the Exercise of telling Stories, and auspiciously. If the Story be not a pleasant one, remember 'tis a _Dutch_ one. I suppose some of you have heard of the Name of _Maccus_? _Ge._ Yes, he has not been dead long. _Po._ He coming once to the City of _Leiden_, and being a Stranger there, had a Mind to make himself taken Notice of for an arch Trick (for that was his Humour); he goes into a Shoemaker's Shop, and salutes him. The Shoemaker, desirous to sell his Ware, asks him what he would buy: _Maccus_ setting his Eyes upon a Pair of Boots that hung up there, the Shoemaker ask'd him if he'd buy any Boots; _Maccus_ assenting to it, he looks out a Pair that would fit him, and when he had found 'em brings 'em out very readily, and, as the usual Way is, draws 'em on. _Maccus_ being very well fitted with a Pair of Boots, How well, says he, would a Pair of double soal'd Shoes agree with these Boots? The Shoemaker asks him, if he would have a Pair of Shoes too. He assents, a Pair is look'd out presently and put on. _Maccus_ commends the Boots, commends the Shoes. The Shoemaker glad in his Mind to hear him talk so, seconds him as he commended 'em, hoping to get a better Price, since the Customer lik'd his Goods so well. And by this Time they were grown a little familiar; then says _Maccus_, Tell me upon your Word, whether it never was your Hap, when you had fitted a Man with Boots and Shoes, as you have me, to have him go away without paying for 'em? No, never in all my Life, says he. But, says _Maccus_, if such a Thing should happen to you, what would you do in the Case? Why, quoth the Shoemaker, I'd run after him. Then says _Maccus_, but are you in Jest or in Earnest? In Earnest, says the other, and I'd do it in Earnest too. Says _Maccus_, I'll try whether you will or no. See I run for the Shoes, and you're to follow me, and out he runs in a Minute; the Shoemaker follows him immediately as fast as ever he could run, crying out, Stop Thief, stop Thief; this Noise brings the People out of their Houses: _Maccus_ laughing, hinders them from laying Hold of him by this Device, Don't stop me, says he, we are running a Race for a Wager of a Pot of Ale; and so they all stood still and look'd on, thinking the Shoemaker had craftily made that Out-cry that he might have the Opportunity to get before him. At last the Shoemaker, being tir'd with running, gives out, and goes sweating, puffing and blowing Home again: So _Maccus_ got the Prize. _Ge._ _Maccus_ indeed escap'd the Shoemaker, but did not escape the Thief. _Po._ Why so? _Ge._ Because he carried the Thief along with him. _Po._ Perhaps he might not have Money at that Time, but paid for 'em afterwards. _Ge._ He might have indicted him for a Robbery. _Po._ That was attempted afterwards, but now the Magistrates knew _Maccus_. _Ge._ What did _Maccus_ say for himself? _Po._ Do you ask what he said for himself, in so good a Cause as this? The Plaintiff was in more Danger than the Defendant. _Ge._ How so? _Po._ Because he arrested him in an Action of Defamation, and prosecuted him upon the Statute of _Rheims_ which says, that he that charges a Man with what he can't prove, shall suffer the Penalty, which the Defendant was to suffer if he had been convicted. He deny'd that he had meddled with another Man's Goods without his Leave, but that he put 'em upon him, and that there was no Mention made of any Thing of a Price; but that he challeng'd the Shoemaker to run for a Wager, and that he accepted the Challenge, and that he had no Reason to complain because he had out-run him. _Ge._ This Action was pretty much like that of the Shadow of the Ass. Well, but what then? _Po._ When they had had laughing enough at the Matter, one of the Judges invites _Maccus_ to Supper, and paid the Shoemaker his Money. Just such another Thing happen'd at _Daventerv_, when I was a Boy. It was at a Time when 'tis the Fishmonger's Fair, and the Butchers Time to be starv'd. A certain Man stood at a Fruiterer's Stall, or Oporopolist's, if you'd have it in _Greek_. The Woman was a very fat Woman, and he star'd very hard upon the Ware she had to sell. She, according as the Custom is, invites him to have what he had a Mind to; and perceiving he set his Eyes upon some Figs, Would you please to have Figs, says she? they are very fine ones. He gives her a Nod. She asks him how many Pound, Would you have five Pound says she? He nods again; she turns him five Pound into his Apron. While she is laying by her Scales, he walks off, not in any great haste, but very gravely. When she comes out to take her Money, her Chap was gone; she follows him, making more Noise than Haste after him. He, taking no Notice, goes on; at last a great many getting together at the Woman's Out-cry, he stands still, pleads his Cause in the midst of the Multitude: there was very good Sport, he denies that he bought any Figs of her, but that she gave 'em him freely; if she had a Mind to have a Trial for it, he would put in an Appearance. _Ge._ Well, I'll tell you a Story not much unlike yours, nor perhaps not much inferior to it, saving it has not so celebrated an Author as _Maccus_. _Pythagoras_ divided the Market into three Sorts of Persons, those that went thither to sell, those that went thither to buy; both these Sorts were a careful Sort of People, and therefore unhappy: others came to see what was there to be sold, and what was done; these only were the happy People, because being free from Care, they took their Pleasure freely. And this he said was the Manner that a Philosopher convers'd in this World, as they do in a Market. But there is a fourth Kind of Persons that walk about in our Markets, who neither buy nor sell, nor are idle Spectators of what others do, but lie upon the Catch to steal what they can. And of this last Sort there are some that are wonderful dextrous. You would swear they were born under a lucky Planet. Our Entertainer gave us a Tale with an Epilogue, I'll give you one with a Prologue to it. Now you shall hear what happen'd lately at _Antwerp_. An old Priest had receiv'd there a pretty handsome Sum of Money, but it was in Silver. A Sharper has his Eye upon him; he goes to the Priest, who had put his Money in a large Bag in his Cassock, where it boug'd out; he salutes him very civilly, and tells him that he had Orders to buy a Surplice, which is the chief Vestment us'd in performing Divine Service, for the Priest of his Parish; he intreats him to lend him a little Assistance in this Matter, and to go with him to those that sell such Attire, that he might fit one according to his Size, because he was much about the same Stature with the Parson of his Parish. This being but a small Kindness, the old Priest promises to do it very readily. They go to a certain Shop, a Surplice is shew'd 'em, the old Priest puts it on, the Seller says, it fits him as exactly as if made for him; the Sharper viewing the old Priest before and behind, likes the Surplice very well, but only found Fault that it was too short before. The Seller, lest he should lose his Customer, says, that was not the Fault of the Surplice, but that the Bag of Money that stuck out, made it look shorter there. To be short, the old Priest lays his Bag down; then they view it over again, and while the old Priest stands with his Back towards it, the Sharper catches it up, and runs away as fast as he could: The Priest runs after him in the Surplice as he was, and the Shop-Keeper after the Priest; the old Priest cries out, Stop Thief; the Salesman cries out, Stop the Priest; the Sharper cries out, Stop the mad Priest; and they took him to be mad, when they saw him run in the open Street in such a Dress: so one hindring the other, the Sharper gets clear off. _Eut._ Hanging is too good for such a Rogue. _Ge._ It is so, if he be not hang'd already. _Eut._ I would not have him hang'd only, but all those that encourage such monstrous Rogues to the Damage of the State. _Ge._ They don't encourage 'em for nothing; there's a fellow Feeling between 'em from the lowest to the highest. _Eut._ Well, but let us return to our Stories again. _Ast._ It comes to your Turn now, if it be meet to oblige a King to keep his Turn. _Eut._ I won't need to be forc'd to keep my Turn, I'll keep it voluntarily; I should be a Tyrant and not a King, if I refus'd to comply with those Laws I prescribe to others. _Ast._ But some Folks say, that a Prince is above the Law. _Eut._ That saying is not altogether false, if by Prince you mean that great Prince who was call'd _Cæsar_; and then, if by being above the Law, you mean, that whereas others do in some Measure keep the Laws by Constraint, he of his own Inclination more exactly observes them. For a good Prince is that to the Body Politick, which the Mind is to the Body Natural. What Need was there to have said a good Prince, when a bad Prince is no Prince? As an unclean Spirit that possesses the human Body, is not the Soul of that Body. But to return to my Story; and I think that as I am King, it becomes me to tell a kingly Story. _Lewis_ King of _France_ the Eleventh of that Name, when his Affairs were disturb'd at Home, took a Journey to _Burgundy_; and there upon the Occasion of a Hunting, contracted a Familiarity with one _Conon_, a Country Farmer, but a plain downright honest Man; and Kings delight in the Conversation of such Men. The King, when he went a hunting, us'd often to go to his House; and as great Princes do sometimes delight themselves with mean Matters, he us'd to be mightily pleas'd in eating of his Turnips. Not long after, _Lewis_ having settled his Affairs, obtain'd the Government of the _French_ Nation; _Conon_'s Wife puts him upon remembring the King of his old Entertainment at their House, bids him go to him, and make him a Present of some rare Turnips. _Conon_ at first would not hear of it, saying he should lose his Labour, for that Princes took no Notice of such small Matters; but his Wife over-persuaded him. _Conon_ picks out a Parcel of choice Turnips, and gets ready for his Journey; but growing hungry by the Way, eats 'em all up but one very large one. When _Conon_ had got Admission into the Hall that the King was to pass thro', the King knew him presently, and sent for him; and he with a great Deal of Chearfulness offers his Present, and the King with as much Readiness of Mind receives it, commanding one that stood near him to lay it up very carefully among his greatest Rarities. He commands _Conon_ to dine with him, and after Dinner thanks him; and _Conon_ being desirous to go back into his own Country, the King orders him 1000 Crowns for his Turnip. When the Report of this Thing, as it is common, was spread abroad thro' the King's Houshold-Servants, one of the Courtiers presents the King with a very fine Horse; the King knowing that it was his Liberality to _Conon_ that had put him upon this, he hoping to make a great Advantage by it, he accepted it with a great Deal of Pleasure, and calling a Council of his Nobles, began to debate, with what Present he should make a Recompence for so fine and valuable a Horse. In the mean Time the Giver of the Horse began to be flushed with Expectation, thinking thus with himself; If he made such a Recompence for a poor Turnip offer'd him by a Country Farmer, how much more magnificently will he requite the Present of so fine a Horse by a Courtier? When one answer'd one Thing, and another another to the King that was consulting about it, as a Matter of great Moment, and the designing Courtier had been for a long Time kept in Fools Paradise; At Length, says the King, it's just now come into my Mind what Return to make him, and calling one of his Noblemen to him, whispers him in the Ear, bids him go fetch him what he found in his Bedchamber (telling him the Place where it lay) choicely wrap'd up in Silk; the Turnip is brought, and the King with his own Hand gives it the Courtier, wrap'd up as it was, saying that he thought he had richly requited the Present of the Horse by so choice a Rarity, as had cost him 1000 Crowns. The Courtier going away, and taking off the Covering, did not find a _Coal instead of a Treasure_, according to the old Proverb, but a dry Turnip: and so the Biter was bitten, and soundly laugh'd at by every Body into the Bargain. _As._ But, Mr. King, if you'll please to permit me, who am but a Peasant, to speak of regal Matters, I'll tell you something that comes into my Mind, by hearing your Story, concerning the same _Lewis_. For as one Link of a Chain draws on another, so one Story draws on another. A certain Servant seeing a Louse crawling upon the King's Coat, falling upon his Knees and lifting up his Hand, gives Notice, that he had a Mind to do some Sort of Service; _Lewis_ offering himself to him, he takes off the Louse, and threw it away privately; the King asks him what it was; he seem'd ashamed to tell him, but the King urging him, he confess'd it was a Louse: That's a very good Sign, says he, for it shews me to be a Man, because this Sort of Vermin particularly haunts Mankind, especially while they are young; and order'd him a Present of 40 Crowns for his good Service. Some Time after, another Person (who had seen how well he came off that had perform'd so small a Service) not considering that there is a great Difference between doing a Thing sincerely, and doing it craftily, approached the King with the like Gesture; and he offering himself to him, he made a Shew of taking something off his Garment, which he presently threw away. But when the King was urgent upon him, seeming unwilling to tell what it was, mimicking Abundance of Modesty, he at last told him it was a Flea; the King perceiving the Fraud, says to him, What do you make a Dog of me? and orders him to be taken away, and instead of 40 Crowns orders him 40 Stripes. _Phily._ I hear it's no good jesting with Kings; for as Lions will sometimes stand still to be stroaked, are Lions again when they please, and kill their Play-Fellow; just so Princes play with Men. But I'll tell you a Story not much unlike yours: not to go off from _Lewis_, who us'd to take a Pleasure in tricking Tricksters. He had receiv'd a Present of ten thousand Crowns from some Place, and as often as the Courtiers know the King has gotten any fresh Money, all the Officers are presently upon the Hunt to catch some Part of it; this _Lewis_ knew very well, this Money being pour'd out upon a Table, he, to raise all their Expectations, thus bespeaks them; What say you, am not I a very rich King? Where shall I bestow all this Money? It was presented to me, and I think it is meet I should make Presents of it again. Where are all my Friends, to whom I am indebted for their good Services? Now let 'em come before this Money's gone. At that Word a great many came running; every Body hop'd to get some of it. The King taking Notice of one that look'd very wishfully upon it, and as if he would devour it with his Eyes, turning to him, says, Well, Friend, what have you to say? He inform'd the King, that he had for a long Time very faithfully kept the King's Hawks, and been at a great Expence thereby. One told him one Thing, another another, every one setting out his Service to the best Advantage, and ever and anon lying into the Bargain. The King heard 'em all very patiently, and approv'd of what they said. This Consultation held a long Time, that he might teaze them the more, by keeping them betwixt Hope and Despair. Among the rest stood the Great Chancellor, for the King had order'd him to be sent for too; he, being wiser than the rest, says never a Word of his own good Services, but was only a Spectator of the Comedy. At Length the King turning toward him, says, Well, what says my Chancellor to the Matter? He is the only Man that asks nothing, and says never a Word of his good Services. I, says the Chancellor, have receiv'd more already from your royal Bounty, than I have deserved. I am so far from craving more, that I am not desirous of any Thing so much, as to behave myself worthy of the royal Bounty I have receiv'd. Then, says the King, you are the only Man of 'em all that does not want Money. Says the Chancellor, I must thank your Bounty that I don't. Then he turns to the others, and says, I am the most magnificent Prince in the World, that have such a wealthy Chancellor. This more inflam'd all their Expectations, that the Money would be distributed among them, since he desired none of it. When the King had play'd upon 'em after this Manner a pretty While, he made the Chancellor take it all up, and carry it Home; then turning to the rest, who now look'd a little dull upon it, says he, You must stay till the next Opportunity. _Philog._ Perhaps that I'm going to tell you, will not seem so entertaining. However, I entreat you that you would not be suspicious, that I use any Deceit or Collusion, or think that I have a Design to desire to be excus'd. One came to the same _Lewis_, with a Petition that he would bestow upon him an Office that happen'd to be vacant in the Town where he liv'd. The King hearing the Petition read, answers immediately, you shall not have it; by that Means putting him out of any future Expectation; the Petitioner immediately returns the King Thanks, and goes his Way. The King observing the Man's Countenance, perceiv'd he was no Blockhead, and thinking perhaps he might have misunderstood what he said, bids him be call'd back again. He came back; then says the King; Did you understand what I said to you? I did understand you, quoth he: Why, what did I say? That I should not have it, said he. What did you thank me for then? Why, says he, I have some Business to do at Home, and therefore it would have been a Trouble to me to have here danc'd Attendance after a doubtful Hope; now, I look upon it a Benefit that you have denied me the Office quickly, and so I count myself to have gain'd whatsoever I should have lost by Attendance upon it, and gone without it at last. By this Answer, the King seeing the Man to be no Blockhead, having ask'd him a few Questions, says he, You shall have what you ask'd for, that you may thank me twice, and turning to his Officers; Let, says he, Letters patent be made out for this Man without Delay, that he may not be detain'd here to his Detriment. _Eugl._ I could tell you a Story of _Lewis_, but I had rather tell one of our _Maximilian_, who as he was far from hiding his Money in the Ground, so he was very generous to those that had spent their Estates, if they were nobly descended. He being minded to assist a young Gentleman, that had fallen under these Circumstances, sent him on an Embassy to demand an hundred thousand Florins of a certain City, but I know not upon what Account. But this was the Condition of it, that if he by his Dexterity could make any more of it, it should be his own. The Embassador extorted fifty thousand from 'em, and gave _Caesar_ thirty of 'em. _Caesar_ being glad to receive more than he expected, dismisses the Man without asking any Questions. In the mean Time the Treasurer and Receivers smelt the Matter, that he had receiv'd more than he had paid in; they importune _Caesar_ to send for him; he being sent for, comes immediately: Says _Maximilian_, I hear you have receiv'd fifty thousand. He confess'd it. But you have paid in but thirty thousand. He confess'd that too. Says he, You must give an Account of it. He promis'd he would do it, and went away. But again he doing nothing in it, the Officers pressing the Matter, he was call'd again; then says _Caesar_ to him, A little While ago, you were order'd to make up the Account. Says he, I remember it, and am ready to do it. _Caesar_, imagining that he had not settled it, let him go again; but he thus eluding the Matter, the Officers insisted more pressingly upon it, crying out, it was a great Affront to play upon _Caesar_ at this Rate. They persuaded the King to send for him, and make him balance the Account before them. _Caesar_ agrees to it, he is sent for, comes immediately, and does not refuse to do any Thing. Then says _Caesar_, Did not you promise to balance the Account? Yes, said he. Well, says he, you must do it here; here are some to take your Account; it must be put off no longer. The Officers sat by, with Books ready for the Purpose. The young Man being come to this Pinch, replies very smartly; Most invincible _Caesar_, I don't refuse to give an Account, but am not very well skilled in these Sort of Accounts, never having given any; but these that sit here are very ready at such Accounts. If I do but once see how they make up such Accounts, I can very easily imitate them. I entreat you to command them but to shew me an Example, and they shall see I am very docible. _Caesar_ perceived what he meant, but they, upon whom it was spoken did not, and smiling, answered him, you say true, and what you demand is nothing but what is reasonable: And so dismissed the young Man. For he intimated that they used to bring in such Accounts to _Caesar_ as he had, that is, to keep a good Part of the Money to themselves. _Le._ Now 'tis Time that our Story-telling should pass, as they say, from better to worse, from Kings to _Anthony_, a Priest of _Louvain_, who was much in Favour with _Philip_ surnamed _the Good_: there are a great many Things told of this Man, both merrily said, and wittily done, but most of them are something slovenly. For he used to season many of his Jokes with a Sort of Perfume that has not a handsome Sound, but a worse Scent. I'll pick out one of the cleanest of 'em. He had given an Invitation to one or two merry Fellows that he had met with by Chance as he went along; and when he comes Home, he finds a cold Kitchen; nor had he any Money in his Pocket, which was no new Thing with him; here was but little Time for Consultation. Away he goes, and says nothing, but going into the Kitchen of a certain Usurer (that was an intimate Acquaintance, by Reason of frequent Dealings with him) when the Maid was gone out of the Way, he makes off with one of the Brass Pots, with the Meat ready boiled, under his Coat, carries it Home, gives it his Cook-Maid, and bids her pour out the Meat and Broth into another Earthen Pot, and rub the Usurer's Brass one till it was bright. Having done this, he sends his Boy to the Pawn-Broker to borrow two Groats upon it, but charges him to take a Note, that should be a Testimonial, that such a Pot had been sent him. The Pawn-Broker not knowing the Pot being scour'd so bright, takes the Pawn, gives him a Note, and lays him down the Money, and with that Money the Boy buys Wine, and so he provided an Entertainment for him. By and by, when the Pawn-Broker's Dinner was going to be taken up, the Pot was missing. He scolds at the Cook-Maid; she being put hardly to it, affirmed no Body had been in the Kitchen all that Day but _Anthony_. It seem'd an ill Thing to suspect a Priest. But however at last they went to him, search'd the House for the Pot, but no Pot was found. But in short, they charg'd him Home with the Pot, because he was the only Person who had been in the Kitchen till the Pot was missing. He confess'd that he had borrow'd a Pot, but that he had sent it Home again to him from whom he had it. But they denying it stiffly, and high Words arising, _Anthony_ calling some Witnesses, Look you, quoth he, how dangerous a Thing it is to have to do with Men now-a-Days, without a Note under their Hands: I should have been in Danger of being indicted for Felony, if I had not had the Pawn-Broker's own Hand to shew. And with that he produces the Note of his Hand. They perceiv'd the Trick, and it made good Sport all the Country over, that the Pawn-Broker had lent Money upon his own Porridge-Pot. Men are commonly very well pleas'd with such Tricks, when they are put upon such as they have no good Opinion of, especially such as use to impose upon other Persons. _Adol._ In Truth, by mentioning the Name of _Anthony_, you have laid open an Ocean of merry Stories; but I'll tell but one, and a short one too, that was told me very lately. A certain Company of jolly Fellows, who are for a short Life, and a merry one, as they call it, were making merry together; among the rest there was one _Anthony_, and another Person, a noted Fellow for an arch Trick, a second _Anthony_. And as 'tis the Custom of Philosophers, when they meet together to propound some Questions or other about the Things of Nature, so in this Company a Question was propos'd; Which was the most honourable Part of a Man? One said the Eyes, another said the Heart, another said the Brain, and others said other Parts; and every one alleg'd some Reason for his Assertion. _Anthony_ was bid to speak his Mind, and he gave his Opinion that the Mouth was the most honourable, and gave some Reason for't, I can't tell what. Upon that the other Person, that he might thwart _Anthony_, made Answer that that was the most honourable Part that we sit upon; and when every one cry'd out, that was absurd, he back'd it with this Reason, that he was commonly accounted the most honourable that was first seated, and that this Honour was commonly done to the Part that he spoke of. They applauded his Opinion, and laughed heartily at it. The Man was mightily pleas'd with his Wit, and _Anthony_ seem'd to have the worst on't. _Anthony_ turn'd the Matter off very well, saying that he had given the prime Honour to the Mouth for no other Reason, but because he knew that the other Man would name some other Part, if it were but out of Envy to thwart him: A few Days after, when they were both invited again to an Entertainment, _Anthony_ going in, finds his Antagonist, talking with some other Persons, while Supper was getting ready, and turning his Arse towards him, lets a great Fart full in his Face. He being in a violent Passion, says to him, Out, you saucy Fellow, where was you drag'd up? _At Hogs Norton_? Then says _Anthony_, What, are you angry? If I had saluted you with my Mouth, you would have answer'd me again; but now I salute you with the most honourable Part of the Body, in your own Opinion, you call me saucy Fellow. And so _Anthony_ regain'd the Reputation he had lost. We have every one told our Tale. Now, Mr. Judge, it is your Business to pass Sentence. _Ge._ Well, I'll do that, but not before every Man has taken off his Glass, and I'll lead the Way. But _talk of the Devil and he'll appear_. _Po._ _Levinus Panagathus_ brings no bad Luck along with him. _Lev._ Well, pray what Diversion has there been among this merry Company? _Po._ What should we do but tell merry Stories till you come? _Lev._ Well then, I'm come to conclude the Meeting. I desire you all to come to Morrow to eat a Theological Dinner with me. _Ge._ You tell us of a melancholy Entertainment indeed. _Lev._ That will appear. If you don't confess that it has been more entertaining than your fabulous one, I'll be content to be amerc'd a Supper; there is nothing more diverting than to treat of Trifles in a serious Manner. _The LYING-IN WOMAN._ The ARGUMENT. _A Lying-in Woman had rather have a Boy than a Girl. Custom is a grievous Tyrant. A Woman argues that she is as good as her Husband. The Dignity of 'em both are compared. The Tongue is a Woman's best Weapon. The Mother herself ought to be the Nurse. She is not the Mother that bears the Child, but she that nurses it. The very Beasts themselves suckle their own Young. The Nurse's Milk corrupts oftentimes both the Genius and natural Constitution of the Infant. The Souls of some Persons inhabit Bodies ill organized._ Cato _judges it the principal Part of Felicity, to dwell happily. She is scarce half a Mother that refuses to bring up what she has brought forth. A Mother is so called from [Greek: mê têrein]. And in short, besides the Knowledge of a great many Things in Nature, here are many that occur in Morality._ EUTRAPELUS, FABULLA. _Eu._ Honest _Fabulla_, I am glad to see you; I wish you well. _Fa._ I wish you well heartily, Eutrapelus. But what's the Matter more than ordinary, that you that come so seldom to see me, are come now? None of our Family has seen you this three Years. _Eu._ I'll tell you, as I chanced to go by the Door, I saw the Knocker (called a Crow) tied up in a white Cloth, I wondered what was the Matter. _Fa._ What! are you such a Stranger in this Country, as not to know that that's a Token of a lying-in Woman in that House? _Eu._ Why, pray is it not a strange Sight to see a white Crow? But without jesting, I did know very well what was the Matter; but I could not dream, that you that are scarce sixteen, should learn so early the difficult Art of getting Children, which some can scarce attain before they are thirty. _Fa._ As you are _Eutrapelus_ by Name, so you are by Nature. _Eu._ And so are you too. For _Fabulla_ never wants a Fable. And while I was in a Quandary, _Polygamus_ came by just in the Nick of Time. _Fa._ What he that lately buried his tenth Wife? _Eu._ The very same, but I believe you don't know that he goes a courting as hotly as if he had lived all his Days a Batchelor. I ask'd him what was the Matter; he told me that in this House the Body of a Woman had been dissever'd. For what great Crime, says I? says he, If what is commonly reported be true, the Mistress of this House attempted to circumcise her Husband, and with that he went away laughing. _Fa._ He's a mere Wag. _Eu._ I presently ran in a-Doors to congratulate your safe Delivery. _Fa._ Congratulate my safe Delivery if you will, _Eutrapelus_, you may congratulate my happy Delivery, when you shall see him that I have brought forth give a Proof of himself to be an honest Man. _Eu._ Indeed, my _Fabulla_ you talk very piously and rationally. _Fa._ Nay, I am no Body's _Fabulla_ but _Petronius's._ _Eu._ Indeed you bear Children for _Petronius_ alone, but you don't live for him alone, I believe. But however, I congratulate you upon this, that you have got a Boy. _Fa._ But why do you think it better to have a Boy than a Girl? _Eu._ Nay, but rather you _Petronius's Fabulla_ (for now I am afraid to call you mine) ought to tell me what Reason you Women have to wish for Boys rather than Girls? _Fa._ I don't know what other People's Minds are; at this Time I am glad I have a Boy, because so it pleased God. If it had pleased him best I should have had a Girl, it would have pleased me best too. _Eu._ Do you think God has nothing else to do but be a Midwife to Women in Labour? _Fa._ Pray, _Eutrapelus_, what should he do else, but preserve by Propagation, what he has founded by Creation? Eu, What should he do else good Dame? If he were not God, he'd never be able to do what he has to do. _Christiernus_ King of _Denmark_, a religious Favourer of the Gospel, is in Exile. _Francis_, King of _France_, is a Sojourner in _Spain._ I can't tell how well he may bear it, but I am sure he is a Man that deserves better Fortune. _Charles_ labours with might and main to inlarge the Territories of his Monarchy. And _Ferdinand_ is mightily taken up about his Affairs in _Germany._ And the Courtiers every where are almost Famished with Hunger after Money. The very Farmers raise dangerous Commotions, nor are deterred from their Attempts by so many Slaughters of Men, that have been made already. The People are for setting up an Anarchy, and the Church goes to Ruin with dangerous Factions. Christ's seamless Coat is rent asunder on all Sides. God's Vineyard is spoiled by more Boars than one. The Authority of the Clergy with their Tythes, the Dignity of Divines, the Majesty of Monks is in Danger: Confession nods, Vows stagger, the Pope's Constitutions go to decay, the Eucharist is call'd in Question, and Antichrist is expected every Day, and the whole World seems to be in Travail to bring forth I know not what Mischief. In the mean Time the _Turks_ over-run all where-e'er they come, and are ready to invade us and lay all waste, if they succeed in what they are about; and do you ask what God has else to do? I think he should rather see to secure his own Kingdom in Time. _Fa._ Perhaps that which Men make the greatest Account of, seems to God of no Moment. But however, if you will, let us let God alone in this Discourse of ours. What is your Reason to think it is happier to bear a Boy than a Girl? It is the Part of a pious Person to think that best which God, who without Controversy is the best Judge, has given. _Eu._ And if God should give you but a Cup made of Crystal, would you not give him Thanks for it? _Fa._ Yes, I would. _Eu._ But what if he should give you one of common Glass, would you give him the like Thanks? But I'm afraid instead of comforting you, by this Discourse, I should make you uneasy. _Fa._ Nay, a _Fabulla_ can be in no Danger of being hurt by a Fable. I have lain in now almost a Month, and I am strong enough for a Match at Wrestling. _Eu._ Why don't you get out of your Bed then? _Fa._ The King has forbid me. _Eu._ What King? _Fa._ Nay a Tyrant rather. _Eu._ What Tyrant prithee? _Fa._ I'll tell you in one Syllable. Custom (_Mos_). _Eu._ Alas! How many Things does that Tyrant exact beyond the Bounds of Equity? But let us go on to talk of our Crystal and our common Glass. _Fa._ I believe you judge, that a Male is naturally more excellent and strong than a Female. _Eu._ I believe they are. _Fa._ That is Mens Opinion. But are Men any Thing longer-liv'd than Women? Are they free from Distempers? _Eu._ No, but in the general they are stronger. _Fa._ But then they themselves are excell'd by Camels in Strength. _Eu._ But besides, the Male was created first. _Fa._ So was _Adam_ before _Christ_. Artists use to be most exquisite in their later Performances. _Eu._ But God put the Woman under Subjection to the Man. _Fa._ It does not follow of Consequence, that he is the better because he commands, he subjects her as a Wife, and not purely as a Woman; and besides that he so puts the Wife under Subjection, that tho' they have each of them Power over the other, he will have the Woman to be obedient to the Man, not as to the more excellent, but to the more fierce Person. Tell me, _Eutrapelus_, which is the weaker Person, he that yields to another, or he that is yielded to? _Eu._ I'll grant you that, if you will explain to me, what Paul meant when he wrote to the _Corinthians_, that _Christ was the Head of the Man, and Man the Head of the Woman;_ and again, when he said, that _a Man was the Image and Glory of God, and a Woman the Glory of the Man._ _Fa._ Well! I'll resolve you that, if you answer me this Question, Whether or no, it is given to Men alone, to be the Members of Christ? _Eu._ God forbid, that is given to all Men and Women too by Faith. _Fa._ How comes it about then, that when there is but one Head, it should not be common to all the Members? And besides that, since God made Man in his own Image, whether did he express this Image in the Shape of his Body, or the Endowments of his Mind? _Eu._ In the Endowments of his Mind. _Fa._ Well, and I pray what have Men in these more excellent than we have? In both Sexes, there are many Drunkennesses, Brawls, Fightings, Murders, Wars, Rapines, and Adulteries. _Eu._ But we Men alone fight for our Country. _Fa._ And you Men often desert from your Colours, and run away like Cowards; and it is not always for the Sake of your Country, that you leave your Wives and Children, but for the Sake of a little nasty Pay; and, worse than Fencers at the Bear-Garden, you deliver up your Bodies to a slavish Necessity of being killed, or yourselves killing others. And now after all your Boasting of your warlike Prowess, there is none of you all, but if you had once experienced what it is to bring a Child into the World, would rather be placed ten Times in the Front of a Battle, than undergo once what we must so often. An Army does not always fight, and when it does, the whole Army is not always engaged. Such as you are set in the main Body, others are kept for Bodies of Reserve, and some are safely posted in the Rear; and lastly, many save themselves by surrendring, and some by running away. We are obliged to encounter Death, Hand to Hand. _Eu._ I have heard these Stories before now; but the Question is, Whether they are true or not? _Fa._ Too true. _Eu._ Well then, _Fabulla_, would you have me persuade your Husband never to touch you more? For if so, you'll be secure from that Danger. _Fa._ In Truth, there is nothing in the World I am more desirious of, if you were able to effect it. _Eu._ If I do persuade him to it, what shall I have for my Pains? _Fa._ I'll present you with half a Score dry'd Neats-Tongues. _Eu._ I had rather have them than the Tongues of ten Nightingales. Well, I don't dislike the Condition, but we won't make the Bargain obligatory, before we have agreed on the Articles. _Fa._ And if you please, you may add any other Article. _Eu._ That shall be according as you are in the Mind after your Month is up. _Fa._ But why not according as I am in the Mind now? _Eu._ Why, I'll tell you, because I am afraid you will not be in the same Mind then; and so you would have double Wages to pay, and I double Work to do, of persuading and dissuading him. _Fa._ Well, let it be as you will then. But come on, shew me why the Man is better than the Woman. _Eu._ I perceive you have a Mind to engage with me in Discourse, but I think it more adviseable to yield to you at this Time. At another Time I'll attack you when I have furnished myself with Arguments; but not without a Second neither. For where the Tongue is the Weapon that decides the Quarrel; seven Men are scarce able to Deal with one Woman. _Fa._ Indeed the Tongue is a Woman's Weapon; but you Men are not without it neither. _Eu._ Perhaps so, but where is your little Boy? _Fa._ In the next Room. _Eu._ What is he doing there, cooking the Pot? _Fa._ You Trifler, he's with his Nurse. _Eu._ What Nurse do you talk of? Has he any Nurse but his Mother? _Fa._ Why not? It is the Fashion. _Eu._ You quote the worst Author in the World, _Fabulla_, the Fashion; 'tis the Fashion to do amiss, to game, to whore, to cheat, to be drunk, and to play the Rake. _Fa._ My Friends would have it so; they were of Opinion I ought to favour myself, being young. _Eu._ But if Nature gives Strength to conceive, it doubtless gives Strength to give Suck too. _Fa._ That may be. _Eu._ Prithee tell me, don't you think Mother is a very pretty Name? _Fa._ Yes, I do. _Eu._ And if such a Thing were possible, would you endure it, that another Woman should be call'd the Mother of your Child? _Fa._ By no Means. _Eu._ Why then do you voluntarily make another Woman more than half the Mother of what you have brought into the World? _Fa._ O fy! _Eutrapelus_, I don't divide my Son in two, I am intirely his Mother, and no Body in the World else. _Eu._ Nay, _Fabulla_, in this Case Nature herself blames you to your Face. Why is the Earth call'd the Mother of all Things? Is it because she produces only? Nay, much rather, because she nourishes those Things she produces: that which is produced by Water, is fed by Water. There is not a living Creature or a Plant that grows on the Face of the Earth, that the Earth does not feed with its own Moisture. Nor is there any living Creature that does not feed its own Offspring. Owls, Lions, and Vipers, feed their own Young, and does Womankind make her Offspring Offcasts? Pray, what can be more cruel than they are, that turn their Offspring out of Doors for Laziness, not to supply them with Food? _Fa._ That you talk of is abominable. _Eu._ But Womankind don't abominate it. Is it not a Sort of turning out of Doors, to commit a tender little Infant, yet reaking of the Mother, breathing the very Air of the Mother, imploring the Mother's Aid and Help with its Voice, which they say will affect even a brute Creature, to a Woman perhaps that is neither wholsome in Body, nor honest, who has more Regard to a little Wages, than to your Child? _Fa._ But they have made Choice of a wholsome, sound Woman. _Eu._ Of this the Doctors are better Judges than yourself. But put the Case, she is as healthful as yourself, and more too; do you think there is no Difference between your little tender Infant's sucking its natural and familiar Milk, and being cherish'd with Warmth it has been accustomed to, and its being forc'd to accustom itself to those of a Stranger? Wheat being sown in a strange Soil, degenerates into Oats or small Wheat. A Vine being transplanted into another Hill, changes its Nature. A Plant when it is pluck'd from its Parent Earth, withers, and as it were dies away, and does in a Manner the same when it is transplanted from its Native Earth. _Fa._ Nay, but they say, Plants that have been transplanted and grafted, lose their wild Nature, and produce better Fruit. _Eu._ But not as soon as ever they peep out of the Ground, good Madam. There will come a Time, by the Grace of God, when you will send away your young Son from you out of Doors, to be accomplish'd with Learning and undergo harsh Discipline, and which indeed is rather the Province of the Father than of the Mother. But now its tender Age calls for Indulgence. And besides, whereas the Food, according as it is, contributes much to the Health and Strength of the Body, so more especially it is essential to take Care, with what Milk that little, tender, soft Body be season'd. For _Horace's_ Saying takes Place here. _Quo semel est imbuta recens servabit odorem Testa diu. What is bred in the Bone, will never out of the Flesh._ _Fa._ I don't so much concern myself as to his Body, so his Mind be but as I would have it. _Eu._ That indeed is piously spoken, but not philosophically. _Fa._ Why not? _Eu._ Why do you when you shred Herbs, complain your Knife is blunt, and order it to be whetted? Why do you reject a blunt pointed Needle, when that does not deprive you of your Art? _Fa._ Art is not wanting, but an unfit Instrument hinders the exerting it. _Eu._ Why do they that have much Occasion to use their Eyes, avoid Darnel and Onions? _Fa._ Because they hurt the Sight. _Eu._ Is it not the Mind that sees? _Fa._ It is, for those that are dead see nothing. But what can a Carpenter do with an Ax whose Edge is spoiled? _Eu._ Then you do acknowledge the Body is the Organ of the Mind? _Fa._ That's plain. _Eu._ And you grant that in a vitiated Body the Mind either cannot act at all, or if it does, it is with Inconvenience? _Fa._ Very likely. _Eu._ Well, I find I have an intelligent Person to deal with; suppose the Soul of a Man was to pass into the Body of a Cock, would it make the same Sound it does now? _Fa._ No to be sure. _Eu._ What would hinder? _Fa._ Because it would want Lips, Teeth, and a Tongue, like to that of a Man. It has neither the Epiglottis, nor the three Cartilages, that are moved by three Muscles, to which Nerves are joined that come from the Brain; nor has it Jaws and Teeth like a Man's. _Eu._ What if it should go into the Body of a Swine? _Fa._ Then it would grunt like a Swine. _Eu._ What if it should pass into the Body of a Camel? _Fa._ It would make a Noise like a Camel. _Eu._ What if it should pass into the Body of an Ass, as it happened to _Apuleius_? _Fa._ Then I think it would bray as an Ass does. _Eu._ Indeed he is a Proof of this, who when he had a Mind to call after _Caesar_, having contracted his Lips as much as he possibly could, scarce pronounced O, but could by no Means pronounce _Caesar._ The same Person, when having heard a Story, and that he might not forget it, would have written it, reprehended himself for his foolish Thought, when he beheld his solid Hoofs. _Fa._ And he had Cause enough. _Eu._ Then it follows that the Soul does not see well thro' purblind Eyes. The Ears hear not clearly when stopped with Filth. The Brain smells not so well when oppressed with Phlegm. And a Member feels not so much when it is benumbed. The Tongue tastes less, when vitiated with ill Humours. _Fa._ These Things can't be denied. _Eu._ And for no other Cause, but because the Organ is vitiated. _Fa._ I believe the same. _Eu._ Nor will you deny, I suppose, that sometimes it is vitiated by Food and Drink. _Fa._ I'll grant that too, but what signifies that to the Goodness of the Mind? _Eu._ As much as Darnel does to a clear Eye-Sight. _Fa._ Because it vitiates the Organ. _Eu._ Well answer'd. But solve me this Difficulty: Why is it that one understands quicker than another, and has a better Memory; why is one more prone to Anger than another; or is more moderate in his Resentment? _Fa._ It proceeds from the Disposition of the Mind. _Eu._ That won't do. Whence comes it that one who was formerly of a very ready Wit, and a retentive Memory, becomes afterwards stupid and forgetful, either by a Blow or a Fall, by Sickness or old Age? _Fa._ Now you seem to play the Sophister with me. _Eu._ Then do you play the Sophistress with me. _Fa._ I suppose you would infer, that as the Mind sees and hears by the Eyes and Ears, so by some Organs it also understands, remembers, loves, hates, is provoked and appeas'd? _Eu._ Right. _Fa._ But pray what are those Organs, and where are they situated? _Eu._ As to the Eyes, you see where they are. _Fa._ I know well enough where the Ears, and the Nose, and the Palate are; and that the Body is all over sensible of the Touch, unless when some Member is seized with a Numbness. _Eu._ When a Foot is cut off, yet the Mind understands. _Fa._ It does so, and when a Hand is cut off too. _Eu._ A Person that receives a violent Blow on the Temples, or hinder-Part of his Head, falls down like one that is dead, and is unsensible. _Fa._ I have sometimes seen that myself. _Eu._ Hence it is to be collected, that the Organs of the Will, Understanding, and Memory, are placed within the Skull, being not so crass as the Eyes and Ears, and yet are material, in as much as the most subtile Spirits that we have in the Body are corporeal. _Fa._ And can they be vitiated with Meat and Drink too? _Eu._ Yes. _Fa._ The Brain is a great Way off from the Stomach. _Eu._ And so is the Funnel of a Chimney from the Fire-Hearth, yet if you sit upon it you'll feel the Smoke. _Fa._ I shan't try that Experiment. _Eu._ Well, if you won't believe me, ask the Storks. And so it is of Moment what Spirits, and what Vapours ascend from the Stomach to the Brain, and the Organs of the Mind. For if these are crude or cold they stay in the Stomach. _Fa._ Pshaw! You're describing to me an Alembick, in which we distil Simple-Waters. _Eu._ You don't guess much amiss. For the Liver, to which the Gall adheres, is the Fire-Place; the Stomach, the Pan; the Scull, the Top of the Still; and if you please, you may call the Nose the Pipe of it. And from this Flux or Reflux of Humours, almost all Manner of Diseases proceed, according as a different Humour falls down after a different Manner, sometimes into the Eyes, sometimes into the Stomach, sometimes into the Shoulders, and sometimes into the Neck, and elsewhere. And that you may understand me the better, why have those that guzzle a great Deal of Wine bad Memories? Why are those that feed upon light Food, not of so heavy a Disposition? Why does Coriander help the Memory? Why does Hellebore purge the Memory? Why does a great Expletion cause an Epilepsy, which at once brings a Stupor upon all the Senses, as in a profound Sleep? In the last Place, as violent Thirst or Want weaken the Strength of Wit or Memory in Boys, so Food eaten immoderately makes Boys dull-headed, if we believe _Aristotle_; in that the Fire of the Mind is extinguish'd by the heaping on too much Matter. _Fa._ Why then, is the Mind corporeal, so as to be affected with corporeal Things? _Eu._ Indeed the Nature itself of the rational Soul is not corrupted; but the Power and Action of it are impeded by the Organs being vitiated, as the Art of an Artist will stand him in no Stead, if he has not Instruments. _Fa._ Of what Bulk, and in what Form is the Mind? _Eu._ You ask a ridiculous Question, what Bulk and Form the Mind is of, when you have allow'd it to be incorporeal. _Fa._ I mean the Body that is felt. _Eu._ Nay, those Bodies that are not to be felt are the most perfect Bodies, as God and the Angels. _Fa._ I have heard that God and Angels are Spirits, but we feel the Spirit. _Eu._ The Holy Scriptures condescend to those low Expressions, because of the Dullness of Men, to signify a Mind pure from all Commerce of sensible Things. _Fa._ Then what is the Difference between an Angel and a Mind? _Eu._ The same that is between a Snail and a Cockle, or, if you like the Comparison better, a Tortoise. _Fa._ Then the Body is rather the Habitation of the Mind than the Instrument of it. _Eu._ There is no Absurdity in calling an adjunct Instrument an Habitation. Philosophers are divided in their Opinions about this. Some call the Body the Garment of the Soul, some the House, some the Instrument, and some the Harmony; call it by which of these you will, it will follow that the Actions of the Mind are impeded by the Affections of the Body. In the first Place, if the Body is to the Mind that which a Garment is to the Body, the Garment of _Hercules_ informs us how much a Garment contributes to the Health of the Body, not to take any Notice of Colours of Hairs or of Skins. But as to that Question, whether one and the same Soul is capable of wearing out many Bodies, it shall be left to _Pythagoras_. _Fa._ If, according to _Pythagoras_, we could make Use of Change of Bodies, as we do of Apparel, it would be convenient to take a fat Body, and of a thick Texture, in Winter Time, and a thinner and lighter Body in Summer Time. _Eu._ But I am of the Opinion, that if we wore out our Body at last as we do our Cloaths; it would not be convenient; for so having worn out many Bodies, the Soul itself would grow old and die. _Fa._ It would not truly. _Eu._ As the Sort of Garment that is worn hath an Influence on the Health and Agility of the Body, so it is of great Moment what Body the Soul wears. _Fa._ If indeed the Body is the Garment of the Soul, I see a great many that are dress'd after a very different Manner. _Eu._ Right, and yet some Part of this Matter is in our own Power, how conveniently our Souls shall be cloathed. _Fa._ Come, have done with the Garment, and say something concerning the Habitation. _Eu._ But, _Fabulla_, that what I say to you mayn't be thought a Fiction, the _Lord Jesus_ calls his Body a _Temple_, and the Apostle _Peter_ calls his a _Tabernacle_. And there have been some that have call'd the Body the Sepulchre of the Soul, supposing it was call'd [Greek: sôma], as tho' it were [Greek: sêma]. Some call it the Prison of the Mind, and some the Fortress or fortify'd Castle. The Minds of Persons that are pure in every Part, dwell in the Temple. They whose Minds are not taken up with the Love of corporeal Things, dwell in a Tent, and are ready to come forth as soon as the Commander calls. The Soul of those that are wholly blinded with Vice and Filthiness, so that they never breathe after the Air of Gospel Liberty, lies in a Sepulchre. But they that wrestle hard with their Vices, and can't yet be able to do what they would do, their Soul dwells in a Prison, whence they frequently cry out to the Deliverer of all, _Bring my Soul out of Prison, that I may praise thy Name, O Lord._ They who fight strenuously with Satan, watching and guarding against his Snares, who goes about as _a roaring Lion, seeking whom he may devour;_ their Soul is as it were in a Garison, out of which they must not go without the General's Leave. _Fa._ If the Body be the Habitation or House of the Soul, I see a great many whose Mind is very illy seated. _Eu._ It is so, that is to say, in Houses where it rains in, that are dark, exposed to all Winds, that are smoaky, damp, decay'd, and ruinous, and such as are filthy and infected: and yet _Cato_ accounts it the principal Happiness of a Man, to dwell handsomly. _Fa._ It were tolerable, if there was any passing out of one House into another. _Eu._ There's no going out before the Landlord calls out. But tho' we can't go out, yet we may by our Art and Care make the Habitation of our Mind commodious; as in a House the Windows are changed, the Floor taken up, the Walls are either plaistered or wainscotted, and the Situation may be purified with Fire or Perfume. But this is a very hard Matter, in an old Body that is near its Ruin. But it is of great Advantage to the Body of a Child, to take the Care of it that ought to be taken presently after its Birth. _Fa._ You would have Mothers and Nurses to be Doctors. _Eu._ So indeed I would, as to the Choice and moderate Use of Meat, Drink, Motion, Sleep, Baths, Unctions, Frictions, and Cloathings. How many are there, think you, who are expos'd to grievous Diseases and Vices, as Epilepsies, Leanness, Weakness, Deafness, broken Backs, crooked Limbs, a weak Brain, disturbed Minds, and for no other Reason than that their Nurses have not taken a due Care of them? _Fa._ I wonder you are not rather a _Franciscan_ than a Painter, who preach so finely. _Eu._ When you are a Nun of the Order of St. _Clare_, then I'll be a _Franciscan_, and preach to you. _Fa._ In Truth, I would fain know what the Soul is, about which we hear so much, and talk of so often, and no Body has seen. _Eu._ Nay, every Body sees it that has Eyes. _Fa._ I see Souls painted in the Shape of little Infants, but why do they put Wings to them as they do to Angels? _Eu._ Why, because, if we can give any Credit to the Fables of _Socrates_, their Wings were broken by their falling from Heaven. _Fa._ How then are they said to fly up to Heaven? _Eu._ Because Faith and Charity make their Wings grow again. He that was weary of this House of his Body, begg'd for these Wings, when he cry'd out, _Who will give me the Wings of a Dove, that I may fly away, and be at rest_. Nor has the Soul any other Wings, being incorporeal, nor any Form that can be beheld by the Eyes of the Body. But those Things that are perceiv'd by the Mind, are more certain. Do you believe the Being of God? _Fa._ Yes, I do. _Eu._ But nothing is more invisible than God. _Fa._ He is seen in the Works of Creation. _Eu._ In like Manner the Soul is seen in Action. If you would know how it acts in a living Body, consider a dead Body. When you see a Man Feel, See, Hear, Move, Understand, Remember and Reason, you see the Soul to be in him with more Certainty than you see this Tankard; for one Sense may be deceiv'd, but so many Proofs of the Senses cannot deceive you. _Fa._ Well then, if you can't shew me the Soul, paint it out to me, just as you would the King, whom I never did see. _Eu._ I have _Aristotle_'s Definition ready for you. _Fa._ What is it? for they say he was a very good Decypherer of every Thing. _Eu. The Soul is the Act of an Organical, Physical Body, having Life_ in Potentia. _Fa._ Why does he rather call it an _Act_ than a _Journey_ or _Way?_ _Eu._ Here's no Regard either to Coachmen or Horsemen, but a bare Definition of the Soul. And he calls the Form _Act_, the Nature of which is to _act_, when it is the Property of Matter to _suffer_. For all natural Motion of the Body proceeds from the Soul. And the Motion of the Body is various. _Fa._ I take that in; but why does he add _of an Organical_? _Eu._ Because the Soul does nothing but by the Help of Organs, that is, by the Instruments of the Body. _Fa._ Why does he say _Physical_? _Eu._ Because _Dædalus_ made such a Body to no Purpose; and therefore he adds, _having Life_ in Potentia. Form does not act upon every Thing; but upon a Body that is capable. _Fa._ What if an Angel should pass into the Body of a Man? _Eu._ He would act indeed, but not by the natural Organs, nor would he give Life to the Body if the Soul was absent from it. _Fa._ Have I had all the Account that is to be given of the Soul? _Eu._ You have _Aristotle_'s Account of it. _Fa._ Indeed I have heard he was a very famous Philosopher, and I am afraid that the College of Sages would prefer a Bill of Heresy against me, if I should say any Thing against him; but else all that he has said concerning the Soul of a Man, is as applicable to the Soul of an Ass or an Ox. _Eu._ Nay, that's true, or to a Beetle or a Snail. _Fa._ What Difference then is there between the Soul of an Ox, and that of a Man? _Eu._ They that say the Soul is nothing else but the Harmony of the Qualities of the Body, would confess that there was no great Difference; and that this Harmony being interrupted, the Souls of both of them do perish. The Soul of a Man and an Ox is not distinguished; but that of an Ox has less Knowledge than the Soul of a Man. And there are some Men to be seen that have less Understanding than an Ox. _Fa._ In Truth, they have the Mind of an Ox. _Eu._ This indeed concerns you, that according to the Quality of your Guittar, your Musick will be the sweeter. _Fa._ I own it. _Eu._ Nor is it of small Moment of what Wood, and in what Shape your Guittar is made. _Fa._ Very true. _Eu._ Nor are Fiddle-Strings made of the Guts of every Animal. _Fa._ So I have heard. _Eu._ They grow slack or tight by the Moisture and Driness of the circumambient Air, and will sometimes break. _Fa._ I have seen that more than once. _Eu._ On this Account you may do uncommon Service to your little Infant, that his Mind may have an Instrument well tempered, and not vitiated, nor relaxed by Sloth, nor squeaking with Wrath, nor hoarse with intemperate drinking. For Education and Diet oftentimes impress us with these Affections. _Fa._ I'll take your Counsel; but I want to hear how you can defend _Aristotle_. _Eu._ He indeed in general describes the Soul, Animal, Vegetative, and Sensitive. The Soul gives Life, but every Thing that has Life is not an Animal. For Trees live, grow old, and die; but they have no Sense; tho' some attribute to them a stupid Sort of Sense. In Things that adhere one to another, there is no Sense to be perceived, but it is found in a Sponge by those that pull it off. Hewers discover a Sense in Timber-Trees, if we may believe them: For they say, that if you strike the Trunk of a Tree that you design to hew down, with the Palm of your Hand, as Wood-Mongers use to do, it will be harder to cut that Tree down because it has contracted itself with Fear. But that which has Life and Feeling is an Animal. But nothing hinders that which does not feel, from being a Vegetable, as Mushrooms, Beets, and Coleworts. _Fa._ If they have a Sort of Life, a Sort of Sense, and Motion in their growing, what hinders but that they may be honoured with the Title of Animals? _Eu._ Why the Antients did not think fit to call them so, and we must not deviate from their Ordinances, nor does it signify much as to what we are upon. _Fa._ But I can't bear the Thoughts on't, that the Soul of a Beetle and of a Man should be the same. _Eu._ Good Madam, it is not the same, saving in some Respects; your Soul animates, vegetates, and renders your Body sensible; the Soul of the Beetle animates his Body: For that some Things act one Way, and some another, that the Soul of a Man acts differently from the Soul of a Beetle, partly proceeds from the Matter; a Beetle neither sings nor speaks, because it wants Organs fit for these Actions. _Fa._ Why then you say, that if the Soul of a Beetle should pass into the Body of a Man, it would act as the human Soul does. _Eu._ Nay, I say not, if it were an angelical Soul: And there is no Difference between an Angel and a human Soul, but that the Soul of a Man was formed to act a human Body compos'd of natural Organs; and as the Soul of a Beetle will move nothing but the Body of a Beetle, an Angel was not made to animate a Body, but to be capable to understand without bodily Organs. _Fa._ Can the Soul do the same Thing? _Eu._ It can indeed, when it is separated from the Body. _Fa._ Is it not at its own Disposal, while it is in the Body? _Eu._ No indeed, except something happen beside the common Course of Nature. _Fa._ In Truth, instead of one Soul you have given me a great many; an animal, a vegetative, a sensitive, an intelligent, a remembring, a willing, an angry, and desiring: One was enough for me. _Eu._ There are different Actions of the same Soul, and these have different Names. _Fa._ I don't well understand you. _Eu._ Well then, I'll make you understand me: You are a Wife in the Bed-Chamber, in your Work-Shop a Weaver of Hangings, in your Warehouse a Seller of them, in your Kitchen a Cook, among your Servants a Mistress, and among your Children a Mother; and yet you are all these in the same House. _Fa._ You philosophize very bluntly. Is then the Soul so in the Body as I am in my House? _Eu._ It is. _Fa._ But while I am weaving in my Work-Shop, I am not cooking in my Kitchen. _Eu._ Nor are you all Soul, but a Soul carrying about a Body, and the Body can't be in many Places at the same Time; but the Soul being a simple Form, is so in the whole Body, tho' it does not act the same in all Parts of the Body, nor after the same Manner, how differently affected soever they are: For it understands and remembers in the Brain, it is angry in the Heart, it lusts in the Liver, it hears with the Ears, sees with the Eyes, smells with the Nose, it tastes in the Palate and Tongue, and feels in all Parts of the Body which are adjoined to any nervous Part: But it does not feel in the Hair, nor the Ends of the Nails; neither do the Lungs feel of themselves, nor the Liver, nor perhaps the Milt neither. _Fa._ So that in certain Parts of the Body it only animates and vegetates. _Eu._ It should seem so. _Fa._ If one and the same Soul does all these Things in one and the same Man, it follows of Consequence, that the _Foetus_ in the Womb of the Mother, both feels and understands, as soon as it begins to grow; which is a Sign of Life, unless a Man in his Formation has more Souls than one, and afterwards the rest giving Place, one acts all. So that at first a Man is a Plant, then an Animal, and lastly a Man. _Eu._ Perhaps _Aristotle_ would not think what you say absurd: I think it is more probable, that the rational Soul is infus'd with the Life, and that like a little Fire that is buried as it were under too great a Quantity of green Wood, it cannot exert its Power. _Fa._ Why then is the Soul bound to the Body that it acts and moves? _Eu._ No otherwise than a Tortoise is bound or tied to the Shell that he carries about. _Fa._ He does move it indeed; but so at the same Time that he moves himself too, as a Pilot steers a Ship, turning it which Way he will, and is at the same Time mov'd with it. _Eu._ Ay, and as a Squirrel turns his Wheel-Cage about, and is himself carried about with it. _Fa._ And so the Soul affects the Body, and is affected by the Body. _Eu._ Yes indeed, as to its Operations. _Fa._ Why then, as to the Nature of it, the Soul of a Fool is equal to the Soul of _Solomon_. _Eu._ There's no Absurdity in that. _Fa._ And so the Angels are equal, in as much as they are without Matter, which, you say, is that which makes the Inequality. _Eu._ We have had Philosophy enough: Let Divines puzzle themselves about these Things; let us discourse of those Matters that were first mentioned. If you would be a compleat Mother, take Care of the Body of your little Infant, so that after the little Fire of the Mind has disengaged itself from the Vapours, it may have sound and fit Organs to make Use of. As often as you hear your Child crying, think this with yourself, he calls for this from me. When you look upon your Breasts, those two little Fountains, turgid, and of their own Accord streaming out a milky Juice, remember Nature puts you in Mind of your Duty: Or else, when your Infant shall begin to speak, and with his pretty Stammering shall call you _Mammy_, How can you hear it without blushing? when you have refus'd to let him have it, and turn'd him off to a hireling Nipple, as if you had committed him to a Goat or a Sheep. When he is able to speak, what if, instead of calling you Mother, he should call you Half-Mother? I suppose you would whip him: Altho' indeed she is scarce Half a Mother that refuses to feed what she has brought into the World. The nourishing of the tender Babe is the best Part of Geniture: For he is not only fed by the Milk, but with the Fragrancy of the Body of the Mother. He requires the same natural, familiar, accustomed Moisture, that he drew in when in her Body, and by which he received his Coalition. And I am of that Opinion, that the Genius of Children are vitiated by the Nature of the Milk they suck, as the Juices of the Earth change the Nature of those Plants and Fruits that it feeds. Do you think there is no Foundation in Reason for this Saying, _He suck'd in this ill Humour with the Nurse's Milk?_ Nor do I think the Greeks spoke without Reason, when they said _like Nurses_, when they would intimate that any one was starved at Nurse: For they put a little of what they chew into the Child's Mouth, but the greatest Part goes down their own Throats. And indeed she can hardly properly be said to bear a Child, that throws it away as soon as she has brought it forth; that is to miscarry, and the _Greek_ Etymology of [Greek: Mêtêr] from [Greek: mê têrein], _i.e._ from not looking after, seems very well to suit such Mothers. For it is a Sort of turning a little Infant out of Doors, to put it to a hireling Nurse, while it is yet warm from the Mother. _Fa._ I would come over to your Opinion, unless such a Woman were chosen, against whom there is nothing to be objected. _Eu._ Suppose it were of no Moment what Milk the little Infant suck'd, what Spittle it swallow'd with its chew'd Victuals; and you had such a Nurse, that I question whether there is such an one to be found; do you think there is any one in the World will go through all the Fatigue of Nursing as the Mother herself; the Bewrayings, the Sitting up a Nights, the Crying, the Sickness, and the diligent Care in looking after it, which can scarce be enough. If there can be one that loves like the Mother, then she will take Care like a Mother. And besides, this will be the Effect of it, that your Son won't love you so heartily, that native Affection being as it were divided between two Mothers; nor will you have the same Affection for your Son: So that when he is grown up, he will neither be so obedient to you, nor will you have the same Regard for him, perhaps perceiving in him the Disposition of his Nurse. The principal Step to Advancement in Learning, is the mutual Love between the Teacher and Scholar: So that if he does not lose any Thing of the Fragrancy of his native good Temper, you will with the greater Ease be able to instil into him the Precepts of a good Life. And a Mother can do much in this Matter, in that she has pliable Matter to work upon, that is easy to be carried any Way. _Fa._ I find it is not so easy a Thing to be a Mother, as it is generally looked upon to be. _Eu._ If you can't depend upon what I say, St. _Paul_, speaking very plainly of Women, says, _She shall be saved in Childbearing._ _Fa._ Are all the Women saved that bear Children? _Eu._ No, he adds, _if she continue in the Faith_. You have not performed the Duty of a Mother before you have first formed the little tender Body of your Son, and after that his Mind, equally soft, by a good Education. _Fa._ But it is not in the Power of the Mother that the Children should persevere in Piety. _Eu._ Perhaps it may not be; but a careful Admonition is of that Moment, that _Paul_ accounts it imputable to Mothers, if the Children degenerate from Piety. But in the last Place, if you do what is in your Power, God will add his Assistance to your Diligence. _Fa._ Indeed _Eutrapelus_, your Discourse has persuaded me, if you can but persuade my Parents and my Husband. _Eu._ Well, I'll take that upon me, if you will but lend your helping Hand. _Fa._ I promise you I will. _Eu._ But mayn't a Body see this little Boy? _Fa._ Yes, that you may and welcome. Do you hear, _Syrisca_, bid the Nurse bring the Child. _Eu._ 'Tis a very pretty Boy. It is a common Saying, there ought to be Grains of Allowance given to the first Essay: But you upon the first Trial have shewn the very highest Pitch of Art. _Fa._ Why, it is not a Piece of carved Work, that so much Art should be required. _Eu._ That's true; but it is a Piece of cast Work. Well, let that be how it will, it is well performed. I wish you could make as good Figures in the Hangings that you weave. _Fa._ But you on the Contrary paint better than you beget. _Eu._ It so seems meet to Nature, to act equally by all. How solicitous is Nature, that nothing should be lost! It has represented two Persons in one; here's the Nose and Eyes of the Father, the Forehead and Chin of the Mother Can you find in your Heart to entrust this dear Pledge to the Fidelity of a Stranger? I think those to be doubly cruel that can find in their Hearts so to do; because in doing so, they do not only do this to the Hazard of the Child; but also of themselves too; because in the Child, the spoiling of the Milk oftentimes brings dangerous Diseases, and so it comes about, that while Care is taken to preserve the Shape of one Body, the Lives of two Bodies are not regarded; and while they provide against old Age coming on too early, they throw themselves into a too early Death. What's the Boy's Name? _Fa. Cornelius_. _Eu._ That's the Name of his Grand-Father by the Father's Side. I wish he may imitate him in his unblemished Life and good Manners. _Fa._ We will do our Endeavour what in us lies. But, hark ye, _Eutrapelus_, here is one Thing I would earnestly entreat of you. _Eu._ I am entirely at your Service; command what you will, I will undertake it. _Fa._ Well then, I won't discharge you till you have finished the good Service that you have begun. _Eu._ What's that? _Fa._ First of all, to give me Instructions how I may manage my Infant, as to his Health, and when he is grown up, how I may form his Mind with pious Principles. _Eu._ That I will readily do another Time, according to my Ability; but that must be at our next Conversation: I will now go and prevail upon your Husband and Parents. _Fa._ I wish you may succeed. END OF VOL. I. 
21628	----	IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS AND POEMS: A SELECTION By WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR CONTENTS IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS Marcellus and Hannibal Queen Elizabeth and Cecil Epictetus and Seneca Peter the Great and Alexis Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn Joseph Scaliger and Montaigne Boccaccio and Petrarca Bossuet and the Duchess de Fontanges John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent Leofric and Godiva Essex and Spenser Lord Bacon and Richard Hooker Oliver Cromwell and Walter Noble Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney Southey and Porson The Abbé Delille and Walter Landor Diogenes and Plato Alfieri and Salomon the Florentine Jew Rousseau and Malesherbes Lucullus and Caesar Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa Dante and Beatrice Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth Tasso and Cornelia La Fontaine and de La Rochefoucault Lucian and Timotheus Bishop Shipley and Benjamin Franklin Southey and Landor The Emperor of China and Tsing-Ti Louis XVIII and Talleyrand Oliver Cromwell and Sir Oliver Cromwell The Count Gleichem: the Countess: their Children, and Zaida THE PENTAMERON First Day's Interview Third Day's Interview Fourth Day's Interview Fifth Day's Interview POEMS I. She I love (alas in vain!) II. Pleasure! why thus desert the heart III. Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives IV. Ianthe! you are call'd to cross the sea! V. The gates of fame and of the grave VI. Twenty years hence my eyes may grow VII. Here, ever since you went abroad VIII. Tell me not things past all belief IX. Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak X. Fiesole Idyl XI. Ah what avails the sceptred race XII. With rosy hand a little girl prest down VIII. Ternissa! you are fled! XIV. Various the roads of life; in one XV. Yes; I write verses now and then XVI. On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia XVII. Once, and once only, have I seen thy face XVIII. To Wordsworth XIX. To Charles Dickens XX. To Barry Cornwall XXI. To Robert Browning XXII. Age XXIII. Leaf after leaf drops off, flower after flower XXIV. Well I remember how you smiled XXV. I strove with none, for none was worth my strife XXVI. Death stands above me, whispering low XXVII. A Pastoral XXVIII. The Lover XXIX. The Poet who Sleeps XXX. Daniel Defoe XXXI. Idle Words XXXII. To the River Avon IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS MARCELLUS AND HANNIBAL _Hannibal._ Could a Numidian horseman ride no faster? Marcellus! oh! Marcellus! He moves not--he is dead. Did he not stir his fingers? Stand wide, soldiers--wide, forty paces; give him air; bring water; halt! Gather those broad leaves, and all the rest, growing under the brushwood; unbrace his armour. Loose the helmet first--his breast rises. I fancied his eyes were fixed on me--they have rolled back again. Who presumed to touch my shoulder? This horse? It was surely the horse of Marcellus! Let no man mount him. Ha! ha! the Romans, too, sink into luxury: here is gold about the charger. _Gaulish Chieftain._ Execrable thief! The golden chain of our king under a beast's grinders! The vengeance of the gods hath overtaken the impure---- _Hannibal._ We will talk about vengeance when we have entered Rome, and about purity among the priests, if they will hear us. Sound for the surgeon. That arrow may be extracted from the side, deep as it is. The conqueror of Syracuse lies before me. Send a vessel off to Carthage. Say Hannibal is at the gates of Rome. Marcellus, who stood alone between us, fallen. Brave man! I would rejoice and cannot. How awfully serene a countenance! Such as we hear are in the islands of the Blessed. And how glorious a form and stature! Such too was theirs! They also once lay thus upon the earth wet with their blood--few other enter there. And what plain armour! _Gaulish Chieftain._ My party slew him; indeed, I think I slew him myself. I claim the chain: it belongs to my king; the glory of Gaul requires it. Never will she endure to see another take it. _Hannibal._ My friend, the glory of Marcellus did not require him to wear it. When he suspended the arms of your brave king in the temple, he thought such a trinket unworthy of himself and of Jupiter. The shield he battered down, the breast-plate he pierced with his sword--these he showed to the people and to the gods; hardly his wife and little children saw this, ere his horse wore it. _Gaulish Chieftain._ Hear me; O Hannibal! _Hannibal._ What! when Marcellus lies before me? when his life may perhaps be recalled? when I may lead him in triumph to Carthage? when Italy, Sicily, Greece, Asia, wait to obey me? Content thee! I will give thee mine own bridle, worth ten such. _Gaulish Chieftain._ For myself? _Hannibal._ For thyself. _Gaulish Chieftain._ And these rubies and emeralds, and that scarlet----? _Hannibal._ Yes, yes. _Gaulish Chieftain._ O glorious Hannibal! unconquerable hero! O my happy country! to have such an ally and defender. I swear eternal gratitude--yes, gratitude, love, devotion, beyond eternity. _Hannibal._ In all treaties we fix the time: I could hardly ask a longer. Go back to thy station. I would see what the surgeon is about, and hear what he thinks. The life of Marcellus! the triumph of Hannibal! what else has the world in it? Only Rome and Carthage: these follow. _Marcellus._ I must die then? The gods be praised! The commander of a Roman army is no captive. _Hannibal._ [_To the Surgeon._] Could not he bear a sea voyage? Extract the arrow. _Surgeon._ He expires that moment. _Marcellus._ It pains me: extract it. _Hannibal._ Marcellus, I see no expression of pain on your countenance, and never will I consent to hasten the death of an enemy in my power. Since your recovery is hopeless, you say truly you are no captive. [_To the Surgeon._] Is there nothing, man, that can assuage the mortal pain? for, suppress the signs of it as he may, he must feel it. Is there nothing to alleviate and allay it? _Marcellus._ Hannibal, give me thy hand--thou hast found it and brought it me, compassion. [_To the Surgeon._] Go, friend; others want thy aid; several fell around me. _Hannibal._ Recommend to your country, O Marcellus, while time permits it, reconciliation and peace with me, informing the Senate of my superiority in force, and the impossibility of resistance. The tablet is ready: let me take off this ring--try to write, to sign it, at least. Oh, what satisfaction I feel at seeing you able to rest upon the elbow, and even to smile! _Marcellus._ Within an hour or less, with how severe a brow would Minos say to me, 'Marcellus, is this thy writing?' Rome loses one man: she hath lost many such, and she still hath many left. _Hannibal._ Afraid as you are of falsehood, say you this? I confess in shame the ferocity of my countrymen. Unfortunately, too, the nearer posts are occupied by Gauls, infinitely more cruel. The Numidians are so in revenge: the Gauls both in revenge and in sport. My presence is required at a distance, and I apprehend the barbarity of one or other, learning, as they must do, your refusal to execute my wishes for the common good, and feeling that by this refusal you deprive them of their country, after so long an absence. _Marcellus._ Hannibal, thou art not dying. _Hannibal._ What then? What mean you? _Marcellus._ That thou mayest, and very justly, have many things yet to apprehend: I can have none. The barbarity of thy soldiers is nothing to me: mine would not dare be cruel. Hannibal is forced to be absent; and his authority goes away with his horse. On this turf lies defaced the semblance of a general; but Marcellus is yet the regulator of his army. Dost thou abdicate a power conferred on thee by thy nation? Or wouldst thou acknowledge it to have become, by thy own sole fault, less plenary than thy adversary's? I have spoken too much: let me rest; this mantle oppresses me. _Hannibal._ I placed my mantle on your head when the helmet was first removed, and while you were lying in the sun. Let me fold it under, and then replace the ring. _Marcellus._ Take it, Hannibal. It was given me by a poor woman who flew to me at Syracuse, and who covered it with her hair, torn off in desperation that she had no other gift to offer. Little thought I that her gift and her words should be mine. How suddenly may the most powerful be in the situation of the most helpless! Let that ring and the mantle under my head be the exchange of guests at parting. The time may come, Hannibal, when thou (and the gods alone know whether as conqueror or conquered) mayest sit under the roof of my children, and in either case it shall serve thee. In thy adverse fortune, they will remember on whose pillow their father breathed his last; in thy prosperity (Heaven grant it may shine upon thee in some other country!) it will rejoice thee to protect them. We feel ourselves the most exempt from affliction when we relieve it, although we are then the most conscious that it may befall us. There is one thing here which is not at the disposal of either. _Hannibal._ What? _Marcellus._ This body. _Hannibal._ Whither would you be lifted? Men are ready. _Marcellus._ I meant not so. My strength is failing. I seem to hear rather what is within than what is without. My sight and my other senses are in confusion. I would have said--this body, when a few bubbles of air shall have left it, is no more worthy of thy notice than of mine; but thy glory will not let thee refuse it to the piety of my family. _Hannibal._ You would ask something else. I perceive an inquietude not visible till now. _Marcellus._ Duty and Death make us think of home sometimes. _Hannibal._ Thitherward the thoughts of the conqueror and of the conquered fly together. _Marcellus._ Hast thou any prisoners from my escort? _Hannibal._ A few dying lie about--and let them lie--they are Tuscans. The remainder I saw at a distance, flying, and but one brave man among them--he appeared a Roman--a youth who turned back, though wounded. They surrounded and dragged him away, spurring his horse with their swords. These Etrurians measure their courage carefully, and tack it well together before they put it on, but throw it off again with lordly ease. Marcellus, why think about them? or does aught else disquiet your thoughts? _Marcellus._ I have suppressed it long enough. My son--my beloved son! _Hannibal._ Where is he? Can it be? Was he with you? _Marcellus._ He would have shared my fate--and has not. Gods of my country! beneficent throughout life to me, in death surpassingly beneficent: I render you, for the last time, thanks. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND CECIL _Elizabeth._ I advise thee again, churlish Cecil, how that our Edmund Spenser, whom thou callest most uncourteously a whining whelp, hath good and solid reason for his complaint. God's blood! shall the lady that tieth my garter and shuffles the smock over my head, or the lord that steadieth my chair's back while I eat, or the other that looketh to my buck-hounds lest they be mangy, be holden by me in higher esteem and estate than he who hath placed me among the bravest of past times, and will as safely and surely set me down among the loveliest in the future? _Cecil._ Your Highness must remember he carouseth fully for such deserts: fifty pounds a year of unclipped moneys, and a butt of canary wine; not to mention three thousand acres in Ireland, worth fairly another fifty and another butt, in seasonable and quiet years. _Elizabeth._ The moneys are not enough to sustain a pair of grooms and a pair of palfreys, and more wine hath been drunken in my presence at a feast. The moneys are given to such men, that they may not incline nor be obligated to any vile or lowly occupation; and the canary, that they may entertain such promising wits as court their company and converse; and that in such manner there may be alway in our land a succession of these heirs unto fame. He hath written, not indeed with his wonted fancifulness, nor in learned and majestical language, but in homely and rustic wise, some verses which have moved me, and haply the more inasmuch as they demonstrate to me that his genius hath been dampened by his adversities. Read them. _Cecil._ How much is lost when neither heart nor eye Rosewinged Desire or fabling Hope deceives; When boyhood with quick throb hath ceased to spy The dubious apple in the yellow leaves; When, rising from the turf where youth reposed, We find but deserts in the far-sought shore; When the huge book of Faery-land lies closed, And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more. _Elizabeth._ The said Edmund hath also furnished unto the weaver at Arras, John Blanquieres, on my account, a description for some of his cunningest wenches to work at, supplied by mine own self, indeed, as far as the subject-matter goes, but set forth by him with figures and fancies, and daintily enough bedecked. I could have wished he had thereunto joined a fair comparison between Dian--no matter--he might perhaps have fared the better for it; but poets' wits--God help them!--when did they ever sit close about them? Read the poesy, not over-rich, and concluding very awkwardly and meanly. _Cecil._ Where forms the lotus, with its level leaves And solid blossoms, many floating isles, What heavenly radiance swift descending cleaves The darksome wave! Unwonted beauty smiles On its pure bosom, on each bright-eyed flower, On every nymph, and twenty sate around, Lo! 'twas Diana--from the sultry hour Hither she fled, nor fear'd she sight or sound. Unhappy youth, whom thirst and quiver-reeds Drew to these haunts, whom awe forbade to fly! Three faithful dogs before him rais'd their heads, And watched and wonder'd at that fixèd eye. Forth sprang his favourite--with her arrow-hand Too late the goddess hid what hand may hide, Of every nymph and every reed complain'd, And dashed upon the bank the waters wide. On the prone head and sandal'd feet they flew-- Lo! slender hoofs and branching horns appear! The last marr'd voice not e'en the favourite knew, But bay'd and fasten'd on the upbraiding deer. Far be, chaste goddess, far from me and mine The stream that tempts thee in the summer noon! Alas, that vengeance dwells with charms divine---- _Elizabeth._ Pshaw! give me the paper: I forewarned thee how it ended--pitifully, pitifully. _Cecil._ I cannot think otherwise than that the undertaker of the aforecited poesy hath chosen your Highness; for I have seen painted--I know not where, but I think no farther off than Putney--the identically same Dian, with full as many nymphs, as he calls them, and more dogs. So small a matter as a page of poesy shall never stir my choler nor twitch my purse-string. _Elizabeth._ I have read in Plinius and Mela of a runlet near Dodona, which kindled by approximation an unlighted torch, and extinguished a lighted one. Now, Cecil, I desire no such a jetty to be celebrated as the decoration of my court: in simpler words, which your gravity may more easily understand, I would not from the fountain of honour give lustre to the dull and ignorant, deadening and leaving in its tomb the lamp of literature and genius. I ardently wish my reign to be remembered: if my actions were different from what they are, I should as ardently wish it to be forgotten. Those are the worst of suicides, who voluntarily and propensely stab or suffocate their fame, when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example. We call him parricide who destroys the author of his existence: tell me, what shall we call him who casts forth to the dogs and birds of prey its most faithful propagator and most firm support? Mark me, I do not speak of that existence which the proudest must close in a ditch--the narrowest, too, of ditches and the soonest filled and fouled, and whereunto a pinch of ratsbane or a poppy-head may bend him; but of that which reposes on our own good deeds, carefully picked up, skilfully put together, and decorously laid out for us by another's kind understanding: I speak of an existence such as no father is author of, or provides for. The parent gives us few days and sorrowful; the poet, many and glorious: the one (supposing him discreet and kindly) best reproves our faults; the other best remunerates our virtues. A page of poesy is a little matter: be it so; but of a truth I do tell thee, Cecil, it shall master full many a bold heart that the Spaniard cannot trouble; it shall win to it full many a proud and flighty one that even chivalry and manly comeliness cannot touch. I may shake titles and dignities by the dozen from my breakfast-board; but I may not save those upon whose heads I shake them from rottenness and oblivion. This year they and their sovereign dwell together; next year, they and their beagle. Both have names, but names perishable. The keeper of my privy seal is an earl: what then? the keeper of my poultry-yard is a Caesar. In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him: what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing. I desire in future to hear no contempt of penmen, unless a depraved use of the pen shall have so cramped them as to incapacitate them for the sword and for the council chamber. If Alexander was the Great, what was Aristoteles who made him so, and taught him every art and science he knew, except three--those of drinking, of blaspheming, and of murdering his bosom friends? Come along: I will bring thee back again nearer home. Thou mightest toss and tumble in thy bed many nights, and never eke out the substance of a stanza; but Edmund, if perchance I should call upon him for his counsel, would give me as wholesome and prudent as any of you. We should indemnify such men for the injustice we do unto them in not calling them about us, and for the mortification they must suffer at seeing their inferiors set before them. Edmund is grave and gentle: he complains of fortune, not of Elizabeth; of courts, not of Cecil. I am resolved--so help me, God!--he shall have no further cause for his repining. Go, convey unto him those twelve silver spoons, with the apostles on them, gloriously gilded; and deliver into his hand these twelve large golden pieces, sufficing for the yearly maintenance of another horse and groom. Beside which, set open before him with due reverence this Bible, wherein he may read the mercies of God toward those who waited in patience for His blessing; and this pair of crimson silk hose, which thou knowest I have worn only thirteen months, taking heed that the heel-piece be put into good and sufficient restoration, at my sole charges, by the Italian woman nigh the pollard elm at Charing Cross. EPICTETUS AND SENECA _Seneca._ Epictetus, I desired your master, Epaphroditus, to send you hither, having been much pleased with his report of your conduct, and much surprised at the ingenuity of your writings. _Epictetus._ Then I am afraid, my friend---- _Seneca._ _My friend!_ are these the expressions--Well, let it pass. Philosophers must bear bravely. The people expect it. _Epictetus._ Are philosophers, then, only philosophers for the people; and, instead of instructing them, must they play tricks before them? Give me rather the gravity of dancing dogs. Their motions are for the rabble; their reverential eyes and pendant paws are under the pressure of awe at a master; but they are dogs, and not below their destinies. _Seneca._ Epictetus! I will give you three talents to let me take that sentiment for my own. _Epictetus._ I would give thee twenty, if I had them, to make it thine. _Seneca._ You mean, by lending it the graces of my language? _Epictetus._ I mean, by lending it to thy conduct. And now let me console and comfort thee, under the calamity I brought on thee by calling thee _my friend_. If thou art not my friend, why send for me? Enemy I can have none: being a slave, Fortune has now done with me. _Seneca._ Continue, then, your former observations. What were you saying? _Epictetus._ That which thou interruptedst. _Seneca._ What was it? _Epictetus._ I should have remarked that, if thou foundest ingenuity in my writings, thou must have discovered in them some deviation from the plain, homely truths of Zeno and Cleanthes. _Seneca._ We all swerve a little from them. _Epictetus._ In practice too? _Seneca._ Yes, even in practice, I am afraid. _Epictetus._ Often? _Seneca._ Too often. _Epictetus._ Strange! I have been attentive, and yet have remarked but one difference among you great personages at Rome. _Seneca._ What difference fell under your observation? _Epictetus._ Crates and Zeno and Cleanthes taught us that our desires were to be subdued by philosophy alone. In this city, their acute and inventive scholars take us aside, and show us that there is not only one way, but two. _Seneca._ Two ways? _Epictetus._ They whisper in our ear, 'These two ways are philosophy and enjoyment: the wiser man will take the readier, or, not finding it, the alternative.' Thou reddenest. _Seneca._ Monstrous degeneracy. _Epictetus._ What magnificent rings! I did not notice them until thou liftedst up thy hands to heaven, in detestation of such effeminacy and impudence. _Seneca._ The rings are not amiss; my rank rivets them upon my fingers: I am forced to wear them. Our emperor gave me one, Epaphroditus another, Tigellinus the third. I cannot lay them aside a single day, for fear of offending the gods, and those whom they love the most worthily. _Epictetus._ Although they make thee stretch out thy fingers, like the arms and legs of one of us slaves upon a cross. _Seneca._ Oh, horrible! Find some other resemblance. _Epictetus._ The extremities of a fig-leaf. _Seneca._ Ignoble! _Epictetus._ The claws of a toad, trodden on or stoned. _Seneca._ You have great need, Epictetus, of an instructor in eloquence and rhetoric: you want topics, and tropes, and figures. _Epictetus._ I have no room for them. They make such a buzz in the house, a man's own wife cannot understand what he says to her. _Seneca._ Let us reason a little upon style. I would set you right, and remove from before you the prejudices of a somewhat rustic education. We may adorn the simplicity of the wisest. _Epictetus._ Thou canst not adorn simplicity. What is naked or defective is susceptible of decoration: what is decorated is simplicity no longer. Thou mayest give another thing in exchange for it; but if thou wert master of it, thou wouldst preserve it inviolate. It is no wonder that we mortals, little able as we are to see truth, should be less able to express it. _Seneca._ You have formed at present no idea of style. _Epictetus._ I never think about it. First, I consider whether what I am about to say is true; then, whether I can say it with brevity, in such a manner as that others shall see it as clearly as I do in the light of truth; for, if they survey it as an ingenuity, my desire is ungratified, my duty unfulfilled. I go not with those who dance round the image of Truth, less out of honour to her than to display their agility and address. _Seneca._ We must attract the attention of readers by novelty, and force, and grandeur of expression. _Epictetus._ We must. Nothing is so grand as truth, nothing so forcible, nothing so novel. _Seneca._ Sonorous sentences are wanted to awaken the lethargy of indolence. _Epictetus._ Awaken it to what? Here lies the question; and a weighty one it is. If thou awakenest men where they can see nothing and do no work, it is better to let them rest: but will not they, thinkest thou, look up at a rainbow, unless they are called to it by a clap of thunder? _Seneca._ Your early youth, Epictetus, has been, I will not say neglected, but cultivated with rude instruments and unskilful hands. _Epictetus._ I thank God for it. Those rude instruments have left the turf lying yet toward the sun; and those unskilful hands have plucked out the docks. _Seneca._ We hope and believe that we have attained a vein of eloquence, brighter and more varied than has been hitherto laid open to the world. _Epictetus._ Than any in the Greek? _Seneca._ We trust so. _Epictetus._ Than your Cicero's? _Seneca._ If the declaration may be made without an offence to modesty. Surely, you cannot estimate or value the eloquence of that noble pleader? _Epictetus._ Imperfectly, not being born in Italy; and the noble pleader is a much less man with me than the noble philosopher. I regret that, having farms and villas, he would not keep his distance from the pumping up of foul words against thieves, cut-throats, and other rogues; and that he lied, sweated, and thumped his head and thighs, in behalf of those who were no better. _Seneca._ Senators must have clients, and must protect them. _Epictetus._ Innocent or guilty? _Seneca._ Doubtless. _Epictetus._ If I regret what is and might not be, I may regret more what both is and must be. However, it is an amiable thing, and no small merit in the wealthy, even to trifle and play at their leisure hours with philosophy. It cannot be expected that such a personage should espouse her, or should recommend her as an inseparable mate to his heir. _Seneca._ I would. _Epictetus._ Yes, Seneca, but thou hast no son to make the match for; and thy recommendation, I suspect, would be given him before he could consummate the marriage. Every man wishes his sons to be philosophers while they are young; but takes especial care, as they grow older, to teach them its insufficiency and unfitness for their intercourse with mankind. The paternal voice says: 'You must not be particular; you are about to have a profession to live by; follow those who have thriven the best in it.' Now, among these, whatever be the profession, canst thou point out to me one single philosopher? _Seneca._ Not just now; nor, upon reflection, do I think it feasible. _Epictetus._ Thou, indeed, mayest live much to thy ease and satisfaction with philosophy, having (they say) two thousand talents. _Seneca._ And a trifle to spare--pressed upon me by that godlike youth, my pupil Nero. _Epictetus._ Seneca! where God hath placed a mine, He hath placed the materials of an earthquake. _Seneca._ A true philosopher is beyond the reach of Fortune. _Epictetus._ The false one thinks himself so. Fortune cares little about philosophers; but she remembers where she hath set a rich man, and she laughs to see the Destinies at his door. PETER THE GREAT AND ALEXIS _Peter._ And so, after flying from thy father's house, thou hast returned again from Vienna. After this affront in the face of Europe, thou darest to appear before me? _Alexis._ My emperor and father! I am brought before your Majesty, not at my own desire. _Peter._ I believe it well. _Alexis._ I would not anger you. _Peter._ What hope hadst thou, rebel, in thy flight to Vienna? _Alexis._ The hope of peace and privacy; the hope of security; and, above all things, of never more offending you. _Peter._ That hope thou hast accomplished. Thou imaginedst, then, that my brother of Austria would maintain thee at his court--speak! _Alexis._ No, sir! I imagined that he would have afforded me a place of refuge. _Peter._ Didst thou, then, take money with thee? _Alexis._ A few gold pieces. _Peter._ How many? _Alexis._ About sixty. _Peter._ He would have given thee promises for half the money; but the double of it does not purchase a house, ignorant wretch! _Alexis._ I knew as much as that: although my birth did not appear to destine me to purchase a house anywhere; and hitherto your liberality, my father, hath supplied my wants of every kind. _Peter._ Not of wisdom, not of duty, not of spirit, not of courage, not of ambition. I have educated thee among my guards and horses, among my drums and trumpets, among my flags and masts. When thou wert a child, and couldst hardly walk, I have taken thee into the arsenal, though children should not enter according to regulations: I have there rolled cannon-balls before thee over iron plates; and I have shown thee bright new arms, bayonets and sabres; and I have pricked the back of my hands until the blood came out in many places; and I have made thee lick it; and I have then done the same to thine. Afterward, from thy tenth year, I have mixed gunpowder in thy grog; I have peppered thy peaches; I have poured bilge-water (with a little good wholesome tar in it) upon thy melons; I have brought out girls to mock thee and cocker thee, and talk like mariners, to make thee braver. Nothing would do. Nay, recollect thee! I have myself led thee forth to the window when fellows were hanged and shot; and I have shown thee every day the halves and quarters of bodies; and I have sent an orderly or chamberlain for the heads; and I have pulled the cap up from over the eyes; and I have made thee, in spite of thee, look steadfastly upon them, incorrigible coward! And now another word with thee about thy scandalous flight from the palace, in time of quiet, too! To the point! Did my brother of Austria invite thee? Did he, or did he not? _Alexis._ May I answer without doing an injury or disservice to his Imperial Majesty? _Peter._ Thou mayest. What injury canst thou or any one do, by the tongue, to such as he is? _Alexis._ At the moment, no; he did not. Nor indeed can I assert that he at any time invited me; but he said he pitied me. _Peter._ About what? hold thy tongue; let that pass. Princes never pity but when they would make traitors: then their hearts grow tenderer than tripe. He pitied thee, kind soul, when he would throw thee at thy father's head; but finding thy father too strong for him, he now commiserates the parent, laments the son's rashness and disobedience, and would not make God angry for the world. At first, however, there must have been some overture on his part; otherwise thou are too shamefaced for intrusion. Come--thou hast never had wit enough to lie--tell me the truth, the whole truth. _Alexis._ He said that if ever I wanted an asylum, his court was open to me. _Peter._ Open! so is the tavern; but folks pay for what they get there. Open, truly! and didst thou find it so? _Alexis._ He received me kindly. _Peter._ I see he did. _Alexis._ Derision, O my father! is not the fate I merit. _Peter._ True, true! it was not intended. _Alexis._ Kind father! punish me then as you will. _Peter._ Villain! wouldst thou kiss my hand, too? Art thou ignorant that the Austrian threw thee away from him, with the same indifference as he would the outermost leaf of a sandy sunburnt lettuce? _Alexis._ Alas! I am not ignorant of this. _Peter._ He dismissed thee at my order. If I had demanded from him his daughter, to be the bedfellow of a Kalmuc, he would have given her, and praised God. _Alexis._ O father! is his baseness my crime? _Peter._ No; thine is greater. Thy intention, I know, is to subvert the institutions it has been the labour of my lifetime to establish. Thou hast never rejoiced at my victories. _Alexis._ I have rejoiced at your happiness and your safety. _Peter._ Liar! coward! traitor! when the Polanders and Swedes fell before me, didst thou from thy soul congratulate me? Didst thou get drunk at home or abroad, or praise the Lord of Hosts and Saint Nicholas? Wert thou not silent and civil and low-spirited? _Alexis._ I lamented the irretrievable loss of human life; I lamented that the bravest and noblest were swept away the first; that the gentlest and most domestic were the earliest mourners; that frugality was supplanted by intemperance; that order was succeeded by confusion; and that your Majesty was destroying the glorious plans you alone were capable of devising. _Peter._ I destroy them! how? Of what plans art thou speaking? _Alexis._ Of civilizing the Muscovites. The Polanders in part were civilized: the Swedes, more than any other nation on the Continent; and so excellently versed were they in military science, and so courageous, that every man you killed cost you seven or eight. _Peter._ Thou liest; nor six. And civilized, forsooth? Why, the robes of the metropolitan, him at Upsal, are not worth three ducats, between Jew and Livornese. I have no notion that Poland and Sweden shall be the only countries that produce great princes. What right have they to such as Gustavus and Sobieski? Europe ought to look to this before discontents become general, and the people do to us what we have the privilege of doing to the people. I am wasting my words: there is no arguing with positive fools like thee. So thou wouldst have desired me to let the Polanders and Swedes lie still and quiet! Two such powerful nations! _Alexis._ For that reason and others I would have gladly seen them rest, until our own people had increased in numbers and prosperity. _Peter._ And thus thou disputest my right, before my face, to the exercise of the supreme power. _Alexis._ Sir! God forbid! _Peter._ God forbid, indeed! What care such villains as thou art what God forbids! He forbids the son to be disobedient to the father; He forbids--He forbids--twenty things. I do not wish, and will not have, a successor who dreams of dead people. _Alexis._ My father! I have dreamed of none such. _Peter._ Thou hast, and hast talked about them--Scythians, I think, they call 'em. Now, who told thee, Mr. Professor, that the Scythians were a happier people than we are; that they were inoffensive; that they were free; that they wandered with their carts from pasture to pasture, from river to river; that they traded with good faith; that they fought with good courage; that they injured none, invaded none, and feared none? At this rate I have effected nothing. The great founder of Rome, I heard in Holland, slew his brother for despiting the weakness of his walls; and shall the founder of this better place spare a degenerate son, who prefers a vagabond life to a civilized one, a cart to a city, a Scythian to a Muscovite? Have I not shaved my people, and breeched them? Have I not formed them into regular armies, with bands of music and haversacks? Are bows better than cannon? shepherds than dragoons, mare's milk than brandy, raw steaks than broiled? Thine are tenets that strike at the root of politeness and sound government. Every prince in Europe is interested in rooting them out by fire and sword. There is no other way with false doctrines: breath against breath does little. _Alexis._ Sire, I never have attempted to disseminate my opinions. _Peter._ How couldst thou? the seed would fall only on granite. Those, however, who caught it brought it to me. _Alexis._ Never have I undervalued civilization: on the contrary, I regretted whatever impeded it. In my opinion, the evils that have been attributed to it sprang from its imperfections and voids; and no nation has yet acquired it more than very scantily. _Peter._ How so? give me thy reasons--thy fancies, rather; for reason thou hast none. _Alexis._ When I find the first of men, in rank and genius, hating one another, and becoming slanderers and liars in order to lower and vilify an opponent; when I hear the God of mercy invoked to massacres, and thanked for furthering what He reprobates and condemns--I look back in vain on any barbarous people for worse barbarism. I have expressed my admiration of our forefathers, who, not being Christians, were yet more virtuous than those who are; more temperate, more just, more sincere, more chaste, more peaceable. _Peter._ Malignant atheist! _Alexis._ Indeed, my father, were I malignant I must be an atheist; for malignity is contrary to the command, and inconsistent with the belief, of God. _Peter._ Am I Czar of Muscovy, and hear discourses on reason and religion? from my own son, too! No, by the Holy Trinity! thou art no son of mine. If thou touchest my knee again, I crack thy knuckles with this tobacco-stopper: I wish it were a sledge-hammer for thy sake. Off, sycophant! Off, runaway slave! _Alexis._ Father! father! my heart is broken! If I have offended, forgive me! _Peter._ The State requires thy signal punishment. _Alexis._ If the State requires it, be it so; but let my father's anger cease! _Peter._ The world shall judge between us. I will brand thee with infamy. _Alexis._ Until now, O father! I never had a proper sense of glory. Hear me, O Czar! let not a thing so vile as I am stand between you and the world! Let none accuse you! _Peter._ Accuse me, rebel! Accuse me, traitor! _Alexis._ Let none speak ill of you, O my father! The public voice shakes the palace; the public voice penetrates the grave; it precedes the chariot of Almighty God, and is heard at the judgment-seat. _Peter._ Let it go to the devil! I will have none of it here in Petersburg. Our church says nothing about it; our laws forbid it. As for thee, unnatural brute, I have no more to do with thee neither! Ho, there! chancellor! What! come at last! Wert napping, or counting thy ducats? _Chancellor._ Your Majesty's will and pleasure! _Peter._ Is the Senate assembled in that room? _Chancellor._ Every member, sire. _Peter._ Conduct this youth with thee, and let them judge him; thou understandest me. _Chancellor._ Your Majesty's commands are the breath of our nostrils. _Peter._ If these rascals are amiss, I will try my new cargo of Livonian hemp upon 'em. _Chancellor._ [_Returning._] Sire, sire! _Peter._ Speak, fellow! Surely they have not condemned him to death, without giving themselves time to read the accusation, that thou comest back so quickly. _Chancellor._ No, sire! Nor has either been done. _Peter._ Then thy head quits thy shoulders. _Chancellor._ O sire! _Peter._ Curse thy silly _sires_! what art thou about? _Chancellor._ Alas! he fell. _Peter._ Tie him up to thy chair, then. Cowardly beast! what made him fall? _Chancellor._ The hand of Death; the name of father. _Peter._ Thou puzzlest me; prithee speak plainlier. _Chancellor._ We told him that his crime was proven and manifest; that his life was forfeited. _Peter._ So far, well enough. _Chancellor._ He smiled. _Peter._ He did! did he? Impudence shall do him little good. Who could have expected it from that smock-face! Go on--what then? _Chancellor._ He said calmly, but not without sighing twice or thrice, 'Lead me to the scaffold: I am weary of life; nobody loves me.' I condoled with him, and wept upon his hand, holding the paper against my bosom. He took the corner of it between his fingers, and said, 'Read me this paper; read my death-warrant. Your silence and tears have signified it; yet the law has its forms. Do not keep me in suspense. My father says, too truly, I am not courageous; but the death that leads me to my God shall never terrify me.' _Peter._ I have seen these white-livered knaves die resolutely; I have seen them quietly fierce like white ferrets with their watery eyes and tiny teeth. You read it? _Chancellor._ In part, sire! When he heard your Majesty's name accusing him of treason and attempts at rebellion and parricide, he fell speechless. We raised him up: he was motionless; he was dead! _Peter._ Inconsiderate and barbarous varlet as thou art, dost thou recite this ill accident to a father! and to one who has not dined! Bring me a glass of brandy. _Chancellor._ And it please your Majesty, might I call a--a---- _Peter._ Away and bring it: scamper! All equally and alike shall obey and serve me. Hark ye! bring the bottle with it: I must cool myself--and--hark ye! a rasher of bacon on thy life! and some pickled sturgeon, and some krout and caviare, and good strong cheese. HENRY VIII AND ANNE BOLEYN _Henry._ Dost thou know me, Nanny, in this yeoman's dress? 'Sblood! does it require so long and vacant a stare to recollect a husband after a week or two? No tragedy-tricks with me! a scream, a sob, or thy kerchief a trifle the wetter, were enough. Why, verily the little fool faints in earnest. These whey faces, like their kinsfolk the ghosts, give us no warning. Hast had water enough upon thee? Take that, then: art thyself again? _Anne._ Father of mercies! do I meet again my husband, as was my last prayer on earth? Do I behold my beloved lord--in peace--and pardoned, my partner in eternal bliss? it was his voice. I cannot see him: why cannot I? Oh, why do these pangs interrupt the transports of the blessed? _Henry._ Thou openest thy arms: faith! I came for that. Nanny, thou art a sweet slut. Thou groanest, wench: art in labour? Faith! among the mistakes of the night, I am ready to think almost that thou hast been drinking, and that I have not. _Anne._ God preserve your Highness: grant me your forgiveness for one slight offence. My eyes were heavy; I fell asleep while I was reading. I did not know of your presence at first; and, when I did, I could not speak. I strove for utterance: I wanted no respect for my liege and husband. _Henry._ My pretty warm nestling, thou wilt then lie! Thou wert reading, and aloud too, with thy saintly cup of water by thee, and--what! thou art still girlishly fond of those dried cherries! _Anne._ I had no other fruit to offer your Highness the first time I saw you, and you were then pleased to invent for me some reason why they should be acceptable. I did not dry these: may I present them, such as they are? We shall have fresh next month. _Henry._ Thou art always driving away from the discourse. One moment it suits thee to know me, another not. _Anne._ Remember, it is hardly three months since I miscarried. I am weak, and liable to swoons. _Henry._ Thou hast, however, thy bridal cheeks, with lustre upon them when there is none elsewhere, and obstinate lips resisting all impression; but, now thou talkest about miscarrying, who is the father of that boy? _Anne._ Yours and mine--He who hath taken him to his own home, before (like me) he could struggle or cry for it. _Henry._ Pagan, or worse, to talk so! He did not come into the world alive: there was no baptism. _Anne._ I thought only of our loss: my senses are confounded. I did not give him my milk, and yet I loved him tenderly; for I often fancied, had he lived, how contented and joyful he would have made you and England. _Henry._ No subterfuges and escapes. I warrant, thou canst not say whether at my entrance thou wert waking or wandering. _Anne._ Faintness and drowsiness came upon me suddenly. _Henry._ Well, since thou really and truly sleepedst, what didst dream of? _Anne._ I begin to doubt whether I did indeed sleep. _Henry._ Ha! false one--never two sentences of truth together! But come, what didst think about, asleep or awake? _Anne._ I thought that God had pardoned me my offences, and had received me unto Him. _Henry._ And nothing more? _Anne._ That my prayers had been heard and my wishes were accomplishing: the angels alone can enjoy more beatitude than this. _Henry._ Vexatious little devil! She says nothing now about me, merely from perverseness. Hast thou never thought about me, nor about thy falsehood and adultery? _Anne._ If I had committed any kind of falsehood, in regard to you or not, I should never have rested until I had thrown myself at your feet and obtained your pardon; but, if ever I had been guilty of that other crime, I know not whether I should have dared to implore it, even of God's mercy. _Henry._ Thou hast heretofore cast some soft glances upon Smeaton; hast thou not? _Anne._ He taught me to play on the virginals, as you know, when I was little, and thereby to please your Highness. _Henry._ And Brereton and Norris--what have they taught thee? _Anne._ They are your servants, and trusty ones. _Henry._ Has not Weston told thee plainly that he loved thee? _Anne._ Yes; and---- _Henry._ What didst thou? _Anne._ I defied him. _Henry._ Is that all? _Anne._ I could have done no more if he had told me that he hated me. Then, indeed, I should have incurred more justly the reproaches of your Highness: I should have smiled. _Henry._ We have proofs abundant: the fellows shall one and all confront thee. Aye, clap thy hands and kiss thy sleeve, harlot! _Anne._ Oh that so great a favour is vouchsafed me! My honour is secure; my husband will be happy again; he will see my innocence. _Henry._ Give me now an account of the moneys thou hast received from me within these nine months. I want them not back: they are letters of gold in record of thy guilt. Thou hast had no fewer than fifteen thousand pounds in that period, without even thy asking; what hast done with it, wanton? _Anne._ I have regularly placed it out to interest. _Henry._ Where? I demand of thee. _Anne._ Among the needy and ailing. My Lord Archbishop has the account of it, sealed by him weekly. I also had a copy myself; those who took away my papers may easily find it; for there are few others, and they lie open. _Henry._ Think on my munificence to thee; recollect who made thee. Dost sigh for what thou hast lost? _Anne._ I do, indeed. _Henry._ I never thought thee ambitious; but thy vices creep out one by one. _Anne._ I do not regret that I have been a queen and am no longer one; nor that my innocence is called in question by those who never knew me; but I lament that the good people who loved me so cordially, hate and curse me; that those who pointed me out to their daughters for imitation check them when they speak about me; and that he whom next to God I have served with most devotion is my accuser. _Henry._ Wast thou conning over something in that dingy book for thy defence? Come, tell me, what wast thou reading? _Anne._ This ancient chronicle. I was looking for someone in my own condition, and must have missed the page. Surely in so many hundred years there shall have been other young maidens, first too happy for exaltation, and after too exalted for happiness--not, perchance, doomed to die upon a scaffold, by those they ever honoured and served faithfully; that, indeed, I did not look for nor think of; but my heart was bounding for any one I could love and pity. She would be unto me as a sister dead and gone; but hearing me, seeing me, consoling me, and being consoled. O my husband! it is so heavenly a thing---- _Henry._ To whine and whimper, no doubt, is vastly heavenly. _Anne._ I said not so; but those, if there be any such, who never weep, have nothing in them of heavenly or of earthly. The plants, the trees, the very rocks and unsunned clouds, show us at least the semblances of weeping; and there is not an aspect of the globe we live on, nor of the waters and skies around it, without a reference and a similitude to our joys or sorrows. _Henry._ I do not remember that notion anywhere. Take care no enemy rake out of it something of materialism. Guard well thy empty hot brain; it may hatch more evil. As for those odd words, I myself would fain see no great harm in them, knowing that grief and frenzy strike out many things which would else lie still, and neither spurt nor sparkle. I also know that thou hast never read anything but Bible and history--the two worst books in the world for young people, and the most certain to lead astray both prince and subject. For which reason I have interdicted and entirely put down the one, and will (by the blessing of the Virgin and of holy Paul) commit the other to a rigid censor. If it behoves us kings to enact what our people shall eat and drink--of which the most unruly and rebellious spirit can entertain no doubt--greatly more doth it behove us to examine what they read and think. The body is moved according to the mind and will; we must take care that the movement be a right one, on pain of God's anger in this life and the next. _Anne._ O my dear husband! it must be a naughty thing, indeed, that makes Him angry beyond remission. Did you ever try how pleasant it is to forgive any one? There is nothing else wherein we can resemble God perfectly and easily. _Henry._ Resemble God perfectly and easily! Do vile creatures talk thus of the Creator? _Anne._ No, Henry, when His creatures talk thus of Him, they are no longer vile creatures! When they know that He is good, they love Him; and, when they love Him, they are good themselves. O Henry! my husband and king! the judgments of our Heavenly Father are righteous; on this, surely, we must think alike. _Henry._ And what, then? Speak out; again I command thee, speak plainly! thy tongue was not so torpid but this moment. Art ready? Must I wait? _Anne._ If any doubt remains upon your royal mind of your equity in this business: should it haply seem possible to you that passion or prejudice, in yourself or another, may have warped so strong an understanding--do but supplicate the Almighty to strengthen and enlighten it, and He will hear you. _Henry._ What! thou wouldst fain change thy quarters, ay? _Anne._ My spirit is detached and ready, and I shall change them shortly, whatever your Highness may determine. _Henry._ Yet thou appearest hale and resolute, and (they tell me) smirkest and smilest to everybody. _Anne._ The withered leaf catches the sun sometimes, little as it can profit by it; and I have heard stories of the breeze in other climates that sets in when daylight is about to close, and how constant it is, and how refreshing. My heart, indeed, is now sustained strangely; it became the more sensibly so from that time forward, when power and grandeur and all things terrestrial were sunk from sight. Every act of kindness in those about me gives me satisfaction and pleasure, such as I did not feel formerly. I was worse before God chastened me; yet I was never an ingrate. What pains have I taken to find out the village-girls who placed their posies in my chamber ere I arose in the morning! How gladly would I have recompensed the forester who lit up a brake on my birthnight, which else had warmed him half the winter! But these are times past: I was not Queen of England. _Henry._ Nor adulterous, nor heretical. _Anne._ God be praised! _Henry._ Learned saint! thou knowest nothing of the lighter, but perhaps canst inform me about the graver, of them. _Anne._ Which may it be, my liege? _Henry._ Which may it be? Pestilence! I marvel that the walls of this tower do not crack around thee at such impiety. _Anne._ I would be instructed by the wisest of theologians: such is your Highness. _Henry._ Are the sins of the body, foul as they are, comparable to those of the soul? _Anne._ When they are united, they must be worse. _Henry._ Go on, go on: thou pushest thy own breast against the sword. God hath deprived thee of thy reason for thy punishment. I must hear more: proceed, I charge thee. _Anne._ An aptitude to believe one thing rather than another, from ignorance or weakness, or from the more persuasive manner of the teacher, or from his purity of life, or from the strong impression of a particular text at a particular time, and various things beside, may influence and decide our opinion; and the hand of the Almighty, let us hope, will fall gently on human fallibility. _Henry._ Opinion in matters of faith! rare wisdom! rare religion! Troth, Anne! thou hast well sobered me. I came rather warmly and lovingly; but these light ringlets, by the holy rood, shall not shade this shoulder much longer. Nay, do not start; I tap it for the last time, my sweetest. If the Church permitted it, thou shouldst set forth on thy long journey with the Eucharist between thy teeth, however loath. _Anne._ Love your Elizabeth, my honoured lord, and God bless you! She will soon forget to call me. Do not chide her: think how young she is. Could I, could I kiss her, but once again! it would comfort my heart--or break it. JOSEPH SCALIGER AND MONTAIGNE _Montaigne._ What could have brought you, M. de l'Escale, to visit the old man of the mountain, other than a good heart? Oh, how delighted and charmed I am to hear you speak such excellent Gascon. You rise early, I see: you must have risen with the sun, to be here at this hour; it is a stout half-hour's walk from the brook. I have capital white wine, and the best cheese in Auvergne. You saw the goats and the two cows before the castle. Pierre, thou hast done well: set it upon the table, and tell Master Matthew to split a couple of chickens and broil them, and to pepper but one. Do you like pepper, M. de l'Escale? _Scaliger._ Not much. _Montaigne._ Hold hard! let the pepper alone: I hate it. Tell him to broil plenty of ham; only two slices at a time, upon his salvation. _Scaliger._ This, I perceive, is the antechamber to your library: here are your everyday books. _Montaigne._ Faith! I have no other. These are plenty, methinks; is not that your opinion? _Scaliger._ You have great resources within yourself, and therefore can do with fewer. _Montaigne._ Why, how many now do you think here may be? _Scaliger._ I did not believe at first that there could be above fourscore. _Montaigne._ Well! are fourscore few?--are we talking of peas and beans? _Scaliger._ I and my father (put together) have written well-nigh as many. _Montaigne._ Ah! to write them is quite another thing: but one reads books without a spur, or even a pat from our Lady Vanity. How do you like my wine?--it comes from the little knoll yonder: you cannot see the vines, those chestnut-trees are between. _Scaliger._ The wine is excellent; light, odoriferous, with a smartness like a sharp child's prattle. _Montaigne._ It never goes to the head, nor pulls the nerves, which many do as if they were guitar-strings. I drink a couple of bottles a day, winter and summer, and never am the worse for it. You gentlemen of the Agennois have better in your province, and indeed the very best under the sun. I do not wonder that the Parliament of Bordeaux should be jealous of their privileges, and call it Bordeaux. Now, if you prefer your own country wine, only say it: I have several bottles in my cellar, with corks as long as rapiers, and as polished. I do not know, M. de l'Escale, whether you are particular in these matters: not quite, I should imagine, so great a judge in them as in others? _Scaliger._ I know three things: wine, poetry, and the world. _Montaigne._ You know one too many, then. I hardly know whether I know anything about poetry; for I like Clem Marot better than Ronsard. Ronsard is so plaguily stiff and stately, where there is no occasion for it; I verily do think the man must have slept with his wife in a cuirass. _Scaliger._ It pleases me greatly that you like Marot. His versions of the Psalms is lately set to music, and added to the New Testament of Geneva. _Montaigne._ It is putting a slice of honeycomb into a barrel of vinegar, which will never grow the sweeter for it. _Scaliger._ Surely, you do not think in this fashion of the New Testament! _Montaigne._ Who supposes it? Whatever is mild and kindly is there. But Jack Calvin has thrown bird-lime and vitriol upon it, and whoever but touches the cover dirties his fingers or burns them. _Scaliger._ Calvin is a very great man, I do assure you, M. de Montaigne. _Montaigne._ I do not like your great men who beckon me to them, call me their begotten, their dear child, and their entrails; and, if I happen to say on any occasion, 'I beg leave, sir, to dissent a little from you,' stamp and cry, 'The devil you do!' and whistle to the executioner. _Scaliger._ You exaggerate, my worthy friend! _Montaigne._ Exaggerate do I, M. de l'Escale? What was it he did the other day to the poor devil there with an odd name?--Melancthon, I think it is. _Scaliger._ I do not know: I have received no intelligence of late from Geneva. _Montaigne._ It was but last night that our curate rode over from Lyons (he made two days of it, as you may suppose) and supped with me. He told me that Jack had got his old friend hanged and burned. I could not join him in the joke, for I find none such in the New Testament, on which he would have founded it; and, if it is one, it is not in my manner or to my taste. _Scaliger._ I cannot well believe the report, my dear sir. He was rather urgent, indeed, on the combustion of the heretic Michael Servetus some years past. _Montaigne._ A thousand to one, my spiritual guide mistook the name. He has heard of both, I warrant him, and thinks in his conscience that either is as good a roast as the other. _Scaliger._ Theologians are proud and intolerant, and truly the farthest of all men from theology, if theology means the rational sense of religion, or indeed has anything to do with it in any way. Melancthon was the very best of the reformers; quiet, sedate, charitable, intrepid, firm in friendship, ardent in faith, acute in argument, and profound in learning. _Montaigne._ Who cares about his argumentation or his learning, if he was the rest? _Scaliger._ I hope you will suspend your judgment on this affair until you receive some more certain and positive information. _Montaigne._ I can believe it of the Sieur Calvin. _Scaliger._ I cannot. John Calvin is a grave man, orderly and reasonable. _Montaigne._ In my opinion he has not the order nor the reason of my cook. Mat never took a man for a sucking-pig, cleaning and scraping and buttering and roasting him; nor ever twitched God by the sleeve and swore He should not have His own way. _Scaliger._ M. de Montaigne, have you ever studied the doctrine of predestination? _Montaigne._ I should not understand it, if I had; and I would not break through an old fence merely to get into a cavern. I would not give a fig or a fig-leaf to know the truth of it, as far as any man can teach it me. Would it make me honester or happier, or, in other things, wiser? _Scaliger._ I do not know whether it would materially. _Montaigne._ I should be an egregious fool then to care about it. Our disputes on controverted points have filled the country with missionaries and cut-throats. Both parties have shown a disposition to turn this comfortable old house of mine into a fortress. If I had inclined to either, the other would have done it. Come walk about it with me; after a ride, you can do nothing better to take off fatigue. _Scaliger._ A most spacious kitchen! _Montaigne._ Look up! _Scaliger._ You have twenty or more flitches of bacon hanging there. _Montaigne._ And if I had been a doctor or a captain, I should have had a cobweb and predestination in the place of them. Your soldiers of the _religion_ on the one side, and of the _good old faith_ on the other, would not have left unto me safe and sound even that good old woman there. _Scaliger._ Oh, yes! they would, I hope. _Old Woman._ Why dost giggle, Mat? What should he know about the business? He speaks mighty bad French, and is as spiteful as the devil. Praised be God, we have a kind master, who thinks about us, and feels for us. _Scaliger._ Upon my word, M. de Montaigne, this gallery is an interesting one. _Montaigne._ I can show you nothing but my house and my dairy. We have no chase in the month of May, you know--unless you would like to bait the badger in the stable. This is rare sport in rainy days. _Scaliger._ Are you in earnest, M. de Montaigne? _Montaigne._ No, no, no, I cannot afford to worry him outright: only a little for pastime--a morning's merriment for the dogs and wenches. _Scaliger._ You really are then of so happy a temperament that, at your time of life, you can be amused by baiting a badger! _Montaigne._ Why not? Your father, a wiser and graver and older man than I am, was amused by baiting a professor or critic. I have not a dog in the kennel that would treat the badger worse than brave Julius treated Cardan and Erasmus, and some dozens more. We are all childish, old as well as young; and our very last tooth would fain stick, M. de l'Escale, in some tender place of a neighbour. Boys laugh at a person who falls in the dirt; men laugh rather when they make him fall, and most when the dirt is of their own laying. Is not the gallery rather cold, after the kitchen? We must go through it to get into the court where I keep my tame rabbits; the stable is hard by: come along, come along. _Scaliger._ Permit me to look a little at those banners. Some of them are old indeed. _Montaigne._ Upon my word, I blush to think I never took notice how they are tattered. I have no fewer than three women in the house, and in a summer's evening, only two hours long, the worst of these rags might have been darned across. _Scaliger._ You would not have done it surely! _Montaigne._ I am not over-thrifty; the women might have been better employed. It is as well as it is then; ay? _Scaliger._ I think so. _Montaigne._ So be it. _Scaliger._ They remind me of my own family, we being descended from the great Cane della Scala, Prince of Verona, and from the House of Hapsburg, as you must have heard from my father. _Montaigne._ What signifies it to the world whether the great Cane was tied to his grandmother or not? As for the House of Hapsburg, if you could put together as many such houses as would make up a city larger than Cairo, they would not be worth his study, or a sheet of paper on the table of it. BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA _Boccaccio._ Remaining among us, I doubt not that you would soon receive the same distinctions in your native country as others have conferred upon you: indeed, in confidence I may promise it. For greatly are the Florentines ashamed that the most elegant of their writers and the most independent of their citizens lives in exile, by the injustice he had suffered in the detriment done to his property, through the intemperate administration of their laws. _Petrarca._ Let them recall me soon and honourably: then perhaps I may assist them to remove their ignominy, which I carry about with me wherever I go, and which is pointed out by my exotic laurel. _Boccaccio._ There is, and ever will be, in all countries and under all governments, an ostracism for their greatest men. _Petrarca._ At present we will talk no more about it. To-morrow I pursue my journey towards Padua, where I am expected; where some few value and esteem me, honest and learned and ingenious men; although neither those Transpadane regions, nor whatever extends beyond them, have yet produced an equal to Boccaccio. _Boccaccio._ Then, in the name of friendship, do not go thither!--form such rather from your fellow-citizens. I love my equals heartily; and shall love them the better when I see them raised up here, from our own mother earth, by you. _Petrarca._ Let us continue our walk. _Boccaccio._ If you have been delighted (and you say you have been) at seeing again, after so long an absence, the house and garden wherein I have placed the relaters of my stories, as reported in the _Decameron_, come a little way farther up the ascent, and we will pass through the vineyard on the west of the villa. You will see presently another on the right, lying in its warm little garden close to the roadside, the scene lately of somewhat that would have looked well, as illustration, in the midst of your Latin reflections. It shows us that people the most serious and determined may act at last contrariwise to the line of conduct they have laid down. _Petrarca._ Relate it to me, Messer Giovanni; for you are able to give reality the merits and charms of fiction, just as easily as you give fiction the semblance, the stature, and the movement of reality. _Boccaccio._ I must here forgo such powers, if in good truth I possess them. _Petrarca._ This long green alley, defended by box and cypresses, is very pleasant. The smell of box, although not sweet, is more agreeable to me than many that are: I cannot say from what resuscitation of early and tender feeling. The cypress, too, seems to strengthen the nerves of the brain. Indeed, I delight in the odour of most trees and plants. Will not that dog hurt us?--he comes closer. _Boccaccio._ Dog! thou hast the colours of a magpie and the tongue of one; prithee be quiet: art thou not ashamed? _Petrarca._ Verily he trots off, comforting his angry belly with his plenteous tail, flattened and bestrewn under it. He looks back, going on, and puffs out his upper lip without a bark. _Boccaccio._ These creatures are more accessible to temperate and just rebuke than the creatures of our species, usually angry with less reason, and from no sense, as dogs are, of duty. Look into that white arcade! Surely it was white the other day; and now I perceive it is still so: the setting sun tinges it with yellow. _Petrarca._ The house has nothing of either the rustic or the magnificent about it; nothing quite regular, nothing much varied. If there is anything at all affecting, as I fear there is, in the story you are about to tell me, I could wish the edifice itself bore externally some little of the interesting that I might hereafter turn my mind toward it, looking out of the catastrophe, though not away from it. But I do not even find the peculiar and uncostly decoration of our Tuscan villas: the central turret, round which the kite perpetually circles in search of pigeons or smaller prey, borne onward, like the Flemish skater, by effortless will in motionless progression. The view of Fiesole must be lovely from that window; but I fancy to myself it loses the cascade under the single high arch of the Mugnone. _Boccaccio._ I think so. In this villa--come rather farther off: the inhabitants of it may hear us, if they should happen to be in the arbour, as most people are at the present hour of day--in this villa, Messer Francesco, lives Monna Tita Monalda, who tenderly loved Amadeo degli Oricellari. She, however, was reserved and coy; and Father Pietro de' Pucci, an enemy to the family of Amadeo, told her nevermore to think of him, for that, just before he knew her, he had thrown his arm round the neck of Nunciata Righi, his mother's maid, calling her most immodestly a sweet creature, and of a whiteness that marble would split with envy at. Monna Tita trembled and turned pale. 'Father, is the girl really so very fair?' said she anxiously. 'Madonna,' replied the father, 'after confession she is not much amiss: white she is, with a certain tint of pink not belonging to her, but coming over her as through the wing of an angel pleased at the holy function; and her breath is such, the very ear smells it: poor, innocent, sinful soul! Hei! The wretch, Amadeo, would have endangered her salvation.' 'She must be a wicked girl to let him,' said Monna Tita. 'A young man of good parentage and education would not dare to do such a thing of his own accord. I will see him no more, however. But it was before he knew me: and it may not be true. I cannot think any young woman would let a young man do so, even in the last hour before Lent. Now in what month was it supposed to be?' 'Supposed to be!' cried the father indignantly: 'in June; I say in June.' 'Oh! that now is quite impossible: for on the second of July, forty-one days from this, and at this very hour of it, he swore to me eternal love and constancy. I will inquire of him whether it is true: I will charge him with it.' She did. Amadeo confessed his fault, and, thinking it a venial one, would have taken and kissed her hand as he asked forgiveness. _Petrarca._ Children! children! I will go into the house, and if their relatives, as I suppose, have approved of the marriage, I will endeavour to persuade the young lady that a fault like this, on the repentance of her lover, is not unpardonable. But first, is Amadeo a young man of loose habits? _Boccaccio._ Less than our others: in fact, I never heard of any deviation, excepting this. _Petrarca._ Come, then, with me. _Boccaccio._ Wait a little. _Petrarca._ I hope the modest Tita, after a trial, will not be too severe with him. _Boccaccio._ Severity is far from her nature; but, such is her purity and innocence, she shed many and bitter tears at his confession, and declared her unalterable determination of taking the veil among the nuns of Fiesole. Amadeo fell at her feet, and wept upon them. She pushed him from her gently, and told him she would still love him if he would follow her example, leave the world, and become a friar of San Marco. Amadeo was speechless; and, if he had not been so, he never would have made a promise he intended to violate. She retired from him. After a time he arose, less wounded than benumbed by the sharp uncovered stones in the garden-walk; and, as a man who fears to fall from a precipice goes farther from it than is necessary, so did Amadeo shun the quarter where the gate is, and, oppressed by his agony and despair, throw his arms across the sundial and rest his brow upon it, hot as it must have been on a cloudless day in August. When the evening was about to close, he was aroused by the cries of rooks overhead; they flew towards Florence, and beyond; he, too, went back into the city. Tita fell sick from her inquietude. Every morning ere sunrise did Amadeo return; but could hear only from the labourers in the field that Monna Tita was ill, because she had promised to take the veil and had not taken it, knowing, as she must do, that the heavenly bridegroom is a bridegroom never to be trifled with, let the spouse be young and beautiful as she may be. Amadeo had often conversed with the peasant of the farm, who much pitied so worthy and loving a gentleman; and, finding him one evening fixing some thick and high stakes in the ground, offered to help him. After due thanks, 'It is time,' said the peasant, 'to rebuild the hovel and watch the grapes.' 'This is my house,' cried he. 'Could I never, in my stupidity, think about rebuilding it before? Bring me another mat or two: I will sleep here to-night, to-morrow night, every night, all autumn, all winter.' He slept there, and was consoled at last by hearing that Monna Tita was out of danger, and recovering from her illness by spiritual means. His heart grew lighter day after day. Every evening did he observe the rooks, in the same order, pass along the same track in the heavens, just over San Marco; and it now occurred to him, after three weeks, indeed, that Monna Tita had perhaps some strange idea, in choosing his monastery, not unconnected with the passage of these birds. He grew calmer upon it, until he asked himself whether he might hope. In the midst of this half-meditation, half-dream, his whole frame was shaken by the voices, however low and gentle, of two monks, coming from the villa and approaching him. He would have concealed himself under this bank whereon we are standing; but they saw him, and called him by name. He now perceived that the younger of them was Guiberto Oddi, with whom he had been at school about six or seven years ago, and who admired him for his courage and frankness when he was almost a child. 'Do not let us mortify poor Amadeo,' said Guiberto to his companion. 'Return to the road: I will speak a few words to him, and engage him (I trust) to comply with reason and yield to necessity.' The elder monk, who saw he should have to climb the hill again, assented to the proposal, and went into the road. After the first embraces and few words, 'Amadeo! Amadeo!' said Guiberto, 'it was love that made me a friar; let anything else make you one.' 'Kind heart!' replied Amadeo. 'If death or religion, or hatred of me, deprives me of Tita Monalda, I will die, where she commanded me, in the cowl. It is you who prepare her, then, to throw away her life and mine!' 'Hold! Amadeo!' said Guiberto, 'I officiate together with good Father Fontesecco, who invariably falls asleep amid our holy function.' Now, Messer Francesco, I must inform you that Father Fontesecco has the heart of a flower. It feels nothing, it wants nothing; it is pure and simple, and full of its own little light. Innocent as a child, as an angel, nothing ever troubled him but how to devise what he should confess. A confession costs him more trouble to invent than any Giornata in my _Decameron_ cost me. He was once overheard to say on this occasion, 'God forgive me in His infinite mercy, for making it appear that I am a little worse than He has chosen I should be!' He is temperate; for he never drinks more than exactly half the wine and water set before him. In fact, he drinks the wine and leaves the water, saying: 'We have the same water up at San Domenico; we send it hither: it would be uncivil to take back our own gift, and still more to leave a suspicion that we thought other people's wine poor beverage.' Being afflicted by the gravel, the physician of his convent advised him, as he never was fond of wine, to leave it off entirely; on which he said, 'I know few things; but this I know well--in water there is often gravel, in wine never. It hath pleased God to afflict me, and even to go a little out of His way in order to do it, for the greater warning to other sinners. I will drink wine, brother Anselmini, and help His work.' I have led you away from the younger monk. 'While Father Fontesecco is in the first stage of beatitude, chanting through his nose the _Benedicite_, I will attempt,' said Guiberto, 'to comfort Monna Tita.' 'Good, blessed Guiberto!' exclaimed Amadeo in a transport of gratitude, at which Guiberto smiled with his usual grace and suavity. 'O Guiberto! Guiberto! my heart is breaking. Why should she want you to comfort her?--but--comfort her then!' and he covered his face within his hands. 'Remember,' said Guiberto placidly, 'her uncle is bedridden; her aunt never leaves him; the servants are old and sullen, and will stir for nobody. Finding her resolved, as they believe, to become a nun, they are little assiduous in their services. Humour her, if none else does, Amadeo; let her fancy that you intend to be a friar; and, for the present, walk not on these grounds.' 'Are you true, or are you traitorous?' cried Amadeo, grasping his friend's hand most fiercely. 'Follow your own counsel, if you think mine insincere,' said the young friar, not withdrawing his hand, but placing the other on Amadeo's. 'Let me, however, advise you to conceal yourself; and I will direct Silvestrina to bring you such accounts of her mistress as may at least make you easy in regard to her health. Adieu.' Amadeo was now rather tranquil; more than he had ever been, not only since the displeasure of Monna Tita, but since the first sight of her. Profuse at all times in his gratitude to Silvestrina, whenever she brought him good news, news better than usual, he pressed her to his bosom. Silvestrina Pioppi is about fifteen, slender, fresh, intelligent, lively, good-humoured, sensitive; and any one but Amadeo might call her very pretty. _Petrarca._ Ah, Giovanni! here I find your heart obtaining the mastery over your vivid and volatile imagination. Well have you said, the maiden being really pretty, any one but Amadeo might think her so. On the banks of the Sorga there are beautiful maids; the woods and the rocks have a thousand times repeated it. I heard but one echo; I heard but one name: I would have fled from them for ever at another. _Boccaccio._ Francesco, do not beat your breast just now: wait a little. Monna Tita would take the veil. The fatal certainty was announced to Amadeo by his true Guiberto, who had earnestly and repeatedly prayed her to consider the thing a few months longer. 'I will see her first! By all the saints of heaven I will see her!' cried the desperate Amadeo, and ran into the house, toward the still apartment of his beloved. Fortunately Guiberto was neither less active nor less strong than he, and overtaking him at the moment, drew him into the room opposite. 'If you will be quiet and reasonable, there is yet a possibility left you,' said Guiberto in his ear, although perhaps he did not think it. 'But if you utter a voice or are seen by any one, you ruin the fame of her you love, and obstruct your own prospects for ever. It being known that you have not slept in Florence these several nights, it will be suspected by the malicious that you have slept in the villa with the connivance of Monna Tita. Compose yourself; answer nothing; rest where you are: do not add a worse imprudence to a very bad one. I promise you my assistance, my speedy return, and best counsel: you shall be released at daybreak.' He ordered Silvestrina to supply the unfortunate youth with the cordials usually administered to the uncle, or with the rich old wine they were made of; and she performed the order with such promptitude and attention, that he was soon in some sort refreshed. _Petrarca._ I pity him from my innermost heart, poor young man! Alas, we are none of us, by original sin, free from infirmities or from vices. _Boccaccio._ If we could find a man exempt by nature from vices and infirmities, we should find one not worth knowing: he would also be void of tenderness and compassion. What allowances then could his best friends expect from him in their frailties? What help, consolation, and assistance in their misfortunes? We are in the midst of a workshop well stored with sharp instruments: we may do ill with many, unless we take heed; and good with all, if we will but learn how to employ them. _Petrarca._ There is somewhat of reason in this. You strengthen me to proceed with you: I can bear the rest. _Boccaccio._ Guiberto had taken leave of his friend, and had advanced a quarter of a mile, which (as you perceive) is nearly the whole way, on his return to the monastery, when he was overtaken by some peasants who were hastening homeward from Florence. The information he collected from them made him determine to retrace his steps. He entered the room again, and, from the intelligence he had just acquired, gave Amadeo the assurance that Monna Tita must delay her entrance into the convent; for that the abbess had that moment gone down the hill on her way toward Siena to venerate some holy relics, carrying with her three candles, each five feet long, to burn before them; which candles contained many particles of the myrrh presented at the Nativity of our Saviour by the Wise Men of the East. Amadeo breathed freely, and was persuaded by Guiberto to take another cup of old wine, and to eat with him some cold roast kid, which had been offered him for _merenda_. After the agitation of his mind a heavy sleep fell upon the lover, coming almost before Guiberto departed: so heavy indeed that Silvestrina was alarmed. It was her apartment; and she performed the honours of it as well as any lady in Florence could have done. _Petrarca._ I easily believe it: the poor are more attentive than the rich, and the young are more compassionate than the old. _Boccaccio._ O Francesco! what inconsistent creatures are we! _Petrarca._ True, indeed! I now foresee the end. He might have done worse. _Boccaccio._ I think so. _Petrarca._ He almost deserved it. _Boccaccio._ I think that too. _Petrarca._ Wretched mortals! our passions for ever lead us into this, or worse. _Boccaccio._ Ay, truly; much worse generally. _Petrarca._ The very twig on which the flowers grew lately scourges us to the bone in its maturity. _Boccaccio._ Incredible will it be to you, and, by my faith, to me it was hardly credible. Certain, however, is it that Guiberto on his return by sunrise found Amadeo in the arms of sleep. _Petrarca._ Not at all, not at all: the truest lover might suffer and act as he did. _Boccaccio._ But, Francesco, there was another pair of arms about him, worth twenty such, divinity as he is. A loud burst of laughter from Guiberto did not arouse either of the parties; but Monna Tita heard it, and rushed into the room, tearing her hair, and invoking the saints of heaven against the perfidy of man. She seized Silvestrina by that arm which appeared the most offending: the girl opened her eyes, turned on her face, rolled out of bed, and threw herself at the feet of her mistress, shedding tears, and wiping them away with the only piece of linen about her. Monna Tita too shed tears. Amadeo still slept profoundly; a flush, almost of crimson, overspreading his cheeks. Monna Tita led away, after some pause, poor Silvestrina, and made her confess the whole. She then wept more and more, and made the girl confess it again, and explain her confession. 'I cannot believe such wickedness,' she cried: 'he could not be so hardened. O sinful Silvestrina! how will you ever tell Father Doni one half, one quarter? He never can absolve you.' _Petrarca._ Giovanni, I am glad I did not enter the house; you were prudent in restraining me. I have no pity for the youth at all: never did one so deserve to lose a mistress. _Boccaccio._ Say, rather, to gain a wife. _Petrarca._ Absurdity! impossibility! _Boccaccio._ He won her fairly; strangely, and on a strange table, as he played his game. Listen! that guitar is Monna Tita's. Listen! what a fine voice (do not you think it?) is Amadeo's. _Amadeo._ [_Singing._] Oh, I have err'd! I laid my hand upon the nest (Tita, I sigh to sing the rest) Of the wrong bird. _Petrarca._ She laughs too at it! Ah! Monna Tita was made by nature to live on this side of Fiesole. BOSSUET AND THE DUCHESS DE FONTANGES _Bossuet._ Mademoiselle, it is the king's desire that I compliment you on the elevation you have attained. _Fontanges._ O monseigneur, I know very well what you mean. His Majesty is kind and polite to everybody. The last thing he said to me was, 'Angélique! do not forget to compliment Monseigneur the bishop on the dignity I have conferred upon him, of almoner to the dauphiness. I desired the appointment for him only that he might be of rank sufficient to confess, now you are duchess. Let him be your confessor, my little girl.' _Bossuet._ I dare not presume to ask you, mademoiselle, what was your gracious reply to the condescension of our royal master. _Fontanges._ Oh, yes! you may. I told him I was almost sure I should be ashamed of confessing such naughty things to a person of high rank, who writes like an angel. _Bossuet._ The observation was inspired, mademoiselle, by your goodness and modesty. _Fontanges._ You are so agreeable a man, monseigneur, I will confess to you, directly, if you like. _Bossuet._ Have you brought yourself to a proper frame of mind, young lady? _Fontanges._ What is that? _Bossuet._ Do you hate sin? _Fontanges._ Very much. _Bossuet._ Are you resolved to leave it off? _Fontanges._ I have left it off entirely since the king began to love me. I have never said a spiteful word of anybody since. _Bossuet._ In your opinion, mademoiselle, are there no other sins than malice? _Fontanges._ I never stole anything; I never committed adultery; I never coveted my neighbour's wife; I never killed any person, though several have told me they should die for me. _Bossuet._ Vain, idle talk! Did you listen to it? _Fontanges._ Indeed I did, with both ears; it seemed so funny. _Bossuet._ You have something to answer for, then. _Fontanges._ No, indeed, I have not, monseigneur. I have asked many times after them, and found they were all alive, which mortified me. _Bossuet._ So, then! you would really have them die for you? _Fontanges._ Oh, no, no! but I wanted to see whether they were in earnest, or told me fibs; for, if they told me fibs, I would never trust them again. _Bossuet._ Do you hate the world, mademoiselle? _Fontanges._ A good deal of it: all Picardy, for example, and all Sologne; nothing is uglier--and, oh my life! what frightful men and women! _Bossuet._ I would say, in plain language, do you hate the flesh and the devil? _Fontanges._ Who does not hate the devil? If you will hold my hand the while, I will tell him so. I hate you, beast! There now. As for flesh, I never could bear a fat man. Such people can neither dance nor hunt, nor do anything that I know of. _Bossuet._ Mademoiselle Marie-Angélique de Scoraille de Rousille, Duchess de Fontanges! do you hate titles and dignities and yourself? _Fontanges._ Myself! does any one hate me? Why should I be the first? Hatred is the worst thing in the world: it makes one so very ugly. _Bossuet._ To love God, we must hate ourselves. We must detest our bodies, if we would save our souls. _Fontanges._ That is hard: how can I do it? I see nothing so detestable in mine. Do you? To love is easier. I love God whenever I think of Him, He has been so very good to me; but I cannot hate myself, if I would. As God hath not hated me, why should I? Beside, it was He who made the king to love me; for I heard you say in a sermon that the hearts of kings are in His rule and governance. As for titles and dignities, I do not care much about them while his Majesty loves me, and calls me his Angélique. They make people more civil about us; and therefore it must be a simpleton who hates or disregards them, and a hypocrite who pretends it. I am glad to be a duchess. Manon and Lisette have never tied my garter so as to hurt me since, nor has the mischievous old La Grange said anything cross or bold: on the contrary, she told me what a fine colour and what a plumpness it gave me. Would not you rather be a duchess than a waiting-maid or a nun, if the king gave you your choice? _Bossuet._ Pardon me, mademoiselle, I am confounded at the levity of your question. _Fontanges._ I am in earnest, as you see. _Bossuet._ Flattery will come before you in other and more dangerous forms: you will be commended for excellences which do not belong to you; and this you will find as injurious to your repose as to your virtue. An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it, you are unhappy; if you accept it, you are undone. The compliments of a king are of themselves sufficient to pervert your intellect. _Fontanges._ There you are mistaken twice over. It is not my person that pleases him so greatly: it is my spirit, my wit, my talents, my genius, and that very thing which you have mentioned--what was it? my intellect. He never complimented me the least upon my beauty. Others have said that I am the most beautiful young creature under heaven; a blossom of Paradise, a nymph, an angel; worth (let me whisper it in your ear--do I lean too hard?) a thousand Montespans. But his Majesty never said more on the occasion than that I was _imparagonable!_ (what is that?) and that he adored me; holding my hand and sitting quite still, when he might have romped with me and kissed me. _Bossuet._ I would aspire to the glory of converting you. _Fontanges._ You may do anything with me but convert me: you must not do that; I am a Catholic born. M. de Turenne and Mademoiselle de Duras were heretics: you did right there. The king told the chancellor that he prepared them, that the business was arranged for you, and that you had nothing to do but get ready the arguments and responses, which you did gallantly--did not you? And yet Mademoiselle de Duras was very awkward for a long while afterwards in crossing herself, and was once remarked to beat her breast in the litany with the points of two fingers at a time, when every one is taught to use only the second, whether it has a ring upon it or not. I am sorry she did so; for people might think her insincere in her conversion, and pretend that she kept a finger for each religion. _Bossuet._ It would be as uncharitable to doubt the conviction of Mademoiselle de Duras as that of M. le Maréchal. _Fontanges._ I have heard some fine verses, I can assure you, monseigneur, in which you are called the conqueror of Turenne. I should like to have been his conqueror myself, he was so great a man. I understand that you have lately done a much more difficult thing. _Bossuet._ To what do you refer, mademoiselle? _Fontanges._ That you have overcome quietism. Now, in the name of wonder, how could you manage that? _Bossuet._ By the grace of God. _Fontanges._ Yes, indeed; but never until now did God give any preacher so much of His grace as to subdue this pest. _Bossuet._ It has appeared among us but lately. _Fontanges._ Oh, dear me! I have always been subject to it dreadfully, from a child. _Bossuet._ Really! I never heard so. _Fontanges._ I checked myself as well as I could, although they constantly told me I looked well in it. _Bossuet._ In what, mademoiselle? _Fontanges._ In quietism; that is, when I fell asleep at sermon time. I am ashamed that such a learned and pious man as M. de Fénelon should incline to it,[1] as they say he does. _Bossuet._ Mademoiselle, you quite mistake the matter. _Fontanges._ Is not then M. de Fénelon thought a very pious and learned person? _Bossuet._ And justly. _Fontanges._ I have read a great way in a romance he has begun, about a knight-errant in search of a father. The king says there are many such about his court; but I never saw them nor heard of them before. The Marchioness de la Motte, his relative, brought it to me, written out in a charming hand, as much as the copy-book would hold; and I got through, I know not how far. If he had gone on with the nymphs in the grotto, I never should have been tired of him; but he quite forgot his own story, and left them at once; in a hurry (I suppose) to set out upon his mission to Saintonge in the _pays de d'Aunis_, where the king has promised him a famous _heretic hunt_. He is, I do assure you, a wonderful creature: he understands so much Latin and Greek, and knows all the tricks of the sorceresses. Yet you keep him under. _Bossuet._ Mademoiselle, if you really have anything to confess, and if you desire that I should have the honour of absolving you, it would be better to proceed in it, than to oppress me with unmerited eulogies on my humble labours. _Fontanges._ You must first direct me, monseigneur: I have nothing particular. The king assures me there is no harm whatever in his love toward me. _Bossuet._ That depends on your thoughts at the moment. If you abstract the mind from the body, and turn your heart toward Heaven---- _Fontanges._ O monseigneur, I always did so--every time but once--you quite make me blush. Let us converse about something else, or I shall grow too serious, just as you made me the other day at the funeral sermon. And now let me tell you, my lord, you compose such pretty funeral sermons, I hope I shall have the pleasure of hearing you preach mine. _Bossuet._ Rather let us hope, mademoiselle, that the hour is yet far distant when so melancholy a service will be performed for you. May he who is unborn be the sad announcer of your departure hence![2] May he indicate to those around him many virtues not perhaps yet full-blown in you, and point triumphantly to many faults and foibles checked by you in their early growth, and lying dead on the open road, you shall have left behind you! To me the painful duty will, I trust, be spared: I am advanced in age; you are a child. _Fontanges._ Oh, no! I am seventeen. _Bossuet._ I should have supposed you younger by two years at least. But do you collect nothing from your own reflection, which raises so many in my breast? You think it possible that I, aged as I am, may preach a sermon at your funeral. We say that our days are few; and saying it, we say too much. Marie-Angélique, we have but one: the past are not ours, and who can promise us the future? This in which we live is ours only while we live in it; the next moment may strike it off from us; the next sentence I would utter may be broken and fall between us.[3] The beauty that has made a thousand hearts to beat at one instant, at the succeeding has been without pulse and colour, without admirer, friend, companion, follower. She by whose eyes the march of victory shall have been directed, whose name shall have animated armies at the extremities of the earth, drops into one of its crevices and mingles with its dust. Duchess de Fontanges! think on this! Lady! so live as to think on it undisturbed! _Fontanges._ O God! I am quite alarmed. Do not talk thus gravely. It is in vain that you speak to me in so sweet a voice. I am frightened even at the rattle of the beads about my neck: take them off, and let us talk on other things. What was it that dropped on the floor as you were speaking? It seemed to shake the room, though it sounded like a pin or button. _Bossuet._ Leave it there! _Fontanges._ Your ring fell from your hand, my lord bishop! How quick you are! Could not you have trusted me to pick it up? _Bossuet._ Madame is too condescending: had this happened, I should have been overwhelmed with confusion. My hand is shrivelled: the ring has ceased to fit it. A mere accident may draw us into perdition; a mere accident may bestow on us the means of grace. A pebble has moved you more than my words. _Fontanges._ It pleases me vastly: I admire rubies. I will ask the king for one exactly like it. This is the time he usually comes from the chase. I am sorry you cannot be present to hear how prettily I shall ask him: but that is impossible, you know; for I shall do it just when I am certain he would give me anything. He said so himself: he said but yesterday-- 'Such a sweet creature is worth a world': and no actor on the stage was more like a king than his Majesty was when he spoke it, if he had but kept his wig and robe on. And yet you know he is rather stiff and wrinkled for so great a monarch; and his eyes, I am afraid, are beginning to fail him, he looks so close at things. _Bossuet._ Mademoiselle, such is the duty of a prince who desires to conciliate our regard and love. _Fontanges._ Well, I think so, too, though I did not like it in him at first. I am sure he will order the ring for me, and I will confess to you with it upon my finger. But first I must be cautious and particular to know of him how much it is his royal will that I should say. FOOTNOTES: [1] The opinions of Molinos on Mysticism and Quietism had begun to spread abroad; but Fénelon, who had acquired already a very high celebrity for eloquence, had not yet written on the subject. We may well suppose that Bossuet was among the earliest assailants of a system which he afterward attacked so vehemently. [2] Bossuet was in his fifty-fourth year; Mademoiselle de Fontanges died in child-bed the year following: he survived her twenty-three years. [3] Though Bossuet was capable of uttering and even of feeling such a sentiment, his conduct towards Fénelon, the fairest apparition that Christianity ever presented, was ungenerous and unjust. While the diocese of Cambray was ravaged by Louis, it was spared by Marlborough; who said to the archbishop that, if he was sorry he had not taken Cambray, it was chiefly because he lost for a time the pleasure of visiting so great a man. Peterborough, the next of our generals in glory, paid his respects to him some years afterward. JOHN OF GAUNT AND JOANNA OF KENT Joanna, called the Fair Maid of Kent, was cousin of the Black Prince, whom she married. John of Gaunt was suspected of aiming at the crown in the beginning of Richard's minority, which, increasing the hatred of the people against him for favouring the sect of Wickliffe, excited them to demolish his house and to demand his impeachment. _Joanna._ How is this, my cousin, that you are besieged in your own house by the citizens of London? I thought you were their idol. _Gaunt._ If their idol, madam, I am one which they may tread on as they list when down; but which, by my soul and knighthood! the ten best battle-axes among them shall find it hard work to unshrine. Pardon me: I have no right, perhaps, to take or touch this hand; yet, my sister, bricks and stones and arrows are not presents fit for you. Let me conduct you some paces hence. _Joanna._ I will speak to those below in the street. Quit my hand: they shall obey me. _Gaunt._ If you intend to order my death, madam, your guards who have entered my court, and whose spurs and halberts I hear upon the staircase, may overpower my domestics; and, seeing no such escape as becomes my dignity, I submit to you. Behold my sword and gauntlet at your feet! Some formalities, I trust, will be used in the proceedings against me. Entitle me, in my attainder, not John of Gaunt, not Duke of Lancaster, not King of Castile; nor commemorate my father, the most glorious of princes, the vanquisher and pardoner of the most powerful; nor style me, what those who loved or who flattered me did when I was happier, cousin to the Fair Maid of Kent. Joanna, those days are over! But no enemy, no law, no eternity can take away from me, or move further off, my affinity in blood to the conqueror in the field of Crecy, of Poitiers, and Najera. Edward was my brother when he was but your cousin; and the edge of my shield has clinked on his in many a battle. Yes, we were ever near--if not in worth, in danger. She weeps. _Joanna._ Attainder! God avert it! Duke of Lancaster, what dark thought--alas! that the Regency should have known it! I came hither, sir, for no such purpose as to ensnare or incriminate or alarm you. These weeds might surely have protected me from the fresh tears you have drawn forth. _Gaunt._ Sister, be comforted! this visor, too, has felt them. _Joanna._ O my Edward! my own so lately! Thy memory--thy beloved image--which never hath abandoned me, makes me bold: I dare not say 'generous'; for in saying it I should cease to be so--and who could be called generous by the side of thee? I will rescue from perdition the enemy of my son. Cousin, you loved your brother. Love, then, what was dearer to him than his life: protect what he, valiant as you have seen him, cannot! The father, who foiled so many, hath left no enemies; the innocent child, who can injure no one, finds them! Why have you unlaced and laid aside your visor? Do not expose your body to those missiles. Hold your shield before yourself, and step aside. I need it not. I am resolved---- _Gaunt._ On what, my cousin? Speak, and, by the saints! it shall be done. This breast is your shield; this arm is mine. _Joanna._ Heavens! who could have hurled those masses of stone from below? they stunned me. Did they descend all of them together; or did they split into fragments on hitting the pavement? _Gaunt._ Truly, I was not looking that way: they came, I must believe, while you were speaking. _Joanna._ Aside, aside! further back! disregard _me_! Look! that last arrow sticks half its head deep in the wainscot. It shook so violently I did not see the feather at first. No, no, Lancaster! I will not permit it. Take your shield up again; and keep it all before you. Now step aside: I am resolved to prove whether the people will hear me. _Gaunt._ Then, madam, by your leave---- _Joanna._ Hold! _Gaunt._ Villains! take back to your kitchens those spits and skewers that you, forsooth, would fain call swords and arrows; and keep your bricks and stones for your graves! _Joanna._ Imprudent man! who can save you? I shall be frightened: I must speak at once. O good kind people! ye who so greatly loved me, when I am sure I had done nothing to deserve it, have I (unhappy me!) no merit with you now, when I would assuage your anger, protect your fair fame, and send you home contented with yourselves and me? Who is he, worthy citizens, whom ye would drag to slaughter? True, indeed, he did revile someone. Neither I nor you can say whom--some feaster and rioter, it seems, who had little right (he thought) to carry sword or bow, and who, to show it, hath slunk away. And then another raised his anger: he was indignant that, under his roof, a woman should be exposed to stoning. Which of you would not be as choleric in a like affront? In the house of which among you should I not be protected as resolutely? No, no: I never can believe those angry cries. Let none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son, of his king, your darling child, Richard. Are your fears more lively than a poor weak female's? than a mother's? yours, whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his father, naming each--he, John of Gaunt, the defender of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the rallying signal of the desperately brave! Retire, Duke of Lancaster! This is no time---- _Gaunt._ Madam, I obey; but not through terror of that puddle at the house door, which my handful of dust would dry up. Deign to command me! _Joanna._ In the name of my son, then, retire! _Gaunt._ Angelic goodness! I must fairly win it. _Joanna._ I think I know his voice that crieth out: 'Who will answer for him?' An honest and loyal man's, one who would counsel and save me in any difficulty and danger. With what pleasure and satisfaction, with what perfect joy and confidence, do I answer our right-trusty and well-judging friend! 'Let Lancaster bring his sureties,' say you, 'and we separate.' A moment yet before we separate; if I might delay you so long, to receive your sanction of those securities: for, in such grave matters, it would ill become us to be over-hasty. I could bring fifty, I could bring a hundred, not from among soldiers, not from among courtiers; but selected from yourselves, were it equitable and fair to show such partialities, or decorous in the parent and guardian of a king to offer any other than herself. Raised by the hand of the Almighty from amidst you, but still one of you, if the mother of a family is a part of it, here I stand surety for John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, for his loyalty and allegiance. _Gaunt._ [_Running back toward Joanna._] Are the rioters, then, bursting into the chamber through the windows? _Joanna._ The windows and doors of this solid edifice rattled and shook at the people's acclamation. My word is given for you: this was theirs in return. Lancaster! what a voice have the people when they speak out! It shakes me with astonishment, almost with consternation, while it establishes the throne: what must it be when it is lifted up in vengeance! _Gaunt._ Wind; vapour---- _Joanna._ Which none can wield nor hold. Need I say this to my cousin of Lancaster? _Gaunt._ Rather say, madam, that there is always one star above which can tranquillize and control them. _Joanna._ Go, cousin! another time more sincerity! _Gaunt._ You have this day saved my life from the people; for I now see my danger better, when it is no longer close before me. My Christ! if ever I forget---- _Joanna._ Swear not: every man in England hath sworn what you would swear. But if you abandon my Richard, my brave and beautiful child, may--Oh! I could never curse, nor wish an evil; but, if you desert him in the hour of need, you will think of those who have not deserted you, and your own great heart will lie heavy on you, Lancaster! Am I graver than I ought to be, that you look dejected? Come, then, gentle cousin, lead me to my horse, and accompany me home. Richard will embrace us tenderly. Every one is dear to every other upon rising out fresh from peril; affectionately then will he look, sweet boy, upon his mother and his uncle! Never mind how many questions he may ask you, nor how strange ones. His only displeasure, if he has any, will be that he stood not against the rioters or among them. _Gaunt._ Older than he have been as fond of mischief, and as fickle in the choice of a party. I shall tell him that, coming to blows, the assailant is often in the right; that the assailed is always. LEOFRIC AND GODIVA _Godiva._ There is a dearth in the land, my sweet Leofric! Remember how many weeks of drought we have had, even in the deep pastures of Leicestershire; and how many Sundays we have heard the same prayers for rain, and supplications that it would please the Lord in His mercy to turn aside His anger from the poor, pining cattle. You, my dear husband, have imprisoned more than one malefactor for leaving his dead ox in the public way; and other hinds have fled before you out of the traces, in which they, and their sons and their daughters, and haply their old fathers and mothers, were dragging the abandoned wain homeward. Although we were accompanied by many brave spearmen and skilful archers, it was perilous to pass the creatures which the farmyard dogs, driven from the hearth by the poverty of their masters, were tearing and devouring; while others, bitten and lamed, filled the air either with long and deep howls or sharp and quick barkings, as they struggled with hunger and feebleness, or were exasperated by heat and pain. Nor could the thyme from the heath, nor the bruised branches of the fir-tree, extinguish or abate the foul odour. _Leofric._ And now, Godiva, my darling, thou art afraid we should be eaten up before we enter the gates of Coventry; or perchance that in the gardens there are no roses to greet thee, no sweet herbs for thy mat and pillow. _Godiva._ Leofric, I have no such fears. This is the month of roses: I find them everywhere since my blessed marriage. They, and all other sweet herbs, I know not why, seem to greet me wherever I look at them, as though they knew and expected me. Surely they cannot feel that I am fond of them. _Leofric._ O light, laughing simpleton! But what wouldst thou? I came not hither to pray; and yet if praying would satisfy thee, or remove the drought, I would ride up straightway to Saint Michael's and pray until morning. _Godiva._ I would do the same, O Leofric! but God hath turned away His ear from holier lips than mine. Would my own dear husband hear me, if I implored him for what is easier to accomplish--what he can do like God? _Leofric._ How! what is it? _Godiva._ I would not, in the first hurry of your wrath, appeal to you, my loving lord, on behalf of these unhappy men who have offended you. _Leofric._ Unhappy! is that all? _Godiva._ Unhappy they must surely be, to have offended you so grievously. What a soft air breathes over us! how quiet and serene and still an evening! how calm are the heavens and the earth! Shall none enjoy them; not even we, my Leofric? The sun is ready to set: let it never set, O Leofric, on your anger. These are not my words: they are better than mine. Should they lose their virtue from my unworthiness in uttering them? _Leofric._ Godiva, wouldst thou plead to me for rebels? _Godiva._ They have, then, drawn the sword against you? Indeed, I knew it not. _Leofric._ They have omitted to send me my dues, established by my ancestors, well knowing of our nuptials, and of the charges and festivities they require, and that in a season of such scarcity my own lands are insufficient. _Godiva._ If they were starving, as they said they were---- _Leofric._ Must I starve too? Is it not enough to lose my vassals? _Godiva._ Enough! O God! too much! too much! May you never lose them! Give them life, peace, comfort, contentment. There are those among them who kissed me in my infancy, and who blessed me at the baptismal font. Leofric, Leofric! the first old man I meet I shall think is one of those; and I shall think on the blessing he gave, and (ah me!) on the blessing I bring back to him. My heart will bleed, will burst; and he will weep at it! he will weep, poor soul, for the wife of a cruel lord who denounces vengeance on him, who carries death into his family! _Leofric._ We must hold solemn festivals. _Godiva._ We must, indeed. _Leofric._ Well, then? _Godiva._ Is the clamorousness that succeeds the death of God's dumb creatures, are crowded halls, are slaughtered cattle festivals?--are maddening songs, and giddy dances, and hireling praises from parti-coloured coats? Can the voice of a minstrel tell us better things of ourselves than our own internal one might tell us; or can his breath make our breath softer in sleep? O my beloved! let everything be a joyance to us: it will, if we will. Sad is the day, and worse must follow, when we hear the blackbird in the garden, and do not throb with joy. But, Leofric, the high festival is strown by the servant of God upon the heart of man. It is gladness, it is thanksgiving; it is the orphan, the starveling, pressed to the bosom, and bidden as its first commandment to remember its benefactor. We will hold this festival; the guests are ready: we may keep it up for weeks, and months, and years together, and always be the happier and the richer for it. The beverage of this feast, O Leofric, is sweeter than bee or flower or vine can give us: it flows from heaven; and in heaven will it abundantly be poured out again to him who pours it out here abundantly. _Leofric._ Thou art wild. _Godiva._ I have, indeed, lost myself. Some Power, some good kind Power, melts me (body and soul and voice) into tenderness and love. O my husband, we must obey it. Look upon me! look upon me! lift your sweet eyes from the ground! I will not cease to supplicate; I dare not. _Leofric._ We may think upon it. _Godiva._ Oh, never say that! What! think upon goodness when you can be good? Let not the infants cry for sustenance! The Mother of Our Blessed Lord will hear them; us never, never afterward. _Leofric._ Here comes the bishop: we are but one mile from the walls. Why dismountest thou? no bishop can expect this. Godiva! my honour and rank among men are humbled by this. Earl Godwin will hear of it. Up! up! the bishop hath seen it: he urgeth his horse onward. Dost thou not hear him now upon the solid turf behind thee? _Godiva._ Never, no, never will I rise, O Leofric, until you remit this most impious task--this tax on hard labour, on hard life. _Leofric._ Turn round: look how the fat nag canters, as to the tune of a sinner's psalm, slow and hard-breathing. What reason or right can the people have to complain, while their bishop's steed is so sleek and well caparisoned? Inclination to change, desire to abolish old usages. Up! up! for shame! They shall smart for it, idlers! Sir Bishop, I must blush for my young bride. _Godiva._ My husband, my husband! will you pardon the city? _Leofric._ Sir Bishop! I could think you would have seen her in this plight. Will I pardon? Yea, Godiva, by the holy rood, will I pardon the city, when thou ridest naked at noontide through the streets! _Godiva._ O my dear, cruel Leofric, where is the heart you gave me? It was not so: can mine have hardened it? _Bishop._ Earl, thou abashest thy spouse; she turneth pale, and weepeth. Lady Godiva, peace be with thee. _Godiva._ Thanks, holy man! peace will be with me when peace is with your city. Did you hear my lord's cruel word? _Bishop._ I did, lady. _Godiva._ Will you remember it, and pray against it? _Bishop._ Wilt _thou_ forget it, daughter? _Godiva._ I am not offended. _Bishop._ Angel of peace and purity! _Godiva._ But treasure it up in your heart: deem it an incense, good only when it is consumed and spent, ascending with prayer and sacrifice. And, now, what was it? _Bishop._ Christ save us! that He will pardon the city when thou ridest naked through the streets at noon. _Godiva._ Did he swear an oath? _Bishop._ He sware by the holy rood. _Godiva._ My Redeemer, Thou hast heard it! save the city! _Leofric._ We are now upon the beginning of the pavement: these are the suburbs. Let us think of feasting: we may pray afterward; to-morrow we shall rest. _Godiva._ No judgments, then, to-morrow, Leofric? _Leofric._ None: we will carouse. _Godiva._ The saints of heaven have given me strength and confidence; my prayers are heard; the heart of my beloved is now softened. _Leofric._ Ay, ay. _Godiva._ Say, dearest Leofric, is there indeed no other hope, no other mediation? _Leofric._ I have sworn. Beside, thou hast made me redden and turn my face away from thee, and all the knaves have seen it: this adds to the city's crime. _Godiva._ I have blushed, too, Leofric, and was not rash nor obdurate. _Leofric._ But thou, my sweetest, art given to blushing: there is no conquering it in thee. I wish thou hadst not alighted so hastily and roughly: it hath shaken down a sheaf of thy hair. Take heed thou sit not upon it, lest it anguish thee. Well done! it mingleth now sweetly with the cloth of gold upon the saddle, running here and there, as if it had life and faculties and business, and were working thereupon some newer and cunninger device. O my beauteous Eve! there is a Paradise about thee! the world is refreshed as thou movest and breathest on it. I cannot see or think of evil where thou art. I could throw my arms even here about thee. No signs for me! no shaking of sunbeams! no reproof or frown of wonderment.--I _will_ say it--now, then, for worse--I could close with my kisses thy half-open lips, ay, and those lovely and loving eyes, before the people. _Godiva._ To-morrow you shall kiss me, and they shall bless you for it. I shall be very pale, for to-night I must fast and pray. _Leofric._ I do not hear thee; the voices of the folk are so loud under this archway. _Godiva._ [_To herself._] God help them! good kind souls! I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow. O Leofric! could my name be forgotten, and yours alone remembered! But perhaps my innocence may save me from reproach; and how many as innocent are in fear and famine! No eye will open on me but fresh from tears. What a young mother for so large a family! Shall my youth harm me? Under God's hand it gives me courage. Ah! when will the morning come? Ah! when will the noon be over? The story of Godiva, at one of whose festivals or fairs I was present in my boyhood, has always much interested me; and I wrote a poem on it, sitting, I remember, by the _square pool_ at Rugby. When I showed it to the friend in whom I had most confidence, he began to scoff at the subject; and, on his reaching the last line, his laughter was loud and immoderate. This conversation has brought both laughter and stanza back to me, and the earnestness with which I entreated and implored my friend _not to tell the lads_, so heart-strickenly and desperately was I ashamed. The verses are these, if any one else should wish another laugh at me: 'In every hour, in every mood, O lady, it is sweet and good To bathe the soul in prayer; And, at the close of such a day, When we have ceased to bless and pray, To dream on thy long hair.' May the peppermint be still growing on the bank in that place! ESSEX AND SPENSER _Essex._ Instantly on hearing of thy arrival from Ireland, I sent a message to thee, good Edmund, that I might learn, from one so judicious and dispassionate as thou art, the real state of things in that distracted country; it having pleased the queen's Majesty to think of appointing me her deputy, in order to bring the rebellious to submission. _Spenser._ Wisely and well considered; but more worthily of her judgment than her affection. May your lordship overcome, as you have ever done, the difficulties and dangers you foresee. _Essex._ We grow weak by striking at random; and knowing that I must strike, and strike heavily, I would fain see exactly where the stroke shall fall. Now what tale have you for us? _Spenser._ Interrogate me, my lord, that I may answer each question distinctly, my mind being in sad confusion at what I have seen and undergone. _Essex._ Give me thy account and opinion of these very affairs as thou leftest them; for I would rather know one part well than all imperfectly; and the violences of which I have heard within the day surpass belief. Why weepest thou, my gentle Spenser? Have the rebels sacked thy house? _Spenser._ They have plundered and utterly destroyed it. _Essex._ I grieve for thee, and will see thee righted. _Spenser._ In this they have little harmed me. _Essex._ How! I have heard it reported that thy grounds are fertile, and thy mansion large and pleasant. _Spenser._ If river and lake and meadow-ground and mountain could render any place the abode of pleasantness, pleasant was mine, indeed! On the lovely banks of Mulla I found deep contentment. Under the dark alders did I muse and meditate. Innocent hopes were my gravest cares, and my playfullest fancy was with kindly wishes. Ah! surely of all cruelties the worst is to extinguish our kindness. Mine is gone: I love the people and the land no longer. My lord, ask me not about them: I may speak injuriously. _Essex._ Think rather, then, of thy happier hours and busier occupations; these likewise may instruct me. _Spenser._ The first seeds I sowed in the garden, ere the old castle was made habitable for my lovely bride, were acorns from Penshurst. I planted a little oak before my mansion at the birth of each child. My sons, I said to myself, shall often play in the shade of them when I am gone; and every year shall they take the measure of their growth, as fondly as I take theirs. _Essex._ Well, well; but let not this thought make thee weep so bitterly. _Spenser._ Poison may ooze from beautiful plants; deadly grief from dearest reminiscences. I _must_ grieve, I _must_ weep: it seems the law of God, and the only one that men are not disposed to contravene. In the performance of this alone do they effectually aid one another. _Essex._ Spenser! I wish I had at hand any arguments or persuasions of force sufficient to remove thy sorrow; but, really, I am not in the habit of seeing men grieve at anything except the loss of favour at court, or of a hawk, or of a buck-hound. And were I to swear out condolences to a man of thy discernment, in the same round, roll-call phrases we employ with one another upon these occasions, I should be guilty, not of insincerity, but of insolence. True grief hath ever something sacred in it; and, when it visiteth a wise man and a brave one, is most holy. Nay, kiss not my hand: he whom God smiteth hath God with him. In His presence what am I? _Spenser._ Never so great, my lord, as at this hour, when you see aright who is greater. May He guide your counsels, and preserve your life and glory! _Essex._ Where are thy friends? Are they with thee? _Spenser._ Ah, where, indeed! Generous, true-hearted Philip! where art thou, whose presence was unto me peace and safety; whose smile was contentment, and whose praise renown? My lord! I cannot but think of him among still heavier losses: he was my earliest friend, and would have taught me wisdom. _Essex._ Pastoral poetry, my dear Spenser, doth not require tears and lamentations. Dry thine eyes; rebuild thine house: the queen and council, I venture to promise thee, will make ample amends for every evil thou hast sustained. What! does that enforce thee to wail still louder? _Spenser._ Pardon me, bear with me, most noble heart! I have lost what no council, no queen, no Essex, can restore. _Essex._ We will see that. There are other swords, and other arms to yield them, beside a Leicester's and a Raleigh's. Others can crush their enemies, and serve their friends. _Spenser._ O my sweet child! And of many so powerful, many so wise and so beneficent, was there none to save thee? None, none! _Essex._ I now perceive that thou lamentest what almost every father is destined to lament. Happiness must be bought, although the payment may be delayed. Consider: the same calamity might have befallen thee here in London. Neither the houses of ambassadors, nor the palaces of kings, nor the altars of God Himself, are asylums against death. How do I know but under this very roof there may sleep some latent calamity, that in an instant shall cover with gloom every inmate of the house, and every far dependent? _Spenser._ God avert it! _Essex._ Every day, every hour of the year, do hundreds mourn what thou mournest. _Spenser._ Oh, no, no, no! Calamities there are around us; calamities there are all over the earth; calamities there are in all seasons: but none in any season, none in any place, like mine. _Essex._ So say all fathers, so say all husbands. Look at any old mansion-house, and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the gateway or the embayed window, and on the happy pair that haply is toying at it: nevertheless, thou mayest say that of a certainty the same fabric hath seen much sorrow within its chambers, and heard many wailings; and each time this was the heaviest stroke of all. Funerals have passed along through the stout-hearted knights upon the wainscot, and amid the laughing nymphs upon the arras. Old servants have shaken their heads, as if somebody had deceived them, when they found that beauty and nobility could perish. Edmund! the things that are too true pass by us as if they were not true at all; and when they have singled us out, then only do they strike us. Thou and I must go too. Perhaps the next year may blow us away with its fallen leaves. _Spenser._ For you, my lord, many years (I trust) are waiting: I never shall see those fallen leaves. No leaf, no bud, will spring upon the earth before I sink into her breast for ever. _Essex._ Thou, who art wiser than most men, shouldst bear with patience, equanimity, and courage what is common to all. _Spenser._ Enough, enough, enough! Have all men seen their infant burnt to ashes before their eyes? _Essex._ Gracious God! Merciful Father! what is this? _Spenser._ Burnt alive! burnt to ashes! burnt to ashes! The flames dart their serpent tongues through the nursery window. I cannot quit thee, my Elizabeth! I cannot lay down our Edmund! Oh, these flames! They persecute, they enthral me; they curl round my temples; they hiss upon my brain; they taunt me with their fierce, foul voices; they carp at me, they wither me, they consume me, throwing back to me a little of life to roll and suffer in, with their fangs upon me. Ask me, my lord, the things you wish to know from me: I may answer them; I am now composed again. Command me, my gracious lord! I would yet serve you: soon I shall be unable. You have stooped to raise me up; you have borne with me; you have pitied me, even like one not powerful. You have brought comfort, and will leave it with me, for gratitude is comfort. Oh! my memory stands all a-tiptoe on one burning point: when it drops from it, then it perishes. Spare me: ask me nothing; let me weep before you in peace--the kindest act of greatness. _Essex._ I should rather have dared to mount into the midst of the conflagration than I now dare entreat thee not to weep. The tears that overflow thy heart, my Spenser, will staunch and heal it in their sacred stream; but not without hope in God. _Spenser._ My hope in God is that I may soon see again what He has taken from me. Amid the myriads of angels, there is not one so beautiful; and even he (if there be any) who is appointed my guardian could never love me so. Ah! these are idle thoughts, vain wanderings, distempered dreams. If there ever were guardian angels, he who so wanted one--my helpless boy--would not have left these arms upon my knees. _Essex._ God help and sustain thee, too gentle Spenser! I never will desert thee. But what am I? Great they have called me! Alas, how powerless, then, and infantile is greatness in the presence of calamity! Come, give me thy hand: let us walk up and down the gallery. Bravely done! I will envy no more a Sidney or a Raleigh. LORD BACON AND RICHARD HOOKER _Bacon._ Hearing much of your worthiness and wisdom, Master Richard Hooker, I have besought your comfort and consolation in this my too heavy affliction: for we often do stand in need of hearing what we know full well, and our own balsams must be poured into our breasts by another's hand. As the air at our doors is sometimes more expeditious in removing pain and heaviness from the body than the most far-fetched remedies would be, so the voice alone of a neighbourly and friendly visitant may be more effectual in assuaging our sorrows, than whatever is most forcible in rhetoric and most recondite in wisdom. On these occasions we cannot put ourselves in a posture to receive the latter, and still less are we at leisure to look into the corners of our store-room, and to uncurl the leaves of our references. As for Memory, who, you may tell me, would save us the trouble, she is footsore enough in all conscience with me, without going farther back. Withdrawn as you live from court and courtly men, and having ears occupied by better reports than such as are flying about me, yet haply so hard a case as mine, befalling a man heretofore not averse from the studies in which you take delight, may have touched you with some concern. _Hooker._ I do think, my Lord of Verulam, that, unhappy as you appear, God in sooth has forgone to chasten you, and that the day which in His wisdom He appointed for your trial, was the very day on which the king's Majesty gave unto your ward and custody the great seal of his English realm. And yet perhaps it may be--let me utter it without offence--that your features and stature were from that day forward no longer what they were before. Such an effect do power and rank and office produce even on prudent and religious men. A hound's whelp howleth, if you pluck him up above where he stood: man, in much greater peril from falling, doth rejoice. You, my lord, as befitted you, are smitten and contrite, and do appear in deep wretchedness and tribulation to your servants and those about you; but I know that there is always a balm which lies uppermost in these afflictions, and that no heart rightly softened can be very sore. _Bacon._ And yet, Master Richard, it is surely no small matter to lose the respect of those who looked up to us for countenance; and the favour of a right learned king; and, O Master Hooker, such a power of money! But money is mere dross. I should always hold it so, if it possessed not two qualities: that of making men treat us reverently, and that of enabling us to help the needy. _Hooker._ The respect, I think, of those who respect us for what a fool can give and a rogue can take away, may easily be dispensed with; but it is indeed a high prerogative to help the needy; and when it pleases the Almighty to deprive us of it, let us believe that He foreknoweth our inclination to negligence in the charge entrusted to us, and that in His mercy He hath removed from us a most fearful responsibility. _Bacon._ I know a number of poor gentlemen to whom I could have rendered aid. _Hooker._ Have you examined and sifted their worthiness? _Bacon._ Well and deeply. _Hooker._ Then must you have known them long before your adversity, and while the means of succouring them were in your hands. _Bacon._ You have circumvented and entrapped me, Master Hooker. Faith! I am mortified: you the schoolman, I the schoolboy! _Hooker._ Say not so, my lord. Your years, indeed, are fewer than mine, by seven or thereabout; but your knowledge is far higher, your experience richer. Our wits are not always in blossom upon us. When the roses are overcharged and languid, up springs a spike of rue. Mortified on such an occasion? God forfend it! But again to the business. I should never be over-penitent for my neglect of needy gentlemen who have neglected themselves much worse. They have chosen their profession with its chances and contingencies. If they had protected their country by their courage or adorned it by their studies, they would have merited, and under a king of such learning and such equity would have received in some sort, their reward. I look upon them as so many old cabinets of ivory and tortoise-shell, scratched, flawed, splintered, rotten, defective both within and without, hard to unlock, insecure to lock up again, unfit to use. _Bacon._ Methinks it beginneth to rain, Master Richard. What if we comfort our bodies with a small cup of wine, against the ill-temper of the air. Wherefore, in God's name, are you affrightened? _Hooker._ Not so, my lord; not so. _Bacon._ What then affects you? _Hooker._ Why, indeed, since your lordship interrogates me--I looked, idly and imprudently, into that rich buffet; and I saw, unless the haze of the weather has come into the parlour, or my sight is the worse for last night's reading, no fewer than six silver pints. Surely, six tables for company are laid only at coronations. _Bacon._ There are many men so squeamish that forsooth they would keep a cup to themselves, and never communicate it to their nearest and best friend; a fashion which seems to me offensive in an honest house, where no disease of ill repute ought to be feared. We have lately, Master Richard, adopted strange fashions; we have run into the wildest luxuries. The Lord Leicester, I heard it from my father--God forfend it should ever be recorded in our history!--when he entertained Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle, laid before her Majesty a fork of pure silver. I the more easily credit it, as Master Thomas Coriatt doth vouch for having seen the same monstrous sign of voluptuousness at Venice. We are surely the especial favourites of Providence, when such wantonness hath not melted us quite away. After this portent, it would otherwise have appeared incredible that we should have broken the Spanish Armada. Pledge me: hither comes our wine. [_To the Servant._] Dolt! villain! is not this the beverage I reserve for myself? The blockhead must imagine that Malmsey runs in a stream under the ocean, like the Alpheus. Bear with me, good Master Hooker, but verily I have little of this wine, and I keep it as a medicine for my many and growing infirmities. You are healthy at present: God in His infinite mercy long maintain you so! Weaker drink is more wholesome for you. The lighter ones of France are best accommodated by Nature to our constitutions, and therefore she has placed them so within our reach that we have only to stretch out our necks, in a manner, and drink them from the vat. But this Malmsey, this Malmsey, flies from centre to circumference, and makes youthful blood boil. _Hooker._ Of a truth, my knowledge in such matters is but spare. My Lord of Canterbury once ordered part of a goblet, containing some strong Spanish wine, to be taken to me from his table when I dined by sufferance with his chaplains, and, although a most discreet, prudent man as befitteth his high station, was not so chary of my health as your lordship. Wine is little to be trifled with, physic less. The Cretans, the brewers of this Malmsey, have many aromatic and powerful herbs among them. On their mountains, and notably on Ida, grows that dittany which works such marvels, and which perhaps may give activity to this hot medicinal drink of theirs. I would not touch it, knowingly: an unregarded leaf, dropped into it above the ordinary, might add such puissance to the concoction as almost to break the buckles in my shoes; since we have good and valid authority that the wounded hart, on eating thereof, casts the arrow out of his haunch or entrails, although it stuck a palm deep.[4] _Bacon._ When I read of such things I doubt them. Religion and politics belong to God, and to God's vicegerent the king; we must not touch upon them unadvisedly: but if I could procure a plant of dittany on easy terms, I would persuade my apothecary and my gamekeeper to make some experiments. _Hooker._ I dare not distrust what grave writers have declared in matters beyond my knowledge. _Bacon._ Good Master Hooker, I have read many of your reasonings, and they are admirably well sustained: added to which, your genius has given such a strong current to your language as can come only from a mighty elevation and a most abundant plenteousness. Yet forgive me, in God's name, my worthy master, if you descried in me some expression of wonder at your simplicity. We are all weak and vulnerable somewhere: common men in the higher parts; heroes, as was feigned of Achilles, in the lower. You would define to a hair's-breadth the qualities, states, and dependencies of principalities, dominations, and powers; you would be unerring about the apostles and the churches; and 'tis marvellous how you wander about a pot-herb! _Hooker._ I know my poor weak intellects, most noble lord, and how scantily they have profited by my hard painstaking. Comprehending few things, and those imperfectly, I say only what others have said before, wise men and holy; and if, by passing through my heart into the wide world around me, it pleaseth God that this little treasure shall have lost nothing of its weight and pureness, my exultation is then the exultation of humility. Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory. And this wisdom, my Lord of Verulam, cometh from above. _Bacon._ I have observed among the well-informed and the ill-informed nearly the same quantity of infirmities and follies: those who are rather the wiser keep them separate, and those who are wisest of all keep them better out of sight. Now, examine the sayings and writings of the prime philosophers, and you will often find them, Master Richard, to be untruths made to resemble truths. The business with them is to approximate as nearly as possible, and not to touch it: the goal of the charioteer is _evitata fervidis rotis_, as some poet saith. But we who care nothing for chants and cadences, and have no time to catch at applauses, push forward over stones and sands straightway to our object. I have persuaded men, and shall persuade them for ages, that I possess a wide range of thought unexplored by others, and first thrown open by me, with many fair enclosures of choice and abstruse knowledge. I have incited and instructed them to examine all subjects of useful and rational inquiry; few that occurred to me have I myself left untouched or untried: one, however, hath almost escaped me, and surely one worth the trouble. _Hooker._ Pray, my lord, if I am guilty of no indiscretion, what may it be? _Bacon._ Francis Bacon. FOOTNOTE: [4] Lest it be thought that authority is wanting for the strong expression of Hooker on the effects of dittany, the reader is referred to the curious treatise of Plutarch on the reasoning faculty of animals, in which (near the end) he asks: 'Who instructed deer wounded by the Cretan arrow to seek for dittany? on the tasting of which herb the bolts fall immediately from their bodies.' OLIVER CROMWELL AND WALTER NOBLE _Cromwell._ What brings thee back from Staffordshire, friend Walter? _Noble._ I hope, General Cromwell, to persuade you that the death of Charles will be considered by all Europe as a most atrocious action. _Cromwell._ Thou hast already persuaded me: what then? _Noble._ Surely, then, you will prevent it, for your authority is great. Even those who upon their consciences found him guilty would remit the penalty of blood, some from policy, some from mercy. I have conversed with Hutchinson, with Ludlow,[5] your friend and mine, with Henry Nevile, and Walter Long: you will oblige these worthy friends, and unite in your favour the suffrages of the truest and trustiest men living. There are many others, with whom I am in no habits of intercourse, who are known to entertain the same sentiments; and these also are among the country gentlemen, to whom our parliament owes the better part of its reputation. _Cromwell._ You country gentlemen bring with you into the People's House a freshness and sweet savour which our citizens lack mightily. I would fain merit your esteem, heedless of those pursy fellows from hulks and warehouses, with one ear lappeted by the pen behind it, and the other an heirloom, as Charles would have had it, in Laud's Star-chamber. Oh, they are proud and bloody men! My heart melts; but, alas! my authority is null: I am the servant of the Commonwealth. I will not, dare not, betray it. If Charles Stuart had threatened my death only, in the letter we ripped out of the saddle, I would have reproved him manfully and turned him adrift: but others are concerned; lives more precious than mine, worn as it is with fastings, prayers, long services, and preyed upon by a pouncing disease. The Lord hath led him into the toils laid for the innocent. Foolish man! he never could eschew evil counsel. _Noble._ In comparison with you, he is but as a pinnacle to a buttress. I acknowledge his weaknesses, and cannot wink upon his crimes: but that which you visit as the heaviest of them perhaps was not so, although the most disastrous to both parties--the bearing of arms against his people. He fought for what he considered his hereditary property; we do the same: should we be hanged for losing a lawsuit? _Cromwell._ No, unless it is the second. Thou talkest finely and foolishly, Wat, for a man of thy calm discernment. If a rogue holds a pistol to my breast, do I ask him who he is? Do I care whether his doublet be of cat-skin or of dog-skin? Fie upon such wicked sophisms! Marvellous, how the devil works upon good men's minds! _Noble._ Charles was always more to be dreaded by his friends than by his enemies, and now by neither. _Cromwell._ God forbid that Englishmen should be feared by Englishmen! but to be daunted by the weakest, to bend before the worst--I tell thee, Walter Noble, if Moses and the prophets commanded me to this villainy, I would draw back and mount my horse. _Noble._ I wish that our history, already too dark with blood, should contain, as far as we are concerned in it, some unpolluted pages. _Cromwell._ 'Twere better, much better. Never shall I be called, I promise thee, an unnecessary shedder of blood. Remember, my good, prudent friend, of what materials our sectaries are composed: what hostility against all eminence, what rancour against all glory. Not only kingly power offends them, but every other; and they talk of _putting to the sword_, as if it were the quietest, gentlest, and most ordinary thing in the world. The knaves even dictate from their stools and benches to men in armour, bruised and bleeding for them; and with school-dames' scourges in their fists do they give counsel to those who protect them from the cart and halter. In the name of the Lord, I must spit outright (or worse) upon these crackling bouncing firebrands, before I can make them tractable. _Noble._ I lament their blindness; but follies wear out the faster by being hard run upon. This fermenting sourness will presently turn vapid, and people will cast it out. I am not surprised that you are discontented and angry at what thwarts your better nature. But come, Cromwell, overlook them, despise them, and erect to yourself a glorious name by sparing a mortal enemy. _Cromwell._ A glorious name, by God's blessing, I will erect; and all our fellow-labourers shall rejoice at it: but I see better than they do the blow descending on them, and my arm better than theirs can ward it off. Noble, thy heart overflows with kindness for Charles Stuart: if he were at liberty to-morrow by thy intercession, he would sign thy death-warrant the day after, for serving the Commonwealth. A generation of vipers! there is nothing upright nor grateful in them: never was there a drop of even Scotch blood in their veins. Indeed, we have a clue to their bedchamber still hanging on the door, and I suspect that an Italian fiddler or French valet has more than once crossed the current. _Noble._ That may be: nor indeed is it credible that any royal or courtly family has gone on for three generations without a spur from interloper. Look at France! some stout Parisian saint performed the last miracle there. _Cromwell._ Now thou talkest gravely and sensibly: I could hear thee discourse thus for hours together. _Noble._ Hear me, Cromwell, with equal patience on matters more important. We all have our sufferings: why increase one another's wantonly? Be the blood Scotch or English, French or Italian, a drummer's or a buffoon's, it carries a soul upon its stream; and every soul has many places to touch at, and much business to perform, before it reaches its ultimate destination. Abolish the power of Charles; extinguish not his virtues. Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy to be preserved. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done, or is likely to do, more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects to ours, and their business is never with virtues or with hopes. _Cromwell._ Walter! Walter! we laugh at speculators. _Noble._ Many indeed are ready enough to laugh at speculators, because many profit, or expect to profit, by established and widening abuses. Speculations toward evil lose their name by adoption; speculations towards good are for ever speculations, and he who hath proposed them is a chimerical and silly creature. Among the matters under this denomination I never find a cruel project, I never find an oppressive or unjust one: how happens it? _Cromwell._ Proportions should exist in all things. Sovereigns are paid higher than others for their office; they should therefore be punished more severely for abusing it, even if the consequences of this abuse were in nothing more grievous or extensive. We cannot clap them in the stocks conveniently, nor whip them at the market-place. Where there is a crown there must be an axe: I would keep it there only. _Noble._ Lop off the rotten, press out the poisonous, preserve the rest; let it suffice to have given this memorable example of national power and justice. _Cromwell._ Justice is perfect; an attribute of God: we must not trifle with it. _Noble._ Should we be less merciful to our fellow-creatures than to our domestic animals? Before we deliver them to be killed, we weigh their services against their inconveniences. On the foundation of policy, when we have no better, let us erect the trophies of humanity: let us consider that, educated in the same manner and situated in the same position, we ourselves might have acted as reprovably. Abolish that for ever which must else for ever generate abuses; and attribute the faults of the man to the office, not the faults of the office to the man. _Cromwell._ I have no bowels for hypocrisy, and I abominate and detest kingship. _Noble._ I abominate and detest hangmanship; but in certain stages of society both are necessary. Let them go together; we want neither now. _Cromwell._ Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace. I must do my duty; I must accomplish what is commanded me; I must not be turned aside. I am loath to be cast into the furnace or the dust; but God's will be done! Prithee, Wat, since thou readest, as I see, the books of philosophers, didst thou ever hear of Digby's remedies by sympathy? _Noble._ Yes, formerly. _Cromwell._ Well, now, I protest, I do believe there is something in them. To cure my headache, I must breathe a vein in the neck of Charles. _Noble._ Oliver, Oliver! others are wittiest over wine, thou over blood: cold-hearted, cruel man. _Cromwell._ Why, dost thou verily think me so, Walter? Perhaps thou art right in the main: but He alone who fashioned me in my mother's womb, and who sees things deeper than we do, knows that. FOOTNOTE: [5] Ludlow, a most humane and temperate man, signed the death-warrant of Charles, for violating the constitution he had sworn to defend, for depriving the subject of property, liberty, limbs, and life unlawfully. In equity he could do no otherwise; and to equity was the only appeal, since the laws of the land had been erased by the king himself. LORD BROOKE AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Lord Brooke is less known than the personage with whom he converses, and upon whose friendship he had the virtue and good sense to found his chief distinction. On his monument at Warwick, written by himself, we read that he was servant of Queen Elizabeth, counsellor of King James and friend of Sir Philip Sidney. His style is stiff, but his sentiments are sound and manly. _Brooke._ I come again unto the woods and unto the wilds of Penshurst, whither my heart and the friend of my heart have long invited me. _Sidney._ Welcome, welcome! And now, Greville, seat yourself under this oak; since if you had hungered or thirsted from your journey, you would have renewed the alacrity of your old servants in the hall. _Brooke._ In truth I did; for no otherwise the good household would have it. The birds met me first, affrightened by the tossing up of caps; and by these harbingers I knew who were coming. When my palfrey eyed them askance for their clamorousness, and shrank somewhat back, they quarrelled with him almost before they saluted me, and asked him many pert questions. What a pleasant spot, Sidney, have you chosen here for meditation! A solitude is the audience-chamber of God. Few days in our year are like this; there is a fresh pleasure in every fresh posture of the limbs, in every turn the eye takes. Youth! credulous of happiness, throw down Upon this turf thy wallet--stored and swoln With morrow-morns, bird-eggs, and bladders burst-- That tires thee with its wagging to and fro: Thou too wouldst breathe more freely for it, Age! Who lackest heart to laugh at life's deceit. It sometimes requires a stout push, and sometimes a sudden resistance, in the wisest men, not to become for a moment the most foolish. What have I done? I have fairly challenged you, so much my master. _Sidney._ You have warmed me: I must cool a little and watch my opportunity. So now, Greville, return you to your invitations, and I will clear the ground for the company; for Youth, for Age, and whatever comes between, with kindred and dependencies. Verily we need no taunts like those in your verses: here we have few vices, and consequently few repinings. I take especial care that my young labourers and farmers shall never be idle, and I supply them with bows and arrows, with bowls and ninepins, for their Sunday evening,[6] lest they drink and quarrel. In church they are taught to love God; after church they are practised to love their neighbour: for business on workdays keeps them apart and scattered, and on market-days they are prone to a rivalry bordering on malice, as competitors for custom. Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good. We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment: the course is then over; the wheel turns round but once; while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual. _Brooke._ You reason justly and you act rightly. Piety--warm, soft, and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace--is made callous and inactive by kneeling too much: her vitality faints under rigorous and wearisome observances. A forced match between a man and his religion sours his temper, and leaves a barren bed. _Sidney._ Desire of lucre, the worst and most general country vice, arises here from the necessity of looking to small gains; it is, however, but the tartar that encrusts economy. _Brooke._ Oh that anything so monstrous should exist in this profusion and prodigality of blessings! The herbs, elastic with health, seem to partake of sensitive and animated life, and to feel under my hand the benediction I would bestow on them. What a hum of satisfaction in God's creatures! How is it, Sidney, the smallest do seem the happiest? _Sidney._ Compensation for their weaknesses and their fears; compensation for the shortness of their existence. Their spirits mount upon the sunbeam above the eagle; and they have more enjoyment in their one summer than the elephant in his century. _Brooke._ Are not also the little and lowly in our species the most happy? _Sidney._ I would not willingly try nor over-curiously examine it. We, Greville, are happy in these parks and forests: we were happy in my close winter-walk of box and laurustine. In our earlier days did we not emboss our bosoms with the daffodils, and shake them almost unto shedding with our transport? Ay, my friend, there is a greater difference, both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year, than in the conditions of men: yet the healthy pass through the seasons, from the clement to the inclement, not only unreluctantly but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of life, excepting that alone which ought reasonably to allure us most, as opening to us the _Via Sacra_, along which we move in triumph to our eternal country. We may in some measure frame our minds for the reception of happiness, for more or for less; we should, however, well consider to what port we are steering in search of it, and that even in the richest its quantity is but too exhaustible. There is a sickliness in the firmest of us, which induceth us to change our side, though reposing ever so softly: yet, wittingly or unwittingly, we turn again soon into our old position. God hath granted unto both of us hearts easily contented, hearts fitted for every station, because fitted for every duty. What appears the dullest may contribute most to our genius; what is most gloomy may soften the seeds and relax the fibres of gaiety. We enjoy the solemnity of the spreading oak above us: perhaps we owe to it in part the mood of our minds at this instant; perhaps an inanimate thing supplies me, while I am speaking, with whatever I possess of animation. Do you imagine that any contest of shepherds can afford them the same pleasure as I receive from the description of it; or that even in their loves, however innocent and faithful, they are so free from anxiety as I am while I celebrate them? The exertion of intellectual power, of fancy and imagination, keeps from us greatly more than their wretchedness, and affords us greatly more than their enjoyment. We are motes in the midst of generations: we have our sunbeams to circuit and climb. Look at the summits of the trees around us, how they move, and the loftiest the most: nothing is at rest within the compass of our view, except the grey moss on the park-pales. Let it eat away the dead oak, but let it not be compared with the living one. Poets are in general prone to melancholy; yet the most plaintive ditty hath imparted a fuller joy, and of longer duration, to its composer, than the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian. A bottle of wine bringeth as much pleasure as the acquisition of a kingdom, and not unlike it in kind: the senses in both cases are confused and perverted. _Brooke._ Merciful Heaven! and for the fruition of an hour's drunkenness, from which they must awaken with heaviness, pain, and terror, men consume a whole crop of their kind at one harvest home. Shame upon those light ones who carol at the feast of blood! and worse upon those graver ones who nail upon their escutcheon the name of great! Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration. Only some cause like unto that which is now scattering the mental fog of the Netherlands, and is preparing them for the fruits of freedom, can justify us in drawing the sword abroad. _Sidney._ And only the accomplishment of our purpose can permit us again to sheathe it; for the aggrandizement of our neighbour is nought of detriment to us: on the contrary, if we are honest and industrious, his wealth is ours. We have nothing to dread while our laws are equitable and our impositions light: but children fly from mothers who strip and scourge them. _Brooke._ We are come to an age when we ought to read and speak plainly what our discretion tells us is fit: we are not to be set in a corner for mockery and derision, with our hands hanging down motionless and our pockets turned inside out. * * * * * But away, away with politics: let not this city-stench infect our fresh country air! * * * * * FOOTNOTE: [6] Censurable as that practice may appear, it belonged to the age of Sidney. Amusements were permitted the English on the seventh day, nor were they restricted until the Puritans gained the ascendancy. SOUTHEY AND PORSON _Porson._ I suspect, Mr. Southey, you are angry with me for the freedom with which I have spoken of your poetry and Wordsworth's. _Southey._ What could have induced you to imagine it, Mr. Professor? You have indeed bent your eyes upon me, since we have been together, with somewhat of fierceness and defiance: I presume you fancied me to be a commentator. You wrong me in your belief that any opinion on my poetical works hath molested me; but you afford me more than compensation in supposing me acutely sensible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must converse on these topics, we will converse on him. What man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or adorned it with nobler studies? _Porson._ I believe so; and they who attack him with virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the _Pursuits of Literature_, could not construe a Greek sentence or scan a verse; and I have fallen on the very _Index_ from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met with in the course of my reading, which has lain, you know, in a province where impudence is no rarity. * * * * * I had visited a friend in _King's Road_ when he entered. 'Have you seen the _Review_?' cried he. 'Worse than ever! I am resolved to insert a paragraph in the papers, declaring that I had no concern in the last number.' 'Is it so very bad?' said I, quietly. 'Infamous! detestable!' exclaimed he. 'Sit down, then: nobody will believe you,' was my answer. Since that morning he has discovered that I drink harder than usual, that my faculties are wearing fast away, that once, indeed, I had some Greek in my head, but--he then claps the forefinger to the side of his nose, turns his eye slowly upward, and looks compassionately and calmly. _Southey._ Come, Mr. Porson, grant him his merits: no critic is better contrived to make any work a monthly one, no writer more dexterous in giving a finishing touch. _Porson._ The plagiary has a greater latitude of choice than we; and if he brings home a parsnip or turnip-top, when he could as easily have pocketed a nectarine or a pineapple, he must be a blockhead. I never heard the name of the _Pursuer of Literature_, who has little more merit in having stolen than he would have had if he had never stolen at all; and I have forgotten that other man's, who evinced his fitness to be the censor of our age, by a translation of the most naked and impure satires of antiquity--those of Juvenal, which owe their preservation to the partiality of the friars. I shall entertain an unfavourable opinion of him if he has translated them well: pray, has he? _Southey._ Indeed, I do not know. I read poets for their poetry, and to extract that nutriment of the intellect and of the heart which poetry should contain. I never listen to the swans of the cesspool, and must declare that nothing is heavier to me than rottenness and corruption. _Porson._ You are right, sir, perfectly right. A translator of Juvenal would open a public drain to look for a needle, and may miss it. My nose is not easily offended; but I must have something to fill my belly. Come, we will lay aside the scrip of the transpositor and the pouch of the pursuer, in reserve for the days of unleavened bread; and again, if you please, to the lakes and mountains. Now we are both in better humour, I must bring you to a confession that in your friend Wordsworth there is occasionally a little trash. _Southey._ A haunch of venison would be trash to a Brahmin, a bottle of Burgundy to the xerif of Mecca. We are guided by precept, by habit, by taste, by constitution. Hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been delivered down to us from authority; and if it can be demonstrated, as I think it may be, that the authority is inadequate, and that the dictates are often inapplicable and often misinterpreted, you will allow me to remove the cause out of court. Every man can see what is very bad in a poem; almost every one can see what is very good: but you, Mr. Porson, who have turned over all the volumes of all the commentators, will inform me whether I am right or wrong in asserting that no critic hath yet appeared who hath been able to fix or to discern the exact degrees of excellence above a certain point. _Porson._ None. _Southey._ The reason is, because the eyes of no one have been upon a level with it. Supposing, for the sake of argument, the contest of Hesiod and Homer to have taken place: the judges who decided in favour of the worse, and he, indeed, in poetry has little merit, may have been elegant, wise, and conscientious men. Their decision was in favour of that to the species of which they had been the most accustomed. Corinna was preferred to Pindar no fewer than five times, and the best judges in Greece gave her the preference; yet whatever were her powers, and beyond a question they were extraordinary, we may assure ourselves that she stood many degrees below Pindar. Nothing is more absurd than the report that the judges were prepossessed by her beauty. Plutarch tells us that she was much older than her competitor, who consulted her judgment in his earlier odes. Now, granting their first competition to have been when Pindar was twenty years old, and that the others were in the years succeeding, her beauty must have been somewhat on the decline; for in Greece there are few women who retain the graces, none who retain the bloom of youth, beyond the twenty-third year. Her countenance, I doubt not, was expressive: but expression, although it gives beauty to men, makes women pay dearly for its stamp, and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their loveliness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to laborious thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths of fancy. We may be convinced that the verdict of the judges was biased by nothing else than the habitudes of thinking; we may be convinced, too, that living in an age when poetry was cultivated highly, and selected from the most acute and the most dispassionate, they were subject to no greater errors of opinion than are the learned messmates of our English colleges. _Porson._ You are more liberal in your largesses to the fair Greeks than a friend of mine was, who resided in Athens to acquire the language. He assured me that beauty there was in bud at thirteen, in full blossom at fifteen, losing a leaf or two every day at seventeen, trembling on the thorn at nineteen, and under the tree at twenty. _Southey._ Mr. Porson, it does not appear to me that anything more is necessary, in the first instance, than to interrogate our hearts in what manner they have been affected. If the ear is satisfied; if at one moment a tumult is aroused in the breast, and tranquillized at another, with a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both cases; if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a strong excitement to thought, to imagination, to sensibility; above all, if we sat down with some propensities toward evil, and walk away with much stronger toward good, in the midst of a world which we never had entered and of which we never had dreamed before--shall we perversely put on again the _old man_ of criticism, and dissemble that we have been conducted by a most beneficent and most potent genius? Nothing proves to me so manifestly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettos, as when I observe how little hath been objected against those who have substituted words for things, and how much against those who have reinstated things for words. Let Wordsworth prove to the world that there may be animation without blood and broken bones, and tenderness remote from the stews. Some will doubt it; for even things the most evident are often but little perceived and strangely estimated. Swift ridiculed the music of Handel and the generalship of Marlborough; Pope the perspicacity and the scholarship of Bentley; Gray the abilities of Shaftesbury and the eloquence of Rousseau. Shakespeare hardly found those who would collect his tragedies; Milton was read from godliness; Virgil was antiquated and rustic; Cicero, Asiatic. What a rabble has persecuted my friend! An elephant is born to be consumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable solitudes: Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why repine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, and recollect that God in the creation left His noblest creature at the mercy of a serpent. * * * * * _Porson._ Wordsworth goes out of his way to be attacked; he picks up a piece of dirt, throws it on the carpet in the midst of the company, and cries, _This is a better man than any of you!_ He does indeed mould the base material into what form he chooses; but why not rather invite us to contemplate it than challenge us to condemn it? Here surely is false taste. _Southey._ The principal and the most general accusation against him is, that the vehicle of his thoughts is unequal to them. Now did ever the judges at the Olympic games say: 'We would have awarded to you the meed of victory, if your chariot had been equal to your horses: it is true they have won; but the people are displeased at a car neither new nor richly gilt, and without a gryphon or sphinx engraved on the axle'? You admire simplicity in Euripides; you censure it in Wordsworth: believe me, sir, it arises in neither from penury of thought--which seldom has produced it--but from the strength of temperance, and at the suggestion of principle. Take up a poem of Wordsworth's and read it--I would rather say, read them all; and, knowing that a mind like yours must grasp closely what comes within it, I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our country, since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less of strain and less of ostentation. I would, however, by his permission, lay before you for this purpose a poem which is yet unpublished and incomplete. _Porson._ Pity, with such abilities, he does not imitate the ancients somewhat more. _Southey._ Whom did they imitate? If his genius is equal to theirs he has no need of a guide. He also will be an ancient; and the very counterparts of those who now decry him will extol him a thousand years hence in malignity to the moderns. THE ABBÉ DELILLE AND WALTER LANDOR The Abbé Delille was the happiest of creatures, when he could weep over the charms of innocence and the country in some crowded and fashionable circle at Paris. We embraced most pathetically on our first meeting there, as if the one were condemned to quit the earth, the other to live upon it. _Delille._ You are reported to have said that descriptive poetry has all the merits of a handkerchief that smells of roses? _Landor._ This, if I said it, is among the things which are neither false enough nor true enough to be displeasing. But the Abbé Delille has merits of his own. To translate Milton well is more laudable than originality in trifling matters; just as to transport an obelisk from Egypt, and to erect it in one of the squares, must be considered a greater labour than to build a new chandler's shop. _Delille._ Milton is indeed extremely difficult to translate; for, however noble and majestic, he is sometimes heavy, and often rough and unequal. _Landor._ Dear Abbé, porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes; those recesses in which the gods partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods? You have treated our poet with courtesy and distinction; in your trimmed and measured dress, he might be taken for a Frenchman. Do not think me flattering. You have conducted Eve from Paradise to Paris, and she really looks prettier and smarter than before she tripped. With what elegance she rises from a most awful dream! You represent her (I repeat your expression) as springing up _en sursaut_, as if you had caught her asleep and tickled the young creature on that sofa. Homer and Virgil have been excelled in sublimity by Shakespeare and Milton, as the Caucasus and Atlas of the old world by the Andes and Teneriffe of the new; but you would embellish them all. _Delille._ I owe to Voltaire my first sentiment of admiration for Milton and Shakespeare. _Landor._ He stuck to them as a woodpecker to an old forest-tree, only for the purpose of picking out what was rotten: he has made the holes deeper than he found them, and, after all his cries and chatter, has brought home but scanty sustenance to his starveling nest. _Delille._ You must acknowledge that there are fine verses in his tragedies. _Landor._ Whenever such is the first observation, be assured, M. l'Abbé, that the poem, if heroic or dramatic, is bad. Should a work of this kind be excellent, we say, 'How admirably the characters are sustained! What delicacy of discrimination! There is nothing to be taken away or altered without an injury to the part or to the whole.' We may afterward descend on the versification. In poetry, there is a greater difference between the good and the excellent than there is between the bad and the good. Poetry has no golden mean; mediocrity here is of another metal, which Voltaire, however, had skill enough to encrust and polish. In the least wretched of his tragedies, whatever is tolerable is Shakespeare's; but, gracious Heaven! how deteriorated! When he pretends to extol a poet he chooses some defective part, and renders it more so whenever he translates it. I will repeat a few verses from Metastasio in support of my assertion. Metastasio was both a better critic and a better poet, although of the second order in each quality; his tyrants are less philosophical, and his chambermaids less dogmatic. Voltaire was, however, a man of abilities, and author of many passable epigrams, beside those which are contained in his tragedies and heroics; yet it must be confessed that, like your Parisian lackeys, they are usually the smartest when out of place. _Delille._ What you call epigram gives life and spirit to grave works, and seems principally wanted to relieve a long poem. I do not see why what pleases us in a star should not please us in a constellation. DIOGENES AND PLATO _Diogenes._ Stop! stop! come hither! Why lookest thou so scornfully and askance upon me? _Plato._ Let me go! loose me! I am resolved to pass. _Diogenes._ Nay, then, by Jupiter and this tub! thou leavest three good ells of Milesian cloth behind thee. Whither wouldst thou amble? _Plato._ I am not obliged in courtesy to tell you. _Diogenes._ Upon whose errand? Answer me directly. _Plato._ Upon my own. _Diogenes._ Oh, then, I will hold thee yet awhile. If it were upon another's, it might be a hardship to a good citizen, though not to a good philosopher. _Plato._ That can be no impediment to my release: you do not think me one. _Diogenes._ No, by my Father Jove! _Plato._ Your father! _Diogenes._ Why not? Thou shouldst be the last man to doubt it. Hast not thou declared it irrational to refuse our belief to those who assert that they are begotten by the gods, though the assertion (these are thy words) be unfounded on reason or probability? In me there is a chance of it: whereas in the generation of such people as thou art fondest of frequenting, who claim it loudly, there are always too many competitors to leave it probable. _Plato._ Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy. _Diogenes._ Thou hast a glimpse of the truth in this place, but as thou hast already shown thy ignorance in attempting to prove to me what a _man_ is, ill can I expect to learn from thee what is a _great man_. _Plato._ No doubt your experience and intercourse will afford me the information. _Diogenes._ Attend, and take it. The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him. _Plato._ Excuse my interruption. In the beginning of your definition I fancied that you were designating your own person, as most people do in describing what is admirable; now I find that you have some other in contemplation. _Diogenes._ I thank thee for allowing me what perhaps I _do_ possess, but what I was not then thinking of; as is often the case with rich possessors: in fact, the latter part of the description suits me as well as any portion of the former. _Plato._ You may call together the best company, by using your hands in the call, as you did with me; otherwise I am not sure that you would succeed in it. _Diogenes._ My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them. Imbecile and vicious men cannot do any of these things. Their thoughts are scattered, vague, uncertain, cumbersome: and the worst stick to them the longest; many indeed by choice, the greater part by necessity, and accompanied, some by weak wishes, others by vain remorse. _Plato._ Is there nothing of greatness, O Diogenes! in exhibiting how cities and communities may be governed best, how morals may be kept the purest, and power become the most stable? _Diogenes._ _Something_ of greatness does not constitute the great man. Let me, however, see him who hath done what thou sayest: he must be the most universal and the most indefatigable traveller, he must also be the oldest creature, upon earth. _Plato._ How so? _Diogenes._ Because he must know perfectly the climate, the soil, the situation, the peculiarities, of the races, of their allies, of their enemies; he must have sounded their harbours, he must have measured the quantity of their arable land and pasture, of their woods and mountains; he must have ascertained whether there are fisheries on their coasts, and even what winds are prevalent. On these causes, with some others, depend the bodily strength, the numbers, the wealth, the wants, the capacities of the people. _Plato._ Such are low thoughts. _Diogenes._ The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her food under hedges: the eagle himself would be starved if he always soared aloft and against the sun. The sweetest fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to be done in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border, would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians to govern us: we want practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one. Experimentalists may be the best philosophers: they are always the worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they will know their interests. Change as little as possible, and correct as much. Philosophers are absurd from many causes, but principally from laying out unthriftily their distinctions. They set up four virtues: fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. Now a man may be a very bad one, and yet possess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must, if he has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more fortitude and more prudence than the greater part of those whom we consider as the best men. And what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from the earth! Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home, Plato; split them, expound them; do what thou wilt with them, if thou but use them. Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than thou ever gavest any one, and easier to remember, thou wert accusing me of invidiousness and malice against those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say the powerful. Thy imagination, I am well aware, had taken its flight toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great man, as earnestly and undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Persephone. Faith! honest Plato, I have no reason to envy thy worthy friend Dionysius. Look at my nose! A lad seven or eight years old threw an apple at me yesterday, while I was gazing at the clouds, and gave me nose enough for two moderate men. Instead of such a godsend, what should I have thought of my fortune, if, after living all my lifetime among golden vases, rougher than my hand with their emeralds and rubies, their engravings and embossments; among Parian caryatides and porphyry sphinxes; among philosophers with rings upon their fingers and linen next their skin; and among singing-boys and dancing-girls, to whom alone thou speakest intelligibly--I ask thee again, what should I in reason have thought of my fortune, if, after these facilities and superfluities, I had at last been pelted out of my house, not by one young rogue, but by thousands of all ages, and not with an apple (I wish I could say a rotten one), but with pebbles and broken pots; and, to crown my deserts, had been compelled to become the teacher of so promising a generation? Great men, forsooth! thou knowest at last who they are. _Plato._ There are great men of various kinds. _Diogenes._ No, by my beard, are there not! _Plato._ What! are there not great captains, great geometricians, great dialectitians? _Diogenes._ Who denied it? A great man was the postulate. Try thy hand now at the powerful one. _Plato._ On seeing the exercise of power, a child cannot doubt who is powerful, more or less; for power is relative. All men are weak, not only if compared to the Demiurgos, but if compared to the sea or the earth, or certain things upon each of them, such as elephants and whales. So placid and tranquil is the scene around us, we can hardly bring to mind the images of strength and force, the precipices, the abysses---- _Diogenes._ Prithee hold thy loose tongue, twinkling and glittering like a serpent's in the midst of luxuriance and rankness! Did never this reflection of thine warn thee that, in human life, the precipices and abysses would be much farther from our admiration if we were less inconsiderate, selfish, and vile? I will not however stop thee long, for thou wert going on quite consistently. As thy great men are fighters and wranglers, so thy mighty things upon the earth and sea are troublesome and intractable encumbrances. Thou perceivedst not what was greater in the former case, neither art thou aware what is greater in this. Didst thou feel the gentle air that passed us? _Plato._ I did not, just then. _Diogenes._ That air, so gentle, so imperceptible to thee, is more powerful not only than all the creatures that breathe and live by it; not only than all the oaks of the forest, which it rears in an age and shatters in a moment; not only than all the monsters of the sea, but than the sea itself, which it tosses up into foam, and breaks against every rock in its vast circumference; for it carries in its bosom, with perfect calm and composure, the incontrollable ocean and the peopled earth, like an atom of a feather. To the world's turmoils and pageantries is attracted, not only the admiration of the populace, but the zeal of the orator, the enthusiasm of the poet, the investigation of the historian, and the contemplation of the philosopher: yet how silent and invisible are they in the depths of air! Do I say in those depths and deserts? No; I say in the distance of a swallow's flight--at the distance she rises above us, ere a sentence brief as this could be uttered. What are its mines and mountains? Fragments welded up and dislocated by the expansion of water from below; the most part reduced to mud, the rest to splinters. Afterwards sprang up fire in many places, and again tore and mangled the mutilated carcass, and still growls over it. What are its cities and ramparts, and moles and monuments? Segments of a fragment, which one man puts together and another throws down. Here we stumble upon thy great ones at their work. Show me now, if thou canst, in history, three great warriors, or three great statesmen, who have acted otherwise than spiteful children. _Plato._ I will begin to look for them in history when I have discovered the same number in the philosophers or the poets. A prudent man searches in his own garden after the plant he wants, before he casts his eyes over the stalls in Kenkrea or Keramicos. Returning to your observation on the potency of the air, I am not ignorant or unmindful of it. May I venture to express my opinion to you, Diogenes, that the earlier discoverers and distributors of wisdom (which wisdom lies among us in ruins and remnants, partly distorted and partly concealed by theological allegory) meant by Jupiter the air in its agitated state; by Juno the air in its quiescent. These are the great agents, and therefore called the king and queen of the gods. Jupiter is denominated by Homer the _compeller of clouds_: Juno receives them, and remits them in showers to plants and animals. I may trust you, I hope, O Diogenes? _Diogenes._ Thou mayest lower the gods in my presence, as safely as men in the presence of Timon. _Plato._ I would not lower them: I would exalt them. _Diogenes._ More foolish and presumptuous still! _Plato._ Fair words, O Sinopean! I protest to you my aim is truth. _Diogenes._ I cannot lead thee where of a certainty thou mayest always find it; but I will tell thee what it is. Truth is a point; the subtilest and finest; harder than adamant; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt those who touch it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life-blood, of those who press earnestly upon it. Let us away from this narrow lane skirted with hemlock, and pursue our road again through the wind and dust toward the _great_ man and the _powerful_. Him I would call the powerful one who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great man, I was going on to demonstrate, is somewhat more. He must be able to do this, and he must have an intellect which puts into motion the intellect of others. _Plato._ Socrates, then, was your great man. _Diogenes._ He was indeed; nor can all thou hast attributed to him ever make me think the contrary. I wish he could have kept a little more at home, and have thought it as well worth his while to converse with his own children as with others. _Plato._ He knew himself born for the benefit of the human race. _Diogenes._ Those who are born for the benefit of the human race go but little into it: those who are born for its curse are crowded. _Plato._ It was requisite to dispel the mists of ignorance and error. _Diogenes._ Has he done it? What doubt has he elucidated, or what fact has he established? Although I was but twelve years old and resident in another city when he died, I have taken some pains in my inquiries about him from persons of less vanity and less perverseness than his disciples. He did not leave behind him any true philosopher among them; any who followed his mode of argumentation, his subjects of disquisition, or his course of life; any who would subdue the malignant passions or coerce the looser; any who would abstain from calumny or from cavil; any who would devote his days to the glory of his country, or, what is easier and perhaps wiser, to his own well-founded contentment and well-merited repose. Xenophon, the best of them, offered up sacrifices, believed in oracles, consulted soothsayers, turned pale at a jay, and was dysenteric at a magpie. _Plato._ He had courage at least. _Diogenes._ His courage was of so strange a quality, that he was ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to fight for Spartan or Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest much, and knowest somewhat less, careth as little for portent and omen as doth Diogenes. What he would have done for a Persian I cannot say; certain I am that he would have no more fought for a Spartan than he would for his own father: yet he mortally hates the man who hath a kinder muse or a better milliner, or a seat nearer the minion of a king. So much for the two disciples of Socrates who have acquired the greatest celebrity! * * * * * _Plato._ Diogenes! if you must argue or discourse with me, I will endure your asperity for the sake of your acuteness; but it appears to me a more philosophical thing to avoid what is insulting and vexatious, than to breast and brave it. _Diogenes._ Thou hast spoken well. _Plato._ It belongs to the vulgar, not to us, to fly from a man's opinions to his actions, and to stab him in his own house for having received no wound in the school. One merit you will allow me: I always keep my temper; which you seldom do. _Diogenes._ Is mine a good or a bad one? _Plato._ Now, must I speak sincerely? _Diogenes._ Dost thou, a philosopher, ask such a question of me, a philosopher? Ay, sincerely or not at all. _Plato._ Sincerely as you could wish, I must declare, then, your temper is the worst in the world. _Diogenes._ I am much in the right, therefore, not to keep it. Embrace me: I have spoken now in thy own manner. Because thou sayest the most malicious things the most placidly, thou thinkest or pretendest thou art sincere. _Plato._ Certainly those who are most the masters of their resentments are likely to speak less erroneously than the passionate and morose. _Diogenes._ If they would, they might; but the moderate are not usually the most sincere, for the same circumspection which makes them moderate makes them likewise retentive of what could give offence: they are also timid in regard to fortune and favour, and hazard little. There is no mass of sincerity in any place. What there is must be picked up patiently, a grain or two at a time; and the season for it is after a storm, after the overflowing of banks, and bursting of mounds, and sweeping away of landmarks. Men will always hold something back; they must be shaken and loosened a little, to make them let go what is deepest in them, and weightiest and purest. _Plato._ Shaking and loosening as much about you as was requisite for the occasion, it became you to demonstrate where and in what manner I had made Socrates appear less sagacious and less eloquent than he was; it became you likewise to consider the great difficulty of finding new thoughts and new expressions for those who had more of them than any other men, and to represent them in all the brilliancy of their wit and in all the majesty of their genius. I do not assert that I have done it; but if I have not, what man has? what man has come so nigh to it? He who could bring Socrates, or Solon, or Diogenes through a dialogue, without disparagement, is much nearer in his intellectual powers to them, than any other is near to him. _Diogenes._ Let Diogenes alone, and Socrates, and Solon. None of the three ever occupied his hours in tingeing and curling the tarnished plumes of prostitute Philosophy, or deemed anything worth his attention, care, or notice, that did not make men brave and independent. As thou callest on me to show thee where and in what manner thou hast misrepresented thy teacher, and as thou seemest to set an equal value on eloquence and on reasoning, I shall attend to thee awhile on each of these matters, first inquiring of thee whether the axiom is Socratic, that it is never becoming to get drunk, _unless_ in the solemnities of Bacchus? _Plato._ This god was the discoverer of the vine and of its uses. _Diogenes._ Is drunkenness one of its uses, or the discovery of a god? If Pallas or Jupiter hath given us reason, we should sacrifice our reason with more propriety to Jupiter or Pallas. To Bacchus is due a libation of wine; the same being his gift, as thou preachest. Another and a graver question. Did Socrates teach thee that 'slaves are to be scourged, and by no means admonished as though they were the children of the master'? _Plato._ He did not argue upon government. _Diogenes._ He argued upon humanity, whereon all government is founded: whatever is beside it is usurpation. _Plato._ Are slaves then never to be scourged, whatever be their transgressions and enormities? _Diogenes._ Whatever they be, they are less than his who reduced them to this condition. _Plato._ What! though they murder his whole family? _Diogenes._ Ay, and poison the public fountain of the city. What am I saying? and to whom? Horrible as is this crime, and next in atrocity to parricide, thou deemest it a lighter one than stealing a fig or grape. The stealer of these is scourged by thee; the sentence on the poisoner is to cleanse out the receptacle. There is, however, a kind of poisoning which, to do thee justice, comes before thee with all its horrors, and which thou wouldst punish capitally, even in such a sacred personage as an aruspex or diviner: I mean the poisoning by incantation. I, and my whole family, my whole race, my whole city, may bite the dust in agony from a truss of henbane in the well; and little harm done forsooth! Let an idle fool set an image of me in wax before the fire, and whistle and caper to it, and purr and pray, and chant a hymn to Hecate while it melts, entreating and imploring her that I may melt as easily--and thou wouldst, in thy equity and holiness, strangle him at the first stave of his psalmody. _Plato._ If this is an absurdity, can you find another? _Diogenes._ Truly, in reading thy book, I doubted at first, and for a long continuance, whether thou couldst have been serious; and whether it were not rather a satire on those busy-bodies who are incessantly intermeddling in other people's affairs. It was only on the protestation of thy intimate friends that I believed thee to have written it in earnest. As for thy question, it is idle to stoop and pick out absurdities from a mass of inconsistency and injustice; but another and another I could throw in, and another and another afterward, from any page in the volume. Two bare, staring falsehoods lift their beaks one upon the other, like spring frogs. Thou sayest that no punishment decreed by the laws tendeth to evil. What! not if immoderate? not if partial? Why then repeal any penal statute while the subject of its animadversion exists? In prisons the less criminal are placed among the more criminal, the inexperienced in vice together with the hardened in it. This is part of the punishment, though it precedes the sentence; nay, it is often inflicted on those whom the judges acquit: the law, by allowing it, does it. The next is, that he who is punished by the laws is the better for it, however the less depraved. What! if anteriorly to the sentence he lives and converses with worse men, some of whom console him by deadening the sense of shame, others by removing the apprehension of punishment? Many laws as certainly make men bad, as bad men make many laws; yet under thy regimen they take us from the bosom of the nurse, turn the meat about upon the platter, pull the bed-clothes off, make us sleep when we would wake, and wake when we would sleep, and never cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see us safe landed at the grave. We can do nothing (but be poisoned) with impunity. What is worst of all, we must marry certain relatives and connexions, be they distorted, blear-eyed, toothless, carbuncled, with hair (if any) eclipsing the reddest torch of Hymen, and with a hide outrivalling in colour and plaits his trimmest saffron robe. At the mention of this indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved to stand out of harm's way, beginnest to make a wry mouth, and findest it difficult to pucker and purse it up again, without an astringent store of moral sentences. Hymen is truly no acquaintance of thine. We know the delicacies of love which thou wouldst reserve for the gluttony of heroes and the fastidiousness of philosophers. Heroes, like gods, must have their own way; but against thee and thy confraternity of elders I would turn the closet-key, and your mouths might water over, but your tongues should never enter those little pots of comfiture. Seriously, you who wear embroidered slippers ought to be very cautious of treading in the mire. Philosophers should not only live the simplest lives, but should also use the plainest language. Poets, in employing magnificent and sonorous words, teach philosophy the better by thus disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains and conveys the finest philosophy. You will never let any man hold his right station: you would rank Solon with Homer for poetry. This is absurd. The only resemblance is in both being eminently wise. Pindar, too, makes even the cadences of his dithyrambics keep time to the flute of Reason. My tub, which holds fifty-fold thy wisdom, would crack at the reverberation of thy voice. _Plato._ Farewell. * * * * * _Diogenes._ I mean that every one of thy whimsies hath been picked up somewhere by thee in thy travels; and each of them hath been rendered more weak and puny by its place of concealment in thy closet. What thou hast written on the immortality of the soul goes rather to prove the immortality of the body; and applies as well to the body of a weasel or an eel as to the fairer one of Agathon or of Aster. Why not at once introduce a new religion, since religions keep and are relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should confer it: and that what comprehends the past and the future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for ever. 'No,' cried they, 'the power of thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider as one, belief and doctrine. _Plato._ As you will. _Diogenes._ I should rather, then, regard these things as mere ornaments; just as many decorate their apartments with lyres and harps, which they themselves look at from the couch, supinely complacent, and leave for visitors to admire and play on. _Plato._ I foresee not how you can disprove my argument on the immortality of the soul, which, being contained in the best of my dialogues, and being often asked for among my friends, I carry with me. _Diogenes._ At this time? _Plato._ Even so. _Diogenes._ Give me then a certain part of it for my perusal. _Plato._ Willingly. _Diogenes._ Hermes and Pallas! I wanted but a cubit of it, or at most a fathom, and thou art pulling it out by the plethron. _Plato._ This is the place in question. _Diogenes._ Read it. _Plato._ [_Reads._] 'Sayest thou not that death is the opposite of life, and that they spring the one from the other?' '_Yes._' 'What springs then from the living?' '_The dead._' 'And what from the dead?' '_The living._' 'Then all things alive spring from the dead.' _Diogenes._ Why the repetition? but go on. _Plato._ [_Reads._] 'Souls therefore exist after death in the infernal regions.' _Diogenes._ Where is the _therefore_? where is it even as to _existence_? As to the _infernal regions_, there is nothing that points toward a proof, or promises an indication. Death neither springs from life, nor life from death. Although death is the inevitable consequence of life, if the observation and experience of ages go for anything, yet nothing shows us, or ever hath signified, that life comes from death. Thou mightest as well say that a barley-corn dies before the germ of another barley-corn grows up from it, than which nothing is more untrue; for it is only the protecting part of the germ that perishes, when its protection is no longer necessary. The consequence, that souls exist after death, cannot be drawn from the corruption of the body, even if it were demonstrable that out of this corruption a live one could rise up. Thou hast not said that the soul is among those dead things which living things must spring from; thou hast not said that a living soul produces a dead soul, or that a dead soul produces a living one. _Plato._ No, indeed. _Diogenes._ On my faith, thou hast said, however, things no less inconsiderate, no less inconsequent, no less unwise; and this very thing must be said and proved, to make thy argument of any value. Do dead men beget children? _Plato._ I have not said it. _Diogenes._ Thy argument implies it. _Plato._ These are high mysteries, and to be approached with reverence. _Diogenes._ Whatever we cannot account for is in the same predicament. We may be gainers by being ignorant if we can be thought mysterious. It is better to shake our heads and to let nothing out of them, than to be plain and explicit in matters of difficulty. I do not mean in confessing our ignorance or our imperfect knowledge of them, but in clearing them up perspicuously: for, if we answer with ease, we may haply be thought good-natured, quick, communicative; never deep, never sagacious; not very defective possibly in our intellectual faculties, yet unequal and chinky, and liable to the probation of every clown's knuckle. _Plato._ The brightest of stars appear the most unsteady and tremulous in their light; not from any quality inherent in themselves, but from the vapours that float below, and from the imperfection of vision in the surveyor. _Diogenes._ Draw thy robe round thee; let the folds fall gracefully, and look majestic. That sentence is an admirable one; but not for me. I want sense, not stars. What then? Do no vapours float below the others? and is there no imperfection in the vision of those who look at _them_, if they are the same men, and look the next moment? We must move on: I shall follow the dead bodies, and the benighted driver of their fantastic bier, close and keen as any hyena. _Plato._ Certainly, O Diogenes, you excel me in elucidations and similes: mine was less obvious. * * * * * _Diogenes._ I know the respect thou bearest to the dogly character, and can attribute to nothing else the complacency with which thou hast listened to me since I released thy cloak. If ever the Athenians, in their inconstancy, should issue a decree to deprive me of the appellation they have conferred on me, rise up, I pray thee, in my defence, and protest that I have not merited so severe a mulct. Something I do deserve at thy hands; having supplied thee, first with a store of patience, when thou wert going without any about thee, although it is the readiest viaticum and the heartiest sustenance of human life; and then with weapons from this tub, wherewith to drive the importunate cock before thee out of doors again. ALFIERI AND SALOMON THE FLORENTINE JEW _Alfieri._ Let us walk to the window, Signor Salomon. And now, instead of the silly, simpering compliments repeated at introductions, let me assure you that you are the only man in Florence with whom I would willingly exchange a salutation. _Salomon._ I must think myself highly flattered, Signor Conte, having always heard that you are not only the greatest democrat, but also the greatest aristocrat, in Europe. _Alfieri._ These two things, however opposite, which your smile would indicate, are not so irreconcilable as you imagine. Let us first understand the words, and then talk about them. The democrat is he who wishes the people to have a due share in the government, and this share if you please shall be the principal one. The aristocrat of our days is contented with no actual share in it; but if a man of family is conscious of his dignity, and resentful that another has invaded it, he may be, and is universally, called an aristocrat. The principal difference is, that one carries outward what the other carries inward. I am thought an aristocrat by the Florentines for conversing with few people, and for changing my shirt and shaving my beard on other days than festivals; which the most aristocratical of them never do, considering it, no doubt, as an excess. I am, however, from my soul a republican, if prudence and modesty will authorize any man to call himself so; and this, I trust, I have demonstrated in the most valuable of my works, the _Treatise on Tyranny_ and the _Dialogue_ with my friends at Siena. The aristocratical part of me, if part of me it must be called, hangs loose and keeps off insects. I see no aristocracy in the children of sharpers from behind the counter, nor, placing the matter in the most favourable point of view, in the descendants of free citizens who accepted from any vile enslaver--French, Spanish, German, or priest, or monk (represented with a piece of buffoonery, like a beehive on his head and a picklock key at his girdle)--the titles of counts and marquises. In Piedmont the matter is different: we must either have been the rabble or the lords; we were military, and we retain over the populace the same rank and spirit as our ancestors held over the soldiery. _Salomon._ Signor Conte, I have heard of levellers, but I have never seen one: all are disposed to level down, but nobody to level up. As for nobility, there is none in Europe beside the Venetian. Nobility must be self-constituted and independent: the free alone are noble; slavery, like death, levels all. The English come nearest to the Venetian: they are independent, but want the main characteristic, the _self-constituted_. You have been in England, Signor Conte, and can judge of them better than I can. * * * * * _Alfieri._ It is among those who stand between the peerage and the people that there exists a greater mass of virtue and of wisdom than in the rest of Europe. Much of their dignified simplicity may be attributed to the plainness of their religion, and, what will always be imitated, to the decorous life of their king: for whatever may be the defects of either, if we compare them with others round us, they are excellent. _Salomon._ A young religion jumps upon the shoulders of an older one, and soon becomes like her, by mockery of her tricks, her cant, and her decrepitude. Meanwhile the old one shakes with indignation, and swears there is neither relationship nor likeness. Was there ever a religion in the world that was not the true religion, or was there ever a king that was not the best of kings? _Alfieri._ In the latter case we must have arrived nigh perfection; since it is evident from the authority of the gravest men--theologians, presidents, judges, corporations, universities, senates--that every prince is better than his father, 'of blessed memory, now with God'. If they continue to rise thus transcendently, earth in a little time will be incapable of holding them, and higher heavens must be raised upon the highest heavens for their reception. The lumber of our Italian courts, the most crazy part of which is that which rests upon a red cushion in a gilt chair, with stars and sheep and crosses dangling from it, must be approached as Artaxerxes and Domitian. These automatons, we are told nevertheless, are very condescending. Poor fools who tell us it! ignorant that where on one side is condescension, on the other side must be baseness. The rascals have ruined my physiognomy. I wear an habitual sneer upon my face, God confound them for it! even when I whisper a word of love in the prone ear of my donna. _Salomon._ This temper or constitution of mind I am afraid may do injury to your works. _Alfieri._ Surely not to all: my satire at least must be the better for it. _Salomon._ I think differently. No satire can be excellent where displeasure is expressed with acrimony and vehemence. When satire ceases to smile, it should be momentarily, and for the purpose of inculcating a moral. Juvenal is hardly more a satirist than Lucan: he is indeed a vigorous and bold declaimer, but he stamps too often, and splashes up too much filth. We Italians have no delicacy in wit: we have indeed no conception of it; we fancy we must be weak if we are not offensive. The scream of Pulcinello is imitated more easily than the masterly strokes of Plautus, or the sly insinuations of Catullus and of Flaccus. _Alfieri._ We are the least witty of men because we are the most trifling. _Salomon._ You would persuade me then that to be witty one must be grave: this is surely a contradiction. _Alfieri._ I would persuade you only that banter, pun, and quibble are the properties of light men and shallow capacities; that genuine humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Contemptuousness is not incompatible with them: worthless is that man who feels no contempt for the worthless, and weak who treats their emptiness as a thing of weight. At first it may seem a paradox, but it is perfectly true, that the gravest nations have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men. In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been _rêveurs_. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier. * * * * * That Shakespeare was gay and pleasurable in conversation I can easily admit; for there never was a mind at once so plastic and so pliant: but without much gravity, could there have been that potency and comprehensiveness of thought, that depth of feeling, that creation of imperishable ideas, that sojourn in the souls of other men? He was amused in his workshop: such was society. But when he left it, he meditated intensely upon those limbs and muscles on which he was about to bestow new action, grace, and majesty; and so great an intensity of meditation must have strongly impressed his whole character. * * * * * _Salomon._ Certainly no race of men upon earth ever was so unwarlike, so indifferent to national dignity and to personal honour, as the Florentines are now: yet in former days a certain pride, arising from a resemblance in their government to that of Athens, excited a vivifying desire of approximation where no danger or loss accompanied it; and Genius was no less confident of his security than of his power. Look from the window. That cottage on the declivity was Dante's: that square and large mansion, with a circular garden before it elevated artificially, was the first scene of Boccaccio's _Decameron_. A boy might stand at an equal distance between them, and break the windows of each with his sling. What idle fabricators of crazy systems will tell me that climate is the creator of genius? The climate of Austria is more regular and more temperate than ours, which I am inclined to believe is the most variable in the whole universe, subject, as you have perceived, to heavy fogs for two months in winter, and to a stifling heat, concentrated within the hills, for five more. Yet a single man of genius hath never appeared in the whole extent of Austria, an extent of several thousand times greater than our city; and this very street has given birth to fifty. _Alfieri._ Since the destruction of the republic, Florence has produced only one great man, Galileo, and abandoned him to every indignity that fanaticism and despotism could invent. Extraordinary men, like the stones that are formed in the higher regions of the air, fall upon the earth only to be broken and cast into the furnace. The precursor of Newton lived in the deserts of the moral world, drank water, and ate locusts and wild honey. It was fortunate that his head also was not lopped off: had a singer asked it, instead of a dancer, it would have been. _Salomon._ In fact it was; for the fruits of it were shaken down and thrown away: he was forbidden to publish the most important of his discoveries, and the better part of his manuscripts was burned after his death. _Alfieri._ Yes, Signor Salomon, those things may rather be called our heads than this knob above the shoulder, of which (as matters stand) we are rather the porters than the proprietors, and which is really the joint concern of barber and dentist. _Salomon._ Our thoughts, if they may not rest at home, may wander freely. Delighting in the remoter glories of my native city, I forget at times its humiliation and ignominy. A town so little that the voice of a cabbage-girl in the midst of it may be heard at the extremities, reared within three centuries a greater number of citizens illustrious for their genius than all the remainder of the Continent (excepting her sister Athens) in six thousand years. My ignorance of the Greek forbids me to compare our Dante with Homer. The propriety and force of language and the harmony of verse in the glorious Grecian are quite lost to me. Dante had not only to compose a poem, but in great part a language. Fantastical as the plan of his poem is, and, I will add, uninteresting and uninviting; unimportant, mean, contemptible, as are nine-tenths of his characters and his details, and wearisome as is the scheme of his versification--there are more thoughts highly poetical, there is more reflection, and the nobler properties of mind and intellect are brought into more intense action, not only than in the whole course of French poetry, but also in the whole of continental; nor do I think (I must here also speak with hesitation) that any one drama of Shakespeare contains so many. Smile as you will, Signor Conte, what must I think of a city where Michel Angelo, Frate Bartolomeo, Ghiberti (who formed them), Guicciardini, and Machiavelli were secondary men? And certainly such were they, if we compare them with Galileo and Boccaccio and Dante. _Alfieri._ I smiled from pure delight, which I rarely do; for I take an interest deep and vital in such men, and in those who appreciate them rightly and praise them unreservedly. These are my fellow-citizens: I acknowledge no other; we are of the same tribe, of the same household; I bow to them as being older than myself, and I love them as being better. _Salomon._ Let us hope that our Italy is not yet effete. Filangieri died but lately: what think you of him? _Alfieri._ If it were possible that I could ever see his statue in a square at Constantinople, though I should be scourged for an idolater, I would kiss the pedestal. As this, however, is less likely than that I should suffer for writing satirically, and as criticism is less likely to mislead me than speculation, I will revert to our former subject. Indignation and contempt may be expressed in other poems than such as are usually called satires. Filicaia, in his celebrated address to Italy, steers a middle course. * * * * * A perfect piece of criticism must exhibit _where_ a work is good or bad; _why_ it is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must also demonstrate in what manner, and to what extent, the same ideas or reflections have come to others, and, if they be clothed in poetry, why by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is mediocrity, in another is excellence. I have never seen a critic of Florence, or Pisa, or Milan, or Bologna, who did not commend and admire the sonnet of Cassiani on the rape of Proserpine, without a suspicion of its manifold and grave defects. * * * * * Does not this describe the devils of our carnival, rather than the majestic brother of Jupiter, at whose side upon asphodel and amaranth the sweet Persephone sits pensively contented, in that deep motionless quiet which mortals pity and which the gods enjoy; rather than him who, under the umbrage of Elysium, gazes at once upon all the beauties that on earth were separated--Helena and Eriphyle, Polyxena and Hermione, Deidamia and Deianira, Leda and Omphale, Atalanta and Cydippe, Laodamia, with her arm round the neck of a fond youth whom she still seems afraid of losing, and, apart, the daughters of Niobe clinging to their parent? _Salomon._ These images are better than satires; but continue, in preference to other thoughts or pursuits, the noble career you have entered. Be contented, Signor Conte, with the glory of our first great dramatist, and neglect altogether any inferior one. Why vex and torment yourself about the French? They buzz and are troublesome while they are swarming; but the master will soon hive them. Is the whole nation worth the worst of your tragedies? All the present race of them, all the creatures in the world which excite your indignation, will lie in the grave, while young and old are clapping their hands or beating their bosoms at your _Bruto Primo_. Consider also that kings and emperors should in your estimation be but as grasshoppers and beetles: let them consume a few blades of your clover without molesting them, without bringing them to crawl on you and claw you. The difference between them and men of genius is almost as great as between men of genius and those higher intelligences who act in immediate subordination to the Almighty. Yes, I assert it, without flattery and without fear, the angels are not higher above mortals than you are above the proudest that trample on them. _Alfieri._ I believe, sir, you were the first in commending my tragedies. _Salomon._ He who first praises a good book becomingly is next in merit to the author. _Alfieri._ As a writer and as a man I know my station: if I found in the world five equal to myself, I would walk out of it, not to be jostled. I must now, Signor Salomon, take my leave of you; for his Eminence my coachman and their Excellencies my horses are waiting. ROUSSEAU AND MALESHERBES _Rousseau._ I am ashamed, sir, of my countrymen: let my humiliation expiate their offence. I wish it had not been a minister of the Gospel who received you with such inhospitality. _Malesherbes._ Nothing can be more ardent and more cordial than the expressions with which you greet me, M. Rousseau, on my return from your lakes and mountains. _Rousseau._ If the pastor took you for a courtier, I reverence him for his contemptuousness. _Malesherbes._ Why so? Indeed you are in the wrong, my friend. No person has a right to treat another with contemptuousness unless he knows him to deserve it. When a courtier enters the house of a pastor in preference to the next, the pastor should partake in the sentiment that induced him, or at least not to be offended to be preferred. A courtier is such at court: in the house of a clergyman he is not a courtier, but a guest. If to be a courtier is offensive, remember that we punish offences where they are committed, where they can be examined, where pleadings can be heard for and against the accused, and where nothing is admitted extraneous from the indictment, excepting what may be adduced in his behalf by witnesses to the general tenor of his character. _Rousseau._ Is it really true that the man told you to mount the hayloft if you wished a night's lodging? _Malesherbes._ He did: a certain proof that he no more took me to be a courtier than I took him to be. I accepted his offer, and never slept so soundly. Moderate fatigue, the Alpine air, the blaze of a good fire (for I was admitted to it some moments), and a profusion of odoriferous hay, below which a cow was sleeping, subdued my senses, and protracted my slumbers beyond the usual hour. _Rousseau._ You have no right, sir, to be the patron and remunerator of inhospitality. Three or four such men as you would corrupt all Switzerland, and prepare it for the fangs of France and Austria. Kings, like hyenas, will always fall upon dead carcasses, although their bellies are full, and although they are conscious that in the end they will tear one another to pieces over them. Why should you prepare their prey? Were your fire and effulgence given you for this? Why, in short, did you thank this churl? Why did you recommend him to his superiors for preferment on the next vacancy? _Malesherbes._ I must adopt your opinion of his behaviour in order to answer you satisfactorily. You suppose him inhospitable: what milder or more effectual mode of reproving him, than to make every dish at his table admonish him? If he did evil, have I no authority before me which commands me to render him good for it? Believe me, M. Rousseau, the execution of this command is always accompanied by the heart's applause, and opportunities of obedience are more frequent here than anywhere. Would not you exchange resentment for the contrary feeling, even if religion or duty said nothing about the matter? I am afraid the most philosophical of us are sometimes a little perverse, and will not be so happy as they might be, because the path is pointed out to them, and because he who points it out is wise and powerful. Obstinacy and jealousy, the worst parts of childhood and of manhood, have range enough for their ill humours without the heavens. _Rousseau._ Sir, I perceive you are among my enemies. I did not think it; for, whatever may be my faults, I am totally free from suspicion. _Malesherbes._ And do not think it now, I entreat you, my good friend. _Rousseau._ Courts and society have corrupted the best heart in France, and have perverted the best intellect. _Malesherbes._ They have done much evil then. _Rousseau._ Answer me, and your own conscience: how could you choose to live among the perfidies of Paris and Versailles? _Malesherbes._ Lawyers, and advocates in particular, must live there; philosophers need not. If every honest man thought it requisite to leave those cities, would the inhabitants be the better? _Rousseau._ You have entered into intimacies with the members of various administrations, opposite in plans and sentiments, but alike hostile to you, and all of whom, if they could have kept your talents down, would have done it. Finding the thing impossible, they ceased to persecute, and would gladly tempt you under the semblance of friendship and esteem to supplicate for some office, that they might indicate to the world your unworthiness by refusing you: a proof, as you know, quite sufficient and self-evident. _Malesherbes._ They will never tempt me to supplicate for anything but justice, and that in behalf of others. I know nothing of parties. If I am acquainted with two persons of opposite sides in politics, I consider them as you consider a watchmaker and a cabinet-maker: one desires to rise by one way, the other by another. Administrations and systems of government would be quite indifferent to those very functionaries and their opponents, who appear the most zealous partisans, if their fortunes and consequence were not affixed to them. Several of these men seem consistent, and indeed are; the reason is, versatility would loosen and detach from them the public esteem and confidence---- _Rousseau._ By which their girandoles are lighted, their dinners served, their lackeys liveried, and their opera-girls vie in benefit-nights. There is no State in Europe where the least wise have not governed the most wise. We find the light and foolish keeping up with the machinery of government easily and leisurely, just as we see butterflies keep up with carriages at full speed. This is owing in both cases to their levity and their position: the stronger and the more active are left behind. I am resolved to prove that farmers-general are the main causes of the defects in our music. _Malesherbes._ Prove it, or anything else, provided that the discussion does not irritate and torment you. _Rousseau._ Truth is the object of philosophy. _Malesherbes._ Not of philosophers: the display of ingenuity, for the most part, is and always has been it. I must here offer you an opinion of my own, which, if you think well of me, you will pardon, though you should disbelieve its solidity. My opinion then is, that truth is not reasonably the main and ultimate object of philosophy; but that philosophy should seek truth merely as the means of acquiring and of propagating happiness. Truths are simple; wisdom, which is formed by their apposition and application, is concrete: out of this, in its vast varieties, open to our wants and wishes, comes happiness. But the knowledge of all the truths ever yet discovered does not lead immediately to it, nor indeed will ever reach it, unless you make the more important of them bear upon your heart and intellect, and form, as it were, the blood that moves and nurtures them. _Rousseau._ I never until now entertained a doubt that truth is the ultimate aim and object of philosophy: no writer has denied it, I think. _Malesherbes._ Designedly none may: but when it is agreed that happiness is the chief good, it must also be agreed that the chief wisdom will pursue it; and I have already said, what your own experience cannot but have pointed out to you, that no truth, or series of truths, hypothetically, can communicate or attain it. Come, M. Rousseau, tell me candidly, do you derive no pleasure from a sense of superiority in genius and independence? _Rousseau._ The highest, sir, from a consciousness of independence. _Malesherbes._ _Ingenuous_ is the epithet we affix to modesty, but modesty often makes men act otherwise than ingenuously: you, for example, now. You are angry at the servility of people, and disgusted at their obtuseness and indifference, on matters of most import to their welfare. If they were equal to you, this anger would cease; but the fire would break out somewhere else, on ground which appears at present sound and level. Voltaire, for instance, is less eloquent than you: but Voltaire is wittier than any man living. This quality---- _Rousseau._ Is the quality of a buffoon and a courtier. But the buffoon should have most of it, to support his higher dignity. _Malesherbes._ Voltaire's is Attic. _Rousseau_. If malignity is Attic. Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance: quartz is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz. Voltaire is a monkey in mischief, and a spaniel in obsequiousness. He declaims against the cruel and tyrannical; and he kisses the hands of adulteresses who murder their husbands, and of robbers who decimate their gang. _Malesherbes._ I will not discuss with you the character of the man, and only that part of the author's on which I spoke. There may be malignity in wit, there cannot be violence. You may irritate and disquiet with it; but it must be by means of a flower or a feather. Wit and humour stand on one side, irony and sarcasm on the other. _Rousseau._ They are in near neighbourhood. _Malesherbes._ So are the Elysian fields and Tartarus. _Rousseau._ Pray, go on: teach me to stand quiet in my stall, while my masters and managers pass by. _Malesherbes._ Well then--Pascal argues as closely and methodically; Bossuet is as scientific in the structure of his sentences; Demosthenes, many think, has equal fire, vigour, dexterity: equal selection of topics and equal temperance in treating them, immeasurably as he falls short of you in appeals to the sensibility, and in everything which by way of excellence we usually call genius. _Rousseau._ Sir, I see no resemblance between a pleader at the bar, or a haranguer of the populace, and me. _Malesherbes._ Certainly his questions are occasional: but one great question hangs in the centre, and high above the rest; and this is, whether the Mother of liberty and civilization shall exist, or whether she shall be extinguished in the bosom of her family. As we often apply to Eloquence and her parts the terms we apply to Architecture and hers, let me do it also, and remark that nothing can be more simple, solid, and symmetrical, nothing more frugal in decoration or more appropriate in distribution, than the apartments of Demosthenes. Yours excel them in space and altitude; your ornaments are equally chaste and beautiful, with more variety and invention, more airiness and light. But why, among the Loves and Graces, does Apollo flay Marsyas?--and why may not the tiara still cover the ears of Midas? Cannot you, who detest kings and courtiers, keep away from them? If I must be with them, let me be in good humour and good spirits. If I will tread upon a Persian carpet, let it at least be in clean shoes. As the raciest wine makes the sharpest vinegar, so the richest fancies turn the most readily to acrimony. Keep yours, my dear M. Rousseau, from the exposure and heats that generate it. Be contented; enjoy your fine imagination; and do not throw your salad out of window, nor shove your cat off your knee, on hearing it said that Shakespeare has a finer, or that a minister is of opinion that you know more of music than of state. My friend! the quarrels of ingenious men are generally far less reasonable and just, less placable and moderate, than those of the stupid and ignorant. We ought to blush at this: and we should blush yet more deeply if we bring them in as parties to our differences. Let us conquer by kindness; which we cannot do easily or well without communication. _Rousseau._ The minister would expel me from his antechamber, and order his valets to buffet me, if I offered him any proposal for the advantage of mankind. _Malesherbes._ Call to him, then, from this room, where the valets are civiler. Nature has given you a speaking-trumpet, which neither storm can drown nor enemy can silence. If you esteem him, instruct him; if you despise him, do the same. Surely, you who have much benevolence would not despise any one willingly or unnecessarily. Contempt is for the incorrigible: now, where upon earth is he whom your genius, if rightly and temperately exerted, would not influence and correct? I never was more flattered or honoured than by your patience in listening to me. Consider me as an old woman who sits by the bedside in your infirmity, who brings you no savoury viand, no exotic fruit, but a basin of whey or a basket of strawberries from your native hills; assures you that what oppressed you was a dream, occasioned by the wrong position in which you lay; opens the window, gives you fresh air, and entreats you to recollect the features of Nature, and to observe (which no man ever did so accurately) their beauty. In your politics you cut down a forest to make a toothpick, and cannot make even that out of it! Do not let us in jurisprudence be like critics in the classics, and change whatever can be changed, right or wrong. No statesman will take your advice. Supposing that any one is liberal in his sentiments and clear-sighted in his views, nevertheless love of power is jealous, and he would rejoice to see you fleeing from persecution or turning to meet it. The very men whom you would benefit will treat you worse. As the ministers of kings wish their masters to possess absolute power that the exercise of it may be delegated to them, which it naturally is from the violence and sloth alternate with despots as with wild beasts, and that they may apprehend no check or control from those who discover their misdemeanours, in like manner the people places more trust in favour than in fortune, and hopes to obtain by subserviency what it never might by election or by chance. Else in free governments, so some are called (for names once given are the last things lost), all minor offices and employments would be assigned by ballot. Each province or canton would present a list annually of such persons in it as are worthy to occupy the local administrations. To avoid any allusion to the country in which we live, let us take England for example. Is it not absurd, iniquitous, and revolting, that the minister of a church in Yorkshire should be appointed by a lawyer in London, who never knew him, never saw him, never heard from a single one of the parishioners a recommendation of any kind? Is it not more reasonable that a justice of the peace should be chosen by those who have always been witnesses of his integrity? _Rousseau._ The king should appoint his ministers, and should invest them with power and splendour; but those ministers should not appoint to any civil or religious place of trust or profit which the community could manifestly fill better. The greater part of offices and dignities should be conferred for a short and stated time, that all might hope to attain and strive to deserve them. Embassies in particular should never exceed one year in Europe, nor consulates two. To the latter office I assign this duration as the more difficult to fulfil properly, from requiring a knowledge of trade, although a slight one, and because those who possess any such knowledge are inclined for the greater part to turn it to their own account, which a consul ought by no means to do. Frequent election of representatives and of civil officers in the subordinate employments would remove most causes of discontent in the people, and of instability in kingly power. Here is a lottery in which every one is sure of a prize, if not for himself, at least for somebody in his family or among his friends; and the ticket would be fairly paid for out of the taxes. _Malesherbes._ So it appears to me. What other system can present so obviously to the great mass of the people the two principal piers and buttresses of government, tangible interest and reasonable hope? No danger of any kind can arise from it, no antipathies, no divisions, no imposture of demagogues, no caprice of despots. On the contrary, many and great advantages in places which at the first survey do not appear to border on it. At present, the best of the English juridical institutions, that of justices of the peace, is viewed with diffidence and distrust. Elected as they would be, and increased in number, the whole judicature, civil and criminal, might be confided to them, and their labours be not only not aggravated but diminished. Suppose them in four divisions to meet at four places in every county once in twenty days, and to possess the power of imposing a fine not exceeding two hundred francs on every cause implying oppression, and one not exceeding fifty on such as they should unanimously declare frivolous. _Rousseau._ Few would become attorneys, and those from among the indigent. _Malesherbes._ Almost the greatest evil that exists in the world, moral or physical, would be removed. A second appeal might be made in the following session; a third could only come before Parliament, and this alone by means of attorneys, the number of whom altogether would not exceed the number of coroners; for in England there are as many who cut their own throats as who would cut their own purses. _Rousseau._ The famous _trial by jury_ would cease: this would disgust the English. _Malesherbes._ The number of justices would be much augmented: nearly all those who now are jurymen would enjoy this rank and dignity, and would be flattered by sitting on the same bench with the first gentlemen of the land. _Rousseau._ What number would sit? _Malesherbes._ Three or five in the first instance; five or seven in the second--as the number of causes should permit. _Rousseau._ The laws of England are extremely intricate and perplexed: such men would be puzzled. _Malesherbes._ Such men having no interest in the perplexity, but on the contrary an interest in unravelling it, would see such laws corrected. Intricate as they are, questions on those which are the most so are usually referred by the judges themselves to private arbitration; of which my plan, I conceive, has all the advantages, united to those of open and free discussion among men of unperverted sense, and unbiased by professional hopes and interests. The different courts of law in England cost about seventy millions of francs annually. On my system, the justices or judges would receive five-and-twenty francs daily; as the _special jurymen_ do now, without any sense of shame or impropriety, however rich they may be: such being the established practice. _Rousseau._ Seventy millions! seventy millions! _Malesherbes._ There are attorneys and conveyancers in London who gain one hundred thousand francs a year, and advocates more. The chancellor---- _Rousseau._ The Celeno of these harpies---- _Malesherbes._ Nets above one million, and is greatly more than an archbishop in the Church, scattering preferment in Cumberland and Cornwall from his bench at Westminster. _Rousseau._ Absurdities and enormities are great in proportion to custom or insuetude. If we had lived from childhood with a boa constrictor, we should think it no more a monster than a canary-bird. The sum you mentioned, of seventy millions, is incredible. _Malesherbes._ In this estimate the expense of letters by the post, and of journeys made by the parties, is not and cannot be included. _Rousseau._ The whole machine of government, civil and religious, ought never to bear upon the people with a weight so oppressive. I do not add the national defence, which being principally naval is more costly, nor institutions for the promotion of the arts, which in a country like England ought to be liberal. But such an expenditure should nearly suffice for these also, in time of peace. Religion and law indeed should cost nothing: at present the one hangs property, the other quarters it. I am confounded at the profusion. I doubt whether the Romans expended so much in that year's war which dissolved the Carthaginian empire, and left them masters of the universe. What is certain, and what is better, it did not cost a tenth of it to colonize Pennsylvania, in whose forests the cradle of freedom is suspended, and where the eye of philanthropy, tired with tears and vigils, may wander and may rest. Your system, or rather your arrangement of one already established, pleases me. Ministers would only lose thereby that portion of their possessions which they give away to needy relatives, unworthy dependants, or the requisite supporters of their authority and power. _Malesherbes._ On this plan, no such supporters would be necessary, no such dependants could exist, and no such relatives could be disappointed. Beside, the conflicts of their opponents must be periodical, weak, and irregular. _Rousseau._ The craving for the rich carrion would be less keen; the zeal of opposition, as usual, would be measured by the stomach, whereon hope and overlooking have always a strong influence. _Malesherbes._ My excellent friend, do not be offended with me for an ingenuous and frank confession: promise me your pardon. _Rousseau._ You need none. _Malesherbes._ Promise it, nevertheless. _Rousseau._ You have said nothing, done nothing, which could in any way displease me. _Malesherbes._ You grant me, then, a bill of indemnity for what I may have undertaken with a good intention since we have been together? _Rousseau._ Willingly. _Malesherbes._ I fell into your views, I walked along with you side by side, merely to occupy your mind, which I perceived was agitated. In compliance with your humour, to engage your fancy, to divert it awhile from Switzerland, by which you appear and partly on my account to be offended, I began with reflections upon England: I raised up another cloud in the region of them, light enough to be fantastic and diaphanous, and to catch some little irradiation from its western sun. Do not run after it farther; it has vanished already. Consider: the three great nations---- _Rousseau._ Pray, which are those? _Malesherbes._ I cannot in conscience give the palm to the Hottentots, the Greenlanders, or the Hurons: I meant to designate those who united to empire the most social virtue and civil freedom. Athens, Rome, and England have received on the subject of government elaborate treatises from their greatest men. You have reasoned more dispassionately and profoundly on it than Plato has done, or probably than Cicero, led away as he often is by the authority of those who are inferior to himself: but do you excel Aristoteles in calm and patient investigation? Or, think you, are your reading and range of thought more extensive than Harrington's and Milton's? Yet what effect have the political works of these marvellous men produced upon the world?--what effect upon any one state, any one city, any one hamlet? A clerk in office, an accountant, a gauger of small beer, a songwriter for a tavern dinner, produces more. He thrusts his rags into the hole whence the wind comes, and sleeps soundly. While you and I are talking about elevations and proportions, pillars and pilasters, architraves and friezes, the buildings we should repair are falling to the earth, and the materials for their restoration are in the quarry. _Rousseau._ I could answer you: but my mind has certain moments of repose, or rather of oscillation, which I would not for the world disturb. Music, eloquence, friendship, bring and prolong them. _Malesherbes._ Enjoy them, my dear friend, and convert them if possible to months and years. It is as much at your arbitration on what theme you shall meditate, as in what meadow you shall botanize; and you have as much at your option the choice of your thoughts, as of the keys in your harpsichord. _Rousseau._ If this were true, who could be unhappy? _Malesherbes._ Those of whom it is not true. Those who from want of practice cannot manage their thoughts, who have few to select from, and who, because of their sloth or of their weakness, do not roll away the heaviest from before them. LUCULLUS AND CAESAR _Caesar._ Lucius Lucullus, I come to you privately and unattended for reasons which you will know; confiding, I dare not say in your friendship, since no service of mine toward you hath deserved it, but in your generous and disinterested love of peace. Hear me on. Cneius Pompeius, according to the report of my connexions in the city, had, on the instant of my leaving it for the province, begun to solicit his dependants to strip me ignominiously of authority. Neither vows nor affinity can bind him. He would degrade the father of his wife; he would humiliate his own children, the unoffending, the unborn; he would poison his own nascent love--at the suggestion of Ambition. Matters are now brought so far, that either he or I must submit to a reverse of fortune; since no concession can assuage his malice, divert his envy, or gratify his cupidity. No sooner could I raise myself up, from the consternation and stupefaction into which the certainty of these reports had thrown me, than I began to consider in what manner my own private afflictions might become the least noxious to the republic. Into whose arms, then, could I throw myself more naturally and more securely, to whose bosom could I commit and consign more sacredly the hopes and destinies of our beloved country, than his who laid down power in the midst of its enjoyments, in the vigour of youth, in the pride of triumph, when Dignity solicited, when Friendship urged, entreated, supplicated, and when Liberty herself invited and beckoned to him from the senatorial order and from the curule chair? Betrayed and abandoned by those we had confided in, our next friendship, if ever our hearts receive any, or if any will venture in those places of desolation, flies forward instinctively to what is most contrary and dissimilar. Caesar is hence the visitant of Lucullus. _Lucullus._ I had always thought Pompeius more moderate and more reserved than you represent him, Caius Julius; and yet I am considered in general, and surely you also will consider me, but little liable to be prepossessed by him. _Caesar._ Unless he may have ingratiated himself with you recently, by the administration of that worthy whom last winter his partisans dragged before the Senate, and forced to assert publicly that you and Cato had instigated a party to circumvent and murder him; and whose carcass, a few days afterward, when it had been announced that he had died by a natural death, was found covered with bruises, stabs, and dislocations. _Lucullus._ You bring much to my memory which had quite slipped out of it, and I wonder that it could make such an impression on yours. A proof to me that the interest you take in my behalf began earlier than your delicacy will permit you to acknowledge. You are fatigued, which I ought to have perceived before. _Caesar._ Not at all; the fresh air has given me life and alertness: I feel it upon my cheek even in the room. _Lucullus._ After our dinner and sleep, we will spend the remainder of the day on the subject of your visit. _Caesar._ Those Ethiopian slaves of yours shiver with cold upon the mountain here; and truly I myself was not insensible to the change of climate, in the way from Mutina. What white bread! I never found such even at Naples or Capua. This Formian wine (which I prefer to the Chian), how exquisite! _Lucullus._ Such is the urbanity of Caesar, even while he bites his lip with displeasure. How! surely it bleeds! Permit me to examine the cup. _Caesar._ I believe a jewel has fallen out of the rim in the carriage: the gold is rough there. _Lucullus._ Marcipor, let me never see that cup again! No answer, I desire. My guest pardons heavier faults. Mind that dinner be prepared for us shortly. _Caesar._ In the meantime, Lucullus, if your health permits it, shall we walk a few paces round the villa? for I have not seen anything of the kind before. _Lucullus._ The walls are double; the space between them two feet: the materials for the most part earth and straw. Two hundred slaves, and about as many mules and oxen, brought the beams and rafters up the mountain; my architects fixed them at once in their places: every part was ready, even the wooden nails. The roof is thatched, you see. _Caesar._ Is there no danger that so light a material should be carried off by the winds, on such an eminence? _Lucullus._ None resists them equally well. _Caesar._ On this immensely high mountain, I should be apprehensive of the lightning, which the poets, and I think the philosophers too, have told us strikes the highest. _Lucullus._ The poets are right; for whatever is received as truth is truth in poetry; and a fable may illustrate like a fact. But the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of simple science, boasters of their acquaintance with gods and goddesses, plagiarists and impostors. I had forgotten my roof, although it is composed of much the same materials as the philosophers'. Let the lightning fall: one handful of silver, or less, repairs the damage. _Caesar._ Impossible! nor indeed one thousand, nor twenty, if those tapestries and pictures are consumed. _Lucullus._ True; but only the thatch would burn. For, before the baths were tessellated, I filled the area with alum and water, and soaked the timbers and laths for many months, and covered them afterward with alum in powder, by means of liquid glue. Mithridates taught me this. Having in vain attacked with combustibles a wooden tower, I took it by stratagem, and found within it a mass of alum, which, if a great hurry had not been observed by us among the enemy in the attempt to conceal it, would have escaped our notice. I never scrupled to extort the truth from my prisoners; but my instruments were purple robes and plate, and the only wheel in my armoury destined to such purposes was the wheel of Fortune. _Caesar._ I wish, in my campaigns, I could have equalled your clemency and humanity; but the Gauls are more uncertain, fierce, and perfidious than the wildest tribes of Caucasus; and our policy cannot be carried with us, it must be formed upon the spot. They love you, not for abstaining from hurting them, but for ceasing; and they embrace you only at two seasons--when stripes are fresh, or when stripes are imminent. Elsewhere, I hope to become the rival of Lucullus in this admirable part of virtue. I shall never build villas, because--but what are your proportions? Surely the edifice is extremely low. _Lucullus._ There is only one floor; the height of the apartments is twenty feet to the cornice, five above it; the breadth is twenty-five, the length forty. The building, as you perceive, is quadrangular: three sides contain four rooms each; the other has many partitions and two stories, for domestics and offices. Here is my salt-bath. _Caesar._ A bath, indeed, for all the Nereids named by Hesiod, with room enough for the Tritons and their herds and horses. _Lucullus._ Here stand my two cows. Their milk is brought to me with its warmth and froth; for it loses its salubrity both by repose and by motion. Pardon me, Caesar: I shall appear to you to have forgotten that I am not conducting Marcus Varro. _Caesar._ You would convert him into Cacus: he would drive them off. What beautiful beasts! how sleek and white and cleanly! I never saw any like them, excepting when we sacrifice to Jupiter the stately leader from the pastures of the Clitumnus. _Lucullus._ Often do I make a visit to these quiet creatures, and with no less pleasure than in former days to my horses. Nor indeed can I much wonder that whole nations have been consentaneous in treating them as objects of devotion: the only thing wonderful is that gratitude seems to have acted as powerfully and extensively as fear; indeed, more extensively, for no object of worship whatever has attracted so many worshippers. Where Jupiter has one, the cow has ten: she was venerated before he was born, and will be when even the carvers have forgotten him. _Caesar._ Unwillingly should I see it; for the character of our gods hath formed the character of our nation. Serapis and Isis have stolen in among them within our memory, and others will follow, until at last Saturn will not be the only one emasculated by his successor. What can be more august than our rites? The first dignitaries of the republic are emulous to administer them: nothing of low or venal has any place in them; nothing pusillanimous, nothing unsocial and austere. I speak of them as they were; before Superstition woke up again from her slumber, and caught to her bosom with maternal love the alluvial monsters of the Nile. Philosophy, never fit for the people, had entered the best houses, and the image of Epicurus had taken the place of the Lemures. But men cannot bear to be deprived long together of anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by fanaticism, and fanaticism by irreligion, alternately and perpetually. _Lucullus._ The religion of our country, as you observe, is well adapted to its inhabitants. Our progenitor, Mars, hath Venus recumbent on his breast and looking up to him, teaching us that pleasure is to be sought in the bosom of valour and by the means of war. No great alteration, I think, will ever be made in our rites and ceremonies--the best and most imposing that could be collected from all nations, and uniting them to us by our complacence in adopting them. The gods themselves may change names, to flatter new power: and, indeed, as we degenerate, Religion will accommodate herself to our propensities and desires. Our heaven is now popular: it will become monarchal; not without a crowded court, as befits it, of apparitors and satellites and minions of both sexes, paid and caressed for carrying to their stern, dark-bearded master prayers and supplications. Altars must be strown with broken minds, and incense rise amid abject aspirations. Gods will be found unfit for their places; and it is not impossible that, in the ruin imminent from our contentions for power, and in the necessary extinction both of ancient families and of generous sentiments, our consular fasces may become the water-sprinklers of some upstart priesthood, and that my son may apply for lustration to the son of my groom. The interest of such men requires that the spirit of arms and of arts be extinguished. They will predicate peace, that the people may be tractable to them; but a religion altogether pacific is the fomenter of wars and the nurse of crimes, alluring Sloth from within and Violence from afar. If ever it should prevail among the Romans, it must prevail alone: for nations more vigorous and energetic will invade them, close upon them, trample them under foot; and the name of Roman, which is now the most glorious, will become the most opprobrious upon earth. _Caesar._ The time, I hope, may be distant; for next to my own name I hold my country's. _Lucullus._ Mine, not coming from Troy or Ida, is lower in my estimation: I place my country's first. You are surveying the little lake beside us. It contains no fish, birds never alight on it, the water is extremely pure and cold; the walk round is pleasant, not only because there is always a gentle breeze from it, but because the turf is fine and the surface of the mountain on this summit is perfectly on a level to a great extent in length--not a trifling advantage to me, who walk often and am weak. I have no alley, no garden, no enclosure; the park is in the vale below, where a brook supplies the ponds, and where my servants are lodged; for here I have only twelve in attendance. _Caesar._ What is that so white, towards the Adriatic? _Lucullus._ The Adriatic itself. Turn round and you may descry the Tuscan Sea. Our situation is reported to be among the highest of the Apennines. Marcipor has made the sign to me that dinner is ready. Pass this way. _Caesar._ What a library is here! Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy image. Why frownest thou upon me--collecting the consular robe and uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again, and Catiline fled before thee? _Lucullus._ Just so; such was the action the statuary chose, as adding a new endearment to the memory of my absent friend. _Caesar._ Sylla, who honoured you above all men, is not here. _Lucullus._ I have his _Commentaries_: he inscribed them, as you know, to me. Something even of our benefactors may be forgotten, and gratitude be unreproved. _Caesar._ The impression on that couch, and the two fresh honeysuckles in the leaves of those two books, would show, even to a stranger, that this room is peculiarly the master's. Are they sacred? _Lucullus._ To me and Caesar. _Caesar._ I would have asked permission---- _Lucullus._ Caius Julius, you have nothing to ask of Polybius and Thucydides; nor of Xenophon, the next to them on the table. _Caesar._ Thucydides! the most generous, the most unprejudiced, the most sagacious, of historians. Now, Lucullus, you whose judgment in style is more accurate than any other Roman's, do tell me whether a commander, desirous of writing his _Commentaries_, could take to himself a more perfect model than Thucydides? _Lucullus._ Nothing is more perfect, nor ever will be: the scholar of Pericles, the master of Demosthenes, the equal of the one in military science, and of the other not the inferior in civil and forensic; the calm dispassionate judge of the general by whom he was defeated, his defender, his encomiast. To talk of such men is conducive not only to virtue but to health. * * * * * This other is my dining-room. You expect the dishes. _Caesar._ I misunderstood--I fancied---- _Lucullus._ Repose yourself, and touch with the ebony wand, beside you, the sphinx on either of those obelisks, right or left. _Caesar._ Let me look at them first. _Lucullus._ The contrivance was intended for one person, or two at most, desirous of privacy and quiet. The blocks of jasper in my pair, and of porphyry in yours, easily yield in their grooves, each forming one partition. There are four, containing four platforms. The lower holds four dishes, such as sucking forest-boars, venison, hares, tunnies, sturgeons, which you will find within; the upper three, eight each, but diminutive. The confectionery is brought separately, for the steam would spoil it, if any should escape. The melons are in the snow, thirty feet under us: they came early this morning from a place in the vicinity of Luni, travelling by night. _Caesar._ I wonder not at anything of refined elegance in Lucullus; but really here Antiochia and Alexandria seem to have cooked for us, and magicians to be our attendants. _Lucullus._ The absence of slaves from our repast is the luxury, for Marcipor alone enters, and he only when I press a spring with my foot or wand. When you desire his appearance, touch that chalcedony just before you. _Caesar._ I eat quick and rather plentifully; yet the valetudinarian (excuse my rusticity, for I rejoice at seeing it) appears to equal the traveller in appetite, and to be contented with one dish. _Lucullus._ It is milk: such, with strawberries, which ripen on the Apennines many months in continuance, and some other berries of sharp and grateful flavour, has been my only diet since my first residence here. The state of my health requires it; and the habitude of nearly three months renders this food not only more commodious to my studies and more conducive to my sleep, but also more agreeable to my palate than any other. _Caesar._ Returning to Rome or Baiae, you must domesticate and tame them. The cherries you introduced from Pontus are now growing in Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul; and the largest and best in the world, perhaps, are upon the more sterile side of Lake Larius. _Lucullus._ There are some fruits, and some virtues, which require a harsh soil and bleak exposure for their perfection. _Caesar._ In such a profusion of viands, and so savoury, I perceive no odour. _Lucullus._ A flue conducts heat through the compartments of the obelisks; and, if you look up, you may observe that those gilt roses, between the astragals in the cornice, are prominent from it half a span. Here is an aperture in the wall, between which and the outer is a perpetual current of air. We are now in the dog-days; and I have never felt in the whole summer more heat than at Rome in many days of March. _Caesar._ Usually you are attended by troops of domestics and of dinner-friends, not to mention the learned and scientific, nor your own family, your attachment to which, from youth upward, is one of the higher graces in your character. Your brother was seldom absent from you. _Lucullus._ Marcus was coming; but the vehement heats along the Arno, in which valley he has a property he never saw before, inflamed his blood, and he now is resting for a few days at Faesulae, a little town destroyed by Sylla within our memory, who left it only air and water, the best in Tuscany. The health of Marcus, like mine, has been declining for several months: we are running our last race against each other, and never was I, in youth along the Tiber, so anxious of first reaching the goal. I would not outlive him: I should reflect too painfully on earlier days, and look forward too despondently on future. As for friends, lampreys and turbots beget them, and they spawn not amid the solitude of the Apennines. To dine in company with more than two is a Gaulish and German thing. I can hardly bring myself to believe that I have eaten in concert with twenty; so barbarous and herdlike a practice does not now appeal to me--such an incentive to drink much and talk loosely; not to add, such a necessity to speak loud, which is clownish and odious in the extreme. On this mountain summit I hear no noises, no voices, not even of salutation; we have no flies about us, and scarcely an insect or reptile. _Caesar._ Your amiable son is probably with his uncle: is he well? _Lucullus._ Perfectly. He was indeed with my brother in his intended visit to me; but Marcus, unable to accompany him hither, or superintend his studies in the present state of his health, sent him directly to his Uncle Cato at Tusculum--a man fitter than either of us to direct his education, and preferable to any, excepting yourself and Marcus Tullius, in eloquence and urbanity. _Caesar._ Cato is so great, that whoever is greater must be the happiest and first of men. _Lucullus._ That any such be still existing, O Julius, ought to excite no groan from the breast of a Roman citizen. But perhaps I wrong you; perhaps your mind was forced reluctantly back again, on your past animosities and contests in the Senate. _Caesar._ I revere him, but cannot love him. _Lucullus._ Then, Caius Julius, you groaned with reason; and I would pity rather than reprove you. On the ceiling at which you are looking, there is no gilding, and little painting--a mere trellis of vines bearing grapes, and the heads, shoulders, and arms rising from the cornice only, of boys and girls climbing up to steal them, and scrambling for them: nothing overhead; no giants tumbling down, no Jupiter thundering, no Mars and Venus caught at mid-day, no river-gods pouring out their urns upon us; for, as I think nothing so insipid as a flat ceiling, I think nothing so absurd as a storied one. Before I was aware, and without my participation, the painter had adorned that of my bedchamber with a golden shower, bursting from varied and irradiated clouds. On my expostulation, his excuse was that he knew the Danaë of Scopas, in a recumbent posture, was to occupy the centre of the room. The walls, behind the tapestry and pictures, are quite rough. In forty-three days the whole fabric was put together and habitable. The wine has probably lost its freshness: will you try some other? _Caesar._ Its temperature is exact; its flavour exquisite. Latterly I have never sat long after dinner, and am curious to pass through the other apartments, if you will trust me. _Lucullus._ I attend you. _Caesar._ Lucullus, who is here? What figure is that on the poop of the vessel? Can it be---- _Lucullus._ The subject was dictated by myself; you gave it. _Caesar._ Oh, how beautifully is the water painted! How vividly the sun strikes against the snows on Taurus! The grey temples and pierhead of Tarsus catch it differently, and the monumental mound on the left is half in shade. In the countenance of those pirates I did not observe such diversity, nor that any boy pulled his father back: I did not indeed mark them or notice them at all. _Lucullus._ The painter in this fresco, the last work finished, had dissatisfied me in one particular. 'That beautiful young face,' said I, 'appears not to threaten death.' 'Lucius,' he replied, 'if one muscle were moved it were not Caesar's: beside, he said it jokingly, though resolved.' 'I am contented with your apology, Antipho; but what are you doing now? for you never lay down or suspend your pencil, let who will talk and argue. The lines of that smaller face in the distance are the same.' 'Not the same,' replied he, 'nor very different: it smiles, as surely the goddess must have done at the first heroic act of her descendant.' _Caesar._ In her exultation and impatience to press forward she seems to forget that she is standing at the extremity of the shell, which rises up behind out of the water; and she takes no notice of the terror on the countenance of this Cupid who would detain her, nor of this who is flying off and looking back. The reflection of the shell has given a warmer hue below the knee; a long streak of yellow light in the horizon is on the level of her bosom, some of her hair is almost lost in it; above her head on every side is the pure azure of the heavens. Oh! and you would not have shown me this? You, among whose primary studies is the most perfect satisfaction of your guests! _Lucullus._ In the next apartment are seven or eight other pictures from our history. There are no more: what do you look for? _Caesar._ I find not among the rest any descriptive of your own exploits. Ah, Lucullus! there is no surer way of making them remembered. This, I presume by the harps in the two corners, is the music-room. _Lucullus._ No, indeed; nor can I be said to have one here; for I love best the music of a single instrument, and listen to it willingly at all times, but most willingly while I am reading. At such seasons a voice or even a whisper disturbs me; but music refreshes my brain when I have read long, and strengthen it from the beginning. I find also that if I write anything in poetry (a youthful propensity still remaining), it gives rapidity and variety and brightness to my ideas. On ceasing, I command a fresh measure and instrument, or another voice; which is to the mind like a change of posture, or of air to the body. My heal this benefited by the gentle play thus opened to the most delicate of the fibres. _Caesar._ Let me augur that a disorder so tractable may be soon removed. What is it thought to be? _Lucullus._ I am inclined to think, and my physician did not long attempt to persuade me of the contrary, that the ancient realms of Aeaetes have supplied me with some other plants than the cherry, and such as I should be sorry to see domesticated here in Italy. _Caesar._ The gods forbid! Anticipate better things! The reason of Lucullus is stronger than the medicaments of Mithridates; but why not use them too? Let nothing be neglected. You may reasonably hope for many years of life: your mother still enjoys it. _Lucullus._ To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings. _Caesar._ Rightly and gravely said: but your country at this time cannot do well without you. _Lucullus._ The bowl of milk, which to-day is presented to me, will shortly be presented to my Manes. _Caesar._ Do you suspect the hand? _Lucullus._ I will not suspect a Roman: let us converse no more about it. _Caesar._ It is the only subject on which I am resolved never to think, as relates to myself. Life may concern us, death not; for in death we neither can act nor reason, we neither can persuade nor command; and our statues are worth more than we are, let them be but wax. * * * * * _Lucullus._ From being for ever in action, for ever in contention, and from excelling in them all other mortals, what advantage derive we? I would not ask what satisfaction, what glory? The insects have more activity than ourselves, the beasts more strength, even inert matter more firmness and stability; the gods alone more goodness. To the exercise of this every country lies open; and neither I eastward nor you westward have found any exhausted by contests for it. Must we give men blows because they will not look at us? or chain them to make them hold the balance evener? Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier. There was a time when the most ardent friend to Alexander of Macedon would have embraced the partisan for his enthusiasm, who should have compared him with Alexander of Pherae. It must have been at a splendid feast, and late at it, when Scipio should have been raised to an equality with Romulus, or Cato with Curius. It has been whispered in my ear, after a speech of Cicero, 'If he goes on so, he will tread down the sandal of Marcus Antonius in the long run, and perhaps leave Hortensius behind.' Officers of mine, speaking about you, have exclaimed with admiration: 'He fights like Cinna.' Think, Caius Julius (for you have been instructed to think both as a poet and as a philosopher), that among the hundred hands of Ambition, to whom we may attribute them more properly than to Briareus, there is not one which holds anything firmly. In the precipitancy of her course, what appears great is small, and what appears small is great. Our estimate of men is apt to be as inaccurate and inexact as that of things, or more. Wishing to have all on our side, we often leave those we should keep by us, run after those we should avoid, and call importunately on others who sit quiet and will not come. We cannot at once catch the applause of the vulgar and expect the approbation of the wise. What are parties? Do men really great ever enter into them? Are they not ball-courts, where ragged adventurers strip and strive, and where dissolute youths abuse one another, and challenge and game and wager? If you and I cannot quite divest ourselves of infirmities and passions, let us think, however, that there is enough in us to be divided into two portions, and let us keep the upper undisturbed and pure. A part of Olympus itself lies in dreariness and in clouds, variable and stormy; but it is not the highest: there the gods govern. Your soul is large enough to embrace your country: all other affection is for less objects, and less men are capable of it. Abandon, O Caesar! such thoughts and wishes as now agitate and propel you: leave them to mere men of the marsh, to fat hearts and miry intellects. Fortunate may we call ourselves to have been born in an age so productive of eloquence, so rich in erudition. Neither of us would be excluded, or hooted at, on canvassing for these honours. He who can think dispassionately and deeply as I do, is great as I am; none other. But his opinions are at freedom to diverge from mine, as mine are from his; and indeed, on recollection, I never loved those most who thought with me, but those rather who deemed my sentiments worth discussion, and who corrected me with frankness and affability. _Caesar._ Lucullus, you perhaps have taken the wiser and better part, certainly the pleasanter. I cannot argue with you: I would gladly hear one who could, but you again more gladly. I should think unworthily of you if I thought you capable of yielding or receding. I do not even ask you to keep our conversation long a secret, so greatly does it preponderate in your favour; so much more of gentleness, of eloquence, and of argument. I came hither with one soldier, avoiding the cities, and sleeping at the villa of a confidential friend. To-night I sleep in yours, and, if your dinner does not disturb me, shall sleep soundly. You go early to rest I know. _Lucullus._ Not, however, by daylight. Be assured, Caius Julius, that greatly as your discourse afflicts me, no part of it shall escape my lips. If you approach the city with arms, with arms I meet you; then your denouncer and enemy, at present your host and confidant. _Caesar._ I shall conquer you. _Lucullus._ That smile would cease upon it: you sigh already. _Caesar._ Yes, Lucullus, if I am oppressed I shall overcome my oppressor: I know my army and myself. A sigh escaped me, and many more will follow; but one transport will rise amid them, when, vanquisher of my enemies and avenger of my dignity, I press again the hand of Lucullus, mindful of this day. EPICURUS, LEONTION, AND TERNISSA * * * * * _Ternissa._ The broad and billowy summits of yon monstrous trees, one would imagine, were made for the storms to rest upon when they are tired of raving. And what bark! It occurs to me, Epicurus, that I have rarely seen climbing plants attach themselves to these trees, as they do to the oak, the maple, the beech, and others. _Leontion._ If your remark be true, perhaps the resinous are not embraced by them so frequently because they dislike the odour of the resin, or some other property of the juices; for they, too, have their affections and antipathies no less than countries and their climes. _Ternissa._ For shame! what would you with me? _Epicurus._ I would not interrupt you while you were speaking, nor while Leontion was replying; this is against my rules and practice. Having now ended, kiss me, Ternissa! _Ternissa._ Impudent man! in the name of Pallas, why should I kiss you? _Epicurus._ Because you expressed hatred. _Ternissa._ Do we kiss when we hate? _Epicurus._ There is no better end of hating. The sentiment should not exist one moment; and if the hater gives a kiss on being ordered to do it, even to a tree or a stone, that tree or stone becomes the monument of a fault extinct. _Ternissa._ I promise you I never will hate a tree again. _Epicurus._ I told you so. _Leontion._ Nevertheless, I suspect, my Ternissa, you will often be surprised into it. I was very near saying, 'I hate these rude square stones!' Why did you leave them here, Epicurus? _Epicurus._ It is true, they are the greater part square, and seem to have been cut out in ancient times for plinths and columns; they are also rude. Removing the smaller, that I might plant violets and cyclamens and convolvuluses and strawberries, and such other herbs as grow willingly in dry places, I left a few of these for seats, a few for tables and for couches. _Leontion._ Delectable couches! _Epicurus._ Laugh as you may, they will become so when they are covered with moss and ivy, and those other two sweet plants whose names I do not remember to have found in any ancient treatise, but which I fancy I have heard Theophrastus call 'Leontion' and 'Ternissa'. _Ternissa._ The bold, insidious, false creature! _Epicurus._ What is that volume, may I venture to ask, Leontion? Why do you blush? _Leontion._ I do not blush about it. _Epicurus._ You are offended, then, my dear girl. _Leontion._ No, nor offended. I will tell you presently what it contains. Account to me first for your choice of so strange a place to walk in: a broad ridge, the summit and one side barren, the other a wood of rose-laurels impossible to penetrate. The worst of all is, we can see nothing of the city or the Parthenon, unless from the very top. _Epicurus._ The place commands, in my opinion, a most perfect view. _Leontion._ Of what, pray? _Epicurus._ Of itself; seeming to indicate that we, Leontion, who philosophize, should do the same. _Leontion._ Go on, go on! say what you please: I will not hate anything yet. Why have you torn up by the root all these little mountain ash-trees? This is the season of their beauty: come, Ternissa, let us make ourselves necklaces and armlets, such as may captivate old Sylvanus and Pan; you shall have your choice. But why have you torn them up? _Epicurus._ On the contrary, they were brought hither this morning. Sosimenes is spending large sums of money on an olive-ground, and has uprooted some hundreds of them, of all ages and sizes. I shall cover the rougher part of the hill with them, setting the clematis and vine and honeysuckle against them, to unite them. _Ternissa._ Oh, what a pleasant thing it is to walk in the green light of the vine trees, and to breathe the sweet odour of their invisible flowers! _Epicurus._ The scent of them is so delicate that it requires a sigh to inhale it; and this, being accompanied and followed by enjoyment, renders the fragrance so exquisite. Ternissa, it is this, my sweet friend, that made you remember the green light of the foliage, and think of the invisible flowers as you would of some blessing from heaven. _Ternissa._ I see feathers flying at certain distances just above the middle of the promontory: what can they mean? _Epicurus._ Cannot you imagine them to be the feathers from the wings of Zethes and Caläis, who came hither out of Thrace to behold the favourite haunts of their mother Oreithyia? From the precipice that hangs over the sea a few paces from the pinasters she is reported to have been carried off by Boreas; and these remains of the primeval forest have always been held sacred on that belief. _Leontion._ The story is an idle one. _Ternissa._ Oh no, Leontion! the story is very true. _Leontion._ Indeed! _Ternissa._ I have heard not only odes, but sacred and most ancient hymns upon it; and the voice of Boreas is often audible here, and the screams of Oreithyia. _Leontion._ The feathers, then, really may belong to Caläis and Zethes. _Ternissa._ I don't believe it; the winds would have carried them away. _Leontion._ The gods, to manifest their power, as they often do by miracles, could as easily fix a feather eternally on the most tempestuous promontory, as the mark of their feet upon the flint. _Ternissa._ They could indeed; but we know the one to a certainty, and have no such authority for the other. I have seen these pinasters from the extremity of the Piraeus, and have heard mention of the altar raised to Boreas: where is it? _Epicurus._ As it stands in the centre of the platform, we cannot see it from hence; there is the only piece of level ground in the place. _Leontion._ Ternissa intends the altar to prove the truth of the story. _Epicurus._ Ternissa is slow to admit that even the young can deceive, much less the old; the gay, much less the serious. _Leontion._ It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires. _Epicurus._ Some minds require much belief, some thrive on little. Rather an exuberance of it is feminine and beautiful. It acts differently on different hearts; it troubles some, it consoles others; in the generous it is the nurse of tenderness and kindness, of heroism and self-devotion; in the ungenerous it fosters pride, impatience of contradiction and appeal, and, like some waters, what it finds a dry stick or hollow straw, it leaves a stone. _Ternissa._ We want it chiefly to make the way of death an easy one. _Epicurus._ There is no easy path leading out of life, and few are the easy ones that lie within it. I would adorn and smoothen the declivity, and make my residence as commodious as its situation and dimensions may allow; but principally I would cast under-foot the empty fear of death. _Ternissa._ Oh, how can you? _Epicurus._ By many arguments already laid down: then by thinking that some perhaps, in almost every age, have been timid and delicate as Ternissa; and yet have slept soundly, have felt no parent's or friend's tear upon their faces, no throb against their breasts: in short, have been in the calmest of all possible conditions, while those around were in the most deplorable and desperate. _Ternissa._ It would pain me to die, if it were only at the idea that any one I love would grieve too much for me. _Epicurus._ Let the loss of our friends be our only grief, and the apprehension of displeasing them our only fear. _Leontion._ No apostrophes! no interjections! Your argument was unsound; your means futile. _Epicurus._ Tell me, then, whether the horse of a rider on the road should not be spurred forward if he started at a shadow. _Leontion._ Yes. _Epicurus._ I thought so: it would, however, be better to guide him quietly up to it, and to show him that it was one. Death is less than a shadow: it represents nothing, even imperfectly. _Leontion._ Then at the best what is it? why care about it, think about it, or remind us that it must befall us? Would you take the same trouble, when you see my hair entwined with ivy, to make me remember that, although the leaves are green and pliable, the stem is fragile and rough, and that before I go to bed I shall have many knots and entanglements to extricate? Let me have them; but let me not hear of them until the time is come. _Epicurus._ I would never think of death as an embarrassment, but as a blessing. _Ternissa._ How? a blessing? _Epicurus._ What, if it makes our enemies cease to hate us? what, if it makes our friends love us the more? _Leontion._ Us? According to your doctrine we shall not exist at all. _Epicurus._ I spoke of that which is consolatory while we are here, and of that which in plain reason ought to render us contented to stay no longer. You, Leontion, would make others better; and better they certainly will be, when their hostilities languish in an empty field, and their rancour is tired with treading upon dust. The generous affections stir about us at the dreary hour of death, as the blossoms of the Median apple swell and diffuse their fragrance in the cold. _Ternissa._ I cannot bear to think of passing the Styx, lest Charon should touch me; he is so old and wilful, so cross and ugly. _Epicurus._ Ternissa! Ternissa! I would accompany you thither, and stand between. Would you not too, Leontion? _Leontion._ I don't know. _Ternissa._ Oh, that we could go together! _Leontion._ Indeed! _Ternissa._ All three, I mean--I said--or was going to say it. How ill-natured you are, Leontion, to misinterpret me; I could almost cry. _Leontion._ Do not, do not, Ternissa! Should that tear drop from your eyelash you would look less beautiful. _Epicurus._ If it is well to conquer a world, it is better to conquer two. _Ternissa._ That is what Alexander of Macedon wept because he could not accomplish. _Epicurus._ Ternissa! we three can accomplish it; or any one of us. _Ternissa._ How? pray! _Epicurus._ We can conquer this world and the next; for you will have another, and nothing should be refused you. _Ternissa._ The next by piety: but this, in what manner? _Epicurus._ By indifference to all who are indifferent to us; by taking joyfully the benefit that comes spontaneously; by wishing no more intensely for what is a hair's-breadth beyond our reach than for a draught of water from the Ganges; and by fearing nothing in another life. _Ternissa._ This, O Epicurus! is the grand impossibility. _Epicurus._ Do you believe the gods to be as benevolent and good as you are? or do you not? _Ternissa._ Much kinder, much better in every way. _Epicurus._ Would you kill or hurt the sparrow that you keep in your little dressing-room with a string around the leg, because he hath flown where you did not wish him to fly? _Ternissa._ No! it would be cruel; the string about the leg of so little and weak a creature is enough. _Epicurus._ You think so; I think so; God thinks so. This I may say confidently; for whenever there is a sentiment in which strict justice and pure benevolence unite, it must be His. _Ternissa._ O Epicurus! when you speak thus-- _Leontion._ Well, Ternissa, what then? _Ternissa._ When Epicurus teaches us such sentiments as these, I am grieved that he has not so great an authority with the Athenians as some others have. _Leontion._ You will grieve more, I suspect, my Ternissa, when he possesses that authority. _Ternissa._ What will he do? _Leontion._ Why turn pale? I am not about to answer that he will forget or leave you. No; but the voice comes deepest from the sepulchre, and a great name hath its root in the dead body. If you invited a company to a feast, you might as well place round the table live sheep and oxen and vases of fish and cages of quails, as you would invite a company of friendly hearers to the philosopher who is yet living. One would imagine that the iris of our intellectual eye were lessened by the glory of his presence, and that, like eastern kings, he could be looked at near only when his limbs are stiff, by waxlight, in close curtains. _Epicurus._ One of whom we know little leaves us a ring or other token of remembrance, and we express a sense of pleasure and of gratitude; one of whom we know nothing writes a book, the contents of which might (if we would let them) have done us more good and might have given us more pleasure, and we revile him for it. The book may do what the legacy cannot; it may be pleasurable and serviceable to others as well as ourselves: we would hinder this too. In fact, all other love is extinguished by self-love: beneficence, humanity, justice, philosophy, sink under it. While we insist that we are looking for Truth, we commit a falsehood. It never was the first object with any one, and with few the second. Feed unto replenishment your quieter fancies, my sweetest little Ternissa! and let the gods, both youthful and aged, both gentle and boisterous, administer to them hourly on these sunny downs: what can they do better? _Leontion._ But those feathers, Ternissa, what god's may they be? since you will not pick them up, nor restore them to Caläis nor to Zethes. _Ternissa._ I do not think they belong to any god whatever; and shall never be persuaded of it unless Epicurus says it is so. _Leontion._ O unbelieving creature! do you reason against the immortals? _Ternissa._ It was yourself who doubted, or appeared to doubt, the flight of Oreithyia. By admitting too much we endanger our religion. Beside, I think I discern some upright stakes at equal distances, and am pretty sure the feathers are tied to them by long strings. _Epicurus._ You have guessed the truth. _Ternissa._ Of what use are they there? _Epicurus._ If you have ever seen the foot of a statue broken off just below the ankle, you have then, Leontion and Ternissa, seen the form of the ground about us. The lower extremities of it are divided into small ridges, as you will perceive if you look around; and these are covered with corn, olives, and vines. At the upper part, where cultivation ceases, and where those sheep and goats are grazing, begins my purchase. The ground rises gradually unto near the summit, where it grows somewhat steep, and terminates in a precipice. Across the middle I have traced a line, denoted by those feathers, from one dingle to the other; the two terminations of my intended garden. The distance is nearly a thousand paces, and the path, perfectly on a level, will be two paces broad, so that I may walk between you; but another could not join us conveniently. From this there will be several circuitous and spiral, leading by the easiest ascent to the summit; and several more, to the road along the cultivation underneath: here will, however, be but one entrance. Among the projecting fragments and the massive stones yet standing of the boundary-wall, which old pomegranates imperfectly defend, and which my neighbour has guarded more effectively against invasion, there are hillocks of crumbling mould, covered in some places with a variety of moss; in others are elevated tufts, or dim labyrinths of eglantine. _Ternissa._ Where will you place the statues? for undoubtedly you must have some. _Epicurus._ I will have some models for statues. Pygmalion prayed the gods to give life to the image he adored: I will not pray them to give marble to mine. Never may I lay my wet cheek upon the foot under which is inscribed the name of Leontion or Ternissa! _Leontion._ Do not make us melancholy; never let us think that the time can come when we shall lose our friends. Glory, literature, philosophy have this advantage over friendship: remove one object from them, and others fill the void; remove one from friendship, one only, and not the earth nor the universality of worlds, no, nor the intellect that soars above and comprehends them, can replace it! _Epicurus._ Dear Leontion! always amiable, always graceful! How lovely do you now appear to me! what beauteous action accompanied your words! _Leontion._ I used none whatever. _Epicurus._ That white arm was then, as it is now, over the shoulder of Ternissa; and her breath imparted a fresh bloom to your cheek, a new music to your voice. No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman. In youth you love one above the others of your sex; in riper age you hate all, more or less, in proportion to similarity of accomplishments and pursuits--which sometimes (I wish it were oftener) are bonds of union to man. In us you more easily pardon faults than excellences in each other. _Your_ tempers are such, my beloved scholars, that even this truth does not ruffle them; and such is your affection, that I look with confidence to its unabated ardour at twenty. _Leontion._ Oh, then I am to love Ternissa almost fifteen months! _Ternissa._ And I am destined to survive the loss of it three months above four years! _Epicurus._ Incomparable creatures! may it be eternal! In loving ye shall follow no example; ye shall step securely over the iron rule laid down for others by the Destinies, and _you_ for ever be Leontion, and _you_ Ternissa. _Leontion._ Then indeed we should not want statues. _Ternissa._ But men, who are vainer creatures, would be good for nothing without them: they must be flattered even by the stones. _Epicurus._ Very true. Neither the higher arts nor the civic virtues can flourish extensively without the statues of illustrious men. But gardens are not the places for them. Sparrows, wooing on the general's truncheon (unless he be such a general as one of ours in the last war), and snails besliming the emblems of the poet, do not remind us worthily of their characters. Porticos are their proper situations, and those the most frequented. Even there they may lose all honour and distinction, whether from the thoughtlessness of magistrates or from the malignity of rivals. Our own city, the least exposed of any to the effects of either, presents us a disheartening example. When the Thebans in their jealousy condemned Pindar to the payment of a fine for having praised the Athenians too highly, our citizens erected a statue of bronze to him. _Leontion._ Jealousy of Athens made the Thebans fine him; and jealousy of Thebes made the Athenians thus record it. _Epicurus._ And jealousy of Pindar, I suspect, made some poet persuade the archons to render the distinction a vile and worthless one, by placing his effigy near a king's--one Evagoras of Cyprus. _Ternissa._ Evagoras, I think I remember to have read in the inscription, was rewarded in this manner for his reception of Conon, defeated by the Lacedemonians. _Epicurus._ Gratitude was due to him, and some such memorial to record it. External reverence should be paid unsparingly to the higher magistrates of every country who perform their offices exemplarily; yet they are not on this account to be placed in the same degree with men of primary genius. They never exalt the human race, and rarely benefit it; and their benefits are local and transitory, while those of a great writer are universal and eternal. If the gods did indeed bestow on us a portion of their fire, they seem to have lighted it in sport and left it; the harder task and the nobler is performed by that genius who raises it clear and glowing from its embers, and makes it applicable to the purposes that dignify or delight our nature. I have ever said, 'Reverence the rulers.' Let, then, his image stand; but stand apart from Pindar's. Pallas and Jove! defend me from being carried down the stream of time among a shoal of royalets, and the rootless weeds they are hatched on! _Ternissa._ So much piety would deserve the exemption, even though your writings did not hold out the decree. _Leontion._ Child, the compliment is ill turned: if you are ironical, as you must be on the piety of Epicurus, Atticism requires that you should continue to be so, at least to the end of the sentence. _Ternissa._ Irony is my abhorrence. Epicurus may appear less pious than some others, but I am certain he is more; otherwise the gods would never have given him---- _Leontion._ What? what? let us hear! _Ternissa._ Leontion! _Leontion._ Silly girl! Were there any hibiscus or broom growing near at hand, I would send him away and whip you. _Epicurus._ There is fern, which is better. _Leontion._ I was not speaking to you: but now you shall have something to answer for yourself. Although you admit no statues in the country, you might at least, methinks, have discovered a retirement with a fountain in it: here I see not even a spring. _Epicurus._ Fountain I can hardly say there is; but on the left there is a long crevice or chasm, which we have never yet visited, and which we cannot discern until we reach it. This is full of soft mould, very moist, and many high reeds and canes are growing there; and the rock itself too drips with humidity along it, and is covered with more tufted moss and more variegated lichens. This crevice, with its windings and sinuosities, is about four hundred paces long, and in many parts eleven, twelve, thirteen feet wide, but generally six or seven. I shall plant it wholly with lilies of the valley, leaving the irises which occupy the sides as well as the clefts, and also those other flowers of paler purple, from the autumnal cups of which we collect the saffron; and forming a narrow path of such turf as I can find there, or rather following it as it creeps among the bays and hazels and sweet-brier, which had fallen at different times from the summit and are now grown old, with an infinity of primroses at the roots. There are nowhere twenty steps without a projection and a turn, nor in any ten together is the chasm of the same width or figure. Hence the ascent in its windings is easy and imperceptible quite to the termination, where the rocks are somewhat high and precipitous; at the entrance they lose themselves in privet and elder, and you must make your way between them through the canes. Do not you remember where I carried you both across the muddy hollow in the footpath? _Ternissa._ Leontion does. _Epicurus._ That place is always wet; not only in this month of Puanepsion,[7] which we are beginning to-day, but in midsummer. The water that causes it comes out a little way above it, but originates from the crevice, which I will cover at top with rose-laurel and mountain-ash, with clematis and vine; and I will intercept the little rill in its wandering, draw it from its concealment, and place it like Bacchus under the protection of the nymphs, who will smile upon it in its marble cradle, which at present I keep at home. _Ternissa._ Leontion, why do you turn away your face? have the nymphs smiled upon you in it? _Leontion._ I bathed in it once, if you must know, Ternissa! Why now, Ternissa, why do you turn away yours? have the nymphs frowned upon you for invading their secrets? _Ternissa._ Epicurus, you are in the right to bring it away from Athens, from under the eye of Pallas: she might be angry. _Epicurus._ You approve of its removal then, my lovely friend? _Ternissa._ Mightily. [_Aside._] I wish it may break in pieces on the road. _Epicurus._ What did you say? _Ternissa._ I wish it were now on the road, that I might try whether it would hold me--I mean with my clothes on. _Epicurus._ It would hold you, and one a span longer. I have another in the house; but it is not decorated with fauns and satyrs and foliage, like this. _Leontion._ I remember putting my hand upon the frightful satyr's head, to leap in: it seems made for the purpose. But the sculptor needed not to place the naiad quite so near--he must have been a very impudent man; it is impossible to look for a moment at such a piece of workmanship. _Ternissa._ For shame! Leontion!--why, what was it? I do not desire to know. _Epicurus._ I don't remember it. _Leontion._ Nor I neither; only the head. _Epicurus._ I shall place the satyr toward the rock, that you may never see him, Ternissa. _Ternissa._ Very right; he cannot turn round. _Leontion._ The poor naiad had done it, in vain. _Ternissa._ All these labourers will soon finish the plantation, if you superintend them, and are not appointed to some magistrature. _Epicurus._ Those who govern us are pleased at seeing a philosopher out of the city, and more still at finding in a season of scarcity forty poor citizens, who might become seditious, made happy and quiet by such employment. Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition: never to be listened to, and to be listened to always. Aware of these, I devote a large portion of my time and labours to the cultivation of such minds as flourish best in cities, where my garden at the gate, although smaller than this, we find sufficiently capacious. There I secure my listeners; here my thoughts and imaginations have their free natural current, and tarry or wander as the will invites: may it ever be among those dearest to me!--those whose hearts possess the rarest and divinest faculty, of retaining or forgetting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained. _Leontion._ The whole ground then will be covered with trees and shrubs? _Epicurus._ There are some protuberances in various parts of the eminence, which you do not perceive till you are upon them or above them. They are almost level at the top, and overgrown with fine grass; for they catch the better soil brought down in small quantities by the rains. These are to be left unplanted: so is the platform under the pinasters, whence there is a prospect of the city, the harbour, the isle of Salamis, and the territory of Megara. 'What then!' cried Sosimenes, 'you would hide from your view my young olives, and the whole length of the new wall I have been building at my own expense between us! and, when you might see at once the whole of Attica, you will hardly see more of it than I could buy.' _Leontion._ I do not perceive the new wall, for which Sosimenes, no doubt, thinks himself another Pericles. _Epicurus._ Those old junipers quite conceal it. _Ternissa._ They look warm and sheltering; but I like the rose-laurels much better: and what a thicket of them here is! _Epicurus._ Leaving all the larger, I shall remove many thousands of them; enough to border the greater part of the walk, intermixed with roses. There is an infinity of other plants and flowers, or weeds as Sosimenes calls them, of which he has cleared his oliveyard, and which I shall adopt. Twenty of his slaves came in yesterday, laden with hyacinths and narcissi, anemones and jonquils. 'The curses of our vineyards,' cried he, 'and good neither for man nor beast. I have another estate infested with lilies of the valley: I should not wonder if you accepted these too.' 'And with thanks,' answered I. The whole of his remark I could not collect: he turned aside, and (I believe) prayed. I only heard 'Pallas'--'Father'--'sound mind'--'inoffensive man'--'good neighbour'. As we walked together I perceived him looking grave, and I could not resist my inclination to smile as I turned my eyes toward him. He observed it, at first with unconcern, but by degrees some doubts arose within him, and he said, 'Epicurus, you have been throwing away no less than half a talent on this sorry piece of mountain, and I fear you are about to waste as much in labour: for nothing was ever so terrible as the price we are obliged to pay the workman, since the conquest of Persia and the increase of luxury in our city. Under three obols none will do his day's work. But what, in the name of all the deities, could induce you to plant those roots, which other people dig up and throw away?' 'I have been doing,' said I, 'the same thing my whole life through, Sosimenes!' 'How!' cried he; 'I never knew that.' 'Those very doctrines,' added I, 'which others hate and extirpate, I inculcate and cherish. They bring no riches, and therefore are thought to bring no advantage; to me, they appear the more advantageous for that reason. They give us immediately what we solicit through the means of wealth. We toil for the wealth first; and then it remains to be proved whether we can purchase with it what we look for. Now, to carry our money to the market, and not to find in the market our money's worth, is great vexation; yet much greater has already preceded, in running up and down for it among so many competitors, and through so many thieves.' After a while he rejoined, 'You really, then, have not overreached me?' 'In what, my friend?' said I. 'These roots,' he answered, 'may perhaps be good and saleable for some purpose. Shall you send them into Persia? or whither?' 'Sosimenes, I shall make love-potions of the flowers.' _Leontion._ O Epicurus! should it ever be known in Athens that they are good for this, you will not have, with all your fences of prunes and pomegranates, and precipices with brier upon them, a single root left under ground after the month of Elaphebolion.[8] _Epicurus._ It is not every one that knows the preparation. _Leontion._ Everybody will try it. _Epicurus._ And you, too, Ternissa? _Ternissa._ Will you teach me? _Epicurus._ This, and anything else I know. We must walk together when they are in flower. _Ternissa._ And can you teach me, then? _Epicurus._ I teach by degrees. _Leontion._ By very slow ones, Epicurus! I have no patience with you; tell us directly. _Epicurus._ It is very material what kind of recipient you bring with you. Enchantresses use a brazen one; silver and gold are employed in other arts. _Leontion._ I will bring any. _Ternissa._ My mother has a fine golden one. She will lend it me; she allows me everything. _Epicurus._ Leontion and Ternissa, those eyes of yours brighten at inquiry, as if they carried a light within them for a guidance. _Leontion._ No flattery! _Ternissa._ No flattery! Come, teach us! _Epicurus._ Will you hear me through in silence? _Leontion._ We promise. _Epicurus._ Sweet girls! the calm pleasures, such as I hope you will ever find in your walks among these gardens, will improve your beauty, animate your discourse, and correct the little that may hereafter rise up for correction in your dispositions. The smiling ideas left in our bosoms from our infancy, that many plants are the favourites of the gods, and that others were even the objects of their love--having once been invested with the human form, beautiful and lively and happy as yourselves--give them an interest beyond the vision; yes, and a station--let me say it--on the vestibule of our affections. Resign your ingenuous hearts to simple pleasures; and there is none in man, where men are Attic, that will not follow and outstrip their movements. _Ternissa._ O Epicurus! _Epicurus._ What said Ternissa? _Leontion._ Some of those anemones, I do think, must be still in blossom. Ternissa's golden cup is at home; but she has brought with her a little vase for the filter--and has filled it to the brim. Do not hide your head behind my shoulder, Ternissa; no, nor in my lap. _Epicurus._ Yes, there let it lie--the lovelier for that tendril of sunny brown hair upon it. How it falls and rises! Which is the hair? which the shadow? _Leontion._ Let the hair rest. _Epicurus._ I must not, perhaps, clasp the shadow! _Leontion._ You philosophers are fond of such unsubstantial things. Oh, you have taken my volume! This is deceit. You live so little in public, and entertain such a contempt for opinion, as to be both indifferent and ignorant what it is that people blame you for. _Epicurus._ I know what it is I should blame myself for, if I attended to them. Prove them to be wiser and more disinterested in their wisdom than I am, and I will then go down to them and listen to them. When I have well considered a thing, I deliver it--regardless of what those think who neither take the time nor possess the faculty of considering anything well, and who have always lived far remote from the scope of our speculations. _Leontion._ In the volume you snatched away from me so slyly, I have defended a position of yours which many philosophers turn into ridicule--namely, that politeness is among the virtues. I wish you yourself had spoken more at large upon the subject. _Epicurus._ It is one upon which a lady is likely to display more ingenuity and discernment. If philosophers have ridiculed my sentiment, the reason is, it is among those virtues which in general they find most difficult to assume or counterfeit. _Leontion._ Surely life runs on the smoother for this equability and polish; and the gratification it affords is more extensive than is afforded even by the highest virtue. Courage, on nearly all occasions, inflicts as much of evil as it imparts of good. It may be exerted in defence of our country, in defence of those who love us, in defence of the harmless and the helpless; but those against whom it is thus exerted may possess an equal share of it. If they succeed, then manifestly the ill it produces is greater than the benefit; if they succumb, it is nearly as great. For many of their adversaries are first killed and maimed, and many of their own kindred are left to lament the consequences of the aggression. _Epicurus._ You have spoken first of courage, as that virtue which attracts your sex principally. _Ternissa._ Not me; I am always afraid of it. I love those best who can tell me the most things I never knew before, and who have patience with me, and look kindly while they teach me, and almost as if they were waiting for fresh questions. Now let me hear directly what you were about to say to Leontion. _Epicurus._ I was proceeding to remark that temperance comes next; and temperance has then its highest merit when it is the support of civility and politeness. So that I think I am right and equitable in attributing to politeness a distinguished rank, not among the ornaments of life, but among the virtues. And you, Leontion and Ternissa, will have leaned the more propensely toward this opinion, if you considered, as I am sure you did, that the peace and concord of families, friends, and cities are preserved by it; in other terms, the harmony of the world. _Ternissa._ Leontion spoke of courage, you of temperance; the next great virtue, in the division made by the philosophers, is justice. _Epicurus._ Temperance includes it; for temperance is imperfect if it is only an abstinence from too much food, too much wine, too much conviviality or other luxury. It indicates every kind of forbearance. Justice is forbearance from what belongs to another. Giving to this one rightly what that one would hold wrongfully in magistrature not in the abstract, and is only a part of its office. The perfectly temperate man is also the perfectly just man; but the perfectly just man (as philosophers now define him) may not be the perfectly temperate one. I include the less in the greater. _Leontion._ We hear of judges, and upright ones too, being immoderate eaters and drinkers. _Epicurus._ The Lacedemonians are temperate in food and courageous in battle; but men like these, if they existed in sufficient numbers, would devastate the universe. We alone, we Athenians, with less military skill perhaps, and certainly less rigid abstinence from voluptuousness and luxury, have set before it the only grand example of social government and of polished life. From us the seed is scattered; from us flow the streams that irrigate it; and ours are the hands, O Leontion, that collect it, cleanse it, deposit it, and convey and distribute it sound and weighty through every race and age. Exhausted as we are by war, we can do nothing better than lie down and doze while the weather is fine overhead, and dream (if we can) that we are affluent and free. O sweet sea air! how bland art thou and refreshing! Breathe upon Leontion! breathe upon Ternissa! bring them health and spirits and serenity, many springs and many summers, and when the vine-leaves have reddened and rustle under their feet! These, my beloved girls, are the children of Eternity: they played around Theseus and the beauteous Amazon; they gave to Pallas the bloom of Venus, and to Venus the animation of Pallas. Is it not better to enjoy by the hour their soft, salubrious influence, than to catch by fits the rancid breath of demagogues; than to swell and move under it without or against our will; than to acquire the semblance of eloquence by the bitterness of passion, the tone of philosophy by disappointment, or the credit of prudence by distrust? Can fortune, can industry, can desert itself, bestow on us anything we have not here? _Leontion._ And when shall those three meet? The gods have never united them, knowing that men would put them asunder at the first appearance. _Epicurus._ I am glad to leave the city as often as possible, full as it is of high and glorious reminiscences, and am inclined much rather to indulge in quieter scenes, whither the Graces and Friendship lead me. I would not contend even with men able to contend with me. You, Leontion, I see, think differently, and have composed at last your long-meditated work against the philosophy of Theophrastus. _Leontion._ Why not? he has been praised above his merits. _Epicurus._ My Leontion! you have inadvertently given me the reason and origin of all controversial writings. They flow not from a love of truth or a regard for science, but from envy and ill-will. Setting aside the evil of malignity--always hurtful to ourselves, not always to others--there is weakness in the argument you have adduced. When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding. Paradox is dear to most people: it bears the appearance of originality, but is usually the talent of the superficial, the perverse, and the obstinate. Nothing is more gratifying than the attention you are bestowing on me, which you always apportion to the seriousness of my observations. _Leontion._ I dislike Theophrastus for his affected contempt of your doctrines. _Epicurus._ Unreasonably, for the contempt of them; reasonably, if affected. Good men may differ widely from me, and wiser ones misunderstand me; for, their wisdom having raised up to them schools of their own, they have not found leisure to converse with me; and from others they have received a partial and inexact report. My opinion is, that certain things are indifferent and unworthy of pursuit or attention, as lying beyond our research and almost our conjecture; which things the generality of philosophers (for the generality are speculative) deem of the first importance. Questions relating to them I answer evasively, or altogether decline. Again, there are modes of living which are suitable to some and unsuitable to others. What I myself follow and embrace, what I recommend to the studious, to the irritable, to the weak in health, would ill agree with the commonality of citizens. Yet my adversaries cry out: 'Such is the opinion and practice of Epicurus!' For instance, I have never taken a wife, and never will take one; but he from among the mass, who should avow his imitation of my example, would act as wisely and more religiously in saying that he chose celibacy because Pallas had done the same. _Leontion._ If Pallas had many such votaries she would soon have few citizens to supply them. _Epicurus._ And extremely bad ones, if all followed me in retiring from the offices of magistracy and of war. Having seen that the most sensible men are the most unhappy, I could not but examine the causes of it; and, finding that the same sensibility to which they are indebted for the activity of their intellect is also the restless mover of their jealousy and ambition, I would lead them aside from whatever operates upon these, and throw under their feet the terrors their imagination has created. My philosophy is not for the populace nor for the proud: the ferocious will never attain it; the gentle will embrace it, but will not call it mine. I do not desire that they should: let them rest their heads upon that part of the pillow which they find the softest, and enjoy their own dreams unbroken. _Leontion._ The old are all against you, Epicurus, the name of pleasure is an affront to them: they know no other kind of it than that which has flowered and seeded, and of which the withered stems have indeed a rueful look. _Epicurus._ Unhappily the aged are retentive of long-acquired maxims, and insensible to new impressions, whether from fancy or from truth: in fact, their eyes blend the two together. Well might the poet tell us: Fewer the gifts that gnarled Age presents To elegantly-handed Infancy, Than elegantly-handed Infancy Presents to gnarled Age. From both they drop; The middle course of life receives them all, Save the light few that laughing Youth runs off with, Unvalued as a mistress or a flower. _Leontion._ Since, in obedience to your institutions, O Epicurus, I must not say I am angry, I am offended at least with Theophrastus for having so misrepresented your opinions, on the necessity of keeping the mind composed and tranquil, and remote from every object and every sentiment by which a painful sympathy may be excited. In order to display his elegance of language, he runs wherever he can lay a censure on you, whether he believes in its equity or not. _Epicurus._ This is the case with all eloquent men, and all disputants. Truth neither warms nor elevates them, neither obtains for them profit nor applause. _Ternissa._ I have heard wise remarks very often and very warmly praised. _Epicurus._ Not for the truth in them, but for the grace, or because they touched the spring of some preconception or some passion. Man is a hater of truth, a lover of fiction. Theophrastus is a writer of many acquirements and some shrewdness, usually judicious, often somewhat witty, always elegant; his thoughts are never confused, his sentences are never incomprehensible. If Aristoteles thought more highly of him than his due, surely you ought not to censure Theophrastus with severity on the supposition of his rating me below mine; unless you argue that a slight error in a short sum is less pardonable than in a longer. Had Aristoteles been living, and had he given the same opinion of me, your friendship and perhaps my self-love might have been wounded; for, if on one occasion he spoke too favourably, he never spoke unfavourably but with justice. This is among the indications of orderly and elevated minds; and here stands the barrier that separates them from the common and the waste. Is a man to be angry because an infant is fretful? Is a philosopher to unpack and throw away his philosophy, because an idiot has tried to overturn it on the road, and has pursued it with gibes and ribaldry? _Leontion._ Theophrastus would persuade us that, according to your system, we not only should decline the succour of the wretched, but avoid the sympathies that poets and historians would awaken in us. Probably for the sake of introducing some idle verses, written by a friend of his, he says that, following the guidance of Epicurus, we should altogether shun the theatre; and not only when Prometheus and Oedipus and Philoctetes are introduced, but even when generous and kindly sentiments are predominant, if they partake of that tenderness which belongs to pity. I know not what Thracian lord recovers his daughter from her ravisher; such are among the words they exchange: _Father._ Insects that dwell in rotten reeds, inert Upon the surface of a stream or pool, Then rush into the air on meshy vans, Are not so different in their varying lives As we are.--Oh! what father on this earth, Holding his child's cool cheek within his palms And kissing his fair front, would wish him man?-- Inheritor of wants and jealousies, Of labour, of ambition, of distress, And, cruellest of all the passions, lust. Who that behold me, persecuted, scorned, A wanderer, e'er could think what friends were mine, How numerous, how devoted? with what glee Smiled my old house, with what acclaim my courts Rang from without whene'er my war-horse neighed? _Daughter._ Thy fortieth birthday is not shouted yet By the young peasantry, with rural gifts And nightly fires along the pointed hills, Yet do thy temples glitter with grey hair Scattered not thinly: ah, what sudden change! Only thy voice and heart remain the same: No! that voice trembles, and that heart (I feel), While it would comfort and console me, breaks. _Epicurus._ I would never close my bosom against the feelings of humanity; but I would calmly and well consider by what conduct of life they may enter it with the least importunity and violence. A consciousness that we have promoted the happiness of others, to the uttermost of our power, is certain not only to meet them at the threshold, but to bring them along with us, and to render them accurate and faithful prompters, when we bend perplexedly over the problem of evil figured by the tragedians. If there were more of pain than of pleasure in the exhibitions of the dramatist, no man in his senses would attend them twice. All the imitative arts have delight for the principal object: the first of these is poetry; the highest of poetry is tragic. _Leontion._ The epic has been called so. _Epicurus._ Improperly; for the epic has much more in it of what is prosaic. Its magnitude is no argument. An Egyptian pyramid contains more materials than an Ionic temple, but requires less contrivance, and exhibits less beauty of design. My simile is yet a defective one; for a tragedy must be carried on with an unbroken interest, and, undecorated by loose foliage or fantastic branches, it must rise, like the palm-tree, with a lofty unity. On these matters I am unable to argue at large, or perhaps correctly; on those, however, which I have studied and treated, my terms are so explicit and clear, that Theophrastus can never have misunderstood them. Let me recall to your attention but two axioms. Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means of meriting or of obtaining the higher. Kindness in ourselves is the honey that blunts the sting of unkindness in another. _Leontion._ Explain to me, then, O Epicurus, why we suffer so much from ingratitude. _Epicurus._ We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love. Passion weeps while she says, 'I did not deserve this from him'; Reason, while she says it, smoothens her brow at the clear fountain of the heart. Permit me also, like Theophrastus, to borrow a few words from a poet. _Ternissa._ Borrow as many such as any one will entrust to you, and may Hermes prosper your commerce! Leontion may go to the theatre then; for she loves it. _Epicurus._ Girls! be the bosom friends of Antigone and Ismene; and you shall enter the wood of the Eumenides without shuddering, and leave it without the trace of a tear. Never did you appear so graceful to me, O Ternissa--no, not even after this walk do you--as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylëa. The wing, with which Sophocles and the statuary represent him, to drive away the summer insects in his agony, had wearied his flaccid arm, hanging down beside him. _Ternissa._ Do you imagine, then, I thought him a living man? _Epicurus._ The sentiment was both more delicate and more august from being indistinct. You would have done it, even if he _had_ been a living man; even if he could have clasped you in his arms, imploring the deities to resemble you in gentleness, you would have done it. _Ternissa._ He looked so abandoned by all, and so heroic, yet so feeble and so helpless! I did not think of turning around to see if any one was near me; or else, perhaps---- _Epicurus._ If you could have thought of looking around, you would no longer have been Ternissa. The gods would have transformed you for it into some tree. _Leontion._ And Epicurus had been walking under it this day, perhaps. _Epicurus._ With Leontion, the partner of his sentiments. But the walk would have been earlier or later than the present hour; since the middle of the day, like the middle of certain fruits, is good for nothing. _Leontion._ For dinner, surely? _Epicurus._ Dinner is a less gratification to me than to many: I dine alone. _Ternissa._ Why? _Epicurus._ To avoid the noise, the heat, and the intermixture both of odours and of occupations. I cannot bear the indecency of speaking with a mouth in which there is food. I careen my body (since it is always in want of repair) in as unobstructed a space as I can, and I lie down and sleep awhile when the work is over. _Leontion._ Epicurus! although it would be very interesting, no doubt, to hear more of what you do after dinner--[_Aside to him._] now don't smile: I shall never forgive you if you say a single word--yet I would rather hear a little about the theatre, and whether you think at last that women should frequent it; for you have often said the contrary. _Epicurus._ I think they should visit it rarely; not because it excites their affections, but because it deadens them. To me nothing is so odious as to be at once among the rabble and among the heroes, and, while I am receiving into my heart the most exquisite of human sensations, to feel upon my shoulder the hand of some inattentive and insensible young officer. _Leontion._ Oh, very bad indeed! horrible! _Ternissa._ You quite fire at the idea. _Leontion._ Not I: I don't care about it. _Ternissa._ Not about what is very bad indeed? quite horrible? _Leontion._ I seldom go thither. _Epicurus._ The theatre is delightful when we erect it in our own house or arbour, and when there is but one spectator. _Leontion._ You must lose the illusion in great part, if you only read the tragedy, which I fancy to be your meaning. _Epicurus._ I lose the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueller torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better part of the language used by Sophocles. We admit it, and willingly, and are at least as much illuded by it as by anything else we hear or see upon the stage. Poets and statuaries and painters give us an adorned imitation of the object, so skilfully treated that we receive it for a correct one. This is the only illusion they aim at: this is the perfection of their arts. _Leontion._ Do you derive no pleasure from the representation of a consummate actor? _Epicurus._ High pleasure; but liable to be overturned in an instant: pleasure at the mercy of any one who sits beside me. * * * * * _Leontion._ In my treatise I have only defended your tenets against Theophrastus. _Epicurus._ I am certain you have done it with spirit and eloquence, dear Leontion; and there are but two words in it I would wish you to erase. _Leontion._ Which are they? _Epicurus._ Theophrastus and Epicurus. If you love me, you will do nothing that may make you uneasy when you grow older; nothing that may allow my adversary to say, 'Leontion soon forgot her Epicurus.' My maxim is, never to defend my systems or paradoxes; if you undertake it, the Athenians will insist that I impelled you secretly, or that my philosophy and my friendship were ineffectual on you. _Leontion._ They shall never say that. _Epicurus._ I am not unmoved by the kindness of your intentions. Most people, and philosophers, too, among the rest, when their own conduct or opinions are questioned, are admirably prompt and dexterous in the science of defence; but when another's are assailed, they parry with as ill a grace and faltering a hand as if they never had taken a lesson in it at home. Seldom will they see what they profess to look for; and, finding it, they pick up with it a thorn under the nail. They canter over the solid turf, and complain that there is no corn upon it; they canter over the corn, and curse the ridges and furrows. All schools of philosophy, and almost all authors, are rather to be frequented for exercise than for freight; but this exercise ought to acquire us health and strength, spirits and good-humour. There is none of them that does not supply some truth useful to every man, and some untruth equally so to the few that are able to wrestle with it. If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt; if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius: and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated. I wish we could demonstrate the existence of utility in some other evils as easily as in this. _Leontion._ My remarks on the conduct and on the style of Theophrastus are not confined to him solely. I have taken at last a general view of our literature, and traced as far as I am able its deviation and decline. In ancient works we sometimes see the mark of the chisel; in modern we might almost suppose that no chisel was employed at all, and that everything was done by grinding and rubbing. There is an ordinariness, an indistinctness, a generalization, not even to be found in a flock of sheep. As most reduce what is sand into dust, the few that avoid it run to a contrary extreme, and would force us to believe that what is original must be unpolished and uncouth. _Epicurus._ There have been in all ages, and in all there will be, sharp and slender heads made purposely and peculiarly for creeping into the crevices of our nature. While we contemplate the magnificence of the universe, and mensurate the fitness and adaptation of one part to another, the small philosopher hangs upon a hair or creeps within a wrinkle, and cries out shrilly from his elevation that we are blind and superficial. He discovers a wart, he pries into a pore; and he calls it knowledge of man. Poetry and criticism, and all the fine arts, have generated such living things, which not only will be co-existent with them but will (I fear) survive them. Hence history takes alternately the form of reproval and of panegyric; and science in its pulverized state, in its shapeless and colourless atoms, assumes the name of metaphysics. We find no longer the rich succulence of Herodotus, no longer the strong filament of Thucydides, but thoughts fit only for the slave, and language for the rustic and the robber. These writings can never reach posterity, nor serve better authors near us; for who would receive as documents the perversions of venality and party? Alexander we know was intemperate, and Philip both intemperate and perfidious: we require not a volume of dissertation on the thread of history, to demonstrate that one or other left a tailor's bill unpaid, and the immorality of doing so; nor a supplement to ascertain on the best authorities which of the two it was. History should explain to us how nations rose and fell, what nurtured them in their growth, what sustained them in their maturity; not which orator ran swiftest through the crowd from the right hand to the left, which assassin was too strong for manacles, or which felon too opulent for crucifixion. _Leontion._ It is better, I own it, that such writers should amuse our idleness than excite our spleen. _Ternissa._ What is spleen? _Epicurus._ Do not ask her; she cannot tell you. The spleen, Ternissa, is to the heart what Arimanes is to Oromazes. _Ternissa._ I am little the wiser yet. Does he ever use such hard words with you? _Leontion._ He means the evil Genius and the good Genius, in the theogony of the Persians: and would perhaps tell you, as he hath told me, that the heart in itself is free from evil, but very capable of receiving and too tenacious of holding it. _Epicurus._ In our moral system, the spleen hangs about the heart and renders it sad and sorrowful, unless we continually keep it in exercise by kind offices, or in its proper place by serious investigation and solitary questionings. Otherwise, it is apt to adhere and to accumulate, until it deadens the principles of sound action, and obscures the sight. _Ternissa._ It must make us very ugly when we grow old. _Leontion._ In youth it makes us uglier, as not appertaining to it: a little more or less ugliness in decrepitude is hardly worth considering, there being quite enough of it from other quarters: I would stop it here, however. _Ternissa._ Oh, what a thing is age! _Leontion._ Death without death's quiet. _Ternissa._ Leontion said that even bad writers may amuse our idle hours: alas! even good ones do not much amuse mine, unless they record an action of love or generosity. As for the graver, why cannot they come among us and teach us, just as you do? _Epicurus._ Would you wish it? _Ternissa._ No, no! I do not want them: only I was imagining how pleasant it is to converse as we are doing, and how sorry I should be to pore over a book instead of it. Books always make me sigh, and think about other things. Why do you laugh, Leontion? _Epicurus._ She was mistaken in saying bad authors may amuse our idleness. Leontion knows not then how sweet and sacred idleness is. _Leontion._ To render it sweet and sacred, the heart must have a little garden of its own, with its umbrage and fountains and perennial flowers--a careless company! Sleep is called sacred as well as sweet by Homer; and idleness is but a step from it. The idleness of the wise and virtuous should be both, it being the repose and refreshment necessary for past exertions and for future; it punishes the bad man, it rewards the good; the deities enjoy it, and Epicurus praises it. I was indeed wrong in my remark; for we should never seek amusement in the foibles of another, never in coarse language, never in low thoughts. When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and grovelling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home. _Epicurus._ Aspasia believed so, and bequeathed to Leontion, with every other gift that Nature had bestowed upon her, the power of delivering her oracles from diviner lips. _Leontion._ Fie! Epicurus! It is well you hide my face for me with your hand. Now take it away; we cannot walk in this manner. _Epicurus._ No word could ever fall from you without its weight; no breath from you ought to lose itself in the common air. _Leontion._ For shame! What would you have? _Ternissa._ He knows not what he would have nor what he would say. I must sit down again. I declare I scarcely understand a single syllable. Well, he is very good, to tease you no longer. Epicurus has an excellent heart; he would give pain to no one; least of all to you. _Leontion,_ I have pained him by this foolish book, and he would only assure me that he does not for a moment bear me malice. Take the volume; take it, Epicurus! tear it in pieces. _Epicurus._ No, Leontion! I shall often look with pleasure on this trophy of brave humanity; let me kiss the hand that raises it! _Ternissa._ I am tired of sitting: I am quite stiff: when shall we walk homeward? _Epicurus._ Take my arm, Ternissa! _Ternissa._ Oh! I had forgotten that I proposed to myself a trip as far up as the pinasters, to look at the precipice of Oreithyia. Come along! come along! how alert does the sea air make us! I seem to feel growing at my feet and shoulders the wings of Zethes or Caläis. _Epicurus._ Leontion walks the nimblest to-day. _Ternissa._ To display her activity and strength, she runs before us. Sweet Leontion, how good she is! but she should have stayed for us: it would be in vain to try to overtake her. No, Epicurus! Mind! take care! you are crushing these little oleanders--and now the strawberry plants--the whole heap. Not I, indeed. What would my mother say, if she knew it? And Leontion! she will certainly look back. _Epicurus._ The fairest of the Eudaimones never look back: such are the Hours and Love, Opportunity and Leontion. _Ternissa._ How could you dare to treat me in this manner? I did not say again I hated anything. _Epicurus._ Forgive me! _Ternissa._ Violent creature! _Epicurus._ If tenderness is violence. Forgive me; and say you love me. _Ternissa._ All at once? could you endure such boldness? _Epicurus._ Pronounce it! whisper it. _Ternissa._ Go, go. Would it be proper? _Epicurus._ Is that sweet voice asking its heart or me? let the worthier give the answer. _Ternissa._ O Epicurus! you are very, very dear to me; and are the last in the world that would ever tell you were called so. FOOTNOTES: [7] The Attic month of Puanepsion had its commencement in the latter days of October; its name is derived from +puana+, the legumes which were offered in sacrifice to Apollo at that season. [8] The thirteenth of Elaphebolion was the tenth of April. DANTE AND BEATRICE _Dante._ When you saw me profoundly pierced with love, and reddening and trembling, did it become you, did it become you, you whom I have always called _the most gentle Bice_, to join in the heartless laughter of those girls around you? Answer me. Reply unhesitatingly. Requires it so long a space for dissimulation and duplicity? Pardon! pardon! pardon! My senses have left me; my heart being gone, they follow. _Beatrice._ Childish man! pursuing the impossible. _Dante._ And was it this you laughed at? We cannot touch the hem of God's garment; yet we fall at His feet and weep. _Beatrice._ But weep not, gentle Dante! fall not before the weakest of His creatures, willing to comfort, unable to relieve you. Consider a little. Is laughter at all times the signal or the precursor of derision? I smiled, let me avow it, from the pride I felt in your preference of me; and if I laughed, it was to conceal my sentiments. Did you never cover sweet fruit with worthless leaves? Come, do not drop again so soon so faint a smile. I will not have you grave, nor very serious. I pity you; I must not love you: if I might, I would. _Dante._ Yet how much love is due to me, O Bice, who have loved you, as you well remember, even from your tenth year. But it is reported, and your words confirm it, that you are going to be married. _Beatrice._ If so, and if I could have laughed at that, and if my laughter could have estranged you from me, would you blame me? _Dante._ Tell me the truth. _Beatrice._ The report is general. _Dante._ The truth! the truth! Tell me, Bice. _Beatrice._ Marriages, it is said, are made in heaven. _Dante._ Is heaven then under the paternal roof? _Beatrice._ It has been to me hitherto. _Dante._ And now you seek it elsewhere. _Beatrice._ I seek it not. The wiser choose for the weaker. Nay, do not sigh so. What would you have, my grave pensive Dante? What can I do? _Dante._ Love me. _Beatrice._ I always did. _Dante._ Love me? O bliss of heaven! _Beatrice._ No, no, no! Forbear! Men's kisses are always mischievous and hurtful; everybody says it. If you truly loved me, you would never think of doing so. _Dante._ Nor even this! _Beatrice._ You forget that you are no longer a boy; and that it is not thought proper at your time of life to continue the arm at all about the waist. Beside, I think you would better not put your head against my bosom; it beats too much to be pleasant to you. Why do you wish it? why fancy it can do you any good? It grows no cooler; it seems to grow even hotter. Oh, how it burns! Go, go; it hurts me too: it struggles, it aches, it sobs. Thank you, my gentle friend, for removing your brow away; your hair is very thick and long; and it began to heat me more than you can imagine. While it was there, I could not see your face so well, nor talk with you so quietly. _Dante._ Oh, when shall we talk quietly in future? _Beatrice._ When I am married. I shall often come to visit my father. He has always been solitary since my mother's death, which happened in my infancy, long before you knew me. _Dante._ How can he endure the solitude of his house when you have left it? _Beatrice._ The very question I asked him. _Dante._ You did not then wish to ... to ... go away? _Beatrice._ Ah no! It is sad to be an outcast at fifteen. _Dante._ An outcast? _Beatrice._ Forced to leave a home. _Dante._ For another? _Beatrice._ Childhood can never have a second. _Dante._ But childhood is now over. _Beatrice._ I wonder who was so malicious as to tell my father that? He wanted me to be married a whole year ago. _Dante._ And, Bice, you hesitated? _Beatrice._ No; I only wept. He is a dear good father. I never disobeyed him but in those wicked tears; and they ran the faster the more he reprehended them. _Dante._ Say, who is the happy youth? _Beatrice._ I know not who ought to be happy if you are not. _Dante._ I? _Beatrice._ Surely you deserve all happiness. _Dante._ Happiness! any happiness is denied me. Ah, hours of childhood! bright hours! what fragrant blossoms ye unfold! what bitter fruits to ripen! _Beatrice._ Now cannot you continue to sit under that old fig-tree at the corner of the garden? It is always delightful to me to think of it. _Dante._ Again you smile: I wish I could smile too. _Beatrice._ You were usually more grave than I, although very often, two years ago, you told me I was the graver. Perhaps I _was_ then indeed; and perhaps I ought to be now: but really I must smile at the recollection, and make you smile with me. _Dante._ Recollection of what in particular? _Beatrice._ Of your ignorance that a fig-tree is the brittlest of trees, especially when it is in leaf; and moreover of your tumble, when your head was just above the wall, and your hand (with the verses in it) on the very coping-stone. Nobody suspected that I went every day to the bottom of our garden, to hear you repeat your poetry on the other side; nobody but yourself; you soon found me out. But on that occasion I thought you might have been hurt; and I clambered up our high peach-tree in the grass plot nearest the place; and thence I saw Messer Dante, with his white sleeve reddened by the fig-juice, and the seeds sticking to it pertinaciously, and Messer blushing, and trying to conceal his calamity, and still holding the verses. They were all about me. _Dante._ Never shall any verse of mine be uttered from my lips, or from the lips of others, without the memorial of Bice. _Beatrice._ Sweet Dante! in the purity of your soul shall Bice live; as (we are told by the goatherds and foresters) poor creatures have been found preserved in the serene and lofty regions of the Alps, many years after the breath of life had left them. Already you rival Guido Cavalcante and Cino da Pistoja: you must attempt, nor perhaps shall it be vainly, to surpass them in celebrity. _Dante._ If ever I am above them ... and I must be ... I know already what angel's hand will have helped me up the ladder. Beatrice, I vow to heaven, shall stand higher than Selvaggia, high and glorious and immortal as that name will be. You have given me joy and sorrow; for the worst of these (I will not say the least) I will confer on you all the generations of our Italy, all the ages of our world. But first (alas, from me you must not have it!) may happiness, long happiness, attend you! _Beatrice._ Ah, those words rend your bosom! why should they? _Dante._ I could go away contented, or almost contented, were I sure of it. Hope is nearly as strong as despair, and greatly more pertinacious and enduring. You have made me see clearly that you never can be mine in this world: but at the same time, O Beatrice, you have made me see quite as clearly that you may and must be mine in another! I am older than you: precedency is given to age, and not to worthiness; I will pray for you when I am nearer to God, and purified from the stains of earth and mortality. He will permit me to behold you, lovely as when I left you. Angels in vain should call me onward. _Beatrice._ Hush, sweetest Dante! hush! _Dante._ It is there where I shall have caught the first glimpse of you again, that I wish all my portion of Paradise to be assigned me; and there, if far below you, yet within the sight of you, to establish my perdurable abode. _Beatrice._ Is this piety? Is this wisdom? O Dante! And may not I be called away first? _Dante._ Alas, alas, how many small feet have swept off the early dew of life, leaving the path black behind them! But to think that you should go before me! It almost sends me forward on my way, to receive and welcome you. If indeed, O Beatrice, such should be God's immutable will, sometimes look down on me when the song to Him is suspended. Oh! look often on me with prayer and pity; for there all prayers are accepted, and all pity is devoid of pain! Why are you silent? _Beatrice._ It is very sinful not to love all creatures in the world. But it is true, O Dante! that we always love those the most who make us the most unhappy? _Dante._ The remark, I fear, is just. _Beatrice._ Then, unless the Virgin be pleased to change my inclinations, I shall begin at last to love my betrothed; for already the very idea of him renders me sad, wearisome, and comfortless. Yesterday he sent me a bunch of violets. When I took them up, delighted as I felt at that sweetest of odours, which you and I once inhaled together.... _Dante._ And only once. _Beatrice._ You know why. Be quiet now, and hear me. I dropped the posy; for around it, hidden by various kinds of foliage, was twined the bridal necklace of pearls. O Dante, how worthless are the finest of them (and there are many fine ones) in comparison with those little pebbles, some of which (for perhaps I may not have gathered up all) may be still lying under the peach-tree, and some (do I blush to say it?) under the fig! Tell me not who threw these, nor for what. But you know you were always thoughtful, and sometimes reading, sometimes writing, and sometimes forgetting me, while I waited to see the crimson cap, and the two bay-leaves I fastened in it, rise above the garden-wall. How silently you are listening, if you do listen! _Dante._ Oh, could my thoughts incessantly and eternally dwell among these recollections, undisturbed by any other voice ... undistracted by any other presence! Soon must they abide with me alone, and be repeated by none but me ... repeated in the accents of anguish and despair! Why could you not have held in the sad home of your heart that necklace and those violets? _Beatrice._ My Dante! we must all obey ... I my father, you your God. He will never abandon you. _Dante._ I have ever sung, and will for ever sing, the most glorious of His works: and yet, O Bice! He abandons me, He casts me off; and He uses your hand for this infliction. _Beatrice._ Men travel far and wide, and see many on whom to fix or transfer their affections; but we maidens have neither the power nor the will. Casting our eyes on the ground, we walk along the straight and narrow road prescribed for us; and, doing this, we avoid in great measure the thorns and entanglements of life. We know we are performing our duty; and the fruit of this knowledge is contentment. Season after season, day after day, you have made me serious, pensive, meditative, and almost wise. Being so little a girl, I was proud that you, so much taller, should lean on my shoulder to overlook my work. And greatly more proud was I when in time you taught me several Latin words, and then whole sentences, both in prose and verse, pasting a strip of paper over, or obscuring with impenetrable ink, those passages in the poets which were beyond my comprehension, and might perplex me. But proudest of all was I when you began to reason with me. What will now be my pride if you are convinced by the first arguments I ever have opposed to you; or if you only take them up and try if they are applicable. Certainly do I know (indeed, indeed I do) that even the patience to consider them will make you happier. Will it not then make me so? I entertain no other wish. Is not this true love? _Dante._ Ah, yes! the truest, the purest, the least perishable, but not the sweetest. Here are the rue and hyssop; but where the rose? _Beatrice._ Wicked must be whatever torments you: and will you let love do it? Love is the gentlest and kindest breath of God. Are you willing that the tempter should intercept it, and respire it polluted into your ear? Do not make me hesitate to pray to the Virgin for you, nor tremble lest she look down on you with a reproachful pity. To her alone, O Dante, dare I confide all my thoughts! Lessen not my confidence in my only refuge. _Dante._ God annihilate a power so criminal! Oh, could my love flow into your breast with hers! It should flow with equal purity. _Beatrice._ You have stored my little mind with many thoughts; dear because they are yours, and because they are virtuous. May I not, O my Dante! bring some of them back again to your bosom; as the _contadina_ lets down the string from the cottage-beam in winter, and culls a few bunches of the soundest for the master of the vineyard? You have not given me glory that the world should shudder at its eclipse. To prove that I am worthy of the smallest part of it, I must obey God; and, under God, my father. Surely the voice of Heaven comes to us audibly from a parent's lips. You will be great, and, what is above, all greatness, good. _Dante._ Rightly and wisely, my sweet Beatrice, have you spoken in this estimate. Greatness is to goodness what gravel is to porphyry: the one is a movable accumulation, swept along the surface of the earth; the other stands fixed and solid and alone, above the violence of war and of the tempest; above all that is residuous of a wasted world. Little men build up great ones; but the snow colossus soon melts: the good stand under the eye of God; and therefore stand. _Beatrice._ Now you are calm and reasonable, listen to me, Bice. You must marry. _Dante._ Marry? _Beatrice._ Unless you do, how can we meet again unreservedly? Worse, worse than ever! I cannot bear to see those large heavy tears following one another, heavy and slow as nuns at the funeral of a sister. Come, I will kiss off one, if you will promise me faithfully to shed no more. Be tranquil, be tranquil; only hear reason. There are many who know you; and all who know you must love you. Don't you hear me? Why turn aside? and why go farther off? I will have that hand. It twists about as if it hated its confinement. Perverse and peevish creature! you have no more reason to be sorry than I have; and you have many to the contrary which I have not. Being a man, you are at liberty to admire a variety, and to make a choice. Is that no comfort to you? _Dante._ Bid this bosom cease to grieve? Bid these eyes fresh objects see? Where's the comfort to believe None might once have rivall'd me? What! my freedom to receive? Broken hearts, are they the free? For another can I live When I may not live for thee? _Beatrice._ I will never be fond of you again if you are so violent. We have been together too long, and we may be noticed. _Dante._ Is this our last meeting? If it is ... and that it is, my heart has told me ... you will not, surely you will not refuse.... _Beatrice._ Dante! Dante! they make the heart sad after: do not wish it. But prayers ... oh, how much better are they, how much quieter and lighter they render it! They carry it up to heaven with them; and those we love are left behind no longer. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND POPE EUGENIUS THE FOURTH _Eugenius._ Filippo! I am informed by my son Cosimo de' Medici of many things relating to thy life and actions, and among the rest, of thy throwing off the habit of a friar. Speak to me as to a friend. Was that well done? _Filippo._ Holy Father! it was done most unadvisedly. _Eugenius._ Continue to treat me with the same confidence and ingenuousness; and, beside the remuneration I intend to bestow on thee for the paintings wherewith thou hast adorned my palace, I will remove with my own hand the heavy accumulation of thy sins, and ward off the peril of fresh ones, placing within thy reach every worldly solace and contentment. _Filippo._ Infinite thanks, Holy Father! from the innermost heart of your unworthy servant, whose duty and wishes bind him alike and equally to a strict compliance with your paternal commands. _Eugenius._ Was it a love of the world and its vanities that induced thee to throw aside the frock? _Filippo._ It was indeed, Holy Father! I never had the courage to mention it in confession among my manifold offences. _Eugenius._ Bad! bad! Repentance is of little use to the sinner, unless he pour it from a full and overflowing heart into the capacious ear of the confessor. Ye must not go straightforward and bluntly up to your Maker, startling Him with the horrors of your guilty conscience. Order, decency, time, place, opportunity, must be observed. _Filippo._ I have observed the greater part of them: time, place, and opportunity. _Eugenius._ That is much. In consideration of it, I hereby absolve thee. _Filippo._ I feel quite easy, quite new-born. _Eugenius._ I am desirous of hearing what sort of feelings thou experiencest, when thou givest loose to thy intractable and unruly wishes. Now, this love of the world, what can it mean? A love of music, of dancing, of riding? What in short is it in thee? _Filippo._ Holy Father! I was ever of a hot and amorous constitution. _Eugenius._ Well, well! I can guess, within a trifle, what that leads unto. I very much disapprove of it, whatever it may be. And then? and then? Prithee go on: I am inflamed with a miraculous zeal to cleanse thee. _Filippo._ I have committed many follies, and some sins. _Eugenius._ Let me hear the sins; I do not trouble my head about the follies; the Church has no business with them. The State is founded on follies, the Church on sins. Come then, unsack them. _Filippo._ Concupiscence is both a folly and a sin. I felt more and more of it when I ceased to be a monk, not having (for a time) so ready means of allaying it. _Eugenius._ No doubt. Thou shouldst have thought again and again before thou strippedst off the cowl. _Filippo._ Ah! Holy Father! I am sore at heart. I thought indeed how often it had held two heads together under it, and that stripping it off was double decapitation. But compensation and contentment came, and we were warm enough without it. _Eugenius._ I am minded to reprove thee gravely. No wonder it pleased the Virgin, and the saints about her, to permit that the enemy of our faith should lead thee captive into Barbary. _Filippo._ The pleasure was all on their side. _Eugenius._ I have heard a great many stories both of males and females who were taken by Tunisians and Algerines: and although there is a sameness in certain parts of them, my especial benevolence toward thee, worthy Filippo, would induce me to lend a vacant ear to thy report. And now, good Filippo, I could sip a small glass of Muscatel or Orvieto, and turn over a few bleached almonds, or essay a smart dried apricot at intervals, and listen while thou relatest to me the manners and customs of that country, and particularly as touching thy own adversities. First, how wast thou taken? _Filippo._ I was visiting at Pesaro my worshipful friend the canonico Andrea Paccone, who delighted in the guitar, played it skilfully, and was always fond of hearing it well accompanied by the voice. My own instrument I had brought with me, together with many gay Florentine songs, some of which were of such a turn and tendency, that the canonico thought they would sound better on water, and rather far from shore, than within the walls of the canonicate. He proposed then, one evening when there was little wind stirring, to exercise three young abbates[9] on their several parts, a little way out of hearing from the water's edge. _Eugenius._ I disapprove of exercising young abbates in that manner. _Filippo._ Inadvertently, O Holy Father! I have made the affair seem worse than it really was. In fact, there were only two genuine abbates; the third was Donna Lisetta, the good canonico's pretty niece, who looks so archly at your Holiness when you bend your knees before her at bedtime. _Eugenius._ How? Where? _Filippo._ She is the angel on the right-hand side of the Holy Family, with a tip of amethyst-coloured wing over a basket of figs and pomegranates. I painted her from memory: she was then only fifteen, and worthy to be the niece of an archbishop. Alas! she never will be: she plays and sings among the infidels, and perhaps would eat a landrail on a Friday as unreluctantly as she would a roach. _Eugenius._ Poor soul! So this is the angel with the amethyst-coloured wing? I thought she looked wanton: we must pray for her release ... from the bondage of sin. What followed in your excursion? _Filippo._ Singing, playing, fresh air, and plashing water, stimulated our appetites. We had brought no eatable with us but fruit and thin _marzopane_, of which the sugar and rose-water were inadequate to ward off hunger; and the sight of a fishing-vessel between us and Ancona, raised our host immoderately. 'Yonder smack,' said he, 'is sailing at this moment just over the best sole-bank in the Adriatic. If she continues her course and we run toward her, we may be supplied, I trust in God, with the finest fish in Christendom. Methinks I see already the bellies of those magnificent sole bestar the deck, and emulate the glories of the orient sky.' He gave his orders with such a majestic air, that he looked rather like an admiral than a priest. _Eugenius._ How now, rogue! Why should not the churchman look majestically and courageously? I myself have found occasion for it, and exerted it. _Filippo._ The world knows the prowess of your Holiness. _Eugenius._ Not mine, not mine, Filippo! but His who gave me the sword and the keys, and the will and the discretion to use them. I trust the canonico did not misapply his station and power, by taking the fish at any unreasonably low price; and that he gave his blessing to the remainder, and to the poor fishermen and to their nets. _Filippo._ He was angry at observing that the vessel, while he thought it was within hail, stood out again to sea. _Eugenius._ He ought to have borne more manfully so slight a vexation. _Filippo._ On the contrary, he swore bitterly he would have the master's ear between his thumb and forefinger in another half-hour, and regretted that he had cut his nails in the morning lest they should grate on his guitar. 'They may fish well,' cried he, 'but they can neither sail nor row; and, when I am in the middle of that tub of theirs, I will teach them more than they look for.' Sure enough he was in the middle of it at the time he fixed: but it was by aid of a rope about his arms and the end of another laid lustily on his back and shoulders. 'Mount, lazy long-chined turnspit, as thou valuest thy life,' cried Abdul the corsair, 'and away for Tunis.' If silence is consent, he had it. The captain, in the Sicilian dialect, told us we might talk freely, for he had taken his siesta. 'Whose guitars are those?' said he. As the canonico raised his eyes to heaven and answered nothing, I replied, 'Sir, one is mine: the other is my worthy friend's there.' Next he asked the canonico to what market he was taking those young slaves, pointing to the abbates. The canonico sobbed and could not utter one word. I related the whole story; at which he laughed. He then took up the music, and commanded my reverend guest to sing an air peculiarly tender, invoking the compassion of a nymph, and calling her cold as ice. Never did so many or such profound sighs accompany it. When it ended, he sang one himself in his own language, on a lady whose eyes were exactly like the scimitars of Damascus, and whose eyebrows met in the middle like the cudgels of prize-fighters. On the whole she resembled both sun and moon, with the simple difference that she never allowed herself to be seen, lest all the nations of the earth should go to war for her, and not a man to be left to breathe out his soul before her. This poem had obtained the prize at the University of Fez, had been translated into the Arabic, the Persian, and the Turkish languages, and was the favourite lay of the corsair. He invited me lastly to try my talent. I played the same air on the guitar, and apologized for omitting the words, from my utter ignorance of the Moorish. Abdul was much pleased, and took the trouble to convince me that the poetry they conveyed, which he translated literally, was incomparably better than ours. 'Cold as ice!' he repeated, scoffing: 'anybody might say that who had seen Atlas: but a genuine poet would rather say, "Cold as a lizard or a lobster."' There is no controverting a critic who has twenty stout rowers, and twenty well-knotted rope-ends. Added to which, he seemed to know as much of the matter as the generality of those who talked about it. He was gratified by my attention and edification, and thus continued: 'I have remarked in the songs I have heard, that these wild woodland creatures of the west, these nymphs, are a strange fantastical race. But are your poets not ashamed to complain of their inconstancy? whose fault is that? If ever it should be my fortune to take one, I would try whether I could not bring her down to the level of her sex; and if her inconstancy caused any complaints, by Allah! they should be louder and shriller than ever rose from the throat of Abdul.' I still thought it better to be a disciple than a commentator. _Eugenius._ If we could convert this barbarian and detain him awhile at Rome, he would learn that women and nymphs (and inconstancy also) are one and the same. These cruel men have no lenity, no suavity. They who do not as they would be done by, are done by very much as they do. Women will glide away from them like water; they can better bear two masters than half one; and a new metal must be discovered before any bars are strong enough to confine them. But proceed with your narrative. _Filippo._ Night had now closed upon us. Abdul placed the younger of the company apart, and after giving them some boiled rice, sent them down into his own cabin. The sailors, observing the consideration and distinction with which their master had treated me, were civil and obliging. Permission was granted me, at my request, to sleep on deck. _Eugenius._ What became of your canonico? _Filippo._ The crew called him a conger, a priest, and a porpoise. _Eugenius._ Foul-mouthed knaves! could not one of these terms content them? On thy leaving Barbary was he left behind? _Filippo._ Your Holiness consecrated him, the other day, Bishop of Macerata. _Eugenius._ True, true; I remember the name, Saccone. How did he contrive to get off? _Filippo._ He was worth little at any work; and such men are the quickest both to get off and to get on. Abdul told me he had received three thousand crowns for his ransom. _Eugenius._ He was worth more to him than to me. I received but two first-fruits, and such other things as of right belong to me by inheritance. The bishopric is passably rich: he may serve thee. _Filippo._ While he was a canonico he was a jolly fellow; not very generous; for jolly fellows are seldom that; but he would give a friend a dinner, a flask of wine or two in preference, and a piece of advice as readily as either. I waited on monsignor at Macerata, soon after his elevation. _Eugenius._ He must have been heartily glad to embrace his companion in captivity, and the more especially as he himself was the cause of so grievous a misfortune. _Filippo._ He sent me word he was so unwell he could not see me. 'What!' said I to his valet, 'is monsignor's complaint in his eyes?' The fellow shrugged up his shoulders and walked away. Not believing that the message was a refusal to admit me, I went straight upstairs, and finding the door of an antechamber half open, and a chaplain milling an egg-posset over the fire, I accosted him. The air of familiarity and satisfaction he observed in me left no doubt in his mind that I had been invited by his patron. 'Will the man never come?' cried his lordship. 'Yes, monsignor!' exclaimed I, running in and embracing him; 'behold him here!' He started back, and then I first discovered the wide difference between an old friend and an egg-posset. _Eugenius._ Son Filippo! thou hast seen but little of the world, and art but just come from Barbary. Go on. _Filippo._ 'Fra Filippo!' said he gravely, 'I am glad to see you. I did not expect you just at present: I am not very well: I had ordered a medicine and was impatient to take it. If you will favour me with the name of your inn, I will send for you when I am in a condition to receive you; perhaps within a day or two.' 'Monsignor!' said I, 'a change of residence often gives a man a cold, and oftener a change of fortune. Whether you caught yours upon deck (where we last saw each other), from being more exposed than usual, or whether the mitre holds wind, is no question for me, and no concern of mine.' _Eugenius._ A just reproof, if an archbishop had made it. On uttering it, I hope thou kneeledst and kissedst his hand. _Filippo._ I did not indeed. _Eugenius._ Oh, there wert thou greatly in the wrong! Having, it is reported, a good thousand crowns yearly of patrimony, and a canonicate worth six hundred more, he might have attempted to relieve thee from slavery, by assisting thy relatives in thy redemption. _Filippo._ The three thousand crowns were the uttermost he could raise, he declared to Abdul, and he asserted that a part of the money was contributed by the inhabitants of Pesaro. 'Do they act out of pure mercy?' said he. 'Ay, they must, for what else could move them in behalf of such a lazy, unserviceable street-fed cur?' In the morning, at sunrise, he was sent aboard. And now, the vessel being under weigh, 'I have a letter from my lord Abdul,' said the master, 'which, being in thy language, two fellow slaves shall read unto thee publicly.' They came forward and began the reading. 'Yesterday I purchased these two slaves from a cruel, unrelenting master, under whose lash they have laboured for nearly thirty years. I hereby give orders that five ounces of my own gold be weighed out to them.' Here one of the slaves fell on his face; the other lifted up his hands, praised God, and blessed his benefactor. _Eugenius._ The pirate? the unconverted pirate? _Filippo._ Even so. 'Here is another slip of paper for thyself to read immediately in my presence,' said the master. The words it contained were, 'Do thou the same, or there enters thy lips neither food nor water until thou landest in Italy. I permit thee to carry away more than double the sum: I am no sutler: I do not contract for thy sustenance.' The canonico asked of the master whether he knew the contents of the letter; he replied no. 'Tell your master, lord Abdul, that I shall take them into consideration.' 'My lord expected a much plainer answer, and commanded me, in case of any such as thou hast delivered, to break this seal.' He pressed it to his forehead and then broke it. Having perused the characters reverentially, 'Christian! dost thou consent?' The canonico fell on his knees, and overthrew the two poor wretches who, saying their prayers, had remained in the same posture before him quite unnoticed. 'Open thy trunk and take out thy money-bag, or I will make room for it in thy bladder.' The canonico was prompt in the execution of the command. The master drew out his scales, and desired the canonico to weigh with his own hand five ounces. He groaned and trembled: the balance was unsteady. 'Throw in another piece: it will not vitiate the agreement,' cried the master. It was done. Fear and grief are among the thirsty passions, but add little to the appetite. It seemed, however, as if every sigh had left a vacancy in the stomach of the canonico. At dinner the cook brought him a salted bonito, half an ell in length; and in five minutes his reverence was drawing his middle finger along the white backbone, out of sheer idleness, until were placed before him some as fine dried locusts as ever provisioned the tents of Africa, together with olives the size of eggs and colour of bruises, shining in oil and brine. He found them savoury and pulpy, and, as the last love supersedes the foregoing, he gave them the preference, even over the delicate locusts. When he had finished them, he modestly requested a can of water. A sailor brought a large flask, and poured forth a plentiful supply. The canonico engulfed the whole, and instantly threw himself back in convulsive agony. 'How is this?' cried the sailor. The master ran up and, smelling the water, began to buffet him, exclaiming, as he turned round to all the crew, 'How came this flask here?' All were innocent. It appeared, however, that it was a flask of mineral water, strongly sulphureous, taken out of a Neapolitan vessel, laden with a great abundance of it for some hospital in the Levant. It had taken the captor by surprise in the same manner as the canonico. He himself brought out instantly a capacious stone jar covered with dew, and invited the sufferer into the cabin. Here he drew forth two richly-cut wineglasses, and, on filling one of them, the outside of it turned suddenly pale, with a myriad of indivisible drops, and the senses were refreshed with the most delicious fragrance. He held up the glass between himself and his guest, and looking at it attentively, said, 'Here is no appearance of wine; all I can see is water. Nothing is wickeder than too much curiosity: we must take what Allah sends us, and render thanks for it, although it fall far short of our expectations. Besides, our Prophet would rather we should even drink wine than poison.' The canonico had not tasted wine for two months: a longer abstinence than ever canonico endured before. He drooped: but the master looked still more disconsolate. 'I would give whatever I possess on earth rather than die of thirst,' cried the canonico. 'Who would not?' rejoined the captain, sighing and clasping his fingers. 'If it were not contrary to my commands, I could touch at some cove or inlet.' 'Do, for the love of Christ!' exclaimed the canonico. 'Or even sail back,' continued the captain. 'O Santa Vergine!' cried in anguish the canonico. 'Despondency,' said the captain, with calm solemnity, 'has left many a man to be thrown overboard: it even renders the plague, and many other disorders, more fatal. Thirst too has a powerful effect in exasperating them. Overcome such weaknesses, or I must do my duty. The health of the ship's company is placed under my care; and our lord Abdul, if he suspected the pest, would throw a Jew, or a Christian, or even a bale of silk, into the sea: such is the disinterestedness and magnanimity of my lord Abdul.' 'He believes in fate; does he not?' said the canonico. 'Doubtless: but he says it is as much fated that he should throw into the sea a fellow who is infected, as that the fellow should have ever been so.' 'Save me, oh, save me!' cried the canonico, moist as if the spray had pelted him. 'Willingly, if possible,' answered calmly the master. 'At present I can discover no certain symptoms; for sweat, unless followed by general prostration, both of muscular strength and animal spirits, may be cured without a hook at the heel.' 'Giesu-Maria!' ejaculated the canonico. _Eugenius._ And the monster could withstand that appeal? _Filippo._ It seems so. The renegade who related to me, on my return, these events as they happened, was very circumstantial. He is a Corsican, and had killed many men in battle, and more out; but is (he gave me his word for it) on the whole an honest man. _Eugenius._ How so? honest? and a renegade? _Filippo._ He declared to me that, although the Mahomedan is the best religion to live in, the Christian is the best to die in; and that, when he has made his fortune, he will make his confession, and lie snugly in the bosom of the Church. _Eugenius._ See here the triumphs of our holy faith! The lost sheep will be found again. _Filippo._ Having played the butcher first. _Eugenius._ Return we to that bad man, the master or captain, who evinced no such dispositions. _Filippo._ He added, 'The other captives, though older men, have stouter hearts than mine.' 'Alas! they are longer used to hardships,' answered he. 'Dost thou believe, in thy conscience,' said the captain, 'that the water we have aboard would be harmless to them? for we have no other; and wine is costly; and our quantity might be insufficient for those who can afford to pay for it.' 'I will answer for their lives,' replied the canonico. 'With thy own?' interrogated sharply the Tunisian. 'I must not tempt God,' said, in tears, the religious man. 'Let us be plain,' said the master. 'Thou knowest thy money is safe; I myself counted it before thee when I brought it from the scrivener's; thou hast sixty broad gold pieces; wilt thou be answerable, to the whole amount of them, for the lives of thy two countrymen if they drink this water?' 'O sir!' said the canonico, 'I will give it, if, only for these few days of voyage, you vouchsafe me one bottle daily of that restorative wine of Bordeaux. The other two are less liable to the plague: they do not sorrow and sweat as I do. They are spare men. There is enough of me to infect a fleet with it; and I cannot bear to think of being in any wise the cause of evil to my fellow-creatures.' 'The wine is my patron's,' cried the Tunisian; 'he leaves everything at my discretion: should I deceive him?' 'If he leaves everything at your discretion,' observed the logician of Pesaro, 'there is no deceit in disposing of it.' The master appeared to be satisfied with the argument. 'Thou shalt not find me exacting,' said he; 'give me the sixty pieces, and the wine shall be thine.' At a signal, when the contract was agreed to, the two slaves entered, bringing a hamper of jars. 'Read the contract before thou signest,' cried the master. He read. 'How is this? how is this? _Sixty golden ducats to the brothers Antonio and Bernabo Panini, for wine received from them?_' The aged men tottered under the stroke of joy; and Bernabo, who would have embraced his brother, fainted. On the morrow there was a calm, and the weather was extremely sultry. The canonico sat in his shirt on deck, and was surprised to see, I forget which of the brothers, drink from a goblet a prodigious draught of water. 'Hold!' cried he angrily; 'you may eat instead; but putrid or sulphureous water, you have heard, may produce the plague, and honest men be the sufferers by your folly and intemperance.' They assured him the water was tasteless, and very excellent, and had been kept cool in the same kind of earthern jars as the wine. He tasted it, and lost his patience. It was better, he protested, than any wine in the world. They begged his acceptance of the jar containing it. But the master, who had witnessed at a distance the whole proceeding, now advanced, and, placing his hand against it, said sternly, 'Let him have his own.' Usually, when he had emptied the second bottle, a desire of converting the Mohammedans came over him: and they showed themselves much less obstinate and refractory than they are generally thought. He selected those for edification who swore the oftenest and the loudest by the Prophet; and he boasted in his heart of having overcome, by precept and example, the stiffest tenet of their abominable creed. Certainly they drank wine, and somewhat freely. The canonico clapped his hands, and declared that even some of the apostles had been more pertinacious recusants of the faith. _Eugenius._ Did he so? Cappari! I would not have made him a bishop for twice the money if I had known it earlier. Could not he have left them alone? Suppose one or other of them did doubt and persecute, was he the man to blab it out among the heathen? _Filippo._ A judgment, it appears, fell on him for so doing. A very quiet sailor, who had always declined his invitations, and had always heard his arguments at a distance and in silence, being pressed and urged by him, and reproved somewhat arrogantly and loudly, as less docile than his messmates, at last lifted up his leg behind him, pulled off his right slipper, and counted deliberately and distinctly thirty-nine sound strokes of the same, on the canonico's broadest tablet, which (please your Holiness) might be called, not inaptly, from that day the tablet of memory. In vain he cried out. Some of the mariners made their moves at chess and waved their left hands as if desirous of no interruption; others went backward and forward about their business, and took no more notice than if their messmate was occupied in caulking a seam or notching a flint. The master himself, who saw the operation, heard the complaint in the evening, and lifted up his shoulders and eyebrows, as if the whole were quite unknown to him. Then, acting as judge-advocate, he called the young man before him and repeated the accusation. To this the defence was purely interrogative. 'Why would he convert me? I never converted him.' Turning to his spiritual guide, he said, 'I quite forgive thee: nay, I am ready to appear in thy favour, and to declare that, in general, thou hast been more decorous than people of thy faith and profession usually are, and hast not scattered on deck that inflammatory language which I, habited in the dress of a Greek, heard last Easter. I went into three churches; and the preachers in all three denounced the curse of Allah on every soul that differed from them a tittle. They were children of perdition, children of darkness, children of the devil, one and all. It seemed a matter of wonder to me, that, in such numerous families and of such indifferent parentage, so many slippers were kept under the heel. Mine, in an evil hour, escaped me: but I quite forgive thee. After this free pardon I will indulge thee with a short specimen of my preaching. I will call none of you a generation of vipers, as ye call one another; for vipers neither bite nor eat during many months of the year: I will call none of you wolves in sheep's clothing; for if ye are, it must be acknowledged that the clothing is very clumsily put on. You priests, however, take people's souls aboard whether they will or not, just as we do your bodies: and you make them pay much more for keeping these in slavery than we make you pay for setting you free body and soul together. You declare that the precious souls, to the especial care of which Allah has called and appointed you, frequently grow corrupt, and stink in His nostrils. Now, I invoke thy own testimony to the fact that thy soul, gross as I imagine it to be from the greasy wallet that holds it, had no carnal thoughts whatsoever, and that thy carcass did not even receive a fly-blow, while it was under my custody. Thy guardian angel (I speak it in humility) could not ventilate thee better. Nevertheless, I should scorn to demand a single maravedi for my labour and skill, or for the wear and tear of my pantoufle. My reward will be in Paradise, where a houri is standing in the shade, above a vase of gold and silver fish, with a kiss on her lip, and an unbroken pair of green slippers in her hand for me.' Saying which, he took off his foot again, the one he had been using, and showed the sole of it, first to the master, then to all the crew, and declared it had become (as they might see) so smooth and oily by the application, that it was dangerous to walk on deck in it. _Eugenius._ See! what notions these creatures have, both of their fool's paradise and of our holy faith! The seven Sacraments, I warrant you, go for nothing! Purgatory, purgatory itself, goes for nothing! _Filippo._ Holy Father! we must stop thee. _That_ does not go for nothing, however. _Eugenius._ Filippo! God forbid I should suspect thee of any heretical taint; but this smells very like it. If thou hast it now, tell me honestly. I mean, hold thy tongue. Florentines are rather lax. Even Son Cosimo might be stricter: so they say: perhaps his enemies. The great always have them abundantly, beside those by whom they are served, and those also whom they serve. Now would I give a silver rose with my benediction on it, to know of a certainty what became of those poor creatures the abbates. The initiatory rite of Mohammedanism is most diabolically malicious. According to the canons of our Catholic Church, it disqualifies the neophyte for holy orders, without going so far as adapting him to the choir of the pontifical chapel. They limp; they halt. _Filippo._ Beatitude! which of them? _Eugenius._ The unbelievers: they surely are found wanting. _Filippo._ The unbelievers too? _Eugenius._ Ay, ay, thou half renegade! Couldst not thou go over with a purse of silver, and try whether the souls of these captives be recoverable? Even if they should have submitted to such unholy rites, I venture to say they have repented. _Filippo._ The devil is in them if they have not. _Eugenius._ They may become again as good Christians as before. _Filippo._ Easily, methinks. _Eugenius._ Not so easily; but by aid of Holy Church in the administration of indulgences. _Filippo._ They never wanted those, whatever they want. _Eugenius._ The corsair then is not one of those ferocious creatures which appear to connect our species with the lion and panther. _Filippo._ By no means, Holy Father! He is an honest man; so are many of his countrymen, bating the Sacrament. _Eugenius._ Bating! poor beguiled Filippo! Being unbaptized, they are only as the beasts that perish: nay worse: for the soul being imperishable, it must stick to their bodies at the last day, whether they will or no, and must sink with it into the fire and brimstone. _Filippo._ Unbaptized! why, they baptize every morning. _Eugenius._ Worse and worse! I thought they only missed the stirrup; I find they overleap the saddle. Obstinate blind reprobates! of whom it is written ... of whom it is written ... of whom, I say, it is written ... as shall be manifest before men and angels in the day of wrath. _Filippo._ More is the pity! for they are hospitable, frank, and courteous. It is delightful to see their gardens, when one has not the weeding and irrigation of them. What fruit! what foliage! what trellises! what alcoves! what a contest of rose and jessamine for supremacy in odour! of lute and nightingale for victory in song! And how the little bright ripples of the docile brooks, the fresher for their races, leap up against one another, to look on! and how they chirrup and applaud, as if they too had a voice of some importance in these parties of pleasure that are loath to separate. _Eugenius._ Parties of pleasure! birds, fruits, shallow-running waters, lute-players, and wantons! Parties of pleasure! and composed of these! Tell me now, Filippo, tell me truly, what complexion in general have the discreeter females of that hapless country. _Filippo._ The colour of an orange-flower, on which an overladen bee has left a slight suffusion of her purest honey. _Eugenius._ We must open their eyes. _Filippo._ Knowing what excellent hides the slippers of this people are made of, I never once ventured on their less perfect theology, fearing to find it written that I should be abed on my face the next fortnight. My master had expressed his astonishment that a religion so admirable as ours was represented should be the only one in the world the precepts of which are disregarded by all conditions of men. 'Our Prophet,' said he, 'our Prophet ordered us to go forth and conquer; we did it: yours ordered you to sit quiet and forbear; and, after spitting in His face, you threw the order back into it, and fought like devils.' _Eugenius._ The barbarians talk of our Holy Scriptures as if they understood them perfectly. The impostor they follow has nothing but fustian and rodomontade in his impudent lying book from beginning to end. I know it, Filippo, from those who have contrasted it, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and have given the knave his due. _Filippo._ Abdul is by no means deficient in a good opinion of his own capacity and his Prophet's all-sufficiency, but he never took me to task about my faith or his own. _Eugenius._ How wert thou mainly occupied? _Filippo._ I will give your Holiness a sample both of my employments and of his character. He was going one evening to a country-house, about fifteen miles from Tunis; and he ordered me to accompany him. I found there a spacious garden, overrun with wild flowers and most luxuriant grass, in irregular tufts, according to the dryness or the humidity of the spot. The clematis overtopped the lemon and orange-trees; and the perennial pea sent forth here a pink blossom, here a purple, here a white one, and after holding (as it were) a short conversation with the humbler plants, sprang up about an old cypress, played among its branches, and mitigated its gloom. White pigeons, and others in colour like the dawn of day, looked down on us and ceased to coo, until some of their companions, in whom they had more confidence, encouraged them loudly from remoter boughs, or alighted on the shoulders of Abdul, at whose side I was standing. A few of them examined me in every position their inquisitive eyes could take; displaying all the advantages of their versatile necks, and pretending querulous fear in the midst of petulant approaches. _Eugenius._ Is it of pigeons thou art talking, O Filippo? I hope it may be. _Filippo._ Of Abdul's pigeons. He was fond of taming all creatures; men, horses, pigeons, equally: but he tamed them all by kindness. In this wilderness is an edifice not unlike our Italian chapter-houses built by the Lombards, with long narrow windows, high above the ground. The centre is now a bath, the waters of which, in another part of the enclosure, had supplied a fountain, at present in ruins, and covered by tufted canes, and by every variety of aquatic plants. The structure has no remains of roof: and, of six windows, one alone is unconcealed by ivy. This had been walled up long ago, and the cement in the inside of it was hard and polished. 'Lippi!' said Abdul to me, after I had long admired the place in silence, 'I leave to thy superintendence this bath and garden. Be sparing of the leaves and branches: make paths only wide enough for me. Let me see no mark of hatchet or pruning-hook, and tell the labourers that whoever takes a nest or an egg shall be impaled.' _Eugenius._ Monster! so then he would really have impaled a poor wretch for eating a bird's egg? How disproportionate is the punishment to the offence! _Filippo._ He efficiently checked in his slaves the desire of transgressing his command. To spare them as much as possible, I ordered them merely to open a few spaces, and to remove the weaker trees from the stronger. Meanwhile I drew on the smooth blank window the figure of Abdul and of a beautiful girl. _Eugenius._ Rather say handmaiden: choicer expression; more decorous. _Filippo._ Holy Father! I have been lately so much out of practice, I take the first that comes in my way. Handmaiden I will use in preference for the future. _Eugenius._ On then! and God speed thee! _Filippo._ I drew Abdul with a blooming handmaiden. One of his feet is resting on her lap, and she is drying the ankle with a saffron robe, of which the greater part is fallen in doing it. That she is a bondmaid is discernible, not only by her occupation, but by her humility and patience, by her loose and flowing brown hair, and by her eyes expressing the timidity at once of servitude and of fondness. The countenance was taken from fancy, and was the loveliest I could imagine: of the figure I had some idea, having seen it to advantage in Tunis. After seven days Abdul returned. He was delighted with the improvement made in the garden. I requested him to visit the bath. 'We can do nothing to that,' answered he impatiently. 'There is no sudatory, no dormitory, no dressing-room, no couch. Sometimes I sit an hour there in the summer, because I never found a fly in it--the principal curse of hot countries, and against which plague there is neither prayer nor amulet, nor indeed any human defence.' He went away into the house. At dinner he sent me from his table some quails and ortolans, and tomatoes and honey and rice, beside a basket of fruit covered with moss and bay-leaves, under which I found a verdino fig, deliciously ripe, and bearing the impression of several small teeth, but certainly no reptile's. _Eugenius._ There might have been poison in them, for all that. _Filippo._ About two hours had passed, when I heard a whir and a crash in the windows of the bath (where I had dined and was about to sleep), occasioned by the settling and again the flight of some pheasants. Abdul entered. 'Beard of the Prophet! what hast thou been doing? That is myself! No, no, Lippi! thou never canst have seen her: the face proves it: but those limbs! thou hast divined them aright: thou hast had sweet dreams then! Dreams are large possessions: in them the possessor may cease to possess his own. To the slave, O Allah! to the slave is permitted what is not his!... I burn with anguish to think how much ... yea, at that very hour. I would not another should, even in a dream.... But, Lippi! thou never canst have seen above the sandal?' To which I answered, 'I never have allowed my eyes to look even on that. But if any one of my lord Abdul's fair slaves resembles, as they surely must all do, in duty and docility, the figure I have represented, let it express to him my congratulation on his happiness.' 'I believe,' said he, 'such representations are forbidden by the Koran; but as I do not remember it, I do not sin. There it shall stay, unless the angel Gabriel comes to forbid it.' He smiled in saying so. _Eugenius._ There is hope of this Abdul. His faith hangs about him more like oil than pitch. _Filippo._ He inquired of me whether I often thought of those I loved in Italy, and whether I could bring them before my eyes at will. To remove all suspicion from him, I declared I always could, and that one beautiful object occupied all the cells of my brain by night and day. He paused and pondered, and then said, 'Thou dost not love deeply.' I thought I had given the true signs. 'No, Lippi! we who love ardently, we, with all our wishes, all the efforts of our souls, cannot bring before us the features which, while they were present, we thought it impossible we ever could forget. Alas! when we most love the absent, when we most desire to see her, we try in vain to bring her image back to us. The troubled heart shakes and confounds it, even as ruffled waters do with shadows. Hateful things are more hateful when they haunt our sleep: the lovely flee away, or are changed into less lovely.' _Eugenius._ What figures now have these unbelievers? _Filippo._ Various in their combinations as the letters or the numerals; but they all, like these, signify something. Almeida (did I not inform your Holiness?) has large hazel eyes.... _Eugenius._ Has she? thou never toldest me that. Well, well! and what else has she? Mind! be cautious! use decent terms. _Filippo._ Somewhat pouting lips. _Eugenius._ Ha! ha! What did they pout at? _Filippo._ And she is rather plump than otherwise. _Eugenius._ No harm in that. _Filippo._ And moreover is cool, smooth, and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise. _Eugenius._ Ha! ha! do not remind me of nectarines. I am very fond of them; and this is not the season! Such females as thou describest are said to be among the likeliest to give reasonable cause for suspicion. I would not judge harshly, I would not think uncharitably; but, unhappily, being at so great a distance from spiritual aid, peradventure a desire, a suggestion, an inkling ... ay? If she, the lost Almeida, came before thee when her master was absent ... which I trust she never did.... But those flowers and shrubs and odours and alleys and long grass and alcoves, might strangely hold, perplex, and entangle, two incautious young persons ... ay? _Filippo._ I confessed all I had to confess in this matter the evening I landed. _Eugenius._ Ho! I am no candidate for a seat at the rehearsal of confessions: but perhaps my absolution might be somewhat more pleasing and unconditional. Well! well! since I am unworthy of such confidence, go about thy business ... paint! paint! _Filippo._ Am I so unfortunate as to have offended your Beatitude? _Eugenius._ Offend _me_, man! who offends _me_? I took an interest in thy adventures, and was concerned lest thou mightest have sinned; for by my soul! Filippo! those are the women that the devil hath set his mark on. _Filippo._ It would do your Holiness's heart good to rub it out again, wherever he may have had the cunning to make it. _Eugenius._ Deep! deep! _Filippo._ Yet it may be got at; she being a Biscayan by birth, as she told me, and not only baptized, but going by sea along the coast for confirmation, when she was captured. _Eugenius._ Alas! to what an imposition of hands was this tender young thing devoted! Poor soul! _Filippo._ I sigh for her myself when I think of her. _Eugenius._ Beware lest the sigh be mundane, and lest the thought recur too often. I wish it were presently in my power to examine her myself on her condition. What thinkest thou? Speak. _Filippo._ Holy Father! she would laugh in your face. _Eugenius._ So lost! _Filippo._ She declared to me she thought she should have died, from the instant she was captured until she was comforted by Abdul: but that she was quite sure she should if she were ransomed. _Eugenius._ Has the wretch then shaken her faith? _Filippo._ The very last thing he would think of doing. Never did I see the virtue of resignation in higher perfection than in the laughing, light-hearted Almeida. _Eugenius._ Lamentable! Poor lost creature! lost in this world and in the next. _Filippo._ What could she do? how could she help herself? _Eugenius._ She might have torn his eyes out, and have died a martyr. _Filippo._ Or have been bastinadoed, whipped, and given up to the cooks and scullions for it. _Eugenius._ Martyrdom is the more glorious the greater the indignities it endures. _Filippo._ Almeida seems unambitious. There are many in our Tuscany who would jump at the crown over those sloughs and briers, rather than perish without them: she never sighs after the like. _Eugenius._ Nevertheless, what must she witness! what abominations! what superstitions! _Filippo._ Abdul neither practises nor exacts any other superstition than ablutions. _Eugenius._ Detestable rites! without our authority. I venture to affirm that, in the whole of Italy and Spain, no convent of monks or nuns contains a bath; and that the worst inmate of either would shudder at the idea of observing such a practice in common with the unbeliever. For the washing of the feet indeed we have the authority of the earlier Christians; and it may be done; but solemnly and sparingly. Thy residence among the Mahomedans, I am afraid, hath rendered thee more favourable to them than beseems a Catholic, and thy mind, I do suspect, sometimes goes back into Barbary unreluctantly. _Filippo._ While I continued in that country, although I was well treated, I often wished myself away, thinking of my friends in Florence, of music, of painting, of our villeggiatura at the vintage-time; whether in the green and narrow glades of Pratolino, with lofty trees above us, and little rills unseen, and little bells about the necks of sheep and goats, tinkling together ambiguously; or amid the grey quarries, or under the majestic walls of modern Fiesole; or down in the woods of the Doccia, where the cypresses are of such a girth that, when a youth stands against one of them, and a maiden stands opposite, and they clasp it, their hands at the time do little more than meet. Beautiful scenes, on which heaven smiles eternally, how often has my heart ached for you! He who hath lived in this country can enjoy no distant one. He breathes here another air; he lives more life; a brighter sun invigorates his studies, and serener stars influence his repose. Barbary hath also the blessing of climate; and although I do not desire to be there again, I feel sometimes a kind of regret at leaving it. A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth. In like manner the recollection of a thing is frequently more pleasing than the actuality; what is harsh is dropped in the space between. There is in Abdul a nobility of soul on which I often have reflected with admiration. I have seen many of the highest rank and distinction, in whom I could find nothing of the great man, excepting a fondness for low company, and an aptitude to shy and start at every spark of genius or virtue that sprang up above or before them. Abdul was solitary, but affable: he was proud, but patient and complacent. I ventured once to ask him how the master of so rich a house in the city, of so many slaves, of so many horses and mules, of such cornfields, of such pastures, of such gardens, woods, and fountains, should experience any delight or satisfaction in infesting the open sea, the high-road of nations. Instead of answering my question, he asked me in return whether I would not respect any relative of mine who avenged his country, enriched himself by his bravery, and endeared to him his friends and relatives by his bounty. On my reply in the affirmative, he said that his family had been deprived of possessions in Spain much more valuable than all the ships and cargoes he could ever hope to capture, and that the remains of his nation were threatened with ruin and expulsion. 'I do not fight,' said he, 'whenever it suits the convenience, or gratifies the malignity, or the caprice of two silly, quarrelsome princes, drawing my sword in perfectly good humour, and sheathing it again at word of command, just when I begin to get into a passion. No; I fight on my own account; not as a hired assassin, or still baser journeyman.' _Eugenius._ It appears then really that the Infidels have some semblances of magnanimity and generosity? _Filippo._ I thought so when I turned over the many changes of fine linen; and I was little short of conviction when I found at the bottom of my chest two hundred Venetian zecchins. _Eugenius._ Corpo di Bacco! Better things, far better things, I would fain do for thee, not exactly of this description; it would excite many heart-burnings. Information has been laid before me, Filippo, that thou art attached to a certain young person, by name Lucrezia, daughter of Francesco Buti, a citizen of Prato. _Filippo._ I acknowledge my attachment: it continues. _Eugenius._ Furthermore, that thou hast offspring by her. _Filippo._ Alas! 'tis undeniable. _Eugenius._ I will not only legitimatize the said offspring by _motu proprio_ and rescript to consistory and chancery.... _Filippo._ Holy Father! Holy Father! For the love of the Virgin, not a word to consistory or chancery of the two hundred zecchins. As I hope for salvation, I have but forty left, and thirty-nine would not serve them. _Eugenius._ Fear nothing. Not only will I perform what I have promised, not only will I give the strictest order that no money be demanded by any officer of my courts, but, under the seal of Saint Peter, I will declare thee and Lucrezia Buti man and wife. _Filippo._ Man and wife! _Eugenius._ Moderate thy transport. _Filippo._ O Holy Father! may I speak? _Eugenius._ Surely she is not the wife of another? _Filippo._ No, indeed. _Eugenius._ Nor within the degrees of consanguinity and affinity? _Filippo._ No, no, no. But ... man and wife! Consistory and chancery are nothing to this fulmination. _Eugenius._ How so? _Filippo._ It is man and wife the first fortnight, but wife and man ever after. The two figures change places: the unit is the decimal and the decimal is the unit. _Eugenius._ What, then, can I do for thee? _Filippo._ I love Lucrezia; let me love her; let her love me. I can make her at any time what she is not; I could never make her again what she is. _Eugenius._ The only thing I can do then is to promise I will forget that I have heard anything about the matter. But, to forget it, I must hear it first. _Filippo._ In the beautiful little town of Prato, reposing in its idleness against the hill that protects it from the north, and looking over fertile meadows, southward to Poggio Cajano, westward to Pistoja, there is the convent of Santa Margarita. I was invited by the sisters to paint an altar-piece for the chapel. A novice of fifteen, my own sweet Lucrezia, came one day alone to see me work at my Madonna. Her blessed countenance had already looked down on every beholder lower by the knees. I myself who made her could almost have worshipped her. _Eugenius._ Not while incomplete; no half-virgin will do. _Filippo._ But there knelt Lucrezia! there she knelt! first looking with devotion at the Madonna, then with admiring wonder and grateful delight at the artist. Could so little a heart be divided? 'Twere a pity! There was enough for me; there is never enough for the Madonna. Resolving on a sudden that the object of my love should be the object of adoration to thousands, born and unborn, I swept my brush across the maternal face, and left a blank in heaven. The little girl screamed; I pressed her to my bosom. _Eugenius._ In the chapel? _Filippo._ I knew not where I was; I thought I was in Paradise. _Eugenius._ If it was not in the chapel, the sin is venial. But a brush against a Madonna's mouth is worse than a beard against her votary's. _Filippo._ I thought so too, Holy Father! _Eugenius._ Thou sayest thou hast forty zecchins; I will try in due season to add forty more. The fisherman must not venture to measure forces with the pirate. Farewell! I pray God my son Filippo, to have thee alway in His holy keeping. FOOTNOTE: [9] Little boys, wearing clerical habits, are often called _abbati_. TASSO AND CORNELIA _Tasso._ She is dead, Cornelia! she is dead! _Cornelia._ Torquato! my Torquato! after so many years of separation do I bend once more your beloved head to my embrace? _Tasso._ She is dead! _Cornelia._ Tenderest of brothers! bravest and best and most unfortunate of men! What, in the name of heaven, so bewilders you? _Tasso._ Sister! sister! sister! I could not save her. _Cornelia._ Certainly it was a sad event; and they who are out of spirits may be ready to take it for an evil omen. At this season of the year the vintagers are joyous and negligent. _Tasso._ How! What is this? _Cornelia._ The little girl was crushed, they say, by a wheel of the car laden with grapes, as she held out a handful of vine-leaves to one of the oxen. And did you happen to be there at the moment? _Tasso._ So then the little too can suffer! the ignorant, the indigent, the unaspiring! Poor child! She was kind-hearted, else never would calamity have befallen her. _Cornelia._ I wish you had not seen the accident. _Tasso._ I see it? I? I saw it not. No other is crushed where I am. The little girl died for her kindness! Natural death! _Cornelia._ Be calm, be composed, my brother! _Tasso._ You would not require me to be composed or calm if you comprehended a thousandth part of my sufferings. _Cornelia._ Peace! peace! we know them all. _Tasso._ Who has dared to name them? Imprisonment, derision, madness. _Cornelia._ Hush! sweet Torquato! If ever these existed, they are past. _Tasso._ You do think they are sufferings? ay? _Cornelia._ Too surely. _Tasso._ No, not too surely: I will not have that answer. They would have been; but Leonora was then living. Unmanly as I am! did I complain of them? and while she was left me? _Cornelia._ My own Torquato! is there no comfort in a sister's love? Is there no happiness but under the passions? Think, O my brother, how many courts there are in Italy: are the princes more fortunate than you? Which among them all loves truly, deeply, and virtuously? Among them all is there any one, for his genius, for his generosity, for his gentleness, ay, for his mere humanity, worthy to be beloved? _Tasso._ Princes! talk to me of princes! How much cross-grained wood a little gypsum covers! a little carmine quite beautifies! Wet your forefinger with your spittle; stick a broken gold-leaf on the sinciput; clip off a beggar's beard to make it tresses; kiss it; fall down before it; worship it. Are you not irradiated by the light of its countenance? Princes! princes! Italian princes! Estes! What matters that costly carrion? Who thinks about it? [_After a pause._] She is dead! She is dead! _Cornelia._ We have not heard it here. _Tasso._ At Sorrento you hear nothing but the light surges of the sea, and the sweet sprinkles of the guitar. _Cornelia._ Suppose the worst to be true. _Tasso._ Always, always. _Cornelia._ If she ceases, as then perhaps she must, to love and to lament you, think gratefully, contentedly, devoutly, that her arms had clasped your neck before they were crossed upon her bosom, in that long sleep which you have rendered placid, and from which your harmonious voice shall once more awaken her. Yes, Torquato! her bosom had throbbed to yours, often and often, before the organ peal shook the fringes round the catafalque. Is not this much, from one so high, so beautiful? _Tasso._ Much? yes; for abject me. But I did so love her! so love her! _Cornelia._ Ah! let the tears flow: she sends you that balm from heaven. _Tasso._ So love her did poor Tasso! Else, O Cornelia, it had indeed been much. I thought, in the simplicity of my heart, that God was as great as an emperor, and could bestow and had bestowed on me as much as the German had conferred or could confer on his vassal. No part of my insanity was ever held in such ridicule as this. And yet the idea cleaves to me strangely, and is liable to stick to my shroud. _Cornelia._ Woe betide the woman who bids you to forget that woman who has loved you: she sins against her sex. Leonora was unblameable. Never think ill of her for what you have suffered. _Tasso._ Think ill of her? I? I? I? No; those we love, we love for everything; even for the pain they have given us. But she gave me none; it was where she was not that pain was. _Cornelia._ Surely, if love and sorrow are destined for companionship, there is no reason why the last comer of the two should supersede the first. _Tasso._ Argue with me, and you drive me into darkness. I am easily persuaded and led on while no reasons are thrown before me. With these you have made my temples throb again. Just heaven! dost thou grant us fairer fields, and wider, for the whirlwind to lay waste? Dost thou build us up habitations above the street, above the palace, above the citadel, for the plague to enter and carouse in? Has not my youth paid its dues, paid its penalties? Cannot our griefs come first, while we have strength to bear them? The fool! the fool! who thinks it a misfortune that his love is unrequited. Happier young man! look at the violets until thou drop asleep on them. Ah! but thou must awake! _Cornelia._ O heavens! what must you have suffered! for a man's heart is sensitive in proportion to its greatness. _Tasso._ And a woman's? _Cornelia._ Alas! I know not; but I think it can be no other. Comfort thee, comfort thee, dear Torquato! _Tasso._ Then do not rest thy face upon my arm; it so reminds me of her. And thy tears too! they melt me into her grave. _Cornelia._ Hear you not her voice as it appeals to you, saying to you, as the priests around have been saying to _her_, Blessed soul! rest in peace? _Tasso._ I heard it not; and yet I am sure she said it. A thousand times has she repeated it, laying her head on my heart to quiet it, simple girl! She told it to rest in peace ... and she went from me! Insatiable love! ever self-torturer, never self-destroyer! the world, with all its weight of miseries, cannot crush thee, cannot keep thee down. Generally men's tears, like the droppings of certain springs, only harden and petrify what they fall on; but mine sank deep into a tender heart, and were its very blood. Never will I believe she has left me utterly. Oftentimes, and long before her departure, I fancied we were in heaven together. I fancied it in the fields, in the gardens, in the palace, in the prison. I fancied it in the broad daylight, when my eyes were open, when blessed spirits drew around me that golden circle which one only of earth's inhabitants could enter. Oftentimes in my sleep also I fancied it; and sometimes in the intermediate state, in that serenity which breathes about the transported soul, enjoying its pure and perfect rest, a span below the feet of the Immortal. _Cornelia._ She has not left you; do not disturb her peace by these repinings. _Tasso._ She will bear with them. Thou knowest not what she was, Cornelia; for I wrote to thee about her while she seemed but human. In my hours of sadness, not only her beautiful form, but her very voice bent over me. How girlish in the gracefulness of her lofty form! how pliable in her majesty! what composure at my petulance and reproaches! what pity in her reproofs! Like the air that angels breathe in the metropolitan temple of the Christian world, her soul at every season preserved one temperature. But it was when she could and did love me! Unchanged must ever be the blessed one who has leaned in fond security on the unchangeable. The purifying flame shoots upward, and is the glory that encircles their brows when they meet above. _Cornelia._ Indulge in these delightful thoughts, my Torquato! and believe that your love is and ought to be imperishable as your glory. Generations of men move forward in endless procession to consecrate and commemorate both. Colour-grinders and gilders, year after year, are bargained with to refresh the crumbling monuments and tarnished decorations of rude, unregarded royalty, and to fasten the nails that cramp the crown upon its head. Meanwhile, in the laurels of my Torquato there will always be one leaf above man's reach, above time's wrath and injury, inscribed with the name of Leonora. _Tasso._ O Jerusalem! I have not then sung in vain the Holy Sepulchre. _Cornelia._ After such devotion of your genius, you have undergone too many misfortunes. _Tasso._ Congratulate the man who has had many, and may have more. I have had, I have, I can have, one only. _Cornelia._ Life runs not smoothly at all seasons, even with the happiest; but after a long course, the rocks subside, the views widen, and it flows on more equably at the end. _Tasso._ Have the stars smooth surfaces? No, no; but how they shine! _Cornelia._ Capable of thoughts so exalted, so far above the earth we dwell on, why suffer any to depress and anguish you? _Tasso._ Cornelia, Cornelia! the mind has within its temples and porticoes and palaces and towers: the mind has under it, ready for the course, steeds brighter than the sun and stronger than the storm; and beside them stand winged chariots, more in number than the Psalmist hath attributed to the Almighty. The mind, I tell thee again, hath its hundred gates, compared whereto the Theban are but willow wickets; and all those hundred gates can genius throw open. But there are some that groan heavily on their hinges, and the hand of God alone can close them. _Cornelia._ Torquato has thrown open those of His holy temple; Torquato hath stood, another angel, at His tomb; and am I the sister of Torquato? Kiss me, my brother, and let my tears run only from my pride and joy! Princes have bestowed knighthood on the worthy and unworthy; thou hast called forth those princes from their ranks, pushing back the arrogant and presumptuous of them like intrusive varlets, and conferring on the bettermost crowns and robes, imperishable and unfading. _Tasso._ I seem to live back into those days. I feel the helmet on my head; I wave the standard over it: brave men smile upon me; beautiful maidens pull them gently back by the scarf, and will not let them break my slumber, nor undraw the curtain. Corneliolina!... _Cornelia._ Well, my dear brother! why do you stop so suddenly in the midst of them? They are the pleasantest and best company, and they make you look quite happy and joyous. _Tasso._ Corneliolina, dost thou remember Bergamo? What city was ever so celebrated for honest and valiant men, in all classes, or for beautiful girls! There is but one class of those: Beauty is above all ranks; the true Madonna, the patroness and bestower of felicity, the queen of heaven. _Cornelia._ Hush, Torquato, hush! talk not so. _Tasso._ What rivers, how sunshiny and revelling, are the Brembo and the Serio! What a country the Valtellina! I went back to our father's house, thinking to find thee again, my little sister; thinking to kick away thy ball of yellow silk as thou wast stooping for it, to make thee run after me and beat me. I woke early in the morning; thou wert grown up and gone. Away to Sorrento: I knew the road: a few strides brought me back: here I am. To-morrow, my Cornelia, we will walk together, as we used to do, into the cool and quiet caves on the shore; and we will catch the little breezes as they come in and go out again on the backs of the jocund waves. _Cornelia._ We will indeed to-morrow; but before we set out we must take a few hours' rest, that we may enjoy our ramble the better. _Tasso._ Our Sorrentines, I see, are grown rich and avaricious. They have uprooted the old pomegranate hedges, and have built high walls to prohibit the wayfarer from their vineyards. _Cornelia._ I have a basket of grapes for you in the book-room that overlooks our garden. _Tasso._ Does the old twisted sage-tree grow still against the window? _Cornelia._ It harboured too many insects at last, and there was always a nest of scorpions in the crevice. _Tasso._ Oh! what a prince of a sage-tree! And the well, too, with its bucket of shining metal, large enough for the largest cocomero to cool in it for dinner. _Cornelia._ The well, I assure you, is as cool as ever. _Tasso._ Delicious! delicious! And the stone-work round it, bearing no other marks of waste than my pruning-hook and dagger left behind? _Cornelia._ None whatever. _Tasso._ White in that place no longer; there has been time enough for it to become all of one colour: grey, mossy, half-decayed. _Cornelia._ No, no; not even the rope has wanted repair. _Tasso._ Who sings yonder? _Cornelia._ Enchanter! No sooner did you say the word cocomero than here comes a boy carrying one upon his head. _Tasso._ Listen! listen! I have read in some book or other those verses long ago. They are not unlike my _Aminta_. The very words! _Cornelia._ Purifier of love, and humanizer of ferocity, how many, my Torquato, will your gentle thoughts make happy! _Tasso._ At this moment I almost think I am one among them.[10] _Cornelia._ Be quite persuaded of it. Come, brother, come with me. You shall bathe your heated brow and weary limbs in the chamber of your childhood. It is there we are always the most certain of repose. The boy shall sing to you those sweet verses; and we will reward him with a slice of his own fruit. _Tasso._ He deserves it; cut it thick. _Cornelia._ Come then, my truant! Come along, my sweet smiling Torquato! _Tasso._ The passage is darker than ever. Is this the way to the little court? Surely those are not the steps that lead down toward the bath? Oh yes! we are right; I smell the lemon-blossoms. Beware of the old wilding that bears them; it may catch your veil; it may scratch your fingers! Pray, take care: it has many thorns about it. And now, Leonora! you shall hear my last verses! Lean your ear a little toward me; for I must repeat them softly under this low archway, else others may hear them too. Ah! you press my hand once more. Drop it, drop it! or the verses will sink into my breast again, and lie there silent! Good girl! Many, well I know, there are Ready in your joys to share, And (I never blame it) you Are almost as ready too. But when comes the darker day, And those friends have dropt away, Which is there among them all You should, if you could, recall? One who wisely loves and well Hears and shares the griefs you tell; Him you ever call apart When the springs o'erflow the heart; For you know that he alone Wishes they were _but_ his own. Give, while these he may divide, Smiles to all the world beside. _Cornelia._ We are now in the full light of the chamber; cannot you remember it, having looked so intently all around? _Tasso._ O sister! I could have slept another hour. You thought I wanted rest: why did you waken me so early? I could have slept another hour or longer. What a dream! But I am calm and happy. _Cornelia._ May you never more be otherwise! Indeed, he cannot be whose last verses are such as those. _Tasso._ Have you written any since that morning? _Cornelia._ What morning? _Tasso._ When you caught the swallow in my curtains, and trod upon my knees in catching it, luckily with naked feet. The little girl of thirteen laughed at the outcry of her brother Torquatino, and sang without a blush her earliest lay. _Cornelia._ I do not recollect it. _Tasso._ I do. Rondinello! rondinello! Tu sei nero, ma sei bello. Cosa fà se tu sei nero? Rondinello! sei il primiero De' volanti, palpitanti, (E vi sono quanti quanti!) Mai tenuto a questo petto, E perciò sei il mio diletto.[11] _Cornelia._ Here is the cocomero; it cannot be more insipid. Try it. _Tasso._ Where is the boy who brought it? where is the boy who sang my _Aminta_? Serve him first; give him largely. Cut deeper; the knife is too short: deeper; mia brava Corneliolina! quite through all the red, and into the middle of the seeds. Well done! FOOTNOTES: [10] The miseries of Tasso arose not only from the imagination and the heart. In the metropolis of the Christian world, with many admirers and many patrons, bishops, cardinals, princes, he was left destitute, and almost famished. These are his own words: '_Appena_ in questo stato ho comprato _due meloni_: e benchè io sia stato _quasi sempre infermo_, molte volte mi sono contentato del manzo: e la ministra di latte o di zucca, _quando ho potuto averne_, mi è stata in vece di delizie.' In another part he says that he was unable to pay the carriage of a parcel. No wonder; if he had not wherewithal to buy enough of zucca for a meal. Even had he been in health and appetite, he might have satisfied his hunger with it for about five farthings, and have left half for supper. And now a word on his insanity. Having been so imprudent not only as to make it too evident in his poetry that he was the lover of Leonora, but also to signify (not very obscurely) that his love was returned, he much perplexed the Duke of Ferrara, who, with great discretion, suggested to him the necessity of feigning madness. The lady's honour required it from a brother; and a true lover, to convince the world, would embrace the project with alacrity. But there was no reason why the seclusion should be in a dungeon, or why exercise and air should be interdicted. This cruelty, and perhaps his uncertainty of Leonora's compassion, may well be imagined to have produced at last the malady he had feigned. But did Leonora love Tasso as a man would be loved? If we wish to do her honour, let us hope it: for what greater glory can there be, than to have estimated at the full value so exalted a genius, so affectionate and so generous a heart! [11] The author wrote the verses first in English, but he found it easy to write them better in Italian: they stood in the text as below: they only do for a girl of thirteen: 'Swallow! swallow! though so jetty Are your pinions, you are pretty: And what matter were it though You were blacker than a crow? Of the many birds that fly (And how many pass me by!) You 're the first I ever prest, Of the many, to my breast: Therefore it is very right You should be my own delight.' LA FONTAINE AND DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULT _La Fontaine._ I am truly sensible of the honour I receive, M. de la Rochefoucault, in a visit from a personage so distinguished by his birth and by his genius. Pardon my ambition, if I confess to you that I have long and ardently wished for the good fortune, which I never could promise myself, of knowing you personally. _Rochefoucault._ My dear M. de la Fontaine! _La Fontaine._ Not '_de_ la', not '_de_ la'. I am _La_ Fontaine, purely and simply. _Rochefoucault._ The whole; not derivative. You appear, in the midst of your purity, to have been educated at court, in the lap of the ladies. What was the last day (pardon!) I had the misfortune to miss you there? _La Fontaine._ I never go to court. They say one cannot go without silk stockings; and I have only thread: plenty of them indeed, thank God! Yet, would you believe it? Nanon, in putting a _solette_ to the bottom of one, last week, sewed it so carelessly, she made a kind of cord across: and I verily believe it will lame me for life; for I walked the whole morning upon it. _Rochefoucault._ She ought to be whipped. _La Fontaine._ I thought so too, and grew the warmer at being unable to find a wisp of osier or a roll of packthread in the house. Barely had I begun with my garter, when in came the Bishop of Grasse, my old friend Godeau, and another lord, whose name he mentioned, and they both interceded for her so long and so touchingly, that at last I was fain to let her rise up and go. I never saw men look down on the erring and afflicted more compassionately. The bishop was quite concerned for me also. But the other, although he professed to feel even more, and said that it must surely be the pain of purgatory to me, took a pinch of snuff, opened his waistcoat, drew down his ruffles, and seemed rather more indifferent. _Rochefoucault._ Providentially, in such moving scenes, the worst is soon over. But Godeau's friend was not too sensitive. _La Fontaine._ Sensitive! no more than if he had been educated at the butcher's or the Sorbonne. _Rochefoucault._ I am afraid there are as many hard hearts under satin waistcoats as there are ugly visages under the same material in miniature cases. _La Fontaine._ My lord, I could show you a miniature case which contains your humble servant, in which the painter has done what no tailor in his senses would do; he has given me credit for a coat of violet silk, with silver frogs as large as tortoises. But I am loath to get up for it while the generous heart of this dog (if I mentioned his name he would jump up) places such confidence on my knee. _Rochefoucault._ Pray do not move on any account; above all, lest you should disturb that amiable grey cat, fast asleep in his innocence on your shoulder. _La Fontaine._ Ah, rogue! art thou there? Why! thou hast not licked my face this half-hour. _Rochefoucault._ And more, too, I should imagine. I do not judge from his somnolency, which, if he were President of the Parliament, could not be graver, but from his natural sagacity. Cats weigh practicabilities. What sort of tongue has he? _La Fontaine._ He has the roughest tongue and the tenderest heart of any cat in Paris. If you observe the colour of his coat, it is rather blue than grey; a certain indication of goodness in these contemplative creatures. _Rochefoucault._ We were talking of his tongue alone; by which cats, like men, are flatterers. _La Fontaine._ Ah! you gentlemen of the court are much mistaken in thinking that vices have so extensive a range. There are some of our vices, like some of our diseases, from which the quadrupeds are exempt; and those, both diseases and vices, are the most discreditable. _Rochefoucault._ I do not bear patiently any evil spoken of the court: for it must be acknowledged, by the most malicious, that the court is the purifier of the whole nation. _La Fontaine._ I know little of the court, and less of the whole nation; but how can this be? _Rochefoucault._ It collects all ramblers and gamblers; all the market-men and market-women who deal in articles which God has thrown into their baskets, without any trouble on their part; all the seducers and all who wish to be seduced; all the duellists who erase their crimes with their swords, and sweat out their cowardice with daily practice; all the nobles whose patents of nobility lie in gold snuff-boxes, or have worn Mechlin ruffles, or are deposited within the archives of knee-deep waistcoats; all stock-jobbers and church-jobbers, the black-legged and the red-legged game, the flower of the _justaucorps_, the _robe_, and the _soutane_. If these were spread over the surface of France, instead of close compressure in the court or cabinet, they would corrupt the whole country in two years. As matters now stand, it will require a quarter of a century to effect it. _La Fontaine._ Am I not right then in preferring my beasts to yours? But if yours were loose, mine (as you prove to me) would be the last to suffer by it, poor dear creatures! Speaking of cats, I would have avoided all personality that might be offensive to them: I would not exactly have said, in so many words, that, by their tongues, they are flatterers, like men. Language may take a turn advantageously in favour of our friends. True, we resemble all animals in something. I am quite ashamed and mortified that your lordship, or anybody, should have had the start of me in this reflection. When a cat flatters with his tongue he is not insincere: you may safely take it for a real kindness. He is loyal, M. de la Rochefoucault! my word for him, he is loyal. Observe too, if you please, no cat ever licks you when he wants anything from you; so that there is nothing of baseness in such an act of adulation, if we must call it so. For my part, I am slow to designate by so foul a name, that (be it what it may) which is subsequent to a kindness. Cats ask plainly for what they want. _Rochefoucault._ And, if they cannot get it by protocols they get it by invasion and assault. _La Fontaine._ No! no! usually they go elsewhere, and fondle those from whom they obtain it. In this I see no resemblance to invaders and conquerors. I draw no parallels: I would excite no heart-burnings between us and them. Let all have their due. I do not like to lift this creature off, for it would waken him, else I could find out, by some subsequent action, the reason why he has not been on the alert to lick my cheek for so long a time. _Rochefoucault._ Cats are wary and provident. He would not enter into any contest with you, however friendly. He only licks your face, I presume, while your beard is but a match for his tongue. _La Fontaine._ Ha! you remind me. Indeed I did begin to think my beard was rather of the roughest; for yesterday Madame de Rambouillet sent me a plate of strawberries, the first of the season, and raised (would you believe it?) under glass. One of these strawberries was dropping from my lips, and I attempted to stop it. When I thought it had fallen to the ground, 'Look for it, Nanon; pick it up and eat it,' said I. 'Master!' cried the wench, 'your beard has skewered and spitted it.' 'Honest girl,' I answered, 'come, cull it from the bed of its adoption.' I had resolved to shave myself this morning: but our wisest and best resolutions too often come to nothing, poor mortals! _Rochefoucault._ We often do very well everything but the only thing we hope to do best of all; and our projects often drop from us by their weight. A little while ago your friend Molière exhibited a remarkable proof of it. _La Fontaine._ Ah, poor Molière! the best man in the world; but flighty, negligent, thoughtless. He throws himself into other men, and does not remember where. The sight of an eagle, M. de la Rochefoucault, but the memory of a fly. _Rochefoucault_. I will give you an example: but perhaps it is already known to you. _La Fontaine._ Likely enough. We have each so many friends, neither of us can trip but the other is invited to the laugh. Well; I am sure he has no malice, and I hope I have none: but who can see his own faults? _Rochefoucault._ He had brought out a new edition of his comedies. _La Fontaine._ There will be fifty; there will be a hundred: nothing in our language, or in any, is so delightful, so graceful; I will add, so clear at once and so profound. _Rochefoucault._ You are among the few who, seeing well his other qualities, see that Molière is also profound. In order to present the new edition to the dauphin, he had put on a sky-blue velvet coat, powdered with fleurs-de-lis. He laid the volume on his library table; and, resolving that none of the courtiers should have an opportunity of ridiculing him for anything like absence of mind, he returned to his bedroom, which, as may often be the case in the economy of poets, is also his dressing-room. Here he surveyed himself in his mirror, as well as the creeks and lagoons in it would permit. _La Fontaine._ I do assure you, from my own observation, M. de la Rochefoucault, that his mirror is a splendid one. I should take it to be nearly three feet high, reckoning the frame, with the Cupid above and the elephant under. I suspected it was the present of some great lady; and indeed I have since heard as much. _Rochefoucault._ Perhaps then the whole story may be quite as fabulous as the part of it which I have been relating. _La Fontaine._ In that case, I may be able to set you right again. _Rochefoucault._ He found his peruke a model of perfection; tight, yet easy; not an inch more on one side than on the other. The black patch on the forehead.... _La Fontaine._ Black patch too! I would have given a fifteen-sous piece to have caught him with that black patch. _Rochefoucault._ He found it lovely, marvellous, irresistible. Those on each cheek.... _La Fontaine._ Do you tell me he had one on each cheek? _Rochefoucault._ Symmetrically. The cravat was of its proper descent, and with its appropriate charge of the best Strasburg snuff upon it. The waistcoat, for a moment, puzzled and perplexed him. He was not quite sure whether the right number of buttons were in their holes; nor how many above, nor how many below, it was the fashion of the week to leave without occupation. Such a piece of ignorance is enough to disgrace any courtier on earth. He was in the act of striking his forehead with desperation; but he thought of the patch, fell on his knees, and thanked Heaven for the intervention. _La Fontaine._ Just like him! just like him! good soul! _Rochefoucault._ The breeches ... ah! those require attention: all proper: everything in its place. Magnificent. The stockings rolled up, neither too loosely nor too negligently. A picture! The buckles in the shoes ... all but one ... soon set to rights ... well thought of! And now the sword ... ah, that cursed sword! it will bring at least one man to the ground if it has its own way much longer ... up with it! up with it higher.... _Allons!_ we are out of danger. _La Fontaine._ Delightful! I have him before my eyes. What simplicity! aye, what simplicity! _Rochefoucault._ Now for hat. Feather in? Five at least. Bravo! He took up hat and plumage, extended his arm to the full length, raised it a foot above his head, lowered it thereon, opened his fingers, and let them fall again at his side. _La Fontaine._ Something of the comedian in that; aye, M. de la Rochefoucault? But, on the stage or off, all is natural in Molière. _Rochefoucault._ Away he went: he reached the palace, stood before the dauphin.... O consternation! O despair! 'Morbleu! bête que je suis,' exclaimed the hapless man, 'le livre, où donc est-il?' You are forcibly struck, I perceive, by this adventure of your friend. _La Fontaine._ Strange coincidence! quite unaccountable! There are agents at work in our dreams, M. de la Rochefoucault, which we shall never see out of them, on this side the grave. [_To himself._] Sky-blue? no. Fleurs-de-lis? bah! bah! Patches? I never wore one in my life. _Rochefoucault._ It well becomes your character for generosity, M. La Fontaine, to look grave, and ponder, and ejaculate, on a friend's untoward accident, instead of laughing, as those who little know you, might expect. I beg your pardon for relating the occurrence. _La Fontaine._ Right or wrong, I cannot help laughing any longer. Comical, by my faith! above the tiptop of comedy. Excuse my flashes and dashes and rushes of merriment. Incontrollable! incontrollable! Indeed the laughter is immoderate. And you all the while are sitting as grave as a judge; I mean a criminal one; who has nothing to do but to keep up his popularity by sending his rogues to the gallows. The civil indeed have much weighty matter on their minds: they must displease one party: and sometimes a doubt arises whether the fairer hand or the fuller shall turn the balance. _Rochefoucault._ I congratulate you on the return of your gravity and composure. _La Fontaine._ Seriously now: all my lifetime I have been the plaything of dreams. Sometimes they have taken such possession of me, that nobody could persuade me afterward they were other than real events. Some are very oppressive, very painful, M. de la Rochefoucault! I have never been able, altogether, to disembarrass my head of the most wonderful vision that ever took possession of any man's. There are some truly important differences, but in many respects this laughable adventure of my innocent, honest friend Molière seemed to have befallen myself. I can only account for it by having heard the tale when I was half asleep. _Rochefoucault._ Nothing more probable. _La Fontaine._ You absolutely have relieved me from an incubus. _Rochefoucault._ I do not yet see how. _La Fontaine._ No longer ago than when you entered this chamber, I would have sworn that I myself had gone to the Louvre, that I myself had been commanded to attend the dauphin, that I myself had come into his presence, had fallen on my knee, and cried, 'Peste! où est donc le livre?' Ah, M. de la Rochefoucault, permit me to embrace you: this is really to find a friend at court. _Rochefoucault._ My visit is even more auspicious than I could have ventured to expect: it was chiefly for the purpose of asking your permission to make another at my return to Paris.... I am forced to go into the country on some family affairs: but hearing that you have spoken favourably of my _Maxims_, I presume to express my satisfaction and delight at your good opinion. _La Fontaine._ Pray, M. de la Rochefoucault, do me the favour to continue here a few minutes. I would gladly reason with you on some of your doctrines. _Rochefoucault._ For the pleasure of hearing your sentiments on the topics I have treated, I will, although it is late, steal a few minutes from the court, of which I must take my leave on parting for the province. _La Fontaine._ Are you quite certain that all your _Maxims_ are true, or, what is of greater consequence, that they are all original? I have lately read a treatise written by an Englishman, Mr. Hobbes; so loyal a man that, while others tell you kings are appointed by God, he tells you God is appointed by kings. _Rochefoucault._ Ah! such are precisely the men we want. If he establishes this verity, the rest will follow. _La Fontaine._ He does not seem to care so much about the rest. In his treatise I find the ground-plan of your chief positions. _Rochefoucault._ I have indeed looked over his publication; and we agree on the natural depravity of man. _La Fontaine._ Reconsider your expression. It appears to me that what is natural is not depraved: that depravity is deflection from nature. Let it pass: I cannot, however, concede to you that the generality of men are bad. Badness is accidental, like disease. We find more tempers good than bad, where proper care is taken in proper time. _Rochefoucault._ Care is not nature. _La Fontaine._ Nature is soon inoperative without it; so soon indeed as to allow no opportunity for experiment or hypothesis. Life itself requires care, and more continually than tempers and morals do. The strongest body ceases to be a body in a few days without a supply of food. When we speak of men being naturally bad or good, we mean susceptible and retentive and communicative of them. In this case (and there can be no other true or ostensible one) I believe that the more are good; and nearly in the same proportion as there are animals and plants produced healthy and vigorous than wayward and weakly. Strange is the opinion of Mr. Hobbes, that, when God hath poured so abundantly His benefits on other creatures, the only one capable of great good should be uniformly disposed to greater evil. _Rochefoucault._ Yet Holy Writ, to which Hobbes would reluctantly appeal, countenances the supposition. _La Fontaine._ The Jews, above all nations, were morose and splenetic. Nothing is holy to me that lessens in my view the beneficence of my Creator. If you could show Him ungentle and unkind in a single instance, you would render myriads of men so, throughout the whole course of their lives, and those too among the most religious. The less that people talk about God the better. He has left us a design to fill up: He has placed the canvas, the colours, and the pencils, within reach; His directing hand is over ours incessantly; it is our business to follow it, and neither to turn round and argue with our Master, nor to kiss and fondle Him. We must mind our lesson, and not neglect our time: for the room is closed early, and the lights are suspended in another, where no one works. If every man would do all the good he might within an hour's walk from his house, he would live the happier and the longer: for nothing is so conducive to longevity as the union of activity and content. But, like children, we deviate from the road, however well we know it, and run into mire and puddles in despite of frown and ferule. _Rochefoucault._ Go on, M. La Fontaine! pray go on. We are walking in the same labyrinth, always within call, always within sight of each other. We set out at its two extremities, and shall meet at last. _La Fontaine._ I doubt it. From deficiency of care proceed many vices, both in men and children, and more still from care taken improperly. Mr. Hobbes attributes not only the order and peace of society, but equity and moderation and every other virtue, to the coercion and restriction of the laws. The laws, as now constituted, do a great deal of good; they also do a great deal of mischief. They transfer more property from the right owner in six months than all the thieves of the kingdom do in twelve. What the thieves take they soon disseminate abroad again; what the laws take they hoard. The thief takes a part of your property: he who prosecutes the thief for you takes another part: he who condemns the thief goes to the tax-gatherer and takes the third. Power has been hitherto occupied in no employment but in keeping down Wisdom. Perhaps the time may come when Wisdom shall exert her energy in repressing the sallies of Power. _Rochefoucault._ I think it more probable that they will agree; that they will call together their servants of all liveries, to collect what they can lay their hands upon; and that meanwhile they will sit together like good housewives, making nets from our purses to cover the coop for us. If you would be plump and in feather, pick up your millet and be quiet in your darkness. Speculate on nothing here below, and I promise you a nosegay in Paradise. _La Fontaine._ Believe me, I shall be most happy to receive it there at your hands, my lord duke. The greater number of men, I am inclined to think, with all the defects of education, all the frauds committed on their credulity, all the advantages taken of their ignorance and supineness, are disposed, on most occasions, rather to virtue than to vice, rather to the kindly affections than the unkindly, rather to the social than the selfish. _Rochefoucault._ Here we differ: and were my opinion the same as yours, my book would be little read and less commended. _La Fontaine._ Why think so? _Rochefoucault._ For this reason. Every man likes to hear evil of all men: every man is delighted to take the air of the common, though not a soul will consent to stand within his own allotment. No enclosure act! no finger-posts! You may call every creature under heaven fool and rogue, and your auditor will join with you heartily: hint to him the slightest of his own defects or foibles, and he draws the rapier. You and he are the judges of the world, but not its denizens. _La Fontaine._ Mr. Hobbes has taken advantage of these weaknesses. In his dissertation he betrays the timidity and malice of his character. It must be granted he reasons well, according to the view he has taken of things; but he has given no proof whatever that his view is a correct one. I will believe that it is, when I am persuaded that sickness is the natural state of the body, and health the unnatural. If you call him a sound philosopher, you may call a mummy a sound man. Its darkness, its hardness, its forced uprightness, and the place in which you find it, may commend it to you; give me rather some weakness and peccability, with vital warmth and human sympathies. A shrewd reasoner in one thing, a sound philosopher is another. I admire your power and precision. Monks will admonish us how little the author of the _Maxims_ knows of the world; and heads of colleges will cry out 'a libel on human nature!' but when they hear your titles, and, above all, your credit at court, they will cast back cowl, and peruke, and lick your boots. You start with great advantages. Throwing off from a dukedom, you are sure of enjoying, if not the tongue of these puzzlers, the full cry of the more animating, and will certainly be as long-lived as the imperfection of our language will allow. I consider your _Maxims_ as a broken ridge of hills, on the shady side of which you are fondest of taking your exercise: but the same ridge hath also a sunny one. You attribute (let me say it again) all actions to self-interest. Now, a sentiment of interest must be preceded by calculation, long or brief, right or erroneous. Tell me then in what region lies the origin of that pleasure which a family in the country feels on the arrival of an unexpected friend. I say a family in the country; because the sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight. If I may judge from the few examples I have been in a position to see, no earthly one can be greater. There are pleasures which lie near the surface, and which are blocked up by artificial ones, or are diverted by some mechanical scheme, or are confined by some stiff evergreen vista of low advantage. But these pleasures do occasionally burst forth in all their brightness; and, if ever you shall by chance find one of them, you will sit by it, I hope, complacently and cheerfully, and turn toward it the kindliest aspect of your meditations. _Rochefoucault._ Many, indeed most people, will differ from me. Nothing is quite the same to the intellect of any two men, much less of all. When one says to another, 'I am entirely of your opinion,' he uses in general an easy and indifferent phrase, believing in its accuracy, without examination, without thought. The nearest resemblance in opinions, if we could trace every line of it, would be found greatly more divergent than the nearest in the human form or countenance, and in the same proportion as the varieties of mental qualities are more numerous and fine than of the bodily. Hence I do not expect nor wish that my opinions should in all cases be similar to those of others: but in many I shall be gratified if, by just degrees and after a long survey, those of others approximate to mine. Nor does this my sentiment spring from a love of power, as in many good men quite unconsciously, when they would make proselytes, since I shall see few and converse with fewer of them, and profit in no way by their adherence and favour; but it springs from a natural and a cultivated love of all truths whatever, and from a certainty that these delivered by me are conducive to the happiness and dignity of man. You shake your head. _La Fontaine._ Make it out. _Rochefoucault._ I have pointed out to him at what passes he hath deviated from his true interest, and where he hath mistaken selfishness for generosity, coldness for judgment, contraction of heart for policy, rank for merit, pomp for dignity; of all mistakes, the commonest and the greatest. I am accused of paradox and distortion. On paradox I shall only say, that every new moral truth has been called so. Inexperienced and negligent observers see no difference in the operations of ravelling and unravelling: they never come close enough: they despise plain work. _La Fontaine._ The more we simplify things, the better we descry their substances and qualities. A good writer will not coil them up and press them into the narrowest possible space, nor macerate them into such particles that nothing shall be remaining of their natural contexture. You are accused of this too, by such as have forgotten your title-page, and who look for treatises where maxims only have been promised. Some of them perhaps are spinning out sermons and dissertations from the poorest paragraph in the volume. _Rochefoucault._ Let them copy and write as they please; against or for, modestly or impudently. I have hitherto had no assailant who is not of too slender a make to be detained an hour in the stocks he had unwarily put his foot into. If you hear of any, do not tell of them. On the subjects of my remarks, had others thought as I do, my labour would have been spared me. I am ready to point out the road where I know it, to whosoever wants it; but I walk side by side with few or none. _La Fontaine._ We usually like those roads which show us the fronts of our friends' houses and the pleasure-grounds about them, and the smooth garden-walks, and the trim espaliers, and look at them with more satisfaction than at the docks and nettles that are thrown in heaps behind. The _Offices_ of Cicero are imperfect; yet who would not rather guide his children by them than by the line and compass of harder-handed guides; such as Hobbes for instance? _Rochefoucault._ Imperfect as some gentlemen in hoods may call the _Offices_, no founder of a philosophical or of a religious sect has been able to add to them anything important. _La Fontaine._ Pity! that Cicero carried with him no better authorities than reason and humanity. He neither could work miracles, nor damn you for disbelieving them. Had he lived fourscore years later, who knows but he might have been another Simon Peter, and have talked Hebrew as fluently as Latin, all at once! Who knows but we might have heard of his patrimony! who knows but our venerable popes might have claimed dominion from him, as descendant from the kings of Rome! _Rochefoucault._ The hint, some centuries ago, would have made your fortune, and that saintly cat there would have kittened in a mitre. _La Fontaine._ Alas! the hint could have done nothing: Cicero could not have lived later. _Rochefoucault._ I warrant him. Nothing is easier to correct than chronology. There is not a lady in Paris, nor a jockey in Normandy, that is not eligible to a professor's chair in it. I have seen a man's ancestor, whom nobody ever saw before, spring back over twenty generations. Our Vatican Jupiters have as little respect for old Chronos as the Cretan had: they mutilate him when and where they think necessary, limp as he may by the operation. _La Fontaine._ When I think, as you make me do, how ambitious men are, even those whose teeth are too loose (one would fancy) for a bite at so hard an apple as the devil of ambition offers them, I am inclined to believe that we are actuated not so much by selfishness as you represent it, but under another form, the love of power. Not to speak of territorial dominion or political office, and such other things as we usually class under its appurtenances, do we not desire an exclusive control over what is beautiful and lovely? the possession of pleasant fields, of well-situated houses, of cabinets, of images, of pictures, and indeed of many things pleasant to see but useless to possess; even of rocks, of streams, and of fountains? These things, you will tell me, have their utility. True, but not to the wisher, nor does the idea of it enter his mind. Do not we wish that the object of our love should be devoted to us only; and that our children should love us better than their brothers and sisters, or even than the mother who bore them? Love would be arrayed in the purple robe of sovereignty, mildly as he may resolve to exercise his power. _Rochefoucault._ Many things which appear to be incontrovertible are such for their age only, and must yield to others which, in their age, are equally so. There are only a few points that are always above the waves. Plain truths, like plain dishes, are commended by everybody, and everybody leaves them whole. If it were not even more impertinent and presumptuous to praise a great writer in his presence than to censure him in his absence, I would venture to say that your prose, from the few specimens you have given of it, is equal to your verse. Yet, even were I the possessor of such a style as yours, I would never employ it to support my _Maxims_. You would think a writer very impudent and self-sufficient who should quote his own works: to defend them is doing more. We are the worst auxiliaries in the world to the opinions we have brought into the field. Our business is, to measure the ground, and to calculate the forces; then let them try their strength. If the weak assails me, he thinks me weak; if the strong, he thinks me strong. He is more likely to compute ill his own vigour than mine. At all events, I love inquiry, even when I myself sit down. And I am not offended in my walks if my visitor asks me whither does that alley lead. It proves that he is ready to go on with me; that he sees some space before him; and that he believes there may be something worth looking after. _La Fontaine._ You have been standing a long time, my lord duke: I must entreat you to be seated. _Rochefoucault._ Excuse me, my dear M. la Fontaine; I would much rather stand. _La Fontaine._ Mercy on us! have you been upon your legs ever since you rose to leave me? _Rochefoucault._ A change of position is agreeable: a friend always permits it. _La Fontaine._ Sad doings! sad oversight! The other two chairs were sent yesterday evening to be scoured and mended. But that dog is the best tempered dog! an angel of a dog, I do assure you; he would have gone down in a moment, at a word. I am quite ashamed of myself for such inattention. With your sentiments of friendship for me, why could you not have taken the liberty to shove him gently off, rather than give me this uneasiness? _Rochefoucault._ My true and kind friend! we authors are too sedentary; we are heartily glad of standing to converse, whenever we can do it without any restraint on our acquaintance. _La Fontaine._ I must reprove that animal when he uncurls his body. He seems to be dreaming of Paradise and houris. Ay, twitch thy ear, my child! I wish at my heart there were as troublesome a fly about the other: God forgive me! The rogue covers all my clean linen! shirt and cravat! what cares he! _Rochefoucault._ Dogs are not very modest. _La Fontaine._ Never say that, M. de la Rochefoucault! The most modest people upon earth! Look at a dog's eyes, and he half closes them, or gently turns them away, with a motion of the lips, which he licks languidly, and of the tail, which he stirs tremulously, begging your forbearance. I am neither blind nor indifferent to the defects of these good and generous creatures. They are subject to many such as men are subject to: among the rest, they disturb the neighbourhood in the discussion of their private causes; they quarrel and fight on small motives, such as a little bad food, or a little vainglory, or the sex. But it must be something present or near that excites them; and they calculate not the extent of evil they may do or suffer. _Rochefoucault._ Certainly not: how should dogs calculate? _La Fontaine._ I know nothing of the process. I am unable to inform you how they leap over hedges and brooks, with exertion just sufficient, and no more. In regard to honour and a sense of dignity, let me tell you, a dog accepts the subsidies of his friends, but never claims them: a dog would not take the field to obtain power for a son, but would leave the son to obtain it by his own activity and prowess. He conducts his visitor or inmate out a-hunting, and makes a present of the game to him as freely as an emperor to an elector. Fond as he is of slumber, which is indeed one of the pleasantest and best things in the universe, particularly after dinner, he shakes it off as willingly as he would a gadfly, in order to defend his master from theft or violence. Let the robber or assailant speak as courteously as he may, he waives your diplomatical terms, gives his reasons in plain language, and makes war. I could say many other things to his advantage; but I never was malicious, and would rather let both parties plead for themselves; give me the dog, however. _Rochefoucault._ Faith! I will give you both, and never boast of my largess in so doing. _La Fontaine._ I trust I have removed from you the suspicion of selfishness in my client, and I feel it quite as easy to make a properer disposal of another ill attribute, namely cruelty, which we vainly try to shuffle off our own shoulders upon others, by employing the offensive and most unjust term, brutality. But to convince you of my impartiality, now I have defended the dog from the first obloquy, I will defend the man from the last, hoping to make you think better of each. What you attribute to cruelty, both while we are children and afterward, may be assigned, for the greater part, to curiosity. Cruelty tends to the extinction of life, the dissolution of matter, the imprisonment and sepulture of truth; and if it were our ruling and chief propensity, the human race would have been extinguished in a few centuries after its appearance. Curiosity, in its primary sense, implies care and consideration. _Rochefoucault._ Words often deflect from their primary sense. We find the most curious men the most idle and silly, the least observant and conservative. _La Fontaine._ So we think; because we see every hour the idly curious, and not the strenuously; we see only the persons of the one set, and only the works of the other. More is heard of cruelty than of curiosity, because while curiosity is silent both in itself and about its object, cruelty on most occasions is like the wind, boisterous in itself, and exciting a murmur and bustle in all the things it moves among. Added to which, many of the higher topics whereto our curiosity would turn, are intercepted from it by the policy of our guides and rulers; while the principal ones on which cruelty is most active, are pointed to by the sceptre and the truncheon, and wealth and dignity are the rewards of their attainment. What perversion! He who brings a bullock into a city for its sustenance is called a butcher, and nobody has the civility to take off the hat to him, although knowing him as perfectly as I know Matthieu le Mince, who served me with those fine kidneys you must have remarked in passing through the kitchen: on the contrary, he who reduces the same city to famine is styled M. le Général or M. le Maréchal, and gentlemen like you, unprejudiced (as one would think) and upright, make room for him in the antechamber. _Rochefoucault._ He obeys orders without the degrading influence of any passion. _La Fontaine._ Then he commits a baseness the more, a cruelty the greater. He goes off at another man's setting, as ingloriously as a rat-trap: he produces the worst effects of fury, and feels none: a Cain unirritated by a brother's incense. _Rochefoucault._ I would hide from you this little rapier, which, like the barber's pole, I have often thought too obtrusive in the streets. _La Fontaine._ Never shall I think my countrymen half civilized while on the dress of a courtier is hung the instrument of a cut-throat. How deplorably feeble must be that honour which requires defending at every hour of the day! _Rochefoucault._ Ingenious as you are, M. La Fontaine, I do not believe that, on this subject, you could add anything to what you have spoken already; but really, I do think one of the most instructive things in the world would be a dissertation on dress by you. _La Fontaine._ Nothing can be devised more commodious than the dress in fashion. Perukes have fallen among us by the peculiar dispensation of Providence. As in all the regions of the globe the indigenous have given way to stronger creatures, so have they (partly at least) on the human head. At present the wren and the squirrel are dominant there. Whenever I have a mind for a filbert, I have only to shake my foretop. Improvement does not end in that quarter. I might forget to take my pinch of snuff when it would do me good, unless I saw a store of it on another's cravat. Furthermore, the slit in the coat behind tells in a moment what it was made for: a thing of which, in regard to ourselves, the best preachers have to remind us all our lives: then the central part of our habiliment has either its loop-hole or its portcullis in the opposite direction, still more demonstrative. All these are for very mundane purposes: but Religion and Humanity have whispered some later utilities. We pray the more commodiously, and of course the more frequently, for rolling up a royal ell of stocking round about our knees: and our high-heeled shoes must surely have been worn by some angel, to save those insects which the flat-footed would have crushed to death. _Rochefoucault._ Ah! the good dog has awakened: he saw me and my rapier, and ran away. Of what breed is he? for I know nothing of dogs. _La Fontaine._ And write so well! _Rochefoucault._ Is he a truffler? _La Fontaine._ No, not he; but quite as innocent. _Rochefoucault._ Something of the shepherd-dog, I suspect. _La Fontaine._ Nor that neither; although he fain would make you believe it. Indeed he is very like one: pointed nose, pointed ears, apparently stiff, but readily yielding; long hair, particularly about the neck; noble tail over his back, three curls deep, exceedingly pleasant to stroke down again; straw-colour all above, white all below. He might take it ill if you looked for it; but so it is, upon my word: an ermeline might envy it. _Rochefoucault._ What are his pursuits? _La Fontaine._ As to pursuit and occupation, he is good for nothing. In fact, I like those dogs best ... and those men too. _Rochefoucault._ Send Nanon then for a pair of silk stockings, and mount my carriage with me: it stops at the Louvre. LUCIAN AND TIMOTHEUS _Timotheus._ I am delighted, my Cousin Lucian, to observe how popular are become your _Dialogues of the Dead_. Nothing can be so gratifying and satisfactory to a rightly disposed mind, as the subversion of imposture by the force of ridicule. It hath scattered the crowd of heathen gods as if a thunderbolt had fallen in the midst of them. Now, I am confident you never would have assailed the false religion, unless you were prepared for the reception of the true. For it hath always been an indication of rashness and precipitancy, to throw down an edifice before you have collected materials for reconstruction. _Lucian._ Of all metaphors and remarks, I believe this of yours, my good cousin Timotheus, is the most trite, and pardon me if I add, the most untrue. Surely we ought to remove an error the instant we detect it, although it may be out of our competence to state and establish what is right. A lie should be exposed as soon as born: we are not to wait until a healthier child is begotten. Whatever is evil in any way should be abolished. The husbandman never hesitates to eradicate weeds, or to burn them up, because he may not happen at the time to carry a sack on his shoulder with wheat or barley in it. Even if no wheat or barley is to be sown in future, the weeding and burning are in themselves beneficial, and something better will spring up. _Timotheus._ That is not so certain. _Lucian._ Doubt it as you may, at least you will allow that the temporary absence of evil is an advantage. _Timotheus._ I think, O Lucian, you would reason much better if you would come over to our belief. _Lucian._ I was unaware that belief is an encourager and guide to reason. _Timotheus._ Depend upon it, there can be no stability of truth, no elevation of genius, without an unwavering faith in our holy mysteries. Babes and sucklings who are blest with it, stand higher, intellectually as well as morally, than stiff unbelievers and proud sceptics. _Lucian._ I do not wonder that so many are firm holders of this novel doctrine. It is pleasant to grow wise and virtuous at so small an expenditure of thought or time. This saying of yours is exactly what I heard spoken with angry gravity not long ago. _Timotheus._ Angry! no wonder! for it is impossible to keep our patience when truths so incontrovertible are assailed. What was your answer? _Lucian._ My answer was: If you talk in this manner, my honest friend, you will excite a spirit of ridicule in the gravest and most saturnine of men, who never had let a laugh out of their breasts before. Lie to _me_, and welcome; but beware lest your own heart take you to task for it, reminding you that both anger and falsehood are reprehended by all religions, yours included. _Timotheus._ Lucian! Lucian! you have always been called profane. _Lucian._ For what? for having turned into ridicule the gods whom you have turned out of house and home, and are reducing to dust? _Timotheus._ Well; but you are equally ready to turn into ridicule the true and holy. _Lucian._ In other words, to turn myself into a fool. He who brings ridicule to bear against Truth, finds in his hand a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary. _Timotheus._ Fine talking! Do you know, you have really been called an atheist? _Lucian._ Yes, yes; I know it well. But, in fact, I believe there are almost as few atheists in the world as there are Christians. _Timotheus._ How! as few? Most of Europe, most of Asia, most of Africa, is Christian. _Lucian._ Show me five men in each who obey the commands of Christ, and I will show you five hundred in this very city who observe the dictates of Pythagoras. Every Pythagorean obeys his defunct philosopher; and almost every Christian disobeys his living God. Where is there one who practises the most important and the easiest of His commands, to abstain from strife? Men easily and perpetually find something new to quarrel about; but the objects of affection are limited in number, and grow up scantily and slowly. Even a small house is often too spacious for them, and there is a vacant seat at the table. Religious men themselves, when the Deity has bestowed on them everything they prayed for, discover, as a peculiar gift of Providence, some fault in the actions or opinions of a neighbour, and run it down, crying and shouting after it, with more alacrity and more clamour than boys would a leveret or a squirrel in the playground. Are our years and our intellects, and the word of God itself, given us for this, O Timotheus? _Timotheus._ A certain latitude, a liberal construction.... _Lucian._ Ay, ay! These 'liberal constructions' let loose all the worst passions into those 'certain latitudes'. The priests themselves, who ought to be the poorest, are the richest; who ought to be the most obedient, are the most refractory and rebellious. All trouble and all piety are vicarious. They send missionaries, at the cost of others, into foreign lands, to teach observances which they supersede at home. I have ridiculed the puppets of all features, all colours, all sizes, by which an impudent and audacious set of impostors have been gaining an easy livelihood these two thousand years. _Timotheus._ Gently! gently! Ours have not been at it yet two hundred. We abolish all idolatry. We know that Jupiter was not the father of gods and men: we know that Mars was not the Lord of Hosts: we know who is: we are quite at ease upon that question. _Lucian._ Are you so fanatical, my good Timotheus, as to imagine that the Creator of the world cares a fig by what appellation you adore Him? whether you call Him on one occasion Jupiter, on another Apollo? I will not add Mars or Lord of Hosts; for, wanting as I may be in piety, I am not, and never was, so impious as to call the Maker the Destroyer; to call Him Lord of Hosts who, according to your holiest of books, declared so lately and so plainly that He permits no hosts at all; much less will He take the command of one against another. Would any man in his senses go down into the cellar, and seize first an amphora from the right, and then an amphora from the left, for the pleasure of breaking them in pieces, and of letting out the wine he had taken the trouble to put in? We are not contented with attributing to the gods our own infirmities; we make them even more wayward, even more passionate, even more exigent and more malignant: and then some of us try to coax and cajole them, and others run away from them outright. _Timotheus._ No wonder: but only in regard to yours: and even those are types. _Lucian._ There are honest men who occupy their lives in discovering types for all things. _Timotheus._ Truly and rationally thou speakest now. Honest men and wise men above their fellows are they, and the greatest of all discoverers. There are many types above thy reach, O Lucian! _Lucian._ And one which my mind, and perhaps yours also, can comprehend. There is in Italy, I hear, on the border of a quiet and beautiful lake, a temple dedicated to Diana; the priests of which temple have murdered each his predecessor for unrecorded ages. _Timotheus._ What of that? They were idolaters. _Lucian._ They made the type, however: take it home with you, and hang it up in your temple. _Timotheus._ Why! you seem to have forgotten on a sudden that I am a Christian: you are talking of the heathens. _Lucian._ True! true! I am near upon eighty years of age, and to my poor eyesight one thing looks very like another. _Timotheus._ You are too indifferent. _Lucian._ No indeed. I love those best who quarrel least, and who bring into public use the most civility and good humour. _Timotheus._ Our holy religion inculcates this duty especially. _Lucian._ Such being the case, a pleasant story will not be thrown away upon you. Xenophanes, my townsman of Samosata, was resolved to buy a new horse: he had tried him, and liked him well enough. I asked him why he wished to dispose of his old one, knowing how sure-footed he was, how easy in his paces, and how quiet in his pasture. 'Very true, O Lucian,' said he; 'the horse is a clever horse; noble eye, beautiful figure, stately step; rather too fond of neighing and of shuffling a little in the vicinity of a mare; but tractable and good tempered.' 'I would not have parted with him then,' said I. 'The fact is,' replied he, 'my grandfather, whom I am about to visit, likes no horses but what are _Saturnized_. To-morrow I begin my journey: come and see me set out.' I went at the hour appointed. The new purchase looked quiet and demure; but _he_ also pricked up his ears, and gave sundry other tokens of equinity, when the more interesting part of his fellow-creatures came near him. As the morning oats began to operate, he grew more and more unruly, and snapped at one friend of Xenophanes, and sidled against another, and gave a kick at a third. 'All in play! all in play!' said Xenophanes; 'his nature is more of a lamb's than a horse's.' However, these mute salutations being over, away went Xenophanes. In the evening, when my lamp had just been replenished for the commencement of my studies, my friend came in striding as if he were still across the saddle. 'I am apprehensive, O Xenophanes,' said I, 'your new acquaintance has disappointed you.' 'Not in the least,' answered he. 'I do assure you, O Lucian! he is the very horse I was looking out for.' On my requesting him to be seated, he no more thought of doing so than if it had been in the presence of the Persian king. I then handed my lamp to him, telling him (as was true) it contained all the oil I had in the house, and protesting I should be happier to finish my Dialogue in the morning. He took the lamp into my bedroom, and appeared to be much refreshed on his return. Nevertheless, he treated his chair with great delicacy and circumspection, and evidently was afraid of breaking it by too sudden a descent. I did not revert to the horse: but he went on of his own accord. 'I declare to you, O Lucian! it is impossible for me to be mistaken in a palfrey. My new one is the only one in Samosata that could carry me at one stretch to my grandfather's.' 'But _has_ he?' said I, timidly. 'No; he has not yet,' answered my friend. 'To-morrow, then, I am afraid, we really must lose you.' 'No,' said he; 'the horse does trot hard: but he is the better for that: I shall soon get used to him.' In fine, my worthy friend deferred his visit to his grandfather: his rides were neither long nor frequent: he was ashamed to part with his purchase, boasted of him everywhere, and, humane as he is by nature, could almost have broken on the cross the quiet contented owner of old Bucephalus. _Timotheus._ Am I to understand by this, O Cousin Lucian, that I ought to be contented with the impurities of paganism? _Lucian._ Unless you are very unreasonable. A moderate man finds plenty in it. _Timotheus._ We abominate the Deities who patronize them, and we hurl down the images of the monsters. _Lucian._ Sweet cousin! be tenderer to my feelings. In such a tempest as this, my spark of piety may be blown out. Hold your hand cautiously before it, until I can find my way. Believe me, no Deities (out of their own houses) patronize immorality; none patronize unruly passions, least of all the fierce and ferocious. In my opinion, you are wrong in throwing down the images of those among them who look on you benignly: the others I give up to your discretion. But I think it impossible to stand habitually in the presence of a sweet and open countenance, graven or depicted, without in some degree partaking of the character it expresses. Never tell any man that he can derive no good, in his devotions, from this or from that: abolish neither hope nor gratitude. _Timotheus._ God is offended at vain efforts to represent Him. _Lucian._ No such thing, my dear Timotheus. If you knew Him at all, you would not talk of Him so irreverently. He is pleased, I am convinced, at every effort to resemble Him, at every wish to remind both ourselves and others of His benefits. You cannot think so often of Him without an effigy. _Timotheus._ What likeness is there in the perishable to the Unperishable? _Lucian._ I see no reason why there may not be a similitude. All that the senses can comprehend may be represented by any material; clay or fig-tree, bronze or ivory, porphyry or gold. Indeed I have a faint remembrance that, according to your sacred volumes, man was made by God after His own image. If so, man's intellectual powers are worthily exercised in attempting to collect all that is beautiful, serene, and dignified, and to bring Him back to earth again by showing Him the noblest of His gifts, the work most like His own. Surely He cannot hate or abandon those who thus cherish His memory, and thus implore His regard. Perishable and imperfect is everything human: but in these very qualities I find the best reason for striving to attain what is least so. Would not any father be gratified by seeing his child attempt to delineate his features? And would not the gratification be rather increased than diminished by his incapacity? How long shall the narrow mind of man stand between goodness and omnipotence? Perhaps the effigy of your ancestor Isknos is unlike him; whether it is or no, you cannot tell; but you keep it in your hall, and would be angry if anybody broke it to pieces or defaced it. Be quite sure there are many who think as much of their gods as you think of your ancestor Isknos, and who see in their images as good a likeness. Let men have their own way, especially their way to the temples. It is easier to drive them out of one road than into another. Our judicious and good-humoured Trajan has found it necessary on many occasions to chastise the law-breakers of your sect, indifferent as he is what gods are worshipped, so long as their followers are orderly and decorous. The fiercest of the Dacians never knocked off Jupiter's beard, or broke an arm off Venus; and the emperor will hardly tolerate in those who have received a liberal education what he would punish in barbarians. Do not wear out his patience: try rather to imitate his equity, his equanimity, and forbearance. _Timotheus._ I have been listening to you with much attention, O Lucian! for I seldom have heard you speak with such gravity. And yet, O Cousin Lucian! I really do find in you a sad deficiency of that wisdom which alone is of any value. You talk of Trajan! what is Trajan? _Lucian._ A beneficent citizen, an impartial judge, a sagacious ruler; the comrade of every brave soldier, the friend and associate of every man eminent in genius, throughout his empire, the empire of the world. All arts, all sciences, all philosophies, all religions, are protected by him. Wherefore his name will flourish, when the proudest of these have perished in the land of Egypt. Philosophies and religions will strive, struggle, and suffocate one another. Priesthoods, I know not how many, are quarrelling and scuffling in the street at this instant, all calling on Trajan to come and knock an antagonist on the head; and the most peaceful of them, as it wishes to be thought, proclaiming him an infidel for turning a deaf ear to its imprecations. Mankind was never so happy as under his guidance; and he has nothing now to do but to put down the battles of the gods. If they must fight it out, he will insist on our neutrality. _Timotheus._ He has no authority and no influence over us in matters of faith. A wise and upright man, whose serious thoughts lead him forward to religion, will never be turned aside from it by any worldly consideration or any human force. _Lucian._ True: but mankind is composed not entirely of the upright and the wise. I suspect that we may find some, here and there, who are rather too fond of novelties in the furniture of temples; and I have observed that new sects are apt to warp, crack, and split, under the heat they generate. Our homely old religion has run into fewer quarrels, ever since the Centaurs and Lapiths (whose controversy was on a subject quite comprehensible), than yours has engendered in twenty years. _Timotheus._ We shall obviate that inconvenience by electing a supreme Pontiff to decide all differences. It has been seriously thought about long ago: and latterly we have been making out an ideal series down to the present day, in order that our successors in the ministry may have stepping-stones up to the fountain-head. At first the disseminators of our doctrines were equal in their commission; we do not approve of this any longer, for reasons of our own. _Lucian._ You may shut, one after another, all our other temples, but, I plainly see, you will never shut the temple of Janus. The Roman Empire will never lose its pugnacious character while your sect exists. The only danger is, lest the fever rage internally and consume the vitals. If you sincerely wish your religion to be long-lived, maintain in it the spirit of its constitution, and keep it patient, humble, abstemious, domestic, and zealous only in the services of humanity. Whenever the higher of your priesthood shall attain the riches they are aiming at, the people will envy their possessions and revolt from their impostures. Do not let them seize upon the palace, and shove their God again into the manger. _Timotheus._ Lucian! Lucian! I call this impiety. _Lucian._ So do I, and shudder at its consequences. Caverns which at first look inviting, the roof at the aperture green with overhanging ferns and clinging mosses, then glittering with native gems and with water as sparkling and pellucid, freshening the air all around; these caverns grow darker and closer, until you find yourself among animals that shun the daylight, adhering to the walls, hissing along the bottom, flapping, screeching, gaping, glaring, making you shrink at the sounds, and sicken at the smells, and afraid to advance or retreat. _Timotheus._ To what can this refer? Our caverns open on verdure, and terminate in veins of gold. _Lucian._ Veins of gold, my good Timotheus, such as your excavations have opened and are opening, in the spirit of avarice and ambition, will be washed (or as you would say, _purified_) in streams of blood. Arrogance, intolerance, resistance to authority and contempt of law, distinguish your aspiring sectarians from the other subjects of the empire. _Timotheus._ Blindness hath often a calm and composed countenance; but, my Cousin Lucian! it usually hath also the advantage of a cautious and a measured step. It hath pleased God to blind you, like all the other adversaries of our faith; but He has given you no staff to lean upon. You object against us the very vices from which we are peculiarly exempt. _Lucian._ Then it is all a story, a fable, a fabrication, about one of your earlier leaders cutting off with his sword a servant's ear? If the accusation is true, the offence is heavy. For not only was the wounded man innocent of any provocation, but he is represented as being in the service of the high priest at Jerusalem. Moreover, from the direction and violence of the blow, it is evident that his life was aimed at. According to law, you know, my dear cousin, all the party might have been condemned to death, as accessories to an attempt at murder. I am unwilling to think so unfavourably of your sect; nor indeed do I see the possibility that, in such an outrage, the principal could be pardoned. For any man but a soldier to go about armed is against the Roman law, which, on that head, as on many others, is borrowed from the Athenian; and it is incredible that in any civilized country so barbarous a practice can be tolerated. Travellers do indeed relate that, in certain parts of India, there are princes at whose courts even civilians are armed. But _traveller_ has occasionally the same signification as _liar_, and _India_ as _fable_. However, if the practice really does exist in that remote and rarely visited country, it must be in some region of it very far beyond the Indus or the Ganges: for the nations situated between those rivers are, and were in the reign of Alexander, and some thousand years before his birth, as civilized as the Europeans; nay, incomparably more courteous, more industrious, and more pacific; the three grand criterions. But answer my question: is there any foundation for so mischievous a report? _Timotheus._ There was indeed, so to say, an ear, or something of the kind, abscinded; probably by mistake. But high priests' servants are propense to follow the swaggering gait of their masters, and to carry things with a high hand, in such wise as to excite the choler of the most quiet. If you knew the character of the eminently holy man who punished the atrocious insolence of that bloody-minded wretch, you would be sparing of your animadversions. We take him for our model. _Lucian._ I see you do. _Timotheus._ We proclaim him Prince of the Apostles. _Lucian._ I am the last in the world to question his princely qualifications; but, if I might advise you, it should be to follow in preference Him whom you acknowledge to be an unerring guide; who delivered to you His ordinances with His own hand, equitable, plain, explicit, compendious, and complete; who committed no violence, who countenanced no injustice, whose compassion was without weakness, whose love was without frailty, whose life was led in humility, in purity, in beneficence, and, at the end, laid down in obedience to His Father's will. _Timotheus._ Ah, Lucian! what strangely imperfect notions! all that is little. _Lucian._ Enough to follow. _Timotheus._ Not enough to compel others. I did indeed hope, O Lucian! that you would again come forward with the irresistible arrows of your wit, and unite with us against our adversaries. By what you have just spoken, I doubt no longer that you approve of the doctrines inculcated by the blessed Founder of our religion. _Lucian._ To the best of my understanding. _Timotheus._ So ardent is my desire for the salvation of your precious soul, O my cousin! that I would devote many hours of every day to disputation with you on the principal points of our Christian controversy. _Lucian._ Many thanks, my kind Timotheus! But I think the blessed Founder of your religion very strictly forbade that there should be _any_ points of controversy. Not only has He prohibited them on the doctrines He delivered, but on everything else. Some of the most obstinate might never have doubted of His Divinity, if the conduct of His followers had not repelled them from the belief of it. How can they imagine you sincere when they see you disobedient? It is in vain for you to protest that you worship the God of Peace, when you are found daily in the courts and market-places with clenched fists and bloody noses. I acknowledge the full value of your offer; but really I am as anxious for the salvation of your precious time as you appear to be for the salvation of my precious soul, particularly since I am come to the conclusion that souls cannot be lost, and that time can. _Timotheus._ We mean by _salvation_ exemption from eternal torments. _Lucian._ Among all my old gods and their children, morose as some of the senior are, and mischievous as are some of the junior, I have never represented the worst of them as capable of inflicting such atrocity. Passionate and capricious and unjust are several of them; but a skin stripped off the shoulder, and a liver tossed to a vulture, are among the worst of their inflictions. _Timotheus._ This is scoffing. _Lucian._ Nobody but an honest man has a right to scoff at anything. _Timotheus._ And yet people of a very different cast are usually those who scoff the most. _Lucian._ We are apt to push forward at that which we are without: the low-born at titles and distinctions, the silly at wit, the knave at the semblance of probity. But I was about to remark, that an honest man may fairly scoff at all philosophies and religions which are proud, ambitious, intemperate, and contradictory. The thing most adverse to the spirit and essence of them all is falsehood. It is the business of the philosophical to seek truth: it is the office of the religious to worship her; under what name is unimportant. The falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison with what is conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole man, throughout life. If, professing love and charity to the human race at large, I quarrel day after day with my next neighbour; if, professing that the rich can never see God, I spend in the luxuries of my household a talent monthly; if, professing to place so much confidence in His word, that, in regard to wordly weal, I need take no care for to-morrow, I accumulate stores even beyond what would be necessary, though I quite distrusted both His providence and His veracity; if, professing that 'he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord', I question the Lord's security, and haggle with Him about the amount of the loan; if, professing that I am their steward, I keep ninety-nine parts in the hundred as the emolument of my stewardship; how, when God hates liars and punishes defrauders, shall I, and other such thieves and hypocrites, fare hereafter? _Timotheus._ Let us hope there are few of them. _Lucian._ We cannot hope against what is: we may, however, hope that in future these will be fewer; but never while the overseers of a priesthood look for offices out of it, taking the lead in politics, in debate, and strife. Such men bring to ruin all religion, but their own first, and raise unbelievers not only in Divine Providence, but in human faith. _Timotheus._ If they leave the altar for the market-place, the sanctuary for the senate-house, and agitate party questions instead of Christian verities, everlasting punishments await them. _Lucian._ Everlasting? _Timotheus._ Certainly: at the very least. I rank it next to heresy in the catalogue of sins; and the Church supports my opinion. _Lucian._ I have no measure for ascertaining the distance between the opinions and practices of men; I only know that they stand widely apart in all countries on the most important occasions; but this newly-hatched word _heresy_, alighting on my ear, makes me rub it. A beneficent God descends on earth in the human form, to redeem us from the slavery of sin, from the penalty of our passions: can you imagine He will punish an error in opinion, or even an obstinacy in unbelief, with everlasting torments? Supposing it highly criminal to refuse to weigh a string of arguments, or to cross-question a herd of witnesses, on a subject which no experience has warranted and no sagacity can comprehend; supposing it highly criminal to be contented with the religion which our parents taught us, which they bequeathed to us as the most precious of possessions, and which it would have broken their hearts if they had foreseen we should cast aside; yet are eternal pains the just retribution of what at worst is but indifference and supineness? _Timotheus._ Our religion has clearly this advantage over yours: it teaches us to regulate our passions. _Lucian._ Rather say it _tells_ us. I believe all religions do the same; some indeed more emphatically and primarily than others; but _that_ indeed would be incontestably of Divine origin, and acknowledged at once by the most sceptical, which should thoroughly teach it. Now, my friend Timotheus, I think you are about seventy-five years of age. _Timotheus._ Nigh upon it. _Lucian._ Seventy-five years, according to my calculation, are equivalent to seventy-five gods and goddesses in regulating our passions for us, if we speak of the amatory, which are always thought in every stage of life the least to be pardoned. _Timotheus._ Execrable! _Lucian._ I am afraid the sourest hang longest on the tree. Mimnermus says: In early youth we often sigh Because our pulses beat so high; All this we conquer, and at last We sigh that we are grown so chaste. _Timotheus._ Swine! _Lucian._ No animal sighs oftener or louder. But, my dear cousin, the quiet swine is less troublesome and less odious than the grumbling and growling and fierce hyena, which will not let the dead rest in their graves. We may be merry with the follies and even the vices of men, without doing or wishing them harm; punishment should come from the magistrate, not from us. If we are to give pain to any one because he thinks differently from us, we ought to begin by inflicting a few smart stripes on ourselves; for both upon light and upon grave occasions, if we have thought much and often, our opinions must have varied. We are always fond of seizing and managing what appertains to others. In the savage state all belongs to all. Our neighbours the Arabs, who stand between barbarism and civilization, waylay travellers, and plunder their equipage and their gold. The wilier marauders in Alexandria start up from under the shadow of temples, force us to change our habiliments for theirs, and strangle us with fingers dipped in holy water if we say they sit uneasily. _Timotheus._ This is not the right view of things. _Lucian._ That is never the right view which lets in too much light. About two centuries have elapsed since your religion was founded. Show me the pride it has humbled; show me the cruelty it has mitigated; show me the lust it has extinguished or repressed. I have now been living ten years in Alexandria; and you never will accuse me, I think, of any undue partiality for the system in which I was educated; yet, from all my observation, I find no priest or elder, in your community, wise, tranquil, firm, and sedate as Epicurus, and Carneades, and Zeno, and Epictetus; or indeed in the same degree as some who were often called forth into political and military life; Epaminondas, for instance, and Phocion. _Timotheus._ I pity them from my soul: they were ignorant of the truth: they are lost, my cousin! take my word for it, they are lost men. _Lucian._ Unhappily, they are. I wish we had them back again; or that, since we have lost them, we could at least find among us the virtues they left for our example. _Timotheus._ Alas, my poor cousin! you too are blind; you do not understand the plainest words, nor comprehend those verities which are the most evident and palpable. Virtues! if the poor wretches had any, they were false ones. _Lucian._ Scarcely ever has there been a politician, in any free state, without much falsehood and duplicity. I have named the most illustrious exceptions. Slender and irregular lines of a darker colour run along the bright blade that decides the fate of nations, and may indeed be necessary to the perfection of its temper. The great warrior has usually his darker lines of character, necessary (it may be) to constitute his greatness. No two men possess the same quantity of the same virtues, if they have many or much. We want some which do not far outstep us, and which we may follow with the hope of reaching; we want others to elevate, and others to defend us. The order of things would be less beautiful without this variety. Without the ebb and flow of our passions, but guided and moderated by a beneficent light above, the ocean of life would stagnate; and zeal, devotion, eloquence, would become dead carcasses, collapsing and wasting on unprofitable sands. The vices of some men cause the virtues of others, as corruption is the parent of fertility. _Timotheus._ O my cousin! this doctrine is diabolical. _Lucian._ What is it? _Timotheus._ Diabolical; a strong expression in daily use among us. We turn it a little from its origin. _Lucian._ Timotheus, I love to sit by the side of a clear water, although there is nothing in it but naked stones. Do not take the trouble to muddy the stream of language for my benefit; I am not about to fish in it. _Timotheus._ Well, we will speak about things which come nearer to your apprehension. I only wish you were somewhat less indifferent in your choice between the true and the false. _Lucian._ We take it for granted that what is not true must be false. _Timotheus._ Surely we do. _Lucian._ This is erroneous. _Timotheus._ Are you grown captious? Pray explain. _Lucian._ What is not true, I need not say, must be untrue; but that alone is false which is intended to deceive. A witness may be mistaken, yet would not you call him a false witness unless he asserted what he knew to be false. _Timotheus._ Quibbles upon words! _Lucian._ On words, on quibbles, if you please to call distinctions so, rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck ineradicably in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness. It is because a word is unsusceptible of explanation, or because they who employed it were impatient of any, that enormous evils have prevailed, not only against our common sense, but against our common humanity. Hence the most pernicious of absurdities, far exceeding in folly and mischief the worship of threescore gods; namely, that an implicit faith in what outrages our reason, which we know is God's gift, and bestowed on us for our guidance, that this weak, blind, stupid faith is surer of His favour than the constant practice of every human virtue. They at whose hands one prodigious lie, such as this, hath been accepted, may reckon on their influence in the dissemination of many smaller, and may turn them easily to their own account. Be sure they will do it sooner or later. The fly floats on the surface for a while, but up springs the fish at last and swallows it. _Timotheus._ Was ever man so unjust as you are? The abominable old priesthoods are avaricious and luxurious: ours is willing to stand or fall by maintaining its ordinances of fellowship and frugality. Point out to me a priest of our religion whom you could, by any temptation or entreaty, so far mislead, that he shall reserve for his own consumption one loaf, one plate of lentils, while another poor Christian hungers. In the meanwhile the priests of Isis are proud and wealthy, and admit none of the indigent to their tables. And now, to tell you the whole truth, my Cousin Lucian, I come to you this morning to propose that we should lay our heads together and compose a merry dialogue on these said priests of Isis. What say you? _Lucian._ These said priests of Isis have already been with me, several times, on a similar business in regard to yours. _Timotheus._ Malicious wretches! _Lucian._ Beside, they have attempted to persuade me that your religion is borrowed from theirs, altering a name a little and laying the scene of action in a corner, in the midst of obscurity and ruins. _Timotheus._ The wicked dogs! the hellish liars! We have nothing in common with such vile impostors. Are they not ashamed of taking such unfair means of lowering us in the estimation of our fellow-citizens? And so, they artfully came to you, craving any spare jibe to throw against us! They lie open to these weapons; we do not: we stand above the malignity, above the strength, of man. You would do justly in turning their own devices against them: it would be amusing to see how they would look. If you refuse me, I am resolved to write a Dialogue of the Dead, myself, and to introduce these hypocrites in it. _Lucian._ Consider well first, my good Timotheus, whether you can do any such thing with propriety; I mean to say judiciously in regard to composition. _Timotheus._ I always thought you generous and open-hearted, and quite inaccessible to jealousy. _Lucian._ Let nobody ever profess himself so much as that: for, although he may be insensible of the disease, it lurks within him, and only waits its season to break out. But really, my cousin, at present I feel no symptoms: and, to prove that I am ingenuous and sincere with you, these are my reasons for dissuasion. We believers in the Homeric family of gods and goddesses, believe also in the locality of Tartarus and Elysium. We entertain no doubt whatever that the passions of men and demigods and gods are nearly the same above ground and below; and that Achilles would dispatch his spear through the body of any shade who would lead Briseis too far among the myrtles, or attempt to throw the halter over the ears of any chariot horse belonging to him in the meads of asphodel. We admit no doubt of these verities, delivered down to us from the ages when Theseus and Hercules had descended into Hades itself. Instead of a few stadions in a cavern, with a bank and a bower at the end of it, under a very small portion of our diminutive Hellas, you Christians possess the whole cavity of the earth for punishment, and the whole convex of the sky for felicity. _Timotheus._ Our passions are burnt out amid the fires of purification, and our intellects are elevated to the enjoyment of perfect intelligence. _Lucian._ How silly then and incongruous would it be, not to say how impious, to represent your people as no better and no wiser than they were before, and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without any fear of censure for inconsistency or irreverence. Hitherto such writers have confined their view mostly to speculative points, sophistic reasonings, and sarcastic interpellations. _Timotheus._ Ha! you are always fond of throwing a little pebble at the lofty Plato, whom we, on the contrary, are ready to receive (in a manner) as one of ourselves. _Lucian._ To throw pebbles is a very uncertain way of showing where lie defects. Whenever I have mentioned him seriously, I have brought forward, not accusations, but passages from his writings, such as no philosopher or scholar or moralist can defend. _Timotheus._ His doctrines are too abstruse and too sublime for you. _Lucian._ Solon, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, are more sublime, if truth is sublimity. _Timotheus._ Truth is, indeed; for God is truth. _Lucian._ We are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon earth, and not to speculate on what never can be. This you, O Timotheus, may call philosophy: to me it appears the idlest of curiosity; for every other kind may teach us something, and may lead to more beyond. Let men learn what benefits men; above all things, to contract their wishes, to calm their passions, and, more especially, to dispel their fears. Now these are to be dispelled, not by collecting clouds, but by piercing and scattering them. In the dark we may imagine depths and heights immeasurable, which, if a torch be carried right before us, we find it easy to leap across. Much of what we call sublime is only the residue of infancy, and the worst of it. The philosophers I quoted are too capacious for schools and systems. Without noise, without ostentation, without mystery, not quarrelsome, not captious, not frivolous, their lives were commentaries on their doctrine. Never evaporating into mist, never stagnating into mire, their limpid and broad morality runs parallel with the lofty summits of their genius. _Timotheus._ Genius! was ever genius like Plato's? _Lucian._ The most admired of his Dialogues, his _Banquet_, is beset with such puerilities, deformed with such pedantry, and disgraced with such impurity, that none but the thickest beards, and chiefly of the philosophers and the satyrs, should bend over it. On a former occasion he has given us a specimen of history, than which nothing in our language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be joking: who knows? _Timotheus._ Forbear! forbear! do not call this notion a silly one: he took it from our Holy Scriptures, but perverted it somewhat. Woman was made from man's rib, and did not require to be cut asunder all the way down: this is no proof of bad reasoning, but merely of misinterpretation. _Lucian._ If you would rather have bad reasoning, I will adduce a little of it. Farther on, he wishes to extol the wisdom of Agathon by attributing to him such a sentence as this: 'It is evident that Love is the most beautiful of the gods, _because_ he is the youngest of them.' Now, even on earth, the youngest is not always the most beautiful; how infinitely less cogent, then, is the argument when we come to speak of the Immortals, with whom age can have no concern! There was a time when Vulcan was the youngest of the gods: was he, also, at that time, and for that reason, the most beautiful? Your philosopher tells us, moreover, that 'Love is of all deities the most _liquid_; else he never could fold himself about everything, and flow into and out of men's souls.' The three last sentences of Agathon's rhapsody are very harmonious, and exhibit the finest specimen of Plato's style; but we, accustomed as we are to hear him lauded for his poetical diction, should hold that poem a very indifferent one which left on the mind so superficial an impression. The garden of Academus is flowery without fragrance, and dazzling without warmth: I am ready to dream away an hour in it after dinner, but I think it insalutary for a night's repose. So satisfied was Plato with his _Banquet_, that he says of himself, in the person of Socrates, 'How can I or any one but find it difficult to speak after a discourse so eloquent? It would have been wonderful if the brilliancy of the sentences at the end of it, and the choice of expression throughout, had not astonished all the auditors. I, who can never say anything nearly so beautiful, would if possible have made my escape, and have fairly run off for shame.' He had indeed much better run off before he made so wretched a pun on the name of Gorgias. 'I dreaded,' says he, 'lest Agathon, _measuring my discourse by the head of the eloquent Gorgias, should turn me to stone_ for inability of utterance.' Was there ever joke more frigid? What painful twisting of unelastic stuff! If Socrates was the wisest man in the world, it would require another oracle to persuade us, after this, that he was the wittiest. But surely a small share of common sense would have made him abstain from hazarding such failures. He falls on his face in very flat and very dry ground; and, when he gets up again, his quibbles are well-nigh as tedious as his witticisms. However, he has the presence of mind to throw them on the shoulders of Diotima, whom he calls a prophetess, and who, ten years before the plague broke out in Athens, obtained from the gods (he tells us) that delay. Ah! the gods were doubly mischievous: they sent her first. Read her words, my cousin, as delivered by Socrates; and if they have another plague in store for us, you may avert it by such an act of expiation. _Timotheus._ The world will have ended before ten years are over. _Lucian._ Indeed! _Timotheus._ It has been pronounced. _Lucian._ How the threads of belief and unbelief run woven close together in the whole web of human life! Come, come; take courage; you will have time for your Dialogue. Enlarge the circle; enrich it with a variety of matter, enliven it with a multitude of characters, occupy the intellect of the thoughtful, the imagination of the lively; spread the board with solid viands, delicate rarities, and sparkling wines; and throw, along the whole extent of it, geniality and festal crowns. _Timotheus._ What writer of dialogues hath ever done this, or undertaken, or conceived, or hoped it? _Lucian._ None whatever; yet surely you yourself may, when even your babes and sucklings are endowed with abilities incomparably greater than our niggardly old gods have bestowed on the very best of us. _Timotheus._ I wish, my dear Lucian, you would let our babes and sucklings lie quiet, and say no more about them: as for your gods, I leave them at your mercy. Do not impose on me the performance of a task in which Plato himself, if he had attempted it, would have failed. _Lucian._ No man ever detected false reasoning with more quickness; but unluckily he called in Wit at the exposure; and Wit, I am sorry to say, held the lowest place in his household. He sadly mistook the qualities of his mind in attempting the facetious; or, rather, he fancied he possessed one quality more than belonged to him. But, if he himself had not been a worse quibbler than any whose writings are come down to us, we might have been gratified by the exposure of wonderful acuteness wretchedly applied. It is no small service to the community to turn into ridicule the grave impostors, who are contending which of them shall guide and govern us, whether in politics or religion. There are always a few who will take the trouble to walk down among the seaweeds and slippery stones, for the sake of showing their credulous fellow-citizens that skins filled with sand, and set upright at the forecastle, are neither men nor merchandise. _Timotheus._ I can bring to mind, O Lucian, no writer possessing so great a variety of wit as you. _Lucian._ No man ever possessed any variety of this gift; and the holder is not allowed to exchange the quality for another. Banter (and such is Plato's) never grows large, never sheds its bristles, and never do they soften into the humorous or the facetious. _Timotheus._ I agree with you that banter is the worst species of wit. We have indeed no correct idea what persons those really were whom Plato drags by the ears, to undergo slow torture under Socrates. One sophist, I must allow, is precisely like another: no discrimination of character, none of manner, none of language. _Lucian._ He wanted the fancy and fertility of Aristophanes. _Timotheus._ Otherwise, his mind was more elevated and more poetical. _Lucian._ Pardon me if I venture to express my dissent in both particulars. Knowledge of the human heart, and discrimination of character, are requisites of the poet. Few ever have possessed them in an equal degree with Aristophanes: Plato has given no indication of either. _Timotheus._ But consider his imagination. _Lucian._ On what does it rest? He is nowhere so imaginative as in his _Polity_. Nor is there any state in the world that is, or would be, governed by it. One day you may find him at his counter in the midst of old-fashioned toys, which crack and crumble under his fingers while he exhibits and recommends them; another day, while he is sitting on a goat's bladder, I may discover his bald head surmounting an enormous mass of loose chaff and uncleanly feathers, which he would persuade you is the pleasantest and healthiest of beds, and that dreams descend on it from the gods. 'Open your mouth, and shut your eyes, and see what Zeus shall send you,' says Aristophanes in his favourite metre. In this helpless condition of closed optics and hanging jaw, we find the followers of Plato. It is by shutting their eyes that they see, and by opening their mouths that they apprehend. Like certain broad-muzzled dogs, all stand equally stiff and staunch, although few scent the game, and their lips wag, and water, at whatever distance from the net. We must leave them with their hands hanging down before them, confident that they are wiser than we are, were it only for this attitude of humility. It is amusing to see them in it before the tall, well-robed Athenian, while he mis-spells the charms, and plays clumsily the tricks, he acquired from the conjurors here in Egypt. I wish you better success with the same materials. But in my opinion all philosophers should speak clearly. The highest things are the purest and brightest; and the best writers are those who render them the most intelligible to the world below. In the arts and sciences, and particularly in music and metaphysics, this is difficult: but the subjects not being such as lie within the range of the community, I lay little stress upon them, and wish authors to deal with them as they best may, only beseeching that they recompense us, by bringing within our comprehension the other things with which they are entrusted for us. The followers of Plato fly off indignantly from any such proposal. If I ask them the meaning of some obscure passage, they answer that I am unprepared and unfitted for it, and that his mind is so far above mine, I cannot grasp it. I look up into the faces of these worthy men, who mingle so much commiseration with so much calmness, and wonder at seeing them look no less vacant than my own. _Timotheus._ You have acknowledged his eloquence, while you derided his philosophy and repudiated his morals. _Lucian._ Certainly there was never so much eloquence with so little animation. When he has heated his oven, he forgets to put the bread into it; instead of which, he throws in another bundle of faggots. His words and sentences are often too large for the place they occupy. If a water-melon is not to be placed in an oyster-shell, neither is a grain of millet in a golden salver. At high festivals a full band may enter: ordinary conversation goes on better without it. _Timotheus._ There is something so spiritual about him, that many of us Christians are firmly of opinion he must have been partially enlightened from above. _Lucian._ I hope and believe we all are. His entire works are in our library. Do me the favour to point out to me a few of those passages where in poetry he approaches the spirit of Aristophanes, or where in morals he comes up to Epictetus. _Timotheus._ It is useless to attempt it if you carry your prejudices with you. Beside, my dear cousin, I would not offend you, but really your mind has no point about it which could be brought to contact or affinity with Plato's. _Lucian._ In the universality of his genius there must surely be some atom coincident with another in mine. You acknowledge, as everybody must do, that his wit is the heaviest and lowest: pray, is the specimen he has given us of history at all better? _Timotheus._ I would rather look to the loftiness of his mind, and the genius that sustains him. _Lucian._ So would I. Magnificent words, and the pomp and procession of stately sentences, may accompany genius, but are not always nor frequently called out by it. The voice ought not to be perpetually nor much elevated in the ethic and didactic, nor to roll sonorously, as if it issued from a mask in the theatre. The horses in the plain under Troy are not always kicking and neighing; nor is the dust always raised in whirlwinds on the banks of Simois and Scamander; nor are the rampires always in a blaze. Hector has lowered his helmet to the infant of Andromache, and Achilles to the embraces of Briseis. I do not blame the prose-writer who opens his bosom occasionally to a breath of poetry; neither, on the contrary, can I praise the gait of that pedestrian who lifts up his legs as high on a bare heath as in a cornfield. Be authority as old and obstinate as it may, never let it persuade you that a man is the stronger for being unable to keep himself on the ground, or the weaker for breathing quietly and softly on ordinary occasions. Tell me, over and over, that you find every great quality in Plato: let me only once ask you in return, whether he ever is ardent and energetic, whether he wins the affections, whether he agitates the heart. Finding him deficient in every one of these faculties, I think his disciples have extolled him too highly. Where power is absent, we may find the robes of genius, but we miss the throne. He would acquit a slave who killed another in self-defence, but if he killed any free man, even in self-defence; he was not only to be punished with death, but to undergo the cruel death of a parricide. This effeminate philosopher was more severe than the manly Demosthenes, who quotes a law against the striking of a slave: and Diogenes, when one ran away from him, remarked that it would be horrible if Diogenes could not do without a slave, when a slave could do without Diogenes. _Timotheus._ Surely the allegories of Plato are evidences of his genius. _Lucian._ A great poet in the hours of his idleness may indulge in allegory: but the highest poetical character will never rest on so unsubstantial a foundation. The poet must take man from God's hands, must look into every fibre of his heart and brain, must be able to take the magnificent work to pieces, and to reconstruct it. When this labour is completed, let him throw himself composedly on the earth, and care little how many of its ephemeral insects creep over him. In regard to these allegories of Plato, about which I have heard so much, pray what and where are they? You hesitate, my fair cousin Timotheus! Employ one morning in transcribing them, and another in noting all the passages which are of practical utility in the commerce of social life, or purify our affections at home, or excite and elevate our enthusiasm in the prosperity and glory of our country. Useful books, moral books, instructive books are easily composed: and surely so great a writer should present them to us without blot or blemish: I find among his many volumes no copy of a similar composition. My enthusiasm is not easily raised indeed; yet such a whirlwind of a poet must carry it away with him; nevertheless, here I stand, calm and collected, not a hair of my beard in commotion. Declamation will find its echo in vacant places: it beats ineffectually on the well-furnished mind. Give me proof; bring the work; show the passages; convince, confound, overwhelm me. _Timotheus._ I may do that another time with Plato. And yet, what effect can I hope to produce on an unhappy man who doubts even that the world is on the point of extinction? _Lucian._ Are there many of your association who believe that this catastrophe is so near at hand? _Timotheus._ We all believe it; or rather, we all are certain of it. _Lucian._ How so? Have you observed any fracture in the disk of the sun? Are any of the stars loosened in their orbits? Has the beautiful light of Venus ceased to pant in the heavens, or has the belt of Orion lost its gems? _Timotheus._ Oh, for shame! _Lucian._ Rather should I be ashamed of indifference on so important an occasion. _Timotheus._ We know the fact by surer signs. _Lucian._ These, if you could vouch for them, would be sure enough for me. The least of them would make me sweat as profusely as if I stood up to the neck in the hot preparation of a mummy. Surely no wise or benevolent philosopher could ever have uttered what he knew or believed might be distorted into any such interpretation. For if men are persuaded that they and their works are so soon about to perish, what provident care are they likely to take in the education and welfare of their families? What sciences will they improve, what learning will they cultivate, what monuments of past ages will they be studious to preserve, who are certain that there can be no future ones? Poetry will be censured as rank profaneness, eloquence will be converted into howls and execrations, statuary will exhibit only Midases and Ixions, and all the colours of painting will be mixed together to produce one grand conflagration: _flammantia moenia mundi_. _Timotheus._ Do not quote an atheist; especially in Latin. I hate the language; the Romans are beginning to differ from us already. _Lucian._ Ah! you will soon split into smaller fractions. But pardon me my unusual fault of quoting. Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom do it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the beauty and unity of style, especially when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements or doubtful of his cause. And moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the shoulder of another, however gracefully that other may walk. Herodotus, Plato, Aristoteles, Demosthenes, are no quoters. Thucydides, twice or thrice, inserts a few sentences of Pericles: but Thucydides is an emanation of Pericles, somewhat less clear indeed, being lower, although at no great distance from that purest and most pellucid source. The best of the Romans, I agree with you, are remote from such originals, if not in power of mind, or in acuteness of remark, or in sobriety of judgment, yet in the graces of composition. While I admired, with a species of awe such as not Homer himself ever impressed me with, the majesty and sanctimony of Livy, I have been informed by learned Romans that in the structure of his sentences he is often inharmonious, and sometimes uncouth. I can imagine such uncouthness in the goddess of battles, confident of power and victory, when part of her hair is waving round the helmet, loosened by the rapidity of her descent or the vibration of her spear. Composition may be too adorned even for beauty. In painting it is often requisite to cover a bright colour with one less bright; and, in language, to relieve the ear from the tension of high notes, even at the cost of a discord. There are urns of which the borders are too prominent and too decorated for use, and which appear to be brought out chiefly for state, at grand carousals. The author who imitates the artificers of these, shall never have my custom. _Timotheus._ I think you judge rightly: but I do not understand languages: I only understand religion. _Lucian._ He must be a most accomplished, a most extraordinary man, who comprehends them both together. We do not even talk clearly when we are walking in the dark. _Timotheus._ Thou art not merely walking in the dark, but fast asleep. _Lucian._ And thou, my cousin, wouldst kindly awaken me with a red-hot poker. I have but a few paces to go along the corridor of life: prithee let me turn into my bed again and lie quiet. Never was any man less an enemy to religion than I am, whatever may be said to the contrary: and you shall judge of me by the soundness of my advice. If your leaders are in earnest, as many think, do persuade them to abstain from quarrelsomeness and contention, and not to declare it necessary that there should perpetually be a religious as well as a political war between east and west. No honest and considerate man will believe in their doctrines, who, inculcating peace and good-will, continue all the time to assail their fellow-citizens with the utmost rancour at every divergency of opinion, and, forbidding the indulgence of the kindlier affections, exercise at full stretch the fiercer. This is certain: if they obey any commander, they will never sound a charge when his order is to sound a retreat: if they acknowledge any magistrate, they will never tear down the tablet of his edicts. _Timotheus._ We have what is all-sufficient. _Lucian._ I see you have. _Timotheus._ You have ridiculed all religion and all philosophy. _Lucian._ I have found but little of either. I have cracked many a nut, and have come only to dust or maggots. _Timotheus._ To say nothing of the saints, are all philosophers fools or impostors? And, because you cannot rise to the ethereal heights of Plato, nor comprehend the real magnitude of a man so much above you, must he be a dwarf? _Lucian._ The best sight is not that which sees best in the dark or the twilight; for no objects are then visible in their true colours, and just proportions; but it is that which presents to us things as they are, and indicates what is within our reach and what is beyond it. Never were any three writers, of high celebrity, so little understood in the main character, as Plato, Diogenes, and Epicurus. Plato is a perfect master of logic and rhetoric; and whenever he errs in either, as I have proved to you he does occasionally, he errs through perverseness, not through unwariness. His language often settles into clear and most beautiful prose, often takes an imperfect and incoherent shape of poetry, and often, cloud against cloud, bursts with a vehement detonation in the air. Diogenes was hated both by the vulgar and the philosophers. By the philosophers, because he exposed their ignorance, ridiculed their jealousies, and rebuked their pride: by the vulgar, because they never can endure a man apparently of their own class who avoids their society and partakes in none of their humours, prejudices, and animosities. What right has he to be greater or better than they are? he who wears older clothes, who eats staler fish, and possesses no vote to imprison or banish anybody. I am now ashamed that I mingled in the rabble, and that I could not resist the childish mischief of smoking him in his tub. He was the wisest man of his time, not excepting Aristoteles; for he knew that he was greater than Philip or Alexander. Aristoteles did not know that he himself was, or knowing it, did not act up to his knowledge; and here is a deficiency of wisdom. _Timotheus._ Whether you did or did not strike the cask, Diogenes would have closed his eyes equally. He would never have come forth and seen the truth, had it shone upon the world in that day. But, intractable as was this recluse, Epicurus, I fear, is quite as lamentable. What horrible doctrines! _Lucian._ Enjoy, said he, the pleasant walks where you are: repose and eat gratefully the fruit that falls into your bosom: do not weary your feet with an excursion, at the end whereof you will find no resting-place: reject not the odour of roses for the fumes of pitch and sulphur. What horrible doctrines! _Timotheus._ Speak seriously. He was much too bad for ridicule. _Lucian._ I will then speak as you desire me, seriously. His smile was so unaffected and so graceful, that I should have thought it very injudicious to set my laugh against it. No philosopher ever lived with such uniform purity, such abstinence from censoriousness, from controversy, from jealousy, and from arrogance. _Timotheus._ Ah, poor mortal! I pity him, as far as may be; he is in hell: it would be wicked to wish him out: we are not to murmur against the all-wise dispensations. _Lucian._ I am sure he would not; and it is therefore I hope he is more comfortable than you believe. _Timotheus._ Never have I defiled my fingers, and never will I defile them, by turning over his writings. But in regard to Plato, I can have no objection to take your advice. _Lucian._ He will reward your assiduity: but he will assist you very little if you consult him principally (and eloquence for this should principally be consulted) to strengthen your humanity. Grandiloquent and sonorous, his lungs seem to play the better for the absence of the heart. His imagination is the most conspicuous, buoyed up by swelling billows over unsounded depths. There are his mild thunders, there are his glowing clouds, his traversing coruscations, and his shooting stars. More of true wisdom, more of trustworthy manliness, more of promptitude and power to keep you steady and straightforward on the perilous road of life, may be found in the little manual of Epictetus, which I could write in the palm of my left hand, than there is in all the rolling and redundant volumes of this mighty rhetorician, which you may begin to transcribe on the summit of the Great Pyramid, carry down over the Sphinx at the bottom, and continue on the sands half-way to Memphis. And indeed the materials are appropriate; one part being far above our sight, and the other on what, by the most befitting epithet, Homer calls the _no-corn-bearing_. _Timotheus._ There are many who will stand against you on this ground. _Lucian._ With what perfect ease and fluency do some of the dullest men in existence toss over and discuss the most elaborate of all works! How many myriads of such creatures would be insufficient to furnish intellect enough for any single paragraph in them! Yet '_we think this_', '_we advise that_', are expressions now become so customary, that it would be difficult to turn them into ridicule. We must pull the creatures out while they are in the very act, and show who and what they are. One of these fellows said to Caius Fuscus in my hearing, that there was a time when it was permitted him to doubt occasionally on particular points of criticism, but that the time was now over. _Timotheus._ And what did you think of such arrogance? What did you reply to such impertinence? _Lucian._ Let me answer one question at a time. First: I thought him a legitimate fool, of the purest breed. Secondly: I promised him I would always be contented with the judgment he had rejected, leaving him and his friends in the enjoyment of the rest. _Timotheus._ And what said he? _Lucian._ I forget. He seemed pleased at my acknowledgment of his discrimination, at my deference and delicacy. He wished, however, I had studied Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero, more attentively; without which preparatory discipline, no two persons could be introduced advantageously into a dialogue. I agreed with him on this position, remarking that we ourselves were at that very time giving our sentence on the fact. He suggested a slight mistake on my side, and expressed a wish that he were conversing with a writer able to sustain the opposite part. With his experience and skill in rhetoric, his long habitude of composition, his knowledge of life, of morals, and of character, he should be less verbose than Cicero, less gorgeous than Plato, and less trimly attired than Xenophon. _Timotheus._ If he spoke in that manner, he might indeed be ridiculed for conceitedness and presumption, but his language is not altogether a fool's. _Lucian._ I deliver his sentiments, not his words: for who would read, or who would listen to me, if such fell from me as from him? Poetry has its probabilities, so has prose: when people cry out against the representation of a dullard, _Could he have spoken all that?_ 'Certainly no,' is the reply: neither did Priam implore, in harmonious verse, the pity of Achilles. We say only what might be said, when great postulates are conceded. _Timotheus._ We will pretermit these absurd and silly men: but, Cousin Lucian! Cousin Lucian! the name of Plato will be durable as that of Sesostris. _Lucian._ So will the pebbles and bricks which gangs of slaves erected into a pyramid. I do not hold Sesostris in much higher estimation than those quieter lumps of matter. They, O Timotheus, who survive the wreck of ages, are by no means, as a body, the worthiest of our admiration. It is in these wrecks, as in those at sea, the best things are not always saved. Hen-coops and empty barrels bob upon the surface, under a serene and smiling sky, when the graven or depicted images of the gods are scattered on invisible rocks, and when those who most resemble them in knowledge and beneficence are devoured by cold monsters below. _Timotheus._ You now talk reasonably, seriously, almost religiously. Do you ever pray? _Lucian._ I do. It was no longer than five years ago that I was deprived by death of my dog Melanops. He had uniformly led an innocent life; for I never would let him walk out with me, lest he should bring home in his mouth the remnant of some god or other, and at last get bitten or stung by one. I reminded Anubis of this: and moreover I told him, what he ought to be aware of, that Melanops did honour to his relationship. _Timotheus._ I cannot ever call it piety to pray for dumb and dead beasts. _Lucian._ Timotheus! Timotheus! have you no heart? have you no dog? do you always pray only for yourself? _Timotheus._ We do not believe that dogs can live again. _Lucian._ More shame for you! If they enjoy and suffer, if they hope and fear, if calamities and wrongs befall them, such as agitate their hearts and excite their apprehensions; if they possess the option of being grateful or malicious, and choose the worthier; if they exercise the same sound judgment on many other occasions, some for their own benefit and some for the benefit of their masters, they have as good a chance of a future life, and a better chance of a happy one, than half the priests of all the religions in the world. Wherever there is the choice of doing well or ill, and that choice (often against a first impulse) decides for well, there must not only be a soul of the same nature as man's, although of less compass and comprehension, but, being of the same nature, the same immortality must appertain to it; for spirit, like body, may change, but cannot be annihilated. It was among the prejudices of former times that pigs are uncleanly animals, and fond of wallowing in the mire for mire's sake. Philosophy has now discovered that when they roll in mud and ordure, it is only from an excessive love of cleanliness, and a vehement desire to rid themselves of scabs and vermin. Unfortunately, doubts keep pace with discoveries. They are like warts, of which the blood that springs from a great one extirpated, makes twenty little ones. _Timotheus._ The Hydra would be a more noble simile. _Lucian._ I was indeed about to illustrate my position by the old Hydra, so ready at hand and so tractable; but I will never take hold of a hydra, when a wart will serve my turn. _Timotheus._ Continue then. _Lucian._ Even children are now taught, in despite of Aesop, that animals never spoke. The uttermost that can be advanced with any show of confidence is, that if they spoke at all, they spoke in unknown tongues. Supposing the fact, is this a reason why they should not be respected? Quite the contrary. If the tongues were unknown, it tends to demonstrate _our_ ignorance, not _theirs_. If we could not understand them, while they possessed the gift, here is no proof that they did not speak to the purpose, but only that it was not to _our_ purpose; which may likewise be said with equal certainty of the wisest men that ever existed. How little have we learned from them, for the conduct of life or the avoidance of calamity! Unknown tongues, indeed! yes, so are all tongues to the vulgar and the negligent. _Timotheus._ It comforts me to hear you talk in this manner, without a glance at our gifts and privileges. _Lucian._ I am less incredulous than you suppose, my cousin! Indeed I have been giving you what ought to be a sufficient proof of it. _Timotheus._ You have spoken with becoming gravity, I must confess. _Lucian._ Let me then submit to your judgment some fragments of history which have lately fallen into my hands. There is among them a _hymn_, of which the metre is so incondite, and the phraseology so ancient, that the grammarians have attributed it to Linus. But the hymn will interest you less, and is less to our purpose, than the tradition; by which it appears that certain priests of high antiquity were of the brute creation. _Timotheus._ No better, any of them. _Lucian._ Now you have polished the palms of your hands, I will commence my narrative from the manuscript. _Timotheus._ Pray do. _Lucian._ There existed in the city of Nephosis a fraternity of priests, reverenced by the appellation of _Gasteres_. It is reported that they were not always of their present form, but were birds aquatic and migratory, a species of cormorant. The poet Linus, who lived nearer the transformation (if there indeed was any), sings thus, in his Hymn to Zeus: 'Thy power is manifest, O Zeus! in the Gasteres. Wild birds were they, strong of talon, clanging of wing, and clamorous of gullet. Wild birds, O Zeus! wild birds; now cropping the tender grass by the river of Adonis, and breaking the nascent reed at the root, and depasturing the sweet nymphaea; now again picking up serpents and other creeping things on each hand of old Aegyptos, whose head is hidden in the clouds. 'Oh that Mnemosyne would command the staidest of her three daughters to stand and sing before me! to sing clearly and strongly. How before thy throne, Saturnian! sharp voices arose, even the voices of Heré and of thy children. How they cried out that innumerable mortal men, various-tongued, kid-roasters in tent and tabernacle, devising in their many-turning hearts and thoughtful minds how to fabricate well-rounded spits of beech-tree, how such men having been changed into brute animals, it behoved thee to trim the balance, and in thy wisdom to change sundry brute animals into men; in order that they might pour out flame-coloured wine unto thee, and sprinkle the white flower of the sea upon the thighs of many bulls, to pleasure thee. Then didst thou, O storm-driver! overshadow far lands with thy dark eyebrows, looking down on them, to accomplish thy will. And then didst thou behold the Gasteres, fat, tall, prominent-crested, purple-legged, daedal-plumed, white and black, changeable in colour as Iris. And lo! thou didst will it, and they were men.' _Timotheus._ No doubt whatever can be entertained of this hymn's antiquity. But what farther says the historian? _Lucian._ I will read on, to gratify you. 'It is recorded that this ancient order of a most lordly priesthood went through many changes of customs and ceremonies, which indeed they were always ready to accommodate to the maintenance of their authority and the enjoyment of their riches. It is recorded that, in the beginning, they kept various tame animals, and some wild ones, within the precincts of the temple: nevertheless, after a time, they applied to their own uses everything they could lay their hands on, whatever might have been the vow of those who came forward with the offering. And when it was expected of them to make sacrifices, they not only would make none, but declared it an act of impiety to expect it. Some of the people, who feared the Immortals, were dismayed and indignant at this backwardness; and the discontent at last grew universal. Whereupon, the two chief priests held a long conference together, and agreed that something must be done to pacify the multitude. But it was not until the greater of them, acknowledging his despondency, called on the gods to answer for him that his grief was only because he never could abide bad precedents: and the other, on his side, protested that he was overruled by his superior, and moreover had a serious objection (founded on principle) to be knocked on the head. Meanwhile the elder was looking down on the folds of his robe, in deep melancholy. After long consideration, he sprang upon his feet, pushing his chair behind him, and said, "Well, it is grown old, and was always too long for me: I am resolved to cut off a finger's breadth." '"Having, in your wisdom and piety, well contemplated the bad precedent," said the other, with much consternation in his countenance at seeing so elastic a spring in a heel by no means bearing any resemblance to a stag's.... "I have, I have," replied the other, interrupting him; "say no more; I am sick at heart; you must do the same." '"A cursed dog has torn a hole in mine," answered the other, "and, if I cut anywhere about it, I only make bad worse. In regard to its length, I wish it were as long again." "Brother! brother! never be worldly-minded," said the senior. "Follow my example: snip off it not a finger's breadth, half a finger's breadth." '"But," expostulated the other, "will that satisfy the gods?" "Who talked about them?" placidly said the senior. "It is very unbecoming to have them always in our mouths: surely there are appointed times for them. Let us be contented with laying the snippings on the altar, and thus showing the people our piety and condescension. They, and the gods also, will be just as well satisfied, as if we offered up a buttock of beef, with a bushel of salt and the same quantity of wheaten flour on it." '"Well, if that will do ... and you know best," replied the other, "so be it." Saying which words, he carefully and considerately snipped off as much in proportion (for he was shorter by an inch) as the elder had done, yet leaving on his shoulders quite enough of materials to make handsome cloaks for seven or eight stout-built generals. Away they both went, arm-in-arm, and then holding up their skirts a great deal higher than was necessary, told the gods what they two had been doing for them and their glory. About the court of the temple the sacred swine were lying in indolent composure: seeing which, the brotherly twain began to commune with themselves afresh: and the senior said repentantly, "What fools we have been! The populace will laugh outright at the curtailment of our vestures, but would gladly have seen these animals eat daily a quarter less of the lentils." The words were spoken so earnestly and emphatically that they were overheard by the quadrupeds. Suddenly there was a rising of all the principal ones in the sacred enclosure: and many that were in the streets took up, each according to his temperament and condition, the gravest or shrillest tone of reprobation. The thinner and therefore the more desperate of the creatures, pushing their snouts under the curtailed habiliments of the high priests, assailed them with ridicule and reproach. For it had pleased the gods to work a miracle in their behoof, and they became as loquacious as those who governed them, and who were appointed to speak in the high places. "Let the worst come to the worst, we at least have our tails to our hams," said they. "For how long?" whined others, piteously: others incessantly ejaculated tremendous imprecations: others, more serious and sedate, groaned inwardly; and, although under their hearts there lay a huge mass of indigestible sourness ready to rise up against the chief priests, they ventured no farther than expostulation. "We shall lose our voices," said they, "if we lose our complement of lentils; and then, most reverend lords, what will ye do for choristers?" Finally, one of grand dimensions, who seemed almost half-human, imposed silence on every debater. He lay stretched out apart from his brethren, covering with his side the greater portion of a noble dunghill, and all its verdure native and imported. He crushed a few measures of peascods to cool his tusks; then turned his pleasurable longitudinal eyes far toward the outer extremities of their sockets, and leered fixedly and sarcastically at the high priests, showing every tooth in each jaw. Other men might have feared them; the high priests envied them, seeing what order they were in, and what exploits they were capable of. A great painter, who flourished many olympiads ago, has, in his volume entitled the _Canon_, defined the line of beauty. It was here in its perfection: it followed with winning obsequiousness every member, but delighted more especially to swim along that placid and pliant curvature on which Nature had ranged the implements of mastication. Pawing with his cloven hoof, he suddenly changed his countenance from the contemplative to the wrathful. At one effort he rose up to his whole length, breadth, and height: and they who had never seen him in earnest, nor separate from the common swine of the enclosure, with which he was in the habit of husking what was thrown to him, could form no idea what a prodigious beast he was. Terrible were the expressions of choler and comminations which burst forth from his fulminating tusks. Erimanthus would have hidden his puny offspring before them; and Hercules would have paused at the encounter. Thrice he called aloud to the high priests: thrice he swore in their own sacred language that they were a couple of thieves and impostors: thrice he imprecated the worst maledictions on his own head if they had not violated the holiest of their vows, and were not ready even to sell their gods. A tremor ran throughout the whole body of the united swine; so awful was the adjuration! Even the Gasteres themselves in some sort shuddered, not perhaps altogether at the solemn tone of its impiety; for they had much experience in these matters. But among them was a Gaster who was calmer than the swearer, and more prudent and conciliating than those he swore against. Hearing this objurgation, he went blandly up to the sacred porker, and, lifting the flap of his right ear between forefinger and thumb with all delicacy and gentleness, thus whispered into it: "You do not in your heart believe that any of us are such fools as to sell our gods, at least while we have such a reserve to fall back upon." '"Are we to be devoured?" cried the noble porker, twitching his ear indignantly from under the hand of the monitor. "Hush!" said he, laying it again, most soothingly, rather farther from the tusks: "hush! sweet friend! Devoured? Oh, certainly not: that is to say, not _all_: or, if all, not all at once. Indeed the holy men my brethren may perhaps be contented with taking a little blood from each of you, entirely for the advantage of your health and activity, and merely to compose a few slender black-puddings for the inferior monsters of the temple, who latterly are grown very exacting, and either are, or pretend to be, hungry after they have eaten a whole handful of acorns, swallowing I am ashamed to say what a quantity of water to wash them down. We do not grudge them it, as they well know: but they appear to have forgotten how recently no inconsiderable portion of this bounty has been conferred. If we, as they object to us, eat more, they ought to be aware that it is by no means for our gratification, since we have abjured it before the gods, but to maintain the dignity of the priesthood, and to exhibit the beauty and utility of subordination." 'The noble porker had beaten time with his muscular tail at many of these periods; but again his heart panted visibly, and he could bear no more. '"All this for our good! for our activity! for our health! Let us alone: we have health enough; we want no activity. Let us alone, I say again, or by the Immortals!..." "Peace, my son! Your breath is valuable: evidently you have but little to spare: and what mortal knows how soon the gods may demand the last of it?" 'At the beginning of this exhortation, the worthy high priest had somewhat repressed the ebullient choler of his refractory and pertinacious disciple, by applying his flat soft palm to the signet-formed extremity of the snout. '"We are ready to hear complaints at all times," added he, "and to redress any grievance at our own. But beyond a doubt, if you continue to raise your abominable outcries, some of the people are likely to hit upon two discoveries: first that your lentils would be sufficient to make daily for every poor family a good wholesome porridge; and secondly, that your flesh, properly cured, might hang up nicely against the forthcoming bean-season." Pondering these mighty words, the noble porker kept his eyes fixed upon him for some instants, then leaned forward dejectedly, then tucked one foot under him, then another, cautious to descend with dignity. At last he grunted (it must for ever be ambiguous whether with despondency or with resignation), pushed his wedgy snout far within the straw subjacent, and sank into that repose which is granted to the just.' _Timotheus._ Cousin! there are glimmerings of truth and wisdom in sundry parts of this discourse, not unlike little broken shells entangled in dark masses of seaweed. But I would rather you had continued to adduce fresh arguments to demonstrate the beneficence of the Deity, proving (if you could) that our horses and dogs, faithful servants and companions to us, and often treated cruelly, may recognize us hereafter, and we them. We have no authority for any such belief. _Lucian._ We have authority for thinking and doing whatever is humane. Speaking of humanity, it now occurs to me, I have heard a report that some well-intentioned men of your religion so interpret the words or wishes of its Founder, they would abolish slavery throughout the empire. _Timotheus._ Such deductions have been drawn indeed from our Master's doctrine: but the saner part of us receive it metaphorically, and would only set men free from the bonds of sin. For if domestic slaves were manumitted, we should neither have a dinner dressed nor a bed made, unless by our own children: and as to labour in the fields, who would cultivate them in this hot climate? We must import slaves from Ethiopia and elsewhere, wheresoever they can be procured: but the hardship lies not on them; it lies on us, and bears heavily; for we must first buy them with our money, and then feed them; and not only must we maintain them while they are hale and hearty and can serve us, but likewise in sickness and (unless we can sell them for a trifle) in decrepitude. Do not imagine, my cousin, that we are no better than enthusiasts, visionaries, subverters of order, and ready to roll society down into one flat surface. _Lucian._ I thought you were maligned: I said so. _Timotheus._ When the subject was discussed in our congregation, the meaner part of the people were much in favour of the abolition: but the chief priests and ministers absented themselves, and gave no vote at all, deeming it secular, and saying that in such matters the laws and customs of the country ought to be observed. _Lucian._ Several of these chief priests and ministers are robed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day. _Timotheus._ I have hopes of you now. _Lucian._ Why so suddenly? _Timotheus._ Because you have repeated those blessed words, which are only to be found in our Scriptures. _Lucian._ There indeed I found them. But I also found in the same volume words of the same speaker, declaring that the rich shall never see His face in heaven. _Timotheus._ He does not always mean what you think He does. _Lucian._ How is this? Did He then direct His discourses to none but men more intelligent than I am? _Timotheus._ Unless He gave you understanding for the occasion, they might mislead you. _Lucian._ Indeed! _Timotheus._ Unquestionably. For instance, He tells us to take no heed of to-morrow: He tells us to share equally all our worldly goods: but we know that we cannot be respected unless we bestow due care on our possessions, and that not only the vulgar but the well-educated esteem us in proportion to the gifts of fortune. _Lucian._ The eclectic philosophy is most flourishing among you Christians. You take whatever suits your appetites, and reject the rest. _Timotheus._ We are not half so rich as the priests of Isis. Give us their possessions; and we will not sit idle as they do, but be able and ready to do incalculable good to our fellow-creatures. _Lucian._ I have never seen great possessions excite to great alacrity. Usually they enfeeble the sympathies, and often overlie and smother them. _Timotheus._ Our religion is founded less on sympathies than on miracles. Cousin! you smile most when you ought to be most serious. _Lucian._ I was smiling at the thought of one whom I would recommend to your especial notice, as soon as you disinherit the priests of Isis. He may perhaps be refractory; for he pretends (the knave!) to work miracles. _Timotheus._ Impostor! who is he? _Lucian._ Aulus of Pelusium. Idle and dissolute, he never gained anything honestly but a scourging, if indeed he ever made, what he long merited, this acquisition. Unable to run into debt where he was known, he came over to Alexandria. _Timotheus._ I know him: I know him well. Here, of his own accord, he has betaken himself to a new and regular life. _Lucian._ He will presently wear it out, or make it sit easier on his shoulders. My metaphor brings me to my story. Having nothing to carry with him beside an empty valise, he resolved on filling it with something, however worthless, lest, seeing his utter destitution, and hopeless of payment, a receiver of lodgers should refuse to admit him into the hostelry. Accordingly, he went to a tailor's, and began to joke about his poverty. Nothing is more apt to bring people into good humour; for, if they are poor themselves, they enjoy the pleasure of discovering that others are no better off; and, if not poor, there is the consciousness of superiority. 'The favour I am about to ask of a man so wealthy and so liberal as you are,' said Aulus, 'is extremely small: you can materially serve me, without the slightest loss, hazard, or inconvenience. In few words, my valise is empty: and to some ears an empty valise is louder and more discordant than a bagpipe: I cannot say I like the sound of it myself. Give me all the shreds and snippings you can spare me. They will feel like clothes; not exactly so to me and my person, but to those who are inquisitive, and who may be importunate.' The tailor laughed, and distended both arms of Aulus with his munificence. Soon was the valise well filled and rammed down. Plenty of boys were in readiness to carry it to the boat. Aulus waved them off, looking at some angrily, at others suspiciously. Boarding the skiff, he lowered his treasure with care and caution, staggering a little at the weight, and shaking it gently on deck, with his ear against it: and then, finding all safe and compact, he sat on it; but as tenderly as a pullet on her first eggs. When he was landed, his care was even greater, and whoever came near him was warned off with loud vociferations. Anxiously as the other passengers were invited by the innkeepers to give their houses the preference, Aulus was importuned most: the others were only beset; he was borne off in triumphant captivity. He ordered a bedroom, and carried his valise with him; he ordered a bath, and carried with him his valise. He started up from the company at dinner, struck his forehead, and cried out, 'Where is my valise?' 'We are honest men here,' replied the host. 'You have left it, sir, in your chamber: where else indeed should you leave it?' 'Honesty is seated on your brow,' exclaimed Aulus; 'but there are few to be trusted in the world we live in. I now believe I can eat.' And he gave a sure token of the belief that was in him, not without a start now and then and a finger at his ear, as if he heard somebody walking in the direction of his bedchamber. Now began his first miracle: for now he contrived to pick up, from time to time, a little money. In the presence of his host and fellow-lodgers, he threw a few obols, negligently and indifferently, among the beggars. 'These poor creatures,' said he, 'know a new-comer as well as the gnats do: in one half-hour I am half ruined by them; and this daily.' Nearly a month had elapsed since his arrival, and no account of board and lodging had been delivered or called for. Suspicion at length arose in the host whether he really was rich. When another man's honesty is doubted, the doubter's is sometimes in jeopardy. The host was tempted to unsew the valise. To his amazement and horror he found only shreds within it. However, he was determined to be cautious, and to consult his wife, who, although a Christian like Aulus, and much edified by his discourses, might dissent from him in regard to a community of goods, at least in her own household, and might defy him to prove by any authority that the doctrine was meant for innkeepers. Aulus, on his return in the evening, found out that his valise had been opened. He hurried back, threw its contents into the canal, and, borrowing an old cloak, he tucked it up under his dress, and returned. Nobody had seen him enter or come back again, nor was it immediately that his host or hostess were willing to appear. But, after he had called them loudly for some time, they entered his apartment: and he thus addressed the woman: 'O Eucharis! no words are requisite to convince you (firm as you are in the faith) of eternal verities, however mysterious. But your unhappy husband has betrayed his incredulity in regard to the most awful. If my prayers, offered up in our holy temples all day long, have been heard, and that they have been heard I feel within me the blessed certainty, something miraculous has been vouchsafed for the conversion of this miserable sinner. Until the present hour, the valise before you was filled with precious relics from the apparel of saints and martyrs, fresh as when on them.' 'True, by Jove!' said the husband to himself. 'Within the present hour,' continued Aulus, 'they are united into one raiment, signifying our own union, our own restoration.' He drew forth the cloak, and fell on his face. Eucharis fell also, and kissed the saintly head prostrate before her. The host's eyes were opened, and he bewailed his hardness of heart. Aulus is now occupied in strengthening his faith, not without an occasional support to the wife's: all three live together in unity. _Timotheus._ And do you make a joke even of this? Will you never cease from the habitude? _Lucian._ Too soon. The farther we descend into the vale of years, the fewer illusions accompany us: we have little inclination, little time, for jocularity and laughter. Light things are easily detached from us, and we shake off heavier as we can. Instead of levity, we are liable to moroseness: for always near the grave there are more briers than flowers, unless we plant them ourselves, or our friends supply them. _Timotheus._ Thinking thus, do you continue to dissemble or to distort the truth? The shreds are become a cable for the faithful. That they were miraculously turned into one entire garment who shall gainsay? How many hath it already clothed with righteousness? Happy men, casting their doubts away before it! Who knows, O Cousin Lucian, but on some future day you yourself will invoke the merciful interposition of Aulus! _Lucian._ Possibly: for if ever I fall among thieves, nobody is likelier to be at the head of them. _Timotheus._ Uncharitable man! how suspicious! how ungenerous! how hardened in unbelief! Reason is a bladder on which you may paddle like a child as you swim in summer waters: but, when the winds rise and the waves roughen, it slips from under you, and you sink; yes, O Lucian, you sink into a gulf whence you never can emerge. _Lucian._ I deem those the wisest who exert the soonest their own manly strength, now with the stream and now against it, enjoying the exercise in fine weather, venturing out in foul, if need be, yet avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive, laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, and inflicting an incurable blindness. _Timotheus._ Well, Cousin Lucian! I can bear all you say while you are not witty. Let me bid you farewell in this happy interval. _Lucian._ Is it not serious and sad, O my cousin, that what the Deity hath willed to lie incomprehensible in His mysteries, we should fall upon with tooth and nail, and ferociously growl over, or ignorantly dissect? _Timotheus._ Ho! now you come to be serious and sad, there are hopes of you. Truth always begins or ends so. _Lucian._ Undoubtedly. But I think it more reverential to abstain from that which, with whatever effort, I should never understand. _Timotheus._ You are lukewarm, my cousin, you are lukewarm. A most dangerous state. _Lucian._ For milk to continue in, not for men. I would not fain be frozen or scalded. _Timotheus._ Alas! you are blind, my sweet cousin! _Lucian._ Well; do not open my eyes with pincers, nor compose for them a collyrium of spurge. May not men eat and drink and talk together, and perform in relation one to another all the duties of social life, whose opinions are different on things immediately under their eyes? If they can and do, surely they may as easily on things equally above the comprehension of each party. The wisest and most virtuous man in the whole extent of the Roman Empire is Plutarch of Cheronaea: yet Plutarch holds a firm belief in the existence of I know not how many gods, every one of whom has committed notorious misdemeanours. The nearest to the Cheronaean in virtue and wisdom is Trajan, who holds all the gods dog-cheap. These two men are friends. If either of them were influenced by your religion, as inculcated and practised by the priesthood, he would be the enemy of the other, and wisdom and virtue would plead for the delinquent in vain. When your religion had existed, as you tell us, about a century, Caius Caecilius, of Novum Comum, was proconsul in Bithynia. Trajan, the mildest and most equitable of mankind, desirous to remove from them, as far as might be, the hatred and invectives of those whose old religion was assailed by them, applied to Caecilius for information on their behaviour as good citizens. The reply of Caecilius was favourable. Had Trajan applied to the most eminent and authoritative of the sect, they would certainly have brought into jeopardy all who differed in one tittle from any point of their doctrine or discipline. For the thorny and bitter aloe of dissension required less than a century to flower on the steps of your temple. _Timotheus._ You are already half a Christian, in exposing to the world the vanities both of philosophy and of power. _Lucian._ I have done no such thing: I have exposed the vanities of the philosophizing and the powerful. Philosophy is admirable; and Power may be glorious: the one conduces to truth, the other has nearly all the means of conferring peace and happiness, but it usually, and indeed almost always, takes a contrary direction. I have ridiculed the futility of speculative minds, only when they would pave the clouds instead of the streets. To see distant things better than near is a certain proof of a defective sight. The people I have held in derision never turn their eyes to what they can see, but direct them continually where nothing is to be seen. And this, by their disciples, is called the sublimity of speculation! There is little merit acquired, or force exhibited, in blowing off a feather that would settle on my nose: and this is all I have done in regard to the philosophers: but I claim for myself the approbation of humanity, in having shown the true dimensions of the great. The highest of them are no higher than my tunic; but they are high enough to trample on the necks of those wretches who throw themselves on the ground before them. _Timotheus._ Was Alexander of Macedon no higher? _Lucian._ What region of the earth, what city, what theatre, what library, what private study, hath he enlightened? If you are silent, I may well be. It is neither my philosophy nor your religion which casts the blood and bones of men in their faces, and insists on the most reverence for those who have made the most unhappy. If the Romans scourged by the hands of children the schoolmaster who would have betrayed them, how greatly more deserving of flagellation, from the same quarter, are those hundreds of pedagogues who deliver up the intellects of youth to such immoral revellers and mad murderers! They would punish a thirsty child for purloining a bunch of grapes from a vineyard, and the same men on the same day would insist on his reverence for the subverter of Tyre, the plunderer of Babylon, and the incendiary of Persepolis. And are these men teachers? are these men philosophers? are these men priests? Of all the curses that ever afflicted the earth, I think Alexander was the worst. Never was he in so little mischief as when he was murdering his friends. _Timotheus._ Yet he built this very city; a noble and opulent one when Rome was of hurdles and rushes. _Lucian._ He built it! I wish, O Timotheus! he had been as well employed as the stone-cutters or the plasterers. No, no: the wisest of architects planned the most beautiful and commodious of cities, by which, under a rational government and equitable laws, Africa might have been civilized to the centre, and the palm have extended her conquests through the remotest desert. Instead of which, a dozen of Macedonian thieves rifled a dying drunkard and murdered his children. In process of time, another drunkard reeled hitherward from Rome, made an easy mistake in mistaking a palace for a brothel, permitted a stripling boy to beat him soundly, and a serpent to receive the last caresses of his paramour. Shame upon historians and pedagogues for exciting the worst passions of youth by the display of such false glories! If your religion hath any truth or influence, her professors will extinguish the promontory lights, which only allure to breakers. They will be assiduous in teaching the young and ardent that great abilities do not constitute great men, without the right and unremitting application of them; and that, in the sight of Humanity and Wisdom, it is better to erect one cottage than to demolish a hundred cities. Down to the present day we have been taught little else than falsehood. We have been told to do this thing and that: we have been told we shall be punished unless we do: but at the same time we are shown by the finger that prosperity and glory, and the esteem of all about us, rest upon other and very different foundations. Now, do the ears or the eyes seduce the most easily and lead the most directly to the heart? But both eyes and ears are won over, and alike are persuaded to corrupt us. _Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I was leaving you with the strangest of all notions in my head. I began to think for a moment that you doubted my sincerity in the religion I profess; and that a man of your admirable good sense, and at your advanced age, could reject that only sustenance which supports us through the grave into eternal life. _Lucian._ I am the most docile and practicable of men, and never reject what people set before me: for if it is bread, it is good for my own use; if bone or bran, it will do for my dog or mule. But, although you know my weakness and facility, it is unfair to expect I should have admitted at once what the followers and personal friends of your Master for a long time hesitated to receive. I remember to have read in one of the early commentators, that His disciples themselves could not swallow the miracle of the loaves; and one who wrote more recently says, that even His brethren did not believe in Him. _Timotheus._ Yet, finally, when they have looked over each other's accounts, they cast them up, and make them all tally in the main sum; and if one omits an article, the next supplies its place with a commodity of the same value. What would you have? But it is of little use to argue on religion with a man who, professing his readiness to believe, and even his credulity, yet disbelieves in miracles. _Lucian._ I should be obstinate and perverse if I disbelieved in the existence of a thing for no better reason than because I never saw it, and cannot understand its operations. Do you believe, O Timotheus, that Perictione, the mother of Plato, became his mother by the sole agency of Apollo's divine spirit, under the phantasm of that god? _Timotheus._ I indeed believe such absurdities? _Lucian._ You touch me on a vital part if you call an absurdity the religion or philosophy in which I was educated. Anaxalides, and Clearagus, and Speusippus, his own nephew, assert it. Who should know better than they? _Timotheus._ Where are their proofs? _Lucian._ I would not be so indelicate as to require them on such an occasion. A short time ago I conversed with an old centurion, who was in service by the side of Vespasian, when Titus, and many officers and soldiers of the army, and many captives, were present, and who saw one Eleazar put a ring to the nostril of a demoniac (as the patient was called) and draw the demon out of it. _Timotheus._ And do you pretend to believe this nonsense? _Lucian._ I only believe that Vespasian and Titus had nothing to gain or accomplish by the miracle; and that Eleazar, if he had been detected in a trick by two acute men and several thousand enemies, had nothing to look forward to but a cross--the only piece of upholstery for which Judea seems to have either wood or workmen, and which are as common in that country as direction-posts are in any other. _Timotheus._ The Jews are a stiff-necked people. _Lucian._ On such occasions, no doubt. _Timotheus._ Would you, O Lucian, be classed among the atheists, like Epicurus? _Lucian._ It lies not at my discretion what name shall be given me at present or hereafter, any more than it did at my birth. But I wonder at the ignorance and precipitancy of those who call Epicurus an atheist. He saw on the same earth with himself a great variety of inferior creatures, some possessing more sensibility and more thoughtfulness than others. Analogy would lead so contemplative a reasoner to the conclusion that if many were inferior and in sight, others might be superior and out of sight. He never disbelieved in the existence of the gods; he only disbelieved that they troubled their heads with our concerns. Have they none of their own? If they are happy, does their happiness depend on us, comparatively so imbecile and vile? He believed, as nearly all nations do, in different ranks and orders of superhuman beings; and perhaps he thought (but I never was in his confidence or counsels) that the higher were rather in communication with the next to them in intellectual faculties, than with the most remote. To me the suggestion appears by no means irrational, that if we are managed or cared for at all by beings wiser than ourselves (which in truth would be no sign of any great wisdom in them), it can only be by such as are very far from perfection, and who indulge us in the commission of innumerable faults and follies, for their own speculation or amusement. _Timotheus._ There is only one such; and he is the devil. _Lucian._ If he delights in our wickedness, which you believe, he must be incomparably the happiest of beings, which you do not believe. No god of Epicurus rests his elbow on his armchair with less energetic exertion or discomposure. _Timotheus._ We lead holier and purer lives than such ignorant mortals as are not living under Grace. _Lucian._ I also live under Grace, O Timotheus! and I venerate her for the pleasures I have received at her hands. I do not believe she has quite deserted me. If my grey hairs are unattractive to her, and if the trace of her fingers is lost in the wrinkles of my forehead, still I sometimes am told it is discernible even on the latest and coldest of my writings. _Timotheus._ You are wilful in misapprehension. The Grace of which I speak is adverse to pleasure and impurity. _Lucian._ Rightly do you separate impurity and pleasure, which indeed soon fly asunder when the improvident would unite them. But never believe that tenderness of heart signifies corruption of morals, if you happen to find it (which indeed is unlikely) in the direction you have taken; on the contrary, no two qualities are oftener found together, on mind as on matter, than hardness and lubricity. Believe me, Cousin Timotheus, when we come to eighty years of age we are all Essenes. In our kingdom of heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage; and austerity in ourselves, when Nature holds over us the sharp instrument with which Jupiter operated on Saturn, makes us austere to others. But how happens it that you, both old and young, break every bond which connected you anciently with the Essenes? Not only do you marry (a height of wisdom to which I never have attained, although in others I commend it), but you never share your substance with the poorest of your community, as they did, nor live simply and frugally, nor purchase nor employ slaves, nor refuse rank and offices in the State, nor abstain from litigation, nor abominate and execrate the wounds and cruelties of war. The Essenes did all this, and greatly more, if Josephus and Philo, whose political and religious tenets are opposite to theirs, are credible and trustworthy. _Timotheus._ Doubtless you would also wish us to retire into the desert, and eschew the conversation of mankind. _Lucian._ No, indeed; but I would wish the greater part of your people to eschew mine, for they bring all the worst of the desert with them whenever they enter; its smothering heats, its blinding sands, its sweeping suffocation. Return to the pure spirit of the Essenes, without their asceticism; cease from controversy, and drop party designations. If you will not do this, do less, and be merely what you profess to be, which is quite enough for an honest, a virtuous, and a religious man. _Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I did not come hither to receive a lecture from you. _Lucian._ I have often given a dinner to a friend who did not come to dine with me. _Timotheus._ Then, I trust, you gave him something better for dinner than bay-salt and dandelions. If you will not assist us in nettling our enemies a little for their absurdities and impositions, let me entreat you, however, to let us alone, and to make no remarks on us. I myself run into no extravagances, like the Essenes, washing and fasting, and retiring into solitude. I am not called to them; when I am, I go. _Lucian._ I am apprehensive the Lord may afflict you with deafness in that ear. _Timotheus._ Nevertheless, I am indifferent to the world, and all things in it. This, I trust, you will acknowledge to be true religion and true philosophy. _Lucian._ That is not philosophy which betrays an indifference to those for whose benefit philosophy was designed; and those are the whole human race. But I hold it to be the most unphilosophical thing in the world to call away men from useful occupations and mutual help, to profitless speculations and acrid controversies. Censurable enough, and contemptible, too, is that supercilious philosopher, sneeringly sedate, who narrates in full and flowing periods the persecutions and tortures of a fellow-man, led astray by his credulity, and ready to die in the assertion of what in his soul he believes to be the truth. But hardly less censurable, hardly less contemptible, is the tranquilly arrogant sectarian, who denies that wisdom or honesty can exist beyond the limits of his own ill-lighted chamber. _Timotheus._ What! is he sanguinary? _Lucian._ Whenever he can be, he is; and he always has it in his power to be even worse than that, for he refuses his custom to the industrious and honest shopkeeper who has been taught to think differently from himself in matters which he has had no leisure to study, and by which, if he had enjoyed that leisure, he would have been a less industrious and a less expert artificer. _Timotheus._ We cannot countenance those hard-hearted men who refuse to hear the word of the Lord. _Lucian._ The hard-hearted knowing this of the tender-hearted, and receiving the declaration from their own lips, will refuse to hear the word of the Lord all their lives. _Timotheus._ Well, well; it cannot be helped. I see, cousin, my hopes of obtaining a little of your assistance in your own pleasant way are disappointed; but it is something to have conceived a better hope of saving your soul, from your readiness to acknowledge your belief in miracles. _Lucian._ Miracles have existed in all ages and in all religions. Witnesses to some of them have been numerous; to others of them fewer. Occasionally, the witnesses have been disinterested in the result. _Timotheus._ Now indeed you speak truly and wisely. _Lucian._ But sometimes the most honest and the most quiescent have either been unable or unwilling to push themselves so forward as to see clearly and distinctly the whole of the operation; and have listened to some knave who felt a pleasure in deluding their credulity, or some other who himself was either an enthusiast or a dupe. It also may have happened in the ancient religions, of Egypt for instance, or of India, or even of Greece, that narratives have been attributed to authors who never heard of them; and have been circulated by honest men who firmly believed them; by half-honest, who indulged their vanity in becoming members of a novel and bustling society; and by utterly dishonest, who, having no other means of rising above the shoulders of the vulgar, threw dust into their eyes and made them stoop. _Timotheus._ Ha! the rogues! It is nearly all over with them. _Lucian._ Let us hope so. Parthenius and the Roman poet Ovidius Naso, have related the transformations of sundry men, women, and gods. _Timotheus._ Idleness! Idleness! I never read such lying authors. _Lucian._ I myself have seen enough to incline me toward a belief in them. _Timotheus._ You? Why! you have always been thought an utter infidel; and now you are running, hot and heedless as any mad dog, to the opposite extreme! _Lucian._ I have lived to see, not indeed one man, but certainly one animal turned into another; nay, great numbers. I have seen sheep with the most placid faces in the morning, one nibbling the tender herb with all its dew upon it; another, negligent of its own sustenance, and giving it copiously to the tottering lamb aside it. _Timotheus._ How pretty! half poetical! _Lucian._ In the heat of the day I saw the very same sheep tearing off each other's fleeces with long teeth and longer claws, and imitating so admirably the howl of wolves, that at last the wolves came down on them in a body, and lent their best assistance at the general devouring. What is more remarkable, the people of the villages seemed to enjoy the sport; and, instead of attacking the wolves, waited until they had filled their stomachs, ate the little that was left, said piously and from the bottom of their hearts what you call _grace_, and went home singing and piping. BISHOP SHIPLEY AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN _Shipley._ There are very few men, even in the bushes and the wilderness, who delight in the commission of cruelty; but nearly all, throughout the earth, are censurable for the admission. When we see a blow struck, we go on and think no more about it: yet every blow aimed at the most distant of our fellow-creatures, is sure to come back, some time or other, to our families and descendants. He who lights a fire in one quarter is ignorant to what other the winds may carry it, and whether what is kindled in the wood may not break out again in the cornfield. _Franklin._ If we could restrain but one generation from deeds of violence, the foundation for a new and a more graceful edifice of society would not only have been laid, but would have been consolidated. _Shipley._ We already are horrified at the bare mention of religious wars; we should then be horrified at the mention of political. Why should they who, when they are affronted or offended, abstain from inflicting blows, some from a sense of decorousness and others from a sense of religion, be forward to instigate the infliction of ten thousand, all irremediable, all murderous? Every chief magistrate should be arbitrator and umpire in all differences between any two, forbidding war. Much would be added to the dignity of the most powerful king by rendering him an efficient member of such a grand Amphictyonic council. Unhappily they are persuaded in childhood that a reign is made glorious by a successful war. What schoolmaster ever taught a boy to question it? or indeed any point of political morality, or any incredible thing in history? Caesar and Alexander are uniformly clement: Themistocles died by a draught of bull's blood: Portia by swallowing red-hot pieces of charcoal. _Franklin._ Certainly no woman or man could perform either of these feats. In my opinion it lies beyond a doubt that Portia suffocated herself by the fumes of charcoal; and that the Athenian, whose stomach must have been formed on the model of other stomachs, and must therefore have rejected a much less quantity of blood than would have poisoned him, died by some chemical preparation, of which a bull's blood might, or might not, have been part. Schoolmasters who thus betray their trust, ought to be scourged by their scholars, like him of their profession who underwent the just indignation of the Roman Consul. You shut up those who are infected with the plague; why do you lay no coercion on those who are incurably possessed by the legion devil of carnage? When a creature is of intellect so perverted that he can discern no difference between a review and a battle, between the animating bugle and the dying groan, it were expedient to remove him, as quietly as may be, from his devastation of God's earth and his usurpation of God's authority. Compassion points out the cell for him at the bottom of the hospital, and listens to hear the key turned in the ward: until then the house is insecure. _Shipley._ God grant our rulers wisdom, and our brethren peace! _Franklin._ Here are but indifferent specimens and tokens. Those fellows throw stones pretty well: if they practise much longer, they will hit us: let me entreat you, my lord, to leave me here. So long as the good people were contented with hooting and shouting at us, no great harm was either done or apprehended: but now they are beginning to throw stones, perhaps they may prove themselves more dexterous in action than their rulers have done latterly in council. _Shipley._ Take care, Doctor Franklin! _That_ was very near being the philosopher's stone. _Franklin._ Let me pick it up, then, and send it to London by the diligence. But I am afraid your ministers, and the nation at large, are as little in the way of wealth as of wisdom, in the experiment they are making. _Shipley._ While I was attending to you, William had started. Look! he has reached them: they are listening to him. Believe me, he has all the courage of an Englishman and of a Christian; and, if the stoutest of them force him to throw off his new black coat, the blusterer would soon think it better to have listened to less polemical doctrine. _Franklin._ Meantime a few of the town boys are come nearer, and begin to grow troublesome. I am sorry to requite your hospitality with such hard fare. _Shipley._ True, these young bakers make their bread very gritty, but we must partake of it together so long as you are with us. _Franklin._ Be pleased, my lord, to give us grace; our repast is over; this is my boat. _Shipley._ We will accompany you as far as to the ship. Thank God! we are now upon the water, and all safe. Give me your hand, my good Doctor Franklin! and although you have failed in the object of your mission, yet the intention will authorize me to say, in the holy words of our Divine Redeemer, Blessed are the peacemakers! _Franklin._ My dear lord! if God ever blessed a man at the intercession of another, I may reasonably and confidently hope in such a benediction. Never did one arise from a warmer, a tenderer, or a purer heart. _Shipley._ Infatuation! that England should sacrifice to her king so many thousands of her bravest men, and ruin so many thousands of her most industrious, in a vain attempt to destroy the very principles on which her strength and her glory are founded! The weakest prince that ever sat upon a throne, and the most needy and sordid Parliament that ever pandered to distempered power, are thrusting our blindfold nation from the pinnacle of prosperity. _Franklin._ I believe _your_ king (from this moment it is permitted me to call him _ours_ no longer) to be as honest and as wise a man as any of those about him: but unhappily he can see no difference between a review and a battle. Such are the optics of most kings and rulers. His Parliament, in both Houses, acts upon calculation. There is hardly a family, in either, that does not anticipate the clear profit of several thousands a year, to itself and its connexions. Appointments to regiments and frigates raise the price of papers; and forfeited estates fly confusedly about, and darken the air from the Thames to the Atlantic. _Shipley._ It is lamentable to think that war, bringing with it every species of human misery, should become a commercial speculation. Bad enough when it arises from revenge; another word for honour. _Franklin._ A strange one indeed! but not more strange than fifty others that come under the same title. Wherever there is nothing of religion, nothing of reason, nothing of truth, we come at once to honour; and here we draw the sword, dispense with what little of civilization we ever pretended to, and murder or get murdered, as may happen. But these ceremonials both begin and end with an appeal to God, who, before we appealed to Him, plainly told us we should do no such thing, and that He would punish us most severely if we did. And yet, my lord, even the gentlemen upon your bench turn a deaf ear to Him on these occasions: nay, they go further; they pray to Him for success in that which He has forbidden so strictly, and when they have broken His commandment, thank Him. Upon seeing these mockeries and impieties age after age repeated, I have asked myself whether the depositaries and expounders of religion have really any whatever of their own; or rather, like the lawyers, whether they do not defend professionally a cause that otherwise does not interest them in the least. Surely, if these holy men really believed in a just retributive God, they would never dare to utter the word _war_, without horror and deprecation. _Shipley._ Let us attribute to infirmity what we must else attribute to wickedness. _Franklin._ Willingly would I: but children are whipped severely for inobservance of things less evident, for disobedience of commands less audible and less awful. I am loath to attribute cruelty to your order: men so entirely at their ease have seldom any. Certain I am that several of the bishops would not have patted Cain upon the back while he was about to kill Abel; and my wonder is that the very same holy men encourage their brothers in England to kill their brothers in America; not one, not two nor three, but thousands, many thousands. _Shipley._ I am grieved at the blindness with which God has afflicted us for our sins. These unhappy men are little aware what combustibles they are storing under the Church, and how soon they may explode. Even the wisest do not reflect on the most important and the most certain of things; which is, that every act of inhumanity and injustice goes far beyond what is apparent at the time of its commission; that these, and all other things, have their consequences; and that the consequences are infinite and eternal. If this one truth alone could be deeply impressed upon the hearts of men, it would regenerate the whole human race. _Franklin._ In regard to politics, I am not quite certain whether a politician may not be too far-sighted: but I am quite certain that, if it be a fault, it is one into which few have fallen. The policy of the Romans in the time of the republic, seems to have been prospective. Some of the Dutch also, and of the Venetians, used the telescope. But in monarchies the prince, not the people, is consulted by the minister of the day; and what pleases the weakest supersedes what is approved by the wisest. _Shipley._ We have had great statesmen: Burleigh, Cromwell, Marlborough, Somers: and whatever may have been in the eyes of a moralist the vices of Walpole, none ever understood more perfectly, or pursued more steadily, the direct and palpable interests of the country. Since his administration, our affairs have never been managed by men of business; and it was more than could have been expected that, in our war against the French in Canada, the appointment fell on an able commander. _Franklin._ Such an anomaly is unlikely to recur. You have in the English Parliament (I speak of both Houses) only two great men; only two considerate and clear-sighted politicians; Chatham and Burke. Three or four can say clever things; several have sonorous voices; many vibrate sharp comminations from the embrasures of portentously slit sleeves; and there are those to be found who deliver their oracles out of wigs as worshipful as the curls of Jupiter, however they may be grumbled at by the flour-mills they have laid under such heavy contribution; yet nearly all of all parties want alike the sagacity to discover that in striking America you shake Europe; that kings will come out of the war either to be victims or to be despots; and that within a quarter of a century they will be hunted down like vermin by the most servile nations, or slain in their palaces by their own courtiers. In a peace of twenty years you might have paid off the greater part of your National Debt, indeed as much of it as it would be expedient to discharge, and you would have left your old enemy France labouring and writhing under the intolerable and increasing weight of hers. This is the only way in which you can ever quite subdue her; and in this you subdue her without a blow, without a menace, and without a wrong. As matters now stand, you are calling her from attending to the corruptions of her court, and inviting her from bankruptcy to glory. _Shipley._ I see not how bankruptcy can be averted by the expenditure of war. _Franklin._ It cannot. But war and glory are the same thing to France, and she sings as shrilly and as gaily after a beating as before. With a subsidy to a less amount than she has lately been accustomed to squander in six weeks, and with no more troops than would garrison a single fortress, she will enable us to set you at defiance, and to do you a heavier injury in two campaigns than she has been able to do in two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell her crown jewels and her church jewels, which cover the whole kingdom, and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy. You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years have not done this; and the first trumpet will untrance her. You leave your house open to incendiaries while you are running after a refractory child. Had you laid down the rod, the child would have come back. And because he runs away from the rod, you take up the poker. Seriously, what means do you possess of enforcing your unjust claims and insolent authority? Never since the Norman Conquest had you an army so utterly inefficient, or generals so notoriously unskilful: no, not even in the reign of that venal traitor, that French stipendiary, the second Charles. Those were yet living who had fought bravely for his father, and those also who had vanquished him: and Victory still hovered over the mast that had borne the banners of our Commonwealth: _ours_, _ours_, my lord! the word is the right word here. _Shipley._ I am depressed in spirit, and can sympathize but little in your exultation. All the crimes of Nero and Caligula are less afflicting to humanity, and consequently we may suppose will bring down on the offenders a less severe retribution, than an unnecessary and unjust war. And yet the authors and abettors of this most grievous among our earthly calamities, the enactors and applauders (on how vast a theatre!) of the first and greatest crime committed upon earth, are quiet complacent creatures, jovial at dinner, hearty at breakfast, and refreshed with sleep! Nay, the prime movers in it are called most religious and most gracious; and the hand that signs in cold blood the death-warrant of nations, is kissed by the kind-hearted, and confers distinction upon the brave! The prolongation of a life that shortens so many others, is prayed for by the conscientious and the pious! Learning is inquisitive in the research of phrases to celebrate him who has conferred such blessings, and the eagle of genius holds the thunderbolt by his throne! Philosophy, O my friend, has hitherto done little for the social state; and Religion has nearly all her work to do! She too hath but recently washed her hands from blood, and stands neutrally by, yes, worse than neutrally, while others shed it. I am convinced that no day of my life will be so censured by my own clergy, as this, the day on which the last hopes of peace have abandoned us, and the only true minister of it is pelted from our shores. Farewell, until better times! may the next generation be wiser! and wiser it surely will be, for the lessons of Calamity are far more impressive than those which repudiated Wisdom would have taught. _Franklin._ Folly hath often the same results as Wisdom: but Wisdom would not engage in her schoolroom so expensive an assistant as Calamity. There are, however, some noisy and unruly children whom she alone has the method of rendering tame and tractable: perhaps it may be by setting them to their tasks both sore and supperless. The ship is getting under weigh. Adieu once more, my most reverend and noble friend! Before me in imagination do I see America, beautiful as Leda in her infant smiles, when her father Jove first raised her from the earth; and behind me I leave England, hollow, unsubstantial, and broken, as the shell she burst from. _Shipley._ O worst of miseries, when it is impiety to pray that our country may be successful. Farewell! may every good attend you! with as little of evil to endure or to inflict, as national sins can expect from the Almighty. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR _Southey._ Of all the beautiful scenery round King's Weston the view from this terrace, and especially from this sundial, is the pleasantest. _Landor._ The last time I ever walked hither in company (which, unless with ladies, I rarely have done anywhere) was with a just, a valiant, and a memorable man, Admiral Nichols, who usually spent his summer months at the village of Shirehampton, just below us. There, whether in the morning or evening, it was seldom I found him otherwise engaged than in cultivating his flowers. _Southey._ I never had the same dislike to company in my walks and rambles as you profess to have, but of which I perceived no sign whatever when I visited you, first at Llanthony Abbey and afterward on the Lake of Como. Well do I remember our long conversations in the silent and solitary church of Sant' Abondio (surely the coolest spot in Italy), and how often I turned back my head toward the open door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more distant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway that leads to the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo with your laughter, at the stories you had collected about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place. _Landor._ I have forgotten most of them, and nearly all: but I have not forgotten how we speculated on the possibility that Milton might once have been sitting on the very bench we then occupied, although we do not hear of his having visited that part of the country. Presently we discoursed on his poetry; as we propose to do again this morning. _Southey._ In that case, it seems we must continue to be seated on the turf. _Landor._ Why so? _Southey._ Because you do not like to walk in company: it might disturb and discompose you: and we never lose our temper without losing at the same time many of our thoughts, which are loath to come forward without it. _Landor._ From my earliest days I have avoided society as much as I could decorously, for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and improvement of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the thoughts of others. Yet, as you know, I never have avoided the intercourse of men distinguished by virtue and genius; of genius, because it warmed and invigorated me by my trying to keep pace with it; of virtue, that if I had any of my own it might be called forth by such vicinity. Among all men elevated in station who have made a noise in the world (admirable old expression!) I never saw any in whose presence I felt inferiority, excepting Kosciusco. But how many in the lower paths of life have exerted both virtues and abilities which I never exerted, and never possessed! what strength and courage and perseverance in some, in others what endurance and forbearance! At the very moment when most, beside yourself, catching up half my words, would call and employ against me in its ordinary signification what ought to convey the most honorific, the term _self-sufficiency_, I bow my head before the humble, with greatly more than their humiliation. You are better tempered than I am, and are readier to converse. There are half-hours when, although in good humour and good spirits, I would, not be disturbed by the necessity of talking, to be the possessor of all the rich marshes we see yonder. In this interval there is neither storm nor sunshine of the mind, but calm and (as the farmer would call it) _growing_ weather, in which the blades of thought spring up and dilate insensibly. Whatever I do, I must do in the open air, or in the silence of night: either is sufficient: but I prefer the hours of exercise, or, what is next to exercise, of field-repose. Did you happen to know the admiral? _Southey._ Not personally: but I believe the terms you have applied to him are well merited. After some experience, he contended that public men, public women, and the public press, may be all designated by one and the same trisyllable. He is reported to have been a strict disciplinarian. In the mutiny at the Nore he was seized by his crew, and summarily condemned by them to be hanged. Many taunting questions were asked him, to which he made no reply. When the rope was fastened round his neck, the ringleader cried, 'Answer this one thing, however, before you go, sir! What would you do with any of us, if we were in your power as you are now in ours?' The admiral, then captain, looked sternly and contemptuously, and replied, 'Hang you, by God!' Enraged at this answer, the mutineer tugged at the rope: but another on the instant rushed forward, exclaiming, 'No, captain!' (for thus he called the fellow) 'he has been cruel to us, flogging here and flogging there, but before so brave a man is hanged like a dog, you heave me overboard.' Others among the most violent now interceded: and an old seaman, not saying a single word, came forward with his knife in his hand, and cut the noose asunder. Nichols did not thank him, nor notice him, nor speak: but, looking round at the other ships, in which there was the like insubordination, he went toward his cabin slow and silent. Finding it locked, he called to a midshipman: 'Tell that man with a knife to come down and open the door.' After a pause of a few minutes, it was done: but he was confined below until the quelling of the mutiny. _Landor._ His conduct as Controller of the Navy was no less magnanimous and decisive. In this office he presided at the trial of Lord Melville. His lordship was guilty, we know, of all the charges brought against him; but, having more patronage than ever minister had before, he refused to answer the questions which (to repeat his own expression) might incriminate him. And his refusal was given with a smile of indifference, a consciousness of security. In those days, as indeed in most others, the main use of power was promotion and protection: and _honest man_ was never in any age among the titles of nobility, and has always been the appellation used toward the feeble and inferior by the prosperous. Nichols said on the present occasion, 'If this man is permitted to skulk away under such pretences, trial is here a mockery.' Finding no support, he threw up his office as Controller of the Navy, and never afterward entered the House of Commons. Such a person, it appears to me, leads us aptly and becomingly to that steadfast patriot on whose writings you promised me your opinion; not incidentally, as before, but turning page after page. It would ill beseem us to treat Milton with generalities. Radishes and salt are the picnic quota of slim spruce reviewers: let us hope to find somewhat more solid and of better taste. Desirous to be a listener and a learner when you discourse on his poetry, I have been more occupied of late in examining the prose. _Southey._ Do you retain your high opinion of it? _Landor._ Experience makes us more sensible of faults than of beauties. Milton is more correct than Addison, but less correct than Hooker, whom I wish he had been contented to receive as a model in style, rather than authors who wrote in another and a poorer language; such, I think, you are ready to acknowledge is the Latin. _Southey._ This was always my opinion. _Landor._ However, I do not complain that in oratory and history his diction is sometimes poetical. _Southey._ Little do I approve of it in prose on any subject. Demosthenes and Aeschines, Lisias and Isaeus, and finally Cicero, avoided it. _Landor._ They did: but Chatham and Burke and Grattan did not; nor indeed the graver and greater Pericles; of whom the most memorable sentence on record is pure poetry. On the fall of the young Athenians in the field of battle, he said, 'The year hath lost its spring.' But how little are these men, even Pericles himself, if you compare them as men of genius with Livy! In Livy, as in Milton, there are bursts of passion which cannot by the nature of things be other than poetical, nor (being so) come forth in other language. If Milton had executed his design of writing a history of England, it would probably have abounded in such diction, especially in the more turbulent scenes and in the darker ages. _Southey._ There are quiet hours and places in which a taper may be carried steadily, and show the way along the ground; but you must stand a-tiptoe and raise a blazing torch above your head, if you would bring to our vision the obscure and time-worn figures depicted on the lofty vaults of antiquity. The philosopher shows everything in one clear light; the historian loves strong reflections and deep shadows, but, above all, prominent and moving characters. We are little pleased with the man who disenchants us: but whoever can make us wonder, must himself (we think) be wonderful, and deserve our admiration. _Landor._ Believing no longer in magic and its charms, we still shudder at the story told by Tacitus, of those which were discovered in the mournful house of Germanicus. _Southey._ Tacitus was also a great poet, and would have been a greater, had he been more contented with the external and ordinary appearances of things. Instead of which, he looked at a part of his pictures through a prism, and at another part through a _camera obscura_. If the historian were as profuse of moral as of political axioms, we should tolerate him less: for in the political we fancy a writer is but meditating; in the moral we regard him as declaiming. In history we desire to be conversant with only the great, according to our notions of greatness: we take it as an affront, on such an invitation, to be conducted into the lecture-room, or to be desired to amuse ourselves in the study. _Landor._ Pray go on. I am desirous of hearing more. _Southey._ Being now alone, with the whole day before us, and having carried, as we agreed at breakfast, each his Milton in his pocket, let us collect all the graver faults we can lay our hands upon, without a too minute and troublesome research; not in the spirit of Johnson, but in our own. _Landor._ That is, abasing our eyes in reverence to so great a man, but without closing them. The beauties of his poetry we may omit to notice, if we can: but where the crowd claps the hands, it will be difficult for us always to refrain. Johnson, I think, has been charged unjustly with expressing too freely and inconsiderately the blemishes of Milton. There are many more of them than he has noticed. _Southey._ If we add any to the number, and the literary world hears of it, we shall raise an outcry from hundreds who never could see either his excellences or his defects, and from several who never have perused the noblest of his writings. _Landor._ It may be boyish and mischievous, but I acknowledge I have sometimes felt a pleasure in irritating, by the cast of a pebble, those who stretch forward to the full extent of the chain their open and frothy mouths against me. I shall seize upon this conjecture of yours, and say everything that comes into my head on the subject. Beside which, if any collateral thoughts should spring up, I may throw them in also; as you perceive I have frequently done in my _Imaginary Conversations_, and as we always do in real ones. _Southey._ When we adhere to one point, whatever the form, it should rather be called a disquisition than a conversation. Most writers of dialogue take but a single stride into questions the most abstruse, and collect a heap of arguments to be blown away by the bloated whiffs of some rhetorical charlatan, tricked out in a multiplicity of ribbons for the occasion. Before we open the volume of poetry, let me confess to you I admire his prose less than you do. _Landor._ Probably because you dissent more widely from the opinions it conveys: for those who are displeased with anything are unable to confine the displeasure to one spot. We dislike everything a little when we dislike anything much. It must indeed be admitted that his prose is often too latinized and stiff. But I prefer his heavy cut velvet, with its ill-placed Roman fibula, to the spangled gauze and gummed-on flowers and puffy flounces of our present street-walking literature. So do you, I am certain. _Southey._ Incomparably. But let those who have gone astray, keep astray, rather than bring Milton into disrepute by pushing themselves into his company and imitating his manner. Milton is none of these: and his language is never a patchwork. We find daily, in almost every book we open, expressions which are not English, never were, and never will be: for the writers are by no means of sufficiently high rank to be masters of the mint. To arrive at this distinction, it is not enough to scatter in all directions bold, hazardous, undisciplined thoughts: there must be lordly and commanding ones, with a full establishment of well-appointed expressions adequate to their maintenance. Occasionally I have been dissatisfied with Milton, because in my opinion that is ill said in prose which can be said more plainly. Not so in poetry: if it were, much of Pindar and Aeschylus, and no little of Dante, would be censurable. _Landor._ Acknowledge that he whose poetry I am holding in my hand is free from every false ornament in his prose, unless a few bosses of latinity may be called so; and I am ready to admit the full claims of your favourite South. Acknowledge that, heading all the forces of our language, he was the great antagonist of every great monster which infested our country; and he disdained to trim his lion-skin with lace. No other English writer has equalled Raleigh, Hooker, and Milton, in the loftier parts of their works. _Southey._ But Hooker and Milton, you allow, are sometimes pedantic. In Hooker there is nothing so elevated as there is in Raleigh. _Landor._ Neither he, however, nor any modern, nor any ancient, has attained to that summit on which the sacred ark of Milton strikes and rests. Reflections, such as we indulged in on the borders of the Larius, come over me here again. Perhaps from the very sod where you are sitting, the poet in his youth sate looking at the Sabrina he was soon to celebrate. There is pleasure in the sight of a glebe which never has been broken; but it delights me particularly in those places where great men have been before. I do not mean warriors: for extremely few among the most remarkable of them will a considerate man call great: but poets and philosophers and philanthropists, the ornaments of society, the charmers of solitude, the warders of civilization, the watchmen at the gate which Tyranny would batter down, and the healers of those wounds which she left festering in the field. And now, to reduce this demon into its proper toad-shape again, and to lose sight of it, open your _Paradise Lost_. * * * * * THE EMPEROR OF CHINA AND TSING-TI On the morrow I was received at the folding-doors by Pru-Tsi, and ushered by him into the presence of his majesty the Emperor, who was graciously pleased to inform me that he had rendered thanks to Almighty God for enlightening his mind, and for placing his empire far beyond the influence of the persecutor and fanatic. 'But,' continued his majesty, 'this story of the sorcerer's man quite confounds me. Little as the progress is which the Europeans seem to have made in the path of humanity, yet the English, we know, are less cruel than their neighbours, and more given to reflection and meditation. How then is it possible they should allow any portion of their fellow-citizens to be hoodwinked, gagged, and carried away into darkness, by such conspirators and assassins? Why didst thou not question the man thyself?' _Tsing-Ti._ I did, O Emperor! and his reply was, 'We can bury such only as were in the household of the faith. It would be a mockery to bid those spirits go in peace which we know are condemned to everlasting fire.' _Emperor._ Amazing! have they that? Who invented it? Everlasting fire! It surely might be applied to better purposes. And have those rogues authority to throw people into it? In what part of the kingdom is it? If natural, it ought to have been marked more plainly in the maps. The English, no doubt, are ashamed of letting it be known abroad that they have any such places in their country. If artificial, it is no wonder they keep such a secret to themselves. Tsing-Ti, I commend thy prudence in asking no questions about it; for I see we are equally at a loss on this curiosity. _Tsing-Ti._ The sorcerer has a secret for diluting it. Oysters and the white of eggs, applied on lucky days, enter into the composition; but certain charms in a strange language must also be employed, and must be repeated a certain number of times. There are stones likewise, and wood cut into particular forms, good against this eternal fire, as they believe. The sorcerer has the power, they pretend, of giving the faculty of hearing and seeing to these stones and pieces of wood; and when he has given them the faculties, they become so sensible and grateful, they do whatever he orders. Some roll their eyes, some sweat, some bleed; and the people beat their breasts before them, calling themselves miserable sinners. _Emperor._ _Sinners_ is not the name I should have given them, although no doubt they are in the right. _Tsing-Ti._ Sometimes, if they will not bleed freely, nor sweat, nor roll their eyes, the devouter break their heads with clubs, and look out for others who will. _Emperor._ Take heed, Tsing-Ti! Take heed! I do believe thou art talking all the while of idols. Thou must be respectful; remember I am head of all the religions in the empire. We have something in our own country not very unlike them, only the people do not worship them; they merely fall down before them as representatives of a higher power. So they say. _Tsing-Ti._ I do not imagine they go much farther in Europe, excepting the introduction of this club-law into their adoration. _Emperor._ And difference enough, in all conscience. Our people is less ferocious and less childish. If any man break an idol here for not sweating, he himself would justly be condemned to sweat, showing him how inconvenient a thing it is when the sweater is not disposed. As for rolling the eyes, surely they know best whom they should ogle; as for bleeding, that must be regulated by the season of the year. Let every man choose his idol as freely as he chooses his wife; let him be constant if he can; if he cannot, let him at least be civil. Whoever dares to scratch the face of any one in my empire, shall be condemned to varnish it afresh, and moreover to keep it in repair all his lifetime. _Tsing-Ti._ In Europe such an offence would be punished with the extremities of torture. _Emperor._ Perhaps their idols cost more, and are newer. Is there no chance, in all their changes, that we may be called upon to supply them with a few? _Tsing-Ti._ They have plenty for the present, and they dig up fresh occasionally. _Emperor._ In regard to the worship of idols, they have not a great deal to learn from us; and what is deficient will come by degrees as they grow humaner. But how little care can any ruler have for the happiness and improvement of his people, who permits such ferocity in the priesthood. If its members are employed by the government to preside at burials, as according to thy discourse I suppose, a virtuous prince would order a twelvemonth's imprisonment, and spare diet, to whichever of them should refuse to perform the last office of humanity toward a fellow-creature. What separation of citizen from citizen, and necessarily what diminution of national strength, must be the consequence of such a system! A single act of it ought to be punished more severely than any single act of sedition, not only as being a greater distractor of civic union, but, in its cruel sequestration of the best affections, a fouler violator of domestic peace. I always had fancied, from the books in my library, that the Christian religion was founded on brotherly love and pure equality. I may calculate ill; but, in my hasty estimate, damnation and dog-burial stand many removes from these. 'Wait a little,' the Emperor continued: 'I wish to read in my library the two names that my father said are considered the two greatest in the West, and may vie nearly with the highest of our own country.' Whereupon did his majesty walk forth into his library; and my eyes followed his glorious figure as he passed through the doorway, traversing the _gallery of the peacocks_, so called because fifteen of those beautiful birds unite their tails in the centre of the ceiling, painted so naturally as to deceive the beholder, each carrying in his beak a different flower, the most beautiful in China, and bending his neck in such a manner as to present it to the passer below. Traversing this gallery, his majesty with his own hand drew aside the curtain of the library door. His majesty then entered; and, after some delay, he appeared with two long scrolls, and shook them gently over the fish-pond, in this dormitory of the sages. Suddenly there were so many splashes and plunges that I was aware of the gratification the fishes had received from the grubs in them, and the disappointment in the atoms of dust. His majesty, with his own right hand, drew the two scrolls trailing on the marble pavement, and pointing to them with his left, said: 'Here they are; Nhu-Tong: Pa-Kong. Suppose they had died where the sorcerer's men held firm footing, would the priests have refused them burial?' I bowed my head at the question; for a single tinge of red, whether arising from such ultra-bestial cruelty in those who have the impudence to accuse the cannibals of theirs, or whether from abhorrent shame at the corroding disease of intractable superstition, hereditary in the European nations for fifteen centuries, a tinge of red came over the countenance of the emperor. When I raised up again my forehead, after such time as I thought would have removed all traces of it, still fixing my eyes on the ground, I answered: 'O Emperor! the most zealous would have done worse. They would have prepared these great men for burial, and then have left them unburied.' _Emperor._ So! so! they would have embalmed them, in their reverence for meditation and genius, although their religion prohibits the ceremony of interring them. _Tsing-Ti._ Alas, sire, my meaning is far different. They would have dislocated their limbs with pulleys, broken them with hammers, and then have burnt the flesh off the bones. This is called an _act of faith_. _Emperor._ _Faith_, didst thou say? Tsing-Ti, thou speakest bad Chinese: thy native tongue is strangely occidentalized. _Tsing-Ti._ So they call it. _Emperor._ God hath not given unto all men the use of speech. Thou meanest to designate the ancient inhabitants of the country, not those who have lived there within the last three centuries. _Tsing-Ti._ The Spaniards and Italians (such are the names of the nations who are most under the influence of the spells) were never so barbarous and cruel as during the first of the last three centuries. The milder of them would have refused two cubits of earth to the two philosophers; and not only would have rejected them from the cemetery of the common citizens, but from the side of the common hangman; the most ignorant priest thinking himself much wiser, and the most enlightened prince not daring to act openly as one who could think otherwise. The Italians had formerly two illustrious men among them; the earlier was a poet, the later a philosopher; one was exiled, the other was imprisoned, and both were within a span of being burnt alive. _Emperor._ We have in Asia some odd religions and some barbarous princes, but neither are like the Europeans. In the name of God! do the fools think of their Christianity as our neighbours in Tartary (with better reason) think of their milk; that it will keep the longer for turning sour? or that it must be wholesome because it is heady? Swill it out, swill it out, say I, and char the tub. LOUIS XVIII AND TALLEYRAND _Louis._ M. Talleyrand! in common with all my family, all France, all Europe, I entertain the highest opinion of your abilities and integrity. You have convinced me that your heart, throughout the storms of the revolution, leaned constantly toward royalty; and that you permitted and even encouraged the caresses of the usurper, merely that you might strangle the more certainly and the more easily his new-born empire. After this, it is impossible to withhold my confidence from you. _Talleyrand._ Conscious of the ridicule his arrogance and presumption would incur, the usurper attempted to silence and stifle it with other and far different emotions. Half his cruelties were perpetrated that his vanity might not be wounded: for scorn is superseded by horror. Whenever he committed an action or uttered a sentiment which would render him an object of derision, he instantly gave vent to another which paralysed by its enormous wickedness. He would extirpate a nation to extinguish a smile. No man alive could deceive your majesty: the extremely few who would wish to do it, lie under that vigilant and piercing eye, which discerned in perspective from the gardens of Hartwell those of the Tuileries and Versailles. As joy arises from calamity, so spring arises from the bosom of winter, purely to receive your majesty, inviting the august descendant of their glorious founder to adorn and animate them again with his beneficent and gracious presence. The waters murmur, in voices half-suppressed, the reverential hymn of peace restored: the woods bow their heads.... _Louis._ Talking of woods, I am apprehensive all the game has been woefully killed up in my forests. _Talleyrand._ A single year will replenish them. _Louis._ Meanwhile! M. Talleyrand! meanwhile! _Talleyrand._ Honest and active and watchful gamekeepers, in sufficient number, must be sought; and immediately. _Louis._ Alas! if the children of my nobility had been educated like the children of the English, I might have promoted some hundreds of them in this department. But their talents lie totally within the binding of their breviaries. Those of them who shoot, can shoot only with pistols; which accomplishment they acquired in England, that they might challenge any of the islanders who should happen to look with surprise or displeasure in their faces, expecting to be noticed by them in Paris, for the little hospitalities the proud young gentlemen, and their prouder fathers, were permitted to offer them in London and at their country-seats. What we call _reconnaissance_, they call _gratitude_, treating a recollector like a debtor. This is a want of courtesy, a defect in civilization, which it behoves us to supply. Our memories are as tenacious as theirs, and rather more eclectic. Since my return to my kingdom I have undergone great indignities from this unreflecting people. One Canova, a sculptor at Rome, visited Paris in the name of the Pope, and in quality of his envoy, and insisted on the cession of those statues and pictures which were brought into France by the French armies. He began to remove them out of the gallery: I told him I would never give my consent: he replied, he thought it sufficient that he had Wellington's. Therefore, the next time Wellington presented himself at the Tuileries, I turned my back upon him before the whole court. Let the English and their allies be aware, that I owe my restoration not to them, but partly to God and partly to Saint Louis. They and their armies are only brute instruments in the hands of my progenitor and intercessor. _Talleyrand._ Fortunate, that the conqueror of France bears no resemblance to the conqueror of Spain. Peterborough (I shudder at the idea) would have ordered a file of soldiers to seat your Majesty in your travelling carriage, and would have reinstalled you at Hartwell. The English people are so barbarous, that he would have done it not only with impunity, but with applause. _Louis._ But the sovereign of his country ... would the sovereign suffer it? _Talleyrand._ Alas! sire! Confronted with such men, what are sovereigns, when the people are the judges? Wellington can drill armies: Peterborough could marshal nations. _Louis._ Thank God! we have no longer any such pests on earth. The most consummate general of our days (such is Wellington) sees nothing one single inch beyond the field of battle; and he is so observant of discipline, that if I ordered him to be flogged in the presence of the allied armies, he would not utter a complaint nor shrug a shoulder; he would only write a dispatch. _Talleyrand._ But his soldiers would execute the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto, and Paris would sink into her catacombs. No man so little beloved was ever so well obeyed: and there is not a man in England, of either party, citizen or soldier, who would not rather die than see him disgraced. His firmness, his moderation, his probity, place him more opposite to Napoleon than he stood in the field of Waterloo. These are his lofty lines of Torres Vedras, which no enemy dares assail throughout their whole extent. _Louis._ M. Talleyrand! is it quite right to extol an enemy and an Englishman in this manner? _Talleyrand._ Pardon! Sire! I stand corrected. Forgive me a momentary fit of enthusiasm, in favour of those qualities by which, although an Englishman's, I am placed again in your majesty's service. _Louis._ We will now then go seriously to business. Wellington and the allied armies have interrupted and occupied us. I will instantly write, with my own hand, to the Marquis of Buckingham, desiring him to send me five hundred pheasants' eggs. I am restored to my throne, M. Talleyrand! but in what a condition! Not a pheasant on the table! I must throw myself on the mercy of foreigners, even for a pheasant! When I have written my letter, I shall be ready to converse with you on the business on which I desired your presence. [_Writes._] Here; read it. Give me your opinion: is not the note a model? _Talleyrand._ If the charms of language could be copied, it would be. But what is intended for delight may terminate in despair: and there are words which, unapproachable by distance and sublimity, may wither the laurels on the most exalted of literary brows. _Louis._ There is grace in that expression of yours, M. Talleyrand! there is really no inconsiderable grace in it. Seal my letter: direct it to the Marquis of Buckingham at Stowe. Wait: open it again: no, no: write another in your own name: instruct him how sure you are it will be agreeable to me, if he sends at the same time fifty or a hundred brace of the birds as well as the eggs. At present I am desolate. My heart is torn, M. Talleyrand! it is almost plucked out of my bosom. I have no other care, no other thought, day or night, but the happiness of my people. The allies, who have most shamefully overlooked the destitution of my kitchen, seem resolved to turn a deaf ear to its cries evermore; nay, even to render them shriller and shriller. The allies, I suspect, are resolved to execute the design of the mischievous Pitt. _Talleyrand._ May it please your majesty to inform me _which_ of them; for he formed a thousand, all mischievous, but greatly more mischievous to England than to France. Resolved to seize the sword, in his drunkenness, he seized it by the edge, and struck at us with the hilt, until he broke it off and until he himself was exhausted by loss of breath and of blood. We owe alike to him the energy of our armies, the bloody scaffolds of public safety, the Reign of Terror, the empire of usurpation, and finally, as the calm is successor to the tempest, and sweet fruit to bitter kernel, the blessing of your majesty's restoration. Excepting in this one event, he was mischievous to our country; but in all events, and in all undertakings, he was pernicious to his own. No man ever brought into the world such enduring evil; few men such extensive. _Louis._ His king ordered it. George III loved battles and blood. _Talleyrand._ But he was prudent in his appetite for them. _Louis._ He talked of peppering his people as I would talk of peppering a capon. _Talleyrand._ Having split it. His subjects cut up by his subjects were only capers to his leg of mutton. From none of his palaces and parks was there any view so rural, so composing to his spirits, as the shambles. When these were not fresh, the gibbet would do. I wish better luck to the pheasants' eggs than befell Mr. Pitt's designs. Not one brought forth anything. _Louis._ No: but he declared in the face of his Parliament, and of Europe, that he would insist on indemnity for the past and security for the future. These were his words. Now, all the money and other wealth the French armies levied in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and everywhere else, would scarcely be sufficient for this indemnity. _Talleyrand._ England shall never receive from us a tithe of that amount. _Louis._ A tithe of it! She may demand a quarter or a third, and leave us wondering at her moderation and forbearance. _Talleyrand._ The matter must be arranged immediately, before she has time for calculation or reflection. A new peace maddens England to the same paroxysm as a new war maddens France. She hath sent over hither her minister ... or rather her prime minister himself is come to transact all the business ... the most ignorant and most shortsighted man to be found in any station of any public office throughout the whole of Europe. He must be treated as her arbiter: we must talk to him of restoring her, of regenerating her, of preserving her, of guiding her, which (we must protest with our hands within our frills) he alone is capable of doing. We must enlarge on his generosity (and generous he indeed is), and there is nothing he will not concede. _Louis._ But if they do not come over in a week, we shall lose the season. I ought to be eating a pheasant-poult by the middle of July. Oh, but you were talking to me about the other matter, and perhaps the weightier of the two; ay, certainly. If this indemnity is paid to England, what becomes of our civil list, the dignity of my family and household? _Talleyrand._ I do assure your majesty, England shall never receive ... did I say a tithe?... I say she shall never receive a fiftieth of what she expended in the war against us. It would be out of all reason, and out of all custom in her to expect it. Indeed it would place her in almost as good a condition as ourselves. Even if she were beaten she could hardly hope _that_: she never in the last three centuries has demanded it when she was victorious. Of all the sufferers by the war, we shall be the best off. _Louis._ The English are calculators and traders. _Talleyrand._ Wild speculators, gamblers in trade, who hazard more ventures than their books can register. It will take England some years to cast up the amount of her losses. _Louis._ But she, in common with her allies, will insist on our ceding those provinces which my predecessor Louis XIV annexed to his kingdom. Be quite certain that nothing short of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franc Comté, will satisfy the German princes. They must restore the German language in those provinces: for languages are the only true boundaries of nations, and there will always be dissension where there is difference of tongue. We must likewise be prepared to surrender the remainder of the Netherlands; not indeed to England, who refused them in the reign of Elizabeth: she wants only Dunkirk, and Dunkirk she will have. _Talleyrand._ This seems reasonable: for which reason it must never be. Diplomacy, when she yields to such simple arguments as plain reason urges against her, loses her office, her efficacy, and her name. _Louis._ I would not surrender our conquests in Germany, if I could help it. _Talleyrand._ Nothing more easy. The Emperor Alexander may be persuaded that Germany united and entire, as she would then become, must be a dangerous rival to Russia. _Louis._ It appears to me that Poland will be more so, with her free institutions. _Talleyrand._ There is only one statesman in the whole number of those assembled at Paris, who believes that her institutions will continue free; and he would rather they did not; but he stipulates for it, to gratify and mystify the people of England. _Louis._ I see this clearly. I have a great mind to send Blacas over to Stowe. I can trust to him to look to the crates and coops, and to see that the pheasants have enough of air and water, and that the Governor of Calais finds a commodious place for them to roost in, forbidding the drums to beat and disturb them, evening or morning. The next night, according to my calculation, they repose at Montreuil. I must look at them before they are let loose. I cannot well imagine why the public men employed by England are usually, indeed constantly so inferior in abilities to those of France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. What say you, M. Talleyrand? I do not mean about the pheasants; I mean about the envoys. _Talleyrand._ It can only be that I have considered the subject more frequently and attentively than suited the avocations of your majesty, that the reason comes out before me clearly and distinctly. The prime ministers, in all these countries, are independent, and uncontrolled in the choice of agents. A prime minister in France may perhaps be willing to promote the interests of his own family; and hence he may appoint from it one unworthy of the place. In regard to other families, he cares little or nothing about them, knowing that his power lies in the palace, and not in the club-room. Whereas in England he must conciliate the great families, the hereditary dependants of his faction, Whig or Tory. Hence even the highest commands have been conferred on such ignorant and worthless men as the Duke of York and the Earl of Chatham, although the minister was fully aware that the honour of his nation was tarnished, and that its safety was in jeopardy, by such appointments. Meanwhile he kept his seat however, and fed from it his tame creatures in the cub. _Louis._ Do you apprehend any danger (talking of cubs) that my pheasants will be bruised against the wooden bars, or suffer by sea-sickness? I would not command my bishops to offer up public prayers against such contingencies: for people must never have positive evidence that the prayers of the Church can possibly be ineffectual: and we cannot pray for pheasants as we pray for fine weather, by the barometer. We must drop it. Now go on with the others, if you have done with England. _Talleyrand._ A succession of intelligent men rules Prussia, Russia, and Austria; because these three are economical, and must get their bread by creeping, day after day, through the hedges next to them, and by filching a sheaf or two, early and late, from cottager or small farmer; that is to say, from free states and petty princes. Prussia, like a mongrel, would fly at the legs of Austria and Russia, catching them with the sack upon their shoulders, unless they untied it and tossed a morsel to her. These great powers take especial care to impose a protective duty on intellect; to let none enter the country, and none leave it, without a passport. Their diplomatists are as clever and conciliatory as those of England are ignorant and repulsive, who, while they offer an uncounted sum of secret-service money with the left hand, give a sounding slap on the face with the right. _Louis._ We, by adopting a contrary policy, gain more information, raise more respect, inspire more awe, and exercise more authority. The weightiest of our disbursements are smiles and flatteries, with a ribbon and a cross at the end of them. But, between the Duke of York and the Earl of Chatham, I must confess, I find very little difference. _Talleyrand._ Some, however. The one was only drunk all the evening and all the night; the other was only asleep all the day. The accumulated fogs of Walcheren seemed to concentrate in his brain, puffing out at intervals just sufficient to affect with typhus and blindness four thousand soldiers. A cake of powder rusted their musket-pans, which they were too weak to open and wipe. Turning round upon their scanty and mouldy straw, they beheld their bayonets piled together against the green dripping wall of the chamber, which neither bayonet nor soldier was ever to leave again. _Louis._ We suffer by the presence of the allied armies in our capital: but we shall soon be avenged: for the English minister in another fortnight will return and remain at home. _Talleyrand._ England was once so infatuated as to give up Malta to us, although fifty Gibraltars would be of inferior value to her. Napoleon laughed at her: she was angry: she began to suspect she had been duped and befooled: and she broke her faith. _Louis._ For the first time, M. Talleyrand, and with a man who never had any. _Talleyrand._ We shall now induce her to evacuate Sicily, in violation of her promises to the people of that island. Faith, having lost her virginity, braves public opinion, and never blushes more. _Louis._ Sicily is the key to India, Egypt is the lock. _Talleyrand._ What, if I induce the minister to restore to us Pondicherry? _Louis._ M. Talleyrand! you have done great things, and without boasting. Whenever you do boast, let it be that you will perform only the thing which is possible. The English know well enough what it is to allow us a near standing-place anywhere. If they permit a Frenchman to plant one foot in India, it will upset all Asia before the other touches the ground. It behoves them to prohibit a single one of us from ever landing on those shores. Improbable as it is that a man uniting to the same degree as Hyder-Ali did political and military genius, will appear in the world again for centuries; most of the princes are politic, some are brave, and perhaps no few are credulous. While England is confiding in our loyalty, we might expatiate on her perfidy, and our tears fall copiously on the broken sceptre in the dust of Delhi. Ignorant and stupid as the king's ministers may be, the East India Company is well-informed on its interests, and alert in maintaining them. I wonder that a republic so wealthy and so wise should be supported on the bosom of royalty. Believe me, her merchants will take alarm, and arouse the nation. _Talleyrand._ We must do all we have to do, while the nation is feasting and unsober. It will awaken with sore eyes and stiff limbs. _Louis._ Profuse as the English are, they will never cut the bottom of their purses. _Talleyrand._ They have already done it. Whenever I look toward the shores of England, I fancy I descry the Danaïds there, toiling at the replenishment of their perforated vases, and all the Nereids leering and laughing at them in the mischievous fullness of their hearts. _Louis._ Certainly she can do me little harm at present, and for several years to come: but we must always have an eye upon her, and be ready to assert our superiority. _Talleyrand._ We feel it. In fifty years, by abstaining from war, we may discharge our debt and replenish our arsenals. England will never shake off the heavy old man from her shoulders. Overladen and morose, she will be palsied in the hand she unremittingly holds up against Ireland. Proud and perverse, she runs into domestic warfare as blindly as France runs into foreign: and she refuses to her subject what she surrenders to her enemy. _Louis._ Her whole policy tends to my security. _Talleyrand._ We must now consider how your majesty may enjoy it at home, all the remainder of your reign. _Louis._ Indeed you must, M. Talleyrand! Between you and me be it spoken, I trust but little my loyal people; their loyalty being so ebullient, that it often overflows the vessel which should contain it, and is a perquisite of scouts and scullions. I do not wish to offend you. _Talleyrand._ Really I can see no other sure method of containing and controlling them, than by bastions and redoubts, the whole circuit of the city. _Louis._ M. Talleyrand! I will not doubt your sincerity: I am confident you have reserved the whole of it for my service; and there are large arrears. But M. Talleyrand! such an attempt would be resisted by any people which had ever heard of liberty, and much more by a people which had ever dreamt of enjoying it. _Talleyrand._ Forts are built in all directions above Genoa. _Louis._ Yes; by her conqueror, not by her king. _Talleyrand._ Your majesty comes with both titles, and rules, like your great progenitor, Et par droit de conquête et par droit de naissance. _Louis._ True; my arms have subdued the rebellious; but not without great firmness and great valour on my part, and some assistance (however tardy) on the part of my allies. Conquerors must conciliate: fatherly kings must offer digestible spoon-meat to their ill-conditioned children. There would be sad screaming and kicking were I to swaddle mine in stone-work. No, M. Talleyrand; if ever Paris is surrounded by fortifications to coerce the populace, it must be the work of some democrat, some aspirant to supreme power, who resolves to maintain it, exercising a domination too hazardous for legitimacy. I will only scrape from the chambers the effervescence of superficial letters and corrosive law. _Talleyrand._ Sire! under all their governments the good people of Paris have submitted to the _octroi_. Now, all complaints, physical or political, arise from the stomach. Were it decorous in a subject to ask a question (however humbly) of his king, I would beg permission to inquire of your majesty, in your wisdom, whether a bar across the shoulders is less endurable than a bar across the palate. Sire! the French can bear anything now they have the honour of bowing before your majesty. _Louis._ The compliment is in a slight degree (a _very_ slight degree) ambiguous, and (accept in good part my criticism, M. Talleyrand) not turned with your usual grace. Announce it as my will and pleasure that the Duc de Blacas do superintend the debarkation of the pheasants; and I pray God, M. de Talleyrand, to have you in His holy keeping. OLIVER CROMWELL AND SIR OLIVER CROMWELL _Sir Oliver._ How many saints and Sions dost carry under thy cloak, lad? Ay, what dost groan at? What art about to be delivered of? Troth, it must be a vast and oddly-shapen piece of roguery which findeth no issue at such capacious quarters. I never thought to see thy face again. Prithee what, in God's name, hath brought thee to Ramsey, fair Master Oliver? _Oliver._ In His name verily I come, and upon His errand; and the love and duty I bear unto my godfather and uncle have added wings, in a sort, unto my zeal. _Sir Oliver._ Take 'em off thy zeal and dust thy conscience with 'em. I have heard an account of a saint, one Phil Neri, who in the midst of his devotions was lifted up several yards from the ground. Now I do suspect, Nol, thou wilt finish by being a saint of his order; and nobody will promise or wish thee the luck to come down on thy feet again, as he did. So! because a rabble of fanatics at Huntingdon have equipped thee as their representative in Parliament, thou art free of all men's houses, forsooth! I would have thee to understand, sirrah, that thou art fitter for the House they have chaired thee unto than for mine. Yet I do not question but thou wilt be as troublesome and unruly there as here. Did I not turn thee out of Hinchinbrook when thou wert scarcely half the rogue thou art latterly grown up to? And yet wert thou immeasurably too big a one for it to hold. _Oliver._ It repenteth me, O mine uncle! that in my boyhood and youth the Lord had not touched me. _Sir Oliver._ Touch thee! thou wast too dirty a dog by half. _Oliver._ Yes, sorely doth it vex and harrow me that I was then of ill conditions, and that my name ... even your godson's ... stank in your nostrils. _Sir Oliver._ Ha! polecat! it was not thy name, although bad enough, that stank first; in my house, at least. But perhaps there are worse maggots in stauncher mummeries. _Oliver._ Whereas in the bowels of your charity you then vouchsafed me forgiveness, so the more confidently may I crave it now in this my urgency. _Sir Oliver._ More confidently! What! hast got more confidence? Where didst find it? I never thought the wide circle of the world had within it another jot for thee. Well, Nol, I see no reason why shouldst stand before me with thy hat off, in the courtyard and in the sun, counting the stones in the pavement. Thou hast some knavery in thy head, I warrant thee. Come, put on thy beaver. _Oliver._ Uncle Sir Oliver! I know my duty too well to stand covered in the presence of so worshipful a kinsman, who, moreover, hath answered at baptism for my good behaviour. _Sir Oliver._ God forgive me for playing the fool before Him so presumptuously and unprofitably! Nobody shall ever take me in again to do such an absurd and wicked thing. But thou hast some left-handed business in the neighbourhood, no doubt, or thou wouldst never more have come under my archway. _Oliver._ These are hard times for them that seek peace. We are clay in the hands of the potter. _Sir Oliver._ I wish your potters sought nothing costlier, and dug in their own grounds for it. Most of us, as thou sayest, have been upon the wheel of these artificers; and little was left but rags when we got off. Sanctified folks are the cleverest skinners in all Christendom, and their Jordan tans and constringes us to the avoirdupois of mummies. _Oliver._ The Lord hath chosen His own vessels. _Sir Oliver._ I wish heartily He would pack them off, and send them anywhere on ass-back or cart (cart preferably), to rid our country of 'em. But now again to the point: for if we fall among the potsherds we shall hobble on but lamely. Since thou art raised unto a high command in the army, and hast a dragoon to hold thy solid and stately piece of horse-flesh, I cannot but take it into my fancy that thou hast some commission of array or disarray to execute hereabout. _Oliver._ With a sad sinking of spirit, to the pitch well-nigh of swounding, and with a sight of bitter tears, which will not be put back nor stayed in any wise, as you bear testimony unto me, Uncle Oliver! _Sir Oliver._ No tears, Master Nol, I beseech thee! Wet days, among those of thy kidney, portend the letting of blood. What dost whimper at? _Oliver._ That I, that I, of all men living, should be put upon this work! _Sir Oliver._ What work, prithee? _Oliver._ I am sent hither by them who (the Lord in His loving kindness having pity, and mercy upon these poor realms) do, under His right hand, administer unto our necessities, and righteously command us, _by the aforesaid as aforesaid_ (thus runs the commission), hither am I deputed (woe is me!) to levy certain fines in this county, or shire, on such as the Parliament in its wisdom doth style malignants. _Sir Oliver._ If there is anything left about the house, never be over-nice: dismiss thy modesty and lay hands upon it. In this county or shire, we let go the civet-bag to save the weazon. _Oliver._ O mine uncle and godfather! be witness for me. _Sir Oliver._ Witness for thee! not I indeed. But I would rather be witness than surety, lad, where thou art docketed. _Oliver._ From the most despised doth the Lord ever choose His servants. _Sir Oliver._ Then, faith! thou art His first butler. _Oliver._ Serving Him with humility, I may peradventure be found worthy of advancement. _Sir Oliver._ Ha! now if any devil speaks from within thee, it is thy own: he does not snuffle: to my ears he speaks plain English. Worthy or unworthy of advancement, thou wilt attain it. Come in; at least for an hour's rest. Formerly thou knewest the means of setting the heaviest heart afloat, let it be sticking in what mud-bank it might: and my wet dock at Ramsey is pretty near as commodious as that over yonder at Hinchinbrook was erewhile. Times are changed, and places too! yet the cellar holds good. _Oliver._ Many and great thanks! But there are certain men on the other side of the gate, who might take it ill if I turn away and neglect them. _Sir Oliver._ Let them enter also, or eat their victuals where they are. _Oliver._ They have proud stomachs: they are recusants. _Sir Oliver._ Recusants of what? of beef and ale? We have claret, I trust, for the squeamish, if they are above the condition of tradespeople. But of course you leave no person of higher quality in the outer court. _Oliver._ Vain are they and worldly, although such wickedness is the most abominable in their cases. Idle folks are fond of sitting in the sun: I would not forbid them this indulgence. _Sir Oliver._ But who are they? _Oliver._ The Lord knows. Maybe priests, deacons, and such-like. _Sir Oliver._ Then, sir, they are gentlemen. And the commission you bear from the parliamentary thieves, to sack and pillage my mansion-house, is far less vexatious and insulting to me, than your behaviour in keeping them so long at my stable-door. With your permission, or without it, I shall take the liberty to invite them to partake of my poor hospitality. _Oliver._ But, Uncle Sir Oliver! there are rules and ordinances whereby it must be manifested that they lie under displeasure ... not mine ... not mine ... but my milk must not flow for them. _Sir Oliver._ You may enter the house or remain where you are, at your option; I make my visit to these gentlemen immediately, for I am tired of standing. If thou ever reachest my age,[12] Oliver! (but God will not surely let this be) thou wilt know that the legs become at last of doubtful fidelity in the service of the body. _Oliver._ Uncle Sir Oliver! now that, as it seemeth, you have been taking a survey of the courtyard and its contents, am I indiscreet in asking your worship whether I acted not prudently in keeping the _men-at-belly_ under the custody of the _men-at-arms_? This pestilence, like unto one I remember to have read about in some poetry of Master Chapman's,[13] began with the dogs and mules, and afterwards crope up into the breasts of men. _Sir Oliver._ I call such treatment barbarous; their troopers will not let the gentlemen come with me into the house, but insist on sitting down to dinner with them. And yet, having brought them out of their colleges, these brutal half-soldiers must know that they are fellows. _Oliver._ Yea, of a truth are they, and fellows well met. Out of their superfluities they give nothing to the Lord or His saints; no, not even stirrup or girth, wherewith we may mount our horses and go forth against those who thirst for our blood. Their eyes are fat, and they raise not up their voices to cry for our deliverance. _Sir Oliver._ Art mad? What stirrups and girths are hung up in college halls and libraries? For what are these gentlemen brought hither? _Oliver._ They have elected me, with somewhat short of unanimity, not indeed to be one of themselves, for of that distinction I acknowledge and deplore my unworthiness, nor indeed to be a poor scholar, to which, unless it be a very poor one, I have almost as small pretension, but simply to undertake a while the heavier office of bursar for them; to cast up their accounts; to overlook the scouring of their plate; and to lay a list thereof, with a few specimens, before those who fight the fight of the Lord, that His saints, seeing the abasement of the proud and the chastisement of worldly-mindedness, may rejoice. _Sir Oliver._ I am grown accustomed to such saints and such rejoicings. But, little could I have thought, threescore years ago, that the hearty and jovial people of England would ever join in so filching and stabbing a jocularity. Even the petticoated torchbearers from rotten Rome, who lighted the faggots in Smithfield some years before, if more blustering and cocksy, were less bitter and vulturine. They were all intolerant, but they were not all hypocritical; they had not always '_the Lord_' in their mouth. _Oliver._ According to their own notions, they might have had, at an outlay of a farthing. _Sir Oliver._ Art facetious, Nol? for it is as hard to find that out as anything else in thee, only it makes thee look, at times, a little the grimmer and sourer. But, regarding these gentlemen from Cambridge. Not being such as, by their habits and professions, could have opposed you in the field, I hold it unmilitary and unmanly to put them under any restraint, and to lead them away from their peaceful and useful occupations. _Oliver._ I always bow submissively before the judgment of mine elders; and the more reverentially when I know them to be endowed with greater wisdom, and guided by surer experience than myself. Alas! these collegians not only are strong men, as you may readily see if you measure them round the waistband, but boisterous and pertinacious challengers. When we, who live in the fear of God, exhorted them earnestly unto peace and brotherly love, they held us in derision. Thus far indeed it might be an advantage to us, teaching us forbearance and self-seeking, but we cannot countenance the evil spirit moving them thereunto. Their occupations, as you remark most wisely, might have been useful and peaceful, and had formerly been so. Why then did they gird the sword of strife about their loins against the children of Israel? By their own declaration, not only are they our enemies, but enemies the most spiteful and untractable. When I came quietly, lawfully, and in the name of the Lord, for their plate, what did they? Instead of surrendering it like honest and conscientious men, they attacked me and my people on horseback, with syllogisms and enthymemes, and the Lord knows with what other such gimcracks; such venomous and rankling old weapons as those who have the fear of God before their eyes are fain to lay aside. Learning should not make folks mockers ... should not make folks malignants ... should not harden their hearts. We came with bowels for them. _Sir Oliver._ That ye did! and bowels which would have stowed within them all the plate on board of a galleon. If tankards and wassail-bowls had stuck between your teeth, you would not have felt them. _Oliver._ We did feel them; some at least: perhaps we missed too many. _Sir Oliver._ How can these learned societies raise the money you exact from them, beside plate? dost think they can create and coin it? _Oliver._ In Cambridge, Uncle Sir Oliver, and more especially in that college named in honour (as they profanely call it) of the Blessed Trinity, there are great conjurors or chemists. Now the said conjurors or chemists not only do possess the faculty of making the precious metals out of old books and parchments, but out of the skulls of young lordlings and gentlefolks, which verily promise less. And this they bring about by certain gold wires fastened at the top of certain caps. Of said metals, thus devilishly converted, do they make a vain and sumptuous use; so that, finally, they are afraid of cutting their lips with glass. But indeed it is high time to call them. _Sir Oliver._ Well ... at last thou hast some mercy. _Oliver._ [_Aloud._] Cuffsatan Ramsbottom! Sadsoul Kiteclaw! advance! Let every gown, together with the belly that is therein, mount up behind you and your comrades in good fellowship. And forasmuch as you at the country places look to bit and bridle, it seemeth fair and equitable that ye should leave unto them, in full propriety, the mancipular office of discharging the account. If there be any spare beds at the inns, allow the doctors and dons to occupy the same ... they being used to lie softly; and be not urgent that more than three lie in each ... they being mostly corpulent. Let pass quietly and unreproved any light bubble of pride or impetuosity, seeing that they have not always been accustomed to the service of guards and ushers. The Lord be with ye!... Slow trot! And now, Uncle Sir Oliver, I can resist no longer your loving kindness. I kiss you, my godfather, in heart's and soul's duty; and most humbly and gratefully do I accept of your invitation to dine and lodge with you, albeit the least worthy of your family and kinsfolk. After the refreshment of needful food, more needful prayer, and that sleep which descendeth on the innocent like the dew of Hermon, to-morrow at daybreak I proceed on my journey Londonward. _Sir Oliver._ [_Aloud._] Ho, there! [_To a servant._] Let dinner be prepared in the great dining-room; let every servant be in waiting, each in full livery; let every delicacy the house affords be placed upon the table in due courses; arrange all the plate upon the sideboard: a gentleman by descent ... a stranger ... has claimed my hospitality. [_Servant goes._] Sir! you are now master. Grant me dispensation, I entreat you, from a further attendance on you. FOOTNOTES: [12] Sir Oliver, who died in 1655, aged ninety-three, might, by possibility, have seen all the men of great genius, excepting Chaucer and Roger Bacon, whom England had produced from its first discovery down to our own times, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, and the prodigious shoal that attended these leviathans through the intellectual deep. Newton was but in his thirteenth year at Sir Oliver's death. Raleigh, Spenser, Hooker, Eliot, Selden, Taylor, Hobbes, Sidney, Shaftesbury, and Locke, were existing in his lifetime; and several more, who may be compared with the smaller of these. [13] Chapman's _Homer_, first book. THE COUNT GLEICHEM: THE COUNTESS: THEIR CHILDREN, AND ZAIDA. _Countess._ Ludolph! my beloved Ludolph! do we meet again? Ah! I am jealous of these little ones, and of the embraces you are giving them. Why sigh, my sweet husband? Come back again, Wilhelm! Come back again, Annabella! How could you run away? Do you think you can see better out of the corner? _Annabella._ Is this indeed our papa? What, in the name of mercy, can have given him so dark a colour? I hope I shall never be like that; and yet everybody tells me I am very like papa. _Wilhelm._ Do not let her plague you, papa; but take me between your knees (I am too old to sit upon them), and tell me all about the Turks, and how you ran away from them. _Countess._ Wilhelm! if your father had run away from the enemy, we should not have been deprived of him two whole years. _Wilhelm._ I am hardly such a child as to suppose that a Christian knight would run away from a rebel Turk in battle. But even Christians are taken, somehow, by their tricks and contrivances, and their dog Mahomet. Beside, you know you yourself told me, with tear after tear, and scolding me for mine, that papa was taken by them. _Annabella._ Neither am I, who am only one year younger, so foolish as to believe there is any dog Mahomet. And, if there were, we have dogs that are better and faithfuller and stronger. _Wilhelm._ [_To his father._] I can hardly help laughing to think what curious fancies girls have about Mahomet. We know that Mahomet is a dog-spirit with three horsetails. _Annabella._ Papa! I am glad to see you smile at Wilhelm. I do assure you he is not half so bad a boy as he was, although he did point at me, and did tell you some mischief. _Count._ I ought to be indeed most happy at seeing you all again. _Annabella._ And so you are. Don't pretend to look grave now. I very easily find you out. I often look grave when I am the happiest. But forth it bursts at last: there is no room for it in tongue, or eyes, or anywhere. _Count._ And so, my little angel, you begin to recollect me. _Annabella._ At first I used to dream of papa, but at last I forgot how to dream of him: and then I cried, but at last I left off crying. And then, papa, who could come to me in my sleep, seldom came again. _Count._ Why do you now draw back from me, Annabella? _Annabella._ Because you really are so very very brown: just like those ugly Turks who sawed the pines in the saw-pit under the wood, and who refused to drink wine in the heat of summer, when Wilhelm and I brought it to them. Do not be angry; we did it only once. _Wilhelm._ Because one of them stamped and frightened her when the other seemed to bless us. _Count._ Are they still living? _Countess._ One of them is. _Wilhelm._ The fierce one. _Count._ We will set him free, and wish it were the other. _Annabella._ Papa! I am glad you are come back without your spurs. _Countess._ Hush, child, hush. _Annabella._ Why, mamma? Do not you remember how they tore my frock when I clung to him at parting? Now I begin to think of him again: I lose everything between that day and this. _Countess._ The girl's idle prattle about the spurs has pained you: always too sensitive; always soon hurt, though never soon offended. _Count._ O God! O my children! O my wife! it is not the loss of spurs I now must blush for. _Annabella._ Indeed, papa, you never can blush at all, until you cut that horrid beard off. _Countess._ Well may you say, my own Ludolph, as you do; for most gallant was your bearing in the battle. _Count._ Ah! why was it ever fought? _Countess._ Why were most battles? But they may lead to glory even through slavery. _Count._ And to shame and sorrow. _Countess._ Have I lost the little beauty I possessed, that you hold my hand so languidly, and turn away your eyes when they meet mine? It was not so formerly ... unless when first we loved. That one kiss restores to me all my lost happiness. Come; the table is ready: there are your old wines upon it: you must want that refreshment. _Count._ Go, my sweet children! you must eat your supper before I do. _Countess._ Run into your own room for it. _Annabella._ I will not go until papa has patted me again on the shoulder, now I begin to remember it. I do not much mind the beard: I grow used to it already: but indeed I liked better to stroke and pat the smooth laughing cheek, with my arm across the neck behind. It is very pleasant even so. Am I not grown? I can put the whole length of my finger between your lips. _Count._ And now, will not _you_ come, Wilhelm? _Wilhelm._ I am too tall and too heavy: she is but a child. [_Whispers._] Yet I think, papa, I am hardly so much of a man but you may kiss me over again ... if you will not let her see it. _Countess._ My dears! why do not you go to your supper? _Annabella._ Because he has come to show us what Turks are like. _Wilhelm._ Do not be angry with her. Do not look down, papa! _Count._ Blessings on you both, sweet children! _Wilhelm._ We may go now. _Countess._ And now, Ludolph, come to the table, and tell me all your sufferings. _Count._ The worst begin here. _Countess._ Ungrateful Ludolph! _Count._ I am he: that is my name in full. _Countess._ You have then ceased to love me? _Count._ Worse; if worse can be: I have ceased to deserve your love. _Countess._ No: Ludolph hath spoken falsely for once; but Ludolph is not false. _Count._ I have forfeited all I ever could boast of, your affection and my own esteem. Away with caresses! Repulse me, abjure me; hate, and never pardon me. Let the abject heart lie untorn by one remorse. Forgiveness would split and shiver what slavery but abased. _Countess._ Again you embrace me; and yet tell me never to pardon you! O inconsiderate man! O idle deviser of impossible things! But you have not introduced to me those who purchased your freedom, or who achieved it by their valour. _Count._ Mercy! O God! _Countess._ Are they dead? Was the plague abroad. _Count._ I will not dissemble ... such was never my intention ... that my deliverance was brought about by means of---- _Countess._ Say it at once ... a lady. _Count._ It was. _Countess._ She fled with you. _Count._ She did. _Countess._ And have you left her, sir? _Count._ Alas! alas! I have not; and never can. _Countess._ Now come to my arms, brave, honourable Ludolph! Did I not say thou couldst not be ungrateful? Where, where is she who has given me back my husband? _Count._ Dare I utter it! in this house. _Countess._ Call the children. _Count._ No; they must not affront her: they must not even stare at her: other eyes, not theirs, must stab me to the heart. _Countess._ They shall bless her; we will all. Bring her in. [_Zaida is led in by the Count._] _Countess._ We three have stood silent long enough: and much there may be on which we will for ever keep silence. But, sweet young creature! can I refuse my protection, or my love, to the preserver of my husband? Can I think it a crime, or even a folly, to have pitied the brave and the unfortunate? to have pressed (but alas! that it ever should have been so here!) a generous heart to a tender one? Why do you begin to weep? _Zaida._ Under your kindness, O lady, lie the sources of these tears. But why has he left us? He might help me to say many things which I want to say. _Countess._ Did he never tell you he was married? _Zaida._ He did indeed. _Countess._ That he had children? _Zaida._ It comforted me a little to hear it. _Countess._ Why? prithee why? _Zaida._ When I was in grief at the certainty of holding but the second place in his bosom, I thought I could at least go and play with them, and win perhaps their love. _Countess._ According to our religion, a man must have only one wife. _Zaida._ That troubled me again. But the dispenser of your religion, who binds and unbinds, does for sequins or services what our Prophet does purely through kindness. _Countess._ We can love but one. _Zaida._ We indeed can love only one: but men have large hearts. _Countess._ Unhappy girl! _Zaida._ The very happiest in the world. _Countess._ Ah! inexperienced creature! _Zaida._ The happier for that perhaps. _Countess._ But the sin! _Zaida._ Where sin is, there must be sorrow: and I, my sweet sister, feel none whatever. Even when tears fall from my eyes, they fall only to cool my breast: I would not have one the fewer: they all are for him: whatever he does, whatever he causes, is dear to me. _Countess._ [_Aside._] This is too much. I could hardly endure to have him so beloved by another, even at the extremity of the earth. [_To Zaida._] You would not lead him into perdition? _Zaida._ I have led him (Allah be praised!) to his wife and children. It was for those I left my father. He whom we love might have stayed with me at home: but there he would have been only half happy, even had he been free. I could not often let him see me through the lattice; I was too afraid; and I dared only once let fall the water-melon; it made such a noise in dropping and rolling on the terrace: but, another day, when I had pared it nicely, and had swathed it up well among vine-leaves, dipped in sugar and sherbet, I was quite happy. I leaped and danced to have been so ingenious. I wonder what creature could have found and eaten it. I wish he were here, that I might ask him if he knew. _Countess._ He quite forgot home then! _Zaida._ When we could speak together at all, he spoke perpetually of those whom the calamity of war had separated from him. _Countess._ It appears that you could comfort him in his distress, and did it willingly. _Zaida._ It is delightful to kiss the eye-lashes of the beloved: is it not? but never so delightful as when fresh tears are on them. _Countess._ And even this too? you did this? _Zaida._ Fifty times. _Countess._ Insupportable! He often then spoke about me? _Zaida._ As sure as ever we met: for he knew I loved him the better when I heard him speak so fondly. _Countess._ [_To herself._] Is this possible? It may be ... of the absent, the unknown, the unfeared, the unsuspected. _Zaida._ We shall now be so happy, all three. _Countess._ How can we all live together? _Zaida._ Now he is here, is there no bond of union? _Countess._ Of union? of union? [_Aside_.] Slavery is a frightful thing! slavery for life, too! And she released him from it. What then? Impossible! impossible! [_To Zaida._] We are rich.... _Zaida._ I am glad to hear it. Nothing anywhere goes on well without riches. _Countess._ We can provide for you amply.... _Zaida._ Our husband.... _Countess._ _Our!... husband!..._ _Zaida._ Yes, yes; I know he is yours too; and you, being the elder and having children, are lady above all. He can tell you how little I want: a bath, a slave, a dish of pilau, one jonquil every morning, as usual; nothing more. But he must swear that he has kissed it first. No, he need not swear it; I may always see him do it, now. _Countess._ [_Aside._] She agonizes me. [_To Zaida._] Will you never be induced to return to your own country? Could not Ludolph persuade you? _Zaida._ He who could once persuade me anything, may now command me everything: when he says I must go, I go. But he knows what awaits me. _Countess._ No, child! he never shall say it. _Zaida._ Thanks, lady! eternal thanks! The breaking of his word would break my heart; and better _that_ break first. Let the command come from you, and not from him. _Countess._ [_Calling aloud._] Ludolph! Ludolph! hither! Kiss the hand I present to you, and never forget it is the hand of a preserver. THE PENTAMERON; OR, INTERVIEWS OF MESSER GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO AND MESSER FRANCESCO PETRARCA WHEN SAID MESSER GIOVANNI LAY INFIRM AT HIS VILLETTA HARD BY CERTALDO; AFTER WHICH THEY SAW NOT EACH OTHER ON OUR SIDE OF PARADISE. FIRST DAY'S INTERVIEW _Boccaccio._ Who is he that entered, and now steps so silently and softly, yet with a foot so heavy it shakes my curtains? Frate Biagio! can it possibly be you? No more physic for me, nor masses neither, at present. Assunta! Assuntina! who is it? _Assunta._ I cannot say, Signor Padrone! he puts his finger in the dimple of his chin, and smiles to make me hold my tongue. _Boccaccio._ Fra Biagio! are you come from Samminiato for this? You need not put your finger there. We want no secrets. The girl knows her duty and does her business. I have slept well, and wake better. [_Raising himself up a little._] Why? who are you? It makes my eyes ache to look aslant over the sheets; and I cannot get to sit quite upright so conveniently; and I must not have the window-shutters opened, they tell me. _Petrarca._ Dear Giovanni! have you then been very unwell? _Boccaccio._ O that sweet voice! and this fat friendly hand of thine, Francesco! Thou hast distilled all the pleasantest flowers, and all the wholesomest herbs of spring, into my breast already. What showers we have had this April, ay! How could you come along such roads? If the devil were my labourer, I would make him work upon these of Certaldo. He would have little time and little itch for mischief ere he had finished them, but would gladly fan himself with an Agnus-castus, and go to sleep all through the carnival. _Petrarca._ Let us cease to talk both of the labour and the labourer. You have then been dangerously ill? _Boccaccio._ I do not know: they told me I was: and truly a man might be unwell enough, who has twenty masses said for him, and fain sigh when he thinks what he has paid for them. As I hope to be saved, they cost me a lira each. Assunta is a good market-girl in eggs, and mutton, and cow-heel; but I would not allow her to argue and haggle about the masses. Indeed she knows best whether they were not fairly worth all that was asked for them, although I could have bought a winter cloak for less money. However, we do not want both at the same time. I did not want the cloak: I wanted _them_, it seems. And yet I begin to think God would have had mercy on me, if I had begged it of him myself in my own house. What think you? _Petrarca._ I think he might. _Boccaccio._ Particularly if I offered him the sacrifice on which I wrote to you. _Petrarca._ That letter has brought me hither. _Boccaccio._ You do then insist on my fulfilling my promise, the moment I can leave my bed. I am ready and willing. _Petrarca._ Promise! none was made. You only told me that, if it pleased God to restore you to your health again, you are ready to acknowledge His mercy by the holocaust of your _Decameron_. What proof have you that God would exact it? If you could destroy the _Inferno_ of Dante, would you? _Boccaccio._ Not I, upon my life! I would not promise to burn a copy of it on the condition of a recovery for twenty years. _Petrarca._ You are the only author who would not rather demolish another's work than his own; especially if he thought it better: a thought which seldom goes beyond suspicion. _Boccaccio._ I am not jealous of any one: I think admiration pleasanter. Moreover, Dante and I did not come forward at the same time, nor take the same walks. His flames are too fierce for you and me: we had trouble enough with milder. I never felt any high gratification in hearing of people being damned; and much less would I toss them into the fire myself. I might indeed have put a nettle under the nose of the learned judge in Florence, when he banished you and your family; but I hardly think I could have voted for more than a scourging to the foulest and fiercest of the party. _Petrarca._ Be as compassionate, be as amiably irresolute, toward your own _Novelle_, which have injured no friend of yours, and deserve more affection. _Boccaccio._ Francesco! no character I ever knew, ever heard of, or ever feigned, deserves the same affection as you do; the tenderest lover, the truest friend, the firmest patriot, and, rarest of glories! the poet who cherishes another's fame as dearly as his own. _Petrarca._ If aught of this is true, let it be recorded of me that my exhortations and entreaties have been successful, in preserving the works of the most imaginative and creative genius that our Italy, or indeed our world, hath in any age beheld. _Boccaccio._ I would not destroy his poems, as I told you, or think I told you. Even the worst of the Florentines, who in general keep only one of God's commandments, keep it rigidly in regard to Dante-- Love them who curse you. He called them all scoundrels, with somewhat less courtesy than cordiality, and less afraid of censure for veracity than adulation: he sent their fathers to hell, with no inclination to separate the child and parent: and now they are hugging him for it in his shroud! Would you ever have suspected them of being such lovers of justice? You must have mistaken my meaning; the thought never entered my head: the idea of destroying a single copy of Dante! And what effect would that produce? There must be fifty, or near it, in various parts of Italy. _Petrarca._ I spoke of you. _Boccaccio._ Of me! My poetry is vile; I have already thrown into the fire all of it within my reach. _Petrarca._ Poetry was not the question. We neither of us are such poets as we thought ourselves when we were younger, and as younger men think us still. I meant your _Decameron_; in which there is more character, more nature, more invention, than either modern or ancient Italy, or than Greece, from whom she derived her whole inheritance, ever claimed or ever knew. Would you consume a beautiful meadow because there are reptiles in it; or because a few grubs hereafter may be generated by the succulence of the grass? _Boccaccio._ You amaze me: you utterly confound me. _Petrarca._ If you would eradicate twelve or thirteen of the _Novelle_, and insert the same number of better, which you could easily do within as many weeks, I should be heartily glad to see it done. Little more than a tenth of the _Decameron_ is bad: less than a twentieth of the _Divina Commedia_ is good. _Boccaccio._ So little? _Petrarca._ Let me never seem irreverent to our master. _Boccaccio._ Speak plainly and fearlessly, Francesco! Malice and detraction are strangers to you. _Petrarca._ Well then: at least sixteen parts in twenty of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ are detestable, both in poetry and principle: the higher parts are excellent indeed. _Boccaccio._ I have been reading the _Paradiso_ more recently. Here it is, under the pillow. It brings me happier dreams than the others, and takes no more time in bringing them. Preparation for my lectures made me remember a great deal of the poem. I did not request my auditors to admire the beauty of the metrical version: Osanna sanctus deus Sabbaoth, Super-illustrans charitate tuâ Felices ignes horum Malahoth, nor these, with a slip of Italian between two pales of Latin: Modicum,[14] et non videbitis me, Et iterum, sorelle mie dilette, Modicum, et vos videbitis me. I dare not repeat all I recollect of Pepe Setan, Pepe Setan, aleppe, as there is no holy-water-sprinkler in the room: and you are aware that other dangers awaited me, had I been so imprudent as to show the Florentines the allusion of our poet. His _gergo_ is perpetually in play, and sometimes plays very roughly. _Petrarca._ We will talk again of him presently. I must now rejoice with you over the recovery and safety of your prodigal son, the _Decameron_. _Boccaccio._ So then, you would preserve at any rate my favourite volume from the threatened conflagration. _Petrarca._ Had I lived at the time of Dante, I would have given him the same advice in the same circumstances. Yet how different is the tendency of the two productions! Yours is somewhat too licentious; and young men, in whose nature, or rather in whose education and habits, there is usually this failing, will read you with more pleasure than is commendable or innocent. Yet the very time they occupy with you, would perhaps be spent in the midst of those excesses or irregularities, to which the moralist, in his utmost severity, will argue that your pen directs them. Now there are many who are fond of standing on the brink of precipices, and who nevertheless are as cautious as any of falling in. And there are minds desirous of being warmed by description, which without this warmth might seek excitement among the things described. I would not tell you in health what I tell you in convalescence, nor urge you to compose what I dissuade you from cancelling. After this avowal, I do declare to you, Giovanni, that in my opinion, the very idlest of your tales will do the world as much good as evil; not reckoning the pleasure of reading, nor the exercise and recreation of the mind, which in themselves are good. What I reprove you for, is the indecorous and uncleanly; and these, I trust, you will abolish. Even these, however, may repel from vice the ingenuous and graceful spirit, and can never lead any such toward them. Never have you taken an inhuman pleasure in blunting and fusing the affections at the furnace of the passions; never, in hardening by sour sagacity and ungenial strictures, that delicacy which is more productive of innocence and happiness, more estranged from every track and tendency of their opposites, than what in cold, crude systems hath holden the place and dignity of the highest virtue. May you live, O my friend, in the enjoyment of health, to substitute the facetious for the licentious, the simple for the extravagant, the true and characteristic for the indefinite and diffuse. * * * * * _Boccaccio._ And after all this, can you bear to think what I am? _Petrarca._ Complacently and joyfully; venturing, nevertheless, to offer you a friend's advice. Enter into the mind and heart of your own creatures: think of them long, entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended the most spider-webs; and the quarry out of which palaces are erected is the nursery of nettle and bramble. _Boccaccio._ It is better to keep always in view such writers as Cicero, than to run after those idlers who throw stones that can never reach us. _Petrarca._ If you copied him to perfection, and on no occasion lost sight of him, you would be an indifferent, not to say a bad writer. _Boccaccio._ I begin to think you are in the right. Well then, retrenching some of my licentious tales, I must endeavour to fill up the vacancy with some serious and some pathetic. _Petrarca._ I am heartily glad to hear of this decision; for, admirable as you are in the jocose, you descend from your natural position when you come to the convivial and the festive. You were placed among the Affections, to move and master them, and gifted with the rod that sweetens the fount of tears. My nature leads me also to the pathetic; in which, however, an imbecile writer may obtain celebrity. Even the hard-hearted are fond of such reading, when they are fond of any; and nothing is easier in the world than to find and accumulate its sufferings. Yet this very profusion and luxuriance of misery is the reason why few have excelled in describing it. The eye wanders over the mass without noticing the peculiarities. To mark them distinctly is the work of genius; a work so rarely performed, that, if time and space may be compared, specimens of it stand at wider distances than the trophies of Sesostris. Here we return again to the _Inferno_ of Dante, who overcame the difficulty. In this vast desert are its greater and its less oasis; Ugolino and Francesca di Rimini. The peopled region is peopled chiefly with monsters and moschitoes: the rest for the most part is sand and suffocation. _Boccaccio._ Ah! had Dante remained through life the pure solitary lover of Bice, his soul had been gentler, tranquiller, and more generous. He scarcely hath described half the curses he went through, nor the roads he took on the journey: theology, politics, and that barbican of the _Inferno_, marriage, surrounded with its Selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte. Admirable is indeed the description of Ugolino, to whoever can endure the sight of an old soldier gnawing at the scalp of an old archbishop. _Petrarca._ The thirty lines from Ed io sentii, are unequalled by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions of poetry. _Boccaccio._ Give me rather the six on Francesca: for if in the former I find the simple, vigorous, clear narration, I find also what I would not wish, the features of Ugolino reflected full in Dante. The two characters are similar in themselves; hard, cruel, inflexible, malignant, but, whenever moved, moved powerfully. In Francesca, with the faculty of divine spirits, he leaves his own nature (not indeed the exact representative of theirs) and converts all his strength into tenderness. The great poet, like the original man of the Platonists, is double, possessing the further advantage of being able to drop one half at his option, and to resume it. Some of the tenderest on paper have no sympathies beyond; and some of the austerest in their intercourse with their fellow-creatures have deluged the world with tears. It is not from the rose that the bee gathers her honey, but often from the most acrid and the most bitter leaves and petals: Quando leggemmo il disiato viso Esser baciato di cotanto amante, Questi, chi mai da me non sia diviso! La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante ... _Galeotto_ fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse ... Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante. In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight; and, instead of naming Paolo, which indeed she never has done from the beginning, she now designates him as Questi chi mai da me non sia diviso! Are we not impelled to join in her prayer, wishing them happier in their union? _Petrarca._ If there be no sin in it. _Boccaccio._ Ay, and even if there be ... God help us! What a sweet aspiration in each cesura of the verse! three love-sighs fixed and incorporate! Then, when she hath said La bocca mi baciò, tutto tremante, she stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says: '_Galeotto_ is the name of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her. '_Galeotto_ is the name of the book.' 'What matters that?' 'And of the writer.' 'Or that either?' At last she disarms him: but how? '_That_ day we read no more.' Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a deplorable want of it. _Petrarca._ Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca, And he who fell as a dead body falls, would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Siena, Pisa, Genoa! what hatred against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the _Inferno_ as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written. Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it, if this had been his intention. Much however as I admire his vigour and severity of style in the description of Ugolino, I acknowledge with you that I do not discover so much imagination, so much creative power, as in the Francesca. I find indeed a minute detail of probable events: but this is not all I want in a poet: it is not even all I want most in a scene of horror. Tribunals of justice, dens of murderers, wards of hospitals, schools of anatomy, will afford us nearly the same sensations, if we hear them from an accurate observer, a clear reporter, a skilful surgeon, or an attentive nurse. There is nothing of sublimity in the horrific of Dante, which there always is in Aeschylus and Homer. If you, Giovanni, had described so nakedly the reception of Guiscardo's heart by Gismonda, or Lorenzo's head by Lisabetta, we could hardly have endured it. _Boccaccio._ Prithee, dear Francesco, do not place me over Dante: I stagger at the idea of approaching him. _Petrarca._ Never think I am placing you blindly or indiscriminately. I have faults to find with you, and even here. Lisabetta should by no means have been represented cutting off the head of her lover, '_as well as she could_,' with a clasp-knife. This is shocking and improbable. She might have found it already cut off by her brothers, in order to bury the corpse more commodiously and expeditiously. Nor indeed is it likely that she should have entrusted it to her waiting-maid, who carried home in her bosom a treasure so dear to her, and found so unexpectedly and so lately. _Boccaccio._ That is true: I will correct the oversight. Why do we never hear of our faults until everybody knows them, and until they stand in record against us? _Petrarca._ Because our ears are closed to truth and friendship for some time after the triumphal course of composition. We are too sensitive for the gentlest touch; and when we really have the most infirmity, we are angry to be told that we have any. _Boccaccio._ Ah, Francesco! thou art poet from scalp to heel: but what other would open his breast as thou hast done! They show ostentatiously far worse weaknesses; but the most honest of the tribe would forswear himself on this. Again, I acknowledge it, you have reason to complain of Lisabetta and Gismonda. * * * * * _Petrarca._ In my delight to listen to you after so long an absence, I have been too unwary; and you have been speaking too much for one infirm. Greatly am I to blame, not to have moderated my pleasure and your vivacity. You must rest now: to-morrow we will renew our conversation. _Boccaccio._ God bless thee, Francesco! I shall be talking with thee all night in my slumbers. Never have I seen thee with such pleasure as to-day, excepting when I was deemed worthy by our fellow-citizens of bearing to thee, and of placing within this dear hand of thine, the sentence of recall from banishment, and when my tears streamed over the ordinance as I read it, whereby thy paternal lands were redeemed from the public treasury. Again God bless thee! Those tears were not quite exhausted: take the last of them. FOOTNOTE: [14] It may puzzle an Englishman to read the lines beginning with 'Modicum', so as to give the metre. The secret is, to draw out _et_ into a disyllable, et-te, as the Italians do, who pronounce Latin verse, if possible, worse than we, adding a syllable to such as end with a consonant. THIRD DAY'S INTERVIEW It being now the Lord's day, Messer Francesco thought it meet that he should rise early in the morning and bestir himself, to hear mass in the parish church at Certaldo. Whereupon he went on tiptoe, if so weighty a man could indeed go in such a fashion, and lifted softly the latch of Ser Giovanni's chamber door, that he might salute him ere he departed, and occasion no wonder at the step he was about to take. He found Ser Giovanni fast asleep, with the missal wide open across his nose, and a pleasant smile on his genial, joyous mouth. Ser Francesco leaned over the couch, closed his hands together, and looking with even more than his usual benignity, said in a low voice: 'God bless thee, gentle soul! the mother of purity and innocence protect thee!' He then went into the kitchen, where he found the girl Assunta, and mentioned his resolution. She informed him that the horse had eaten his two beans,[15] and was as strong as a lion and as ready as a lover. Ser Francesco patted her on the cheek, and called her _semplicetta_! She was overjoyed at this honour from so great a man, the bosom friend of her good master, whom she had always thought the greatest man in the world, not excepting Monsignore, until he told her he was only a dog confronted with Ser Francesco. She tripped alertly across the paved court into the stable, and took down the saddle and bridle from the farther end of the rack. But Ser Francesco, with his natural politeness, would not allow her to equip his palfrey. 'This is not the work for maidens,' said he; 'return to the house, good girl!' She lingered a moment, then went away; but, mistrusting the dexterity of Ser Francesco, she stopped and turned back again, and peeped through the half-closed door, and heard sundry sobs and wheezes round about the girth. Ser Francesco's wind ill seconded his intention; and, although he had thrown the saddle valiantly and stoutly in its station, yet the girths brought him into extremity. She entered again, and dissembling the reason, asked him whether he would not take a small beaker of the sweet white wine before he set out, and offered to girdle the horse while his Reverence bitted and bridled him. Before any answer could be returned, she had begun. And having now satisfactorily executed her undertaking, she felt irrepressible delight and glee at being able to do what Ser Francesco had failed in. He was scarcely more successful with his allotment of the labour; found unlooked-for intricacies and complications in the machinery, wondered that human wit could not simplify it, and declared that the animal had never exhibited such restiveness before. In fact, he never had experienced the same grooming. At this conjuncture, a green cap made its appearance, bound with straw-coloured ribbon, and surmounted with two bushy sprigs of hawthorn, of which the globular buds were swelling, and some bursting, but fewer yet open. It was young Simplizio Nardi, who sometimes came on the Sunday morning to sweep the courtyard for Assunta. 'Oh! this time you are come just when you were wanted,' said the girl. 'Bridle, directly, Ser Francesco's horse, and then go away about your business.' The youth blushed, and kissed Ser Francesco's hand, begging his permission. It was soon done. He then held the stirrup; and Ser Francesco, with scarcely three efforts, was seated and erect on the saddle. The horse, however, had somewhat more inclination for the stable than for the expedition; and, as Assunta was handing to the rider his long ebony staff, bearing an ivory caduceus, the quadruped turned suddenly round. Simplizio called him _bestiaccia_! and then, softening it, _poco garbato_! and proposed to Ser Francesco that he should leave the bastone behind, and take the crab-switch he presented to him, giving at the same time a sample of its efficacy, which covered the long grizzle hair of the worthy quadruped with a profusion of pink blossoms, like embroidery. The offer was declined; but Assunta told Simplizio to carry it himself, and to walk by the side of Ser Canonico quite up to the church porch, having seen what a sad, dangerous beast his reverence had under him. With perfect good will, partly in the pride of obedience to Assunta, and partly to enjoy the renown of accompanying a canon of Holy Church, Simplizio did as she enjoined. And now the sound of village bells, in many hamlets and convents and churches out of sight, was indistinctly heard, and lost again; and at last the five of Certaldo seemed to crow over the faintness of them all. The freshness of the morning was enough of itself to excite the spirits of youth; a portion of which never fails to descend on years that are far removed from it, if the mind has partaken in innocent mirth while it was its season and its duty to enjoy it. Parties of young and old passed the canonico and his attendant with mute respect, bowing and bare-headed; for that ebony staff threw its spell over the tongue, which the frank and hearty salutation of the bearer was inadequate to break. Simplizio, once or twice, attempted to call back an intimate of the same age with himself; but the utmost he could obtain was a _riveritissimo_! and a genuflexion to the rider. It is reported that a heart-burning rose up from it in the breast of a cousin, some days after, too distinctly apparent in the long-drawn appellation of _Gnor_[16] Simplizio. Ser Francesco moved gradually forward, his steed picking his way along the lane, and looking fixedly on the stones with all the sobriety of a mineralogist. He himself was well satisfied with the pace, and told Simplizio to be sparing of the switch, unless in case of a hornet or a gadfly. Simplizio smiled, toward the hedge, and wondered at the condescension of so great a theologian and astrologer, in joking with him about the gadflies and hornets in the beginning of April. 'Ah! there are men in the world who can make wit out of anything!' said he to himself. As they approached the walls of the town, the whole country was pervaded by a stirring and diversified air of gladness. Laughter and songs and flutes and viols, inviting voices and complying responses, mingled with merry bells and with processional hymns, along the woodland paths and along the yellow meadows. It was really the _Lord's Day_, for He made His creatures happy in it, and their hearts were thankful. Even the cruel had ceased from cruelty; and the rich man alone exacted from the animal his daily labour. Ser Francesco made this remark, and told his youthful guide that he had never been before where he could not walk to church on a Sunday; and that nothing should persuade him to urge the speed of his beast, on the seventh day, beyond his natural and willing foot's-pace. He reached the gates of Certaldo more than half an hour before the time of service, and he found laurels suspended over them, and being suspended; and many pleasant and beautiful faces were protruded between the ranks of gentry and clergy who awaited him. Little did he expect such an attendance; but Fra Biagio of San Vivaldo, who himself had offered no obsequiousness or respect, had scattered the secret of his visit throughout the whole country. A young poet, the most celebrated in the town, approached the canonico with a long scroll of verses, which fell below the knee, beginning: How shall we welcome our illustrious guest? To which Ser Francesco immediately replied: 'Take your favourite maiden, lead the dance with her, and bid all your friends follow; you have a good half-hour for it.' Universal applauses succeeded, the music struck up, couples were instantly formed. The gentry on this occasion led out the cittadinanza, as they usually do in the villeggiatura, rarely in the carnival, and never at other times. The elder of the priests stood round in their sacred vestments, and looked with cordiality and approbation on the youths, whose hands and arms could indeed do much, and did it, but whose active eyes could rarely move upward the modester of their partners. While the elder of the clergy were thus gathering the fruits of their liberal cares and paternal exhortations, some of the younger looked on with a tenderer sentiment, not unmingled with regret. Suddenly the bells ceased; the figure of the dance was broken; all hastened into the church; and many hands that joined on the green, met together at the font, and touched the brow reciprocally with its lustral waters, in soul-devotion. After the service, and after a sermon a good church-hour in length to gratify him, enriched with compliments from all authors, Christian and Pagan, informing him at the conclusion that, although he had been crowned in the Capitol, he must die, being born mortal, Ser Francesco rode homeward. The sermon seemed to have sunk deeply into him, and even into the horse under him, for both of them nodded, both snorted, and one stumbled. Simplizio was twice fain to cry: 'Ser Canonico! Riverenza! in this country if we sleep before dinner it does us harm. There are stones in the road, Ser Canonico, loose as eggs in a nest, and pretty nigh as thick together, huge as mountains.' 'Good lad!' said Ser Francesco, rubbing his eyes, 'toss the biggest of them out of the way, and never mind the rest.' The horse, although he walked, shuffled almost into an amble as he approached the stable, and his master looked up at it with nearly the same contentment. Assunta had been ordered to wait for his return, and cried: 'O Ser Francesco! you are looking at our long apricot, that runs the whole length of the stable and barn, covered with blossoms as the old white hen is with feathers. You must come in the summer, and eat this fine fruit with Signor Padrone. You cannot think how ruddy and golden and sweet and mellow it is. There are peaches in all the fields, and plums, and pears, and apples, but there is not another apricot for miles and miles. Ser Giovanni brought the stone from Naples before I was born: a lady gave it to him when she had eaten only half the fruit off it: but perhaps you may have seen her, for you have ridden as far as Rome, or beyond. Padrone looks often at the fruit, and eats it willingly; and I have seen him turn over the stones in his plate, and choose one out from the rest, and put it into his pocket, but never plant it.' 'Where is the youth?' inquired Ser Francesco. 'Gone away,' answered the maiden. 'I wanted to thank him,' said the Canonico. 'May I tell him so?' asked she. 'And give him ...' continued he, holding a piece of silver. 'I will give him something of my own, if he goes on and behaves well,' said she; 'but Signor Padrone would drive him away for ever, I am sure, if he were tempted in an evil hour to accept a quattrino for any service he could render the friends of the house.' Ser Francesco was delighted with the graceful animation of this ingenuous girl, and asked her, with a little curiosity, how she could afford to make him a present. 'I do not intend to make him a present,' she replied: 'but it is better he should be rewarded by me,' she blushed and hesitated, 'or by Signor Padrone,' she added, 'than by your reverence. He has not done half his duty yet; not half. I will teach him: he is quite a child; four months younger than me.' Ser Francesco went into the house, saying to himself at the doorway: 'Truth, innocence, and gentle manners have not yet left the earth. There are sermons that never make the ears weary. I have heard but few of them, and come from church for this.' Whether Simplizio had obeyed some private signal from Assunta, or whether his own delicacy had prompted him to disappear, he was now again in the stable, and the manger was replenished with hay. A bucket was soon after heard ascending from the well; and then two words: 'Thanks, Simplizio.' When Petrarca entered the chamber, he found Boccaccio with his breviary in his hand, not looking into it indeed, but repeating a thanksgiving in an audible and impassioned tone of voice. Seeing Ser Francesco, he laid the book down beside him, and welcomed him. 'I hope you have an appetite after your ride,' said he, 'for you have sent home a good dinner before you.' Ser Francesco did not comprehend him, and expressed it not in words but in looks. 'I am afraid you will dine sadly late to-day: noon has struck this half-hour, and you must wait another, I doubt. However, by good luck, I had a couple of citrons in the house, intended to assuage my thirst if the fever had continued. This being over, by God's mercy, I will try (please God!) whether we two greyhounds cannot be a match for a leveret.' 'How is this?' said Ser Francesco. 'Young Marc-Antonio Grilli, the cleverest lad in the parish at noosing any wild animal, is our patron of the feast. He has wanted for many a day to say something in the ear of Matilda Vercelli. Bringing up the leveret to my bedside, and opening the lips, and cracking the knuckles, and turning the foot round to show the quality and quantity of the hair upon it, and to prove that it really and truly was a leveret, and might be eaten without offence to my teeth, he informed me that he had left his mother in the yard, ready to dress it for me; she having been cook to the prior. He protested he owed the _crowned martyr_ a forest of leverets, boars, deers, and everything else within them, for having commanded the most backward girls to dance directly. Whereupon he darted forth at Matilda, saying, "The _crowned martyr_ orders it," seizing both her hands, and swinging her round before she knew what she was about. He soon had an opportunity of applying a word, no doubt as dexterously as hand or foot; and she said submissively, but seriously, and almost sadly, "Marc-Antonio, now all the people have seen it, they will think it." 'And after a pause: '"I am quite ashamed: and so should you be: are not you now?" 'The others had run into the church. Matilda, who scarcely had noticed it, cried suddenly: '"O Santissima! we are quite alone." '"Will you be mine?" cried he, enthusiastically. '"Oh! they will hear you in the church," replied she. '"They shall, they shall," cried he again, as loudly. '"If you will only go away." '"And then?" '"Yes, yes, indeed." '"The Virgin hears you: fifty saints are witnesses." '"Ah! they know you made me: they will look kindly on us." 'He released her hand: she ran into the church, doubling her veil (I will answer for her) at the door, and kneeling as near it as she could find a place. '"By St. Peter," said Marc-Antonio, "if there is a leveret in the wood, the _crowned martyr_ shall dine upon it this blessed day." And he bounded off, and set about his occupation. I inquired what induced him to designate you by such a title. He answered, that everybody knew you had received the crown of martyrdom at Rome, between the pope and antipope, and had performed many miracles, for which they had canonized you, and that you wanted only to die to become a saint.' The leveret was now served up, cut into small pieces, and covered with a rich tenacious sauce, composed of sugar, citron, and various spices. The appetite of Ser Francesco was contagious. Never was dinner more enjoyed by two companions, and never so much by a greater number. One glass of a fragrant wine, the colour of honey, and unmixed with water, crowned the repast. Ser Francesco then went into his own chamber, and found, on his ample mattress, a cool, refreshing sleep, quite sufficient to remove all the fatigues of the morning; and Ser Giovanni lowered the pillow against which he had seated himself, and fell into his usual repose. Their separation was not of long continuance: and, the religious duties of the Sabbath having been performed, a few reflections on literature were no longer interdicted. * * * * * _Petrarca._ The land, O Giovanni, of your early youth, the land of my only love, fascinates us no longer. Italy is our country; and not ours only, but every man's, wherever may have been his wanderings, wherever may have been his birth, who watches with anxiety the recovery of the Arts, and acknowledges the supremacy of Genius. Besides, it is in Italy at last that all our few friends are resident. Yours were left behind you at Paris in your adolescence, if indeed any friendship can exist between a Florentine and a Frenchman: mine at Avignon were Italians, and older for the most part than myself. Here we know that we are beloved by some, and esteemed by many. It indeed gave me pleasure the first morning as I lay in bed, to overhear the fondness and earnestness which a worthy priest was expressing in your behalf. _Boccaccio._ In mine? _Petrarca._ Yes indeed: what wonder? _Boccaccio._ A worthy priest? _Petrarca._ None else, certainly. _Boccaccio._ Heard in bed! dreaming, dreaming; ay? _Petrarca._ No indeed: my eyes and ears were wide open. _Boccaccio._ The little parlour opens into your room. But what priest could that be? Canonico Casini? He only comes when we have a roast of thrushes, or some such small matter, at table: and this is not the season; they are pairing. Plover eggs might tempt him hitherward. If he heard a plover he would not be easy, and would fain make her drop her oblation before she had settled her nest. _Petrarca._ It is right and proper that you should be informed who the clergyman was, to whom you are under an obligation. _Boccaccio._ Tell me something about it, for truly I am at a loss to conjecture. _Petrarca._ He must unquestionably have been expressing a kind and ardent solicitude for your eternal welfare. The first words I heard on awakening were these: 'Ser Giovanni, although the best of masters ...' _Boccaccio._ Those were Assuntina's. _Petrarca._ '... may hardly be quite so holy (not being priest or friar) as your Reverence.' She was interrupted by the question: 'What conversation holdeth he?' She answered: 'He never talks of loving our neighbour with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength, although he often gives away the last loaf in the pantry.' _Boccaccio._ It was she! Why did she say that? the slut! _Petrarca._ 'He doth well,' replied the confessor. 'Of the Church, of the brotherhood, that is, of me, what discourses holdeth he?' I thought the question an indiscreet one; but confessors vary in their advances to the seat of truth. She proceeded to answer: 'He never said anything about the power of the Church to absolve us, if we should happen to go astray a little in good company, like your Reverence.' Here, it is easy to perceive, is some slight ambiguity. Evidently she meant to say, by the seduction of 'bad' company, and to express that his Reverence had asserted his power of absolution; which is undeniable. _Boccaccio._ I have my version. _Petrarca._ What may yours be? _Boccaccio._ Frate Biagio; broad as daylight; the whole frock round! I would wager a flask of oil against a turnip, that he laid another trap for a penance. Let us see how he went on. I warrant, as he warmed, he left off limping in his paces, and bore hard upon the bridle. _Petrarca._ 'Much do I fear,' continued the expositor, 'he never spoke to thee, child, about another world.' There was a silence of some continuance. 'Speak!' said the confessor. 'No indeed he never did, poor Padrone!' was the slow and evidently reluctant avowal of the maiden; for, in the midst of the acknowledgment her sighs came through the crevices of the door: then, without any farther interrogation, and with little delay, she added: 'But he often makes this look like it.' _Boccaccio._ And now, if he had carried a holy scourge, it would not have been on his shoulders that he would have laid it. _Petrarca._ Zeal carries men often too far afloat; and confessors in general wish to have the sole steerage of the conscience. When she told him that your benignity made this world another heaven, he warmly and sharply answered: 'It is only we who ought to do that.' 'Hush,' said the maiden; and I verily believe she at that moment set her back against the door, to prevent the sounds from coming through the crevices, for the rest of them seemed to be just over my night-cap. 'Hush,' said she, in the whole length of that softest of all articulations. 'There is Ser Francesco in the next room: he sleeps long into the morning, but he is so clever a clerk, he may understand you just the same. I doubt whether he thinks Ser Giovanni in the wrong for making so many people quite happy; and if he should, it would grieve me very much to think he blamed Ser Giovanni.' 'Who is Ser Francesco?' he asked, in a low voice. 'Ser Canonico,' she answered. 'Of what Duomo?' continued he. 'Who knows?' was the reply; 'but he is Padrone's heart's friend, for certain.' 'Cospetto di Bacco! It can then be no other than Petrarca. He makes rhymes and love like the devil. Don't listen to him, or you are undone. Does he love you too, as well as Padrone?' he asked, still lowering his voice. 'I cannot tell that matter,' she answered, somewhat impatiently; 'but I love him.' 'To my face!' cried he, smartly. 'To the Santissima!' replied she, instantaneously; 'for have not I told your Reverence he is Padrone's true heart's friend! And are not you my confessor, when you come on purpose?' 'True, true!' answered he; 'but there are occasions when we are shocked by the confession, and wish it made less daringly.' 'I was bold; but who can help loving him who loves my good Padrone?' said she, much more submissively. _Boccaccio._ Brave girl, for that! Dog of a Frate! They are all of a kidney; all of a kennel. I would dilute their meal well and keep them low. They should not waddle and wallop in every hollow lane, nor loll out their watery tongues at every wash-pool in the parish. We shall hear, I trust, no more about Fra Biagio in the house while you are with us. Ah! were it then for life. _Petrarca._ The man's prudence may be reasonably doubted, but it were uncharitable to question his sincerity. Could a neighbour, a religious one in particular, be indifferent to the welfare of Boccaccio, or any belonging to him? _Boccaccio._ I do not complain of his indifference. Indifferent! no, not he. He might as well be, though. My villetta here is my castle: it was my father's; it was his father's. Cowls did not hang to dry upon the same cord with caps in their podere; they shall not in mine. The girl is an honest girl, Francesco, though I say it. Neither she nor any other shall be befooled and bamboozled under my roof. Methinks Holy Church might contrive some improvement upon confession. _Petrarca._ Hush! Giovanni! But, it being a matter of discipline, who knows but she might. _Boccaccio._ Discipline! ay, ay, ay! faith and troth there are some who want it. _Petrarca._ You really terrify me. These are sad surmises. _Boccaccio._ Sad enough: but I am keeper of my handmaiden's probity. _Petrarca._ It could not be kept safer. _Boccaccio._ I wonder what the Frate would be putting into her head? _Petrarca._ Nothing, nothing: be assured. _Boccaccio._ Why did he ask her all those questions? _Petrarca._ Confessors do occasionally take circuitous ways to arrive at the secrets of the human heart. _Boccaccio._ And sometimes they drive at it, me thinks, a whit too directly. He had no business to make remarks about me. _Petrarca._ Anxiety. _Boccaccio._ 'Fore God, Francesco, he shall have more of that; for I will shut him out the moment I am again up and stirring, though he stand but a nose's length off. I have no fear about the girl; no suspicion of her. He might whistle to the moon on a frosty night, and expect as reasonably her descending. Never was a man so entirely at his ease as I am about that; never, never. She is adamant; a bright sword now first unscabbarded; no breath can hang about it. A seal of beryl, of chrysolite, of ruby; to make impressions (all in good time and proper place though) and receive none: incapable, just as they are, of splitting, or cracking, or flawing, or harbouring dirt. Let him mind that. Such, I assure you, is that poor little wench, Assuntina. _Petrarca._ I am convinced that so well-behaved a young creature as Assunta---- _Boccaccio._ Right! Assunta is her name by baptism; we usually call her Assuntina, because she is slender, and scarcely yet full-grown, perhaps: but who can tell? As for those friars, I never was a friend to impudence: I hate loose suggestions. In girls' minds you will find little dust but what is carried there by gusts from without. They seldom want sweeping; when they do, the broom should be taken from behind the house door, and the master should be the sacristan. ... Scarcely were these words uttered when Assunta was heard running up the stairs; and the next moment she rapped. Being ordered to come in, she entered with a willow twig in her hand, from the middle of which willow twig (for she held the two ends together) hung a fish, shining with green and gold. 'What hast there, young maiden?' said Ser Francesco. 'A fish, Riverenza!' answered she. 'In Tuscany we call it _tinca_.' _Petrarca._ I too am a little of a Tuscan. _Assunta._ Indeed! well, you really speak very like one, but only more sweetly and slowly. I wonder how you can keep up with Signor Padrone--he talks fast when he is in health; and you have made him so. Why did not you come before? Your Reverence has surely been at Certaldo in time past. _Petrarca._ Yes, before thou wert born. _Assunta._ Ah, sir! it must have been long ago then. _Petrarca._ Thou hast just entered upon life. _Assunta._ I am no child. _Petrarca._ What then art thou? _Assunta._ I know not: I have lost both father and mother; there is a name for such as I am. _Petrarca._ And a place in heaven. _Boccaccio._ Who brought us that fish, Assunta? hast paid for it? there must be seven pounds: I never saw the like. _Assunta._ I could hardly lift up my apron to my eyes with it in my hand. Luca, who brought it all the way from the Padule, could scarcely be entreated to eat a morsel of bread or sit down. _Boccaccio._ Give him a flask or two of our wine; he will like it better than the sour puddle of the plain. _Assunta._ He is gone back. _Boccaccio._ Gone! who is he, pray? _Assunta._ Luca, to be sure. _Boccaccio._ What Luca? _Assunta._ Dominedio! O Riverenza! how sadly must Ser Giovanni, my poor Padrone, have lost his memory in this cruel long illness! he cannot recollect young Luca of the Bientola, who married Maria. _Boccaccio._ I never heard of either, to the best of my knowledge. _Assunta._ Be pleased to mention this in your prayers to-night, Ser Canonico! May Our Lady soon give him back his memory! and everything else she has been pleased (only in play, I hope) to take away from him! Ser Francesco, you must have heard all over the world how Maria Gargarelli, who lived in the service of our paroco, somehow was outwitted by Satanasso. Monsignore thought the paroco had not done all he might have done against his wiles and craftiness, and sent his Reverence over to the monastery in the mountains, Laverna yonder, to make him look sharp; and there he is yet. And now does Signor Padrone recollect? _Boccaccio._ Rather more distinctly. _Assunta._ Ah me! Rather more distinctly! have patience, Signor Padrone! I am too venturous, God help me! But, Riverenza, when Maria was the scorn or the abhorrence of everybody else, excepting poor Luca Sabbatini, who had always cherished her, and excepting Signor Padrone, who had never seen her in his lifetime ... for paroco Snello said he desired no visits from any who took liberties with Holy Church ... as if Padrone did! Luca one day came to me out of breath, with money in his hand for our duck. Now it so happened that the duck, stuffed with noble chestnuts, was going to table at that instant. I told Signor Padrone.... _Boccaccio._ Assunta, I never heard thee repeat so long and tiresome a story before, nor put thyself out of breath so. Come, we have had enough of it. _Petrarca._ She is mortified: pray let her proceed. _Boccaccio._ As you will. _Assunta._ I told Signor Padrone how Luca was lamenting that Maria was seized with an _imagination_. _Petrarca._ No wonder then she fell into misfortune, and her neighbours and friends avoided her. _Assunta._ Riverenza! how can you smile? Signor Padrone! and you too? You shook your head and sighed at it when it happened. The Demonio, who had caused all the first mischief, was not contented until he had given her the _imagination_. _Petrarca._ He could not have finished his work more effectually. _Assunta._ He was balked, however. Luca said: 'She shall not die under her wrongs, please God!' I repeated the words to Signor Padrone.... He seems to listen, Riverenza! and will remember presently ... and Signor Padrone cut away one leg for himself, clean forgetting all the chestnuts inside, and said sharply, 'Give the bird to Luca; and, hark ye, bring back the minestra.' Maria loved Luca with all her heart, and Luca loved Maria with all his: but they both hated paroco Snello for such neglect about the evil one. And even Monsignore, who sent for Luca on purpose, had some difficulty in persuading him to forbear from choler and discourse. For Luca, who never swears, swore bitterly that the devil should play no such tricks again, nor alight on girls napping in the parsonage. Monsignore thought he intended to take violent possession, and to keep watch there himself without consent of the incumbent. 'I will have no scandal,' said Monsignore; so there was none. Maria, though she did indeed, as I told your Reverence, love her Luca dearly, yet she long refused to marry him, and cried very much at last on the wedding day, and said, as she entered the porch: 'Luca! it is not yet too late to leave me.' He would have kissed her, but her face was upon his shoulder. Pievano Locatelli married them, and gave them his blessing: and going down from the altar, he said before the people, as he stood on the last step: 'Be comforted, child! be comforted! God above knows that thy husband is honest, and that thou art innocent.' Pievano's voice trembled, for he was an aged and holy man, and had walked two miles on the occasion. Pulcheria, his governante, eighty years old, carried an apronful of lilies to bestrew the altar; and partly from the lilies, and partly from the blessed angels who (although invisible) were present, the church was filled with fragrance. Many who heretofore had been frightened at hearing the mention of Maria's name, ventured now to walk up toward her; and some gave her needles, and some offered skeins of thread, and some ran home again for pots of honey. _Boccaccio._ And why didst not thou take her some trifle? _Assunta._ I had none. _Boccaccio._ Surely there are always such about the premises. _Assunta._ Not mine to give away. _Boccaccio._ So then at thy hands, Assunta, she went off not overladen. Ne'er a bone-bodkin out of thy bravery, ay? _Assunta._ I ran out knitting, with the woodbine and syringa in the basket for the parlour. I made the basket ... I and ... but myself chiefly, for boys are loiterers. _Boccaccio._ Well, well: why not bestow the basket, together with its rich contents? _Assunta._ I am ashamed to say it ... I covered my half-stocking with them as quickly as I could, and ran after her, and presented it. Not knowing what was under the flowers, and never minding the liberty I had taken, being a stranger to her, she accepted it as graciously as possible, and bade me be happy. _Petrarca._ I hope you have always kept her command. _Assunta._ Nobody is ever unhappy here, except Fra Biagio, who frets sometimes: but that may be the walk; or he may fancy Ser Giovanni to be worse than he really is. ... Having now performed her mission and concluded her narrative, she bowed, and said: 'Excuse me, Riverenza! excuse me, Signor Padrone! my arm aches with this great fish.' Then, bowing again, and moving her eyes modestly toward each, she added, 'with permission!' and left the chamber. 'About the sposina,' after a pause began Ser Francesco: 'about the sposina, I do not see the matter clearly.' 'You have studied too much for seeing all things clearly,' answered Ser Giovanni; 'you see only the greatest. In fine, the devil, on this count, is acquitted by acclamation; and the paroco Snello eats lettuce and chicory up yonder at Laverna. He has mendicant friars for his society every day; and snails, as pure as water can wash and boil them, for his repast on festivals. Under this discipline, if they keep it up, surely one devil out of legion will depart from him.' FOOTNOTES: [15] Literally, _due fave_, the expression on such occasions to signify a small quantity. [16] Contraction of _signor_, customary in Tuscany. FOURTH DAY'S INTERVIEW _Petrarca._ Giovanni, you are unsuspicious, and would scarcely see a monster in a minotaur. It is well, however, to draw good out of evil, and it is the peculiar gift of an elevated mind. Nevertheless, you must have observed, although with greater curiosity than concern, the slipperiness and tortuousness of your detractors. _Boccaccio._ Whatever they detract from me, they leave more than they can carry away. Beside, they always are detected. _Petrarca._ When they are detected, they raise themselves up fiercely, as if their nature were erect and they could reach your height. _Boccaccio._ Envy would conceal herself under the shadow and shelter of contemptuousness, but she swells too huge for the den she creeps into. Let her lie there and crack, and think no more about her. The people you have been talking of can find no greater and no other faults in my writings than I myself am willing to show them, and still more willing to correct. There are many things, as you have just now told me, very unworthy of their company. _Petrarca._ He who has much gold is none the poorer for having much silver too. When a king of old displayed his wealth and magnificence before a philosopher, the philosopher's exclamation was: 'How many things are here which I do not want!' Does not the same reflection come upon us, when we have laid aside our compositions for a time, and look into them again more leisurely? Do we not wonder at our own profusion, and say like the philosopher: 'How many things are here which I do not want!' It may happen that we pull up flowers with weeds; but better this than rankness. We must bear to see our first-born dispatched before our eyes, and give them up quietly. _Boccaccio._ The younger will be the most reluctant. There are poets among us who mistake in themselves the freckles of the hay-fever for beauty-spots. In another half-century their volumes will be inquired after; but only for the sake of cutting out an illuminated letter from the title-page, or of transplanting the willow at the end, that hangs so prettily over the tomb of Amaryllis. If they wish to be healthy and vigorous, let them open their bosoms to the breezes of Sunium; for the air of Latium is heavy and overcharged. Above all, they must remember two admonitions; first, that sweet things hurt digestion; secondly, that great sails are ill adapted to small vessels. What is there lovely in poetry unless there be moderation and composure? Are they not better than the hot, uncontrollable harlotry of a flaunting, dishevelled enthusiasm? Whoever has the power of creating, has likewise the inferior power of keeping his creation in order. The best poets are the most impressive, because their steps are regular; for without regularity there is neither strength nor state. Look at Sophocles, look at Aeschylus, look at Homer. _Petrarca._ I agree with you entirely to the whole extent of your observations; and, if you will continue, I am ready to lay aside my Dante for the present. _Boccaccio._ No, no; we must have him again between us: there is no danger that he will sour our tempers. _Petrarca._ In comparing his and yours, since you forbid me to declare all I think of your genius, you will at least allow me to congratulate you as being the happier of the two. _Boccaccio._ Frequently, where there is great power in poetry, the imagination makes encroachments on the heart, and uses it as her own. I have shed tears on writings which never cost the writer a sigh, but which occasioned him to rub the palms of his hands together, until they were ready to strike fire, with satisfaction at having overcome the difficulty of being tender. _Petrarca._ Giovanni! are you not grown satirical? _Boccaccio._ Not in this. It is a truth as broad and glaring as the eye of the Cyclops. To make you amends for your shuddering, I will express my doubt, on the other hand, whether Dante felt all the indignation he threw into his poetry. We are immoderately fond of warming ourselves; and we do not think, or care, what the fire is composed of. Be sure it is not always of cedar, like Circe's. Our Alighieri had slipped into the habit of vituperation; and he thought it fitted him; so he never left it off. _Petrarca._ Serener colours are pleasanter to our eyes and more becoming to our character. The chief desire in every man of genius is to be thought one; and no fear or apprehension lessens it. Alighieri, who had certainly studied the gospel, must have been conscious that he not only was inhumane, but that he betrayed a more vindictive spirit than any pope or prelate who is enshrined within the fretwork of his golden grating. _Boccaccio._ Unhappily, his strong talon had grown into him, and it would have pained him to suffer amputation. This eagle, unlike Jupiter's, never loosened the thunderbolt from it under the influence of harmony. _Petrarca._ The only good thing we can expect in such minds and tempers is good poetry: let us at least get that; and, having it, let us keep and value it. If you had never written some wanton stories, you would never have been able to show the world how much wiser and better you grew afterward. _Boccaccio._ Alas! if I live, I hope to show it. You have raised my spirits: and now, dear Francesco! do say a couple of prayers for me, while I lay together the materials of a tale; a right merry one, I promise you. Faith! it shall amuse you, and pay decently for the prayers; a good honest litany-worth. I hardly know whether I ought to have a nun in it: do you think I may? _Petrarca._ Cannot you do without one? _Boccaccio._ No; a nun I must have: say nothing against her; I can more easily let the abbess alone. Yet Frate Biagio ... that Frate Biagio, who never came to visit me but when he thought I was at extremities or asleep.... Assuntina! are you there? _Petrarca._ No; do you want her? _Boccaccio._ Not a bit. That Frate Biagio has heightened my pulse when I could not lower it again. The very devil is that Frate for heightening pulses. And with him I shall now make merry ... God willing ... in God's good time ... should it be His divine will to restore me! which I think He has begun to do miraculously. I seem to be within a frog's leap of well again; and we will presently have some rare fun in my _Tale of the Frate_. _Petrarca._ Do not openly name him. _Boccaccio._ He shall recognize himself by one single expression. He said to me, when I was at the worst: 'Ser Giovanni! it would not be much amiss (with permission!) if you begin to think (at any spare time), just a morsel, of eternity.' 'Ah! Fra Biagio!' answered I, contritely, 'I never heard a sermon of yours but I thought of it seriously and uneasily, long before the discourse was over.' 'So must all,' replied he, 'and yet few have the grace to own it.' Now mind, Francesco! if it should please the Lord to call me unto Him, I say, _The Nun and Fra Biagio_ will be found, after my decease, in the closet cut out of the wall, behind yon Saint Zacharias in blue and yellow. Well done! well done! Francesco. I never heard any man repeat his prayers so fast and fluently. Why! how many (at a guess) have you repeated? Such is the power of friendship, and such the habit of religion! They have done me good: I feel myself stronger already. To-morrow I think I shall be able, by leaning on that stout maple stick in the corner, to walk half over my podere. Have you done? have you done? _Petrarca._ Be quiet: you may talk too much. _Boccaccio._ I cannot be quiet for another hour; so, if you have any more prayers to get over, stick the spur into the other side of them: they must verily speed, if they beat the last. _Petrarca._ Be more serious, dear Giovanni. _Boccaccio._ Never bid a convalescent be more serious: no, nor a sick man neither. To health it may give that composure which it takes away from sickness. Every man will have his hours of seriousness; but, like the hours of rest, they often are ill-chosen and unwholesome. Be assured, our heavenly Father is as well pleased to see His children in the playground as in the schoolroom. He has provided both for us, and has given us intimations when each should occupy us. _Petrarca._ You are right, Giovanni! but we know which bell is heard the most distinctly. We fold our arms at the one, try the cooler part of the pillow, and turn again to slumber; at the first stroke of the other, we are beyond our monitors. As for you, hardly Dante himself could make you grave. _Boccaccio._ I do not remember how it happened that we slipped away from his side. One of us must have found him tedious. _Petrarca._ If you were really and substantially at his side, he would have no mercy on you. _Boccaccio._ In sooth, our good Alighieri seems to have had the appetite of a dogfish or shark, and to have bitten the harder the warmer he was. I would not voluntarily be under his manifold rows of dentals. He has an incisor to every saint in the calendar. I should fare, methinks, like Brutus and the archbishop. He is forced to stretch himself, out of sheer listlessness, in so idle a place as Purgatory: he loses half his strength in Paradise: Hell alone makes him alert and lively: there he moves about and threatens as tremendously as the serpent that opposed the legions on their march in Africa. He would not have been contented in Tuscany itself, even had his enemies left him unmolested. Were I to write on his model a tripartite poem, I think it should be entitled, _Earth, Italy, and Heaven_. _Petrarca._ You will never give yourself the trouble. _Boccaccio._ I should not succeed. _Petrarca._ Perhaps not: but you have done very much, and may be able to do very much more. _Boccaccio._ Wonderful is it to me, when I consider that an infirm and helpless creature, as I am, should be capable of laying thoughts up in their cabinets of words, which Time, as he rushes by, with the revolutions of stormy and destructive years, can never move from their places. On this coarse mattress, one among the homeliest in the fair at Impruneta, is stretched an old burgess of Certaldo, of whom perhaps more will be known hereafter than we know of the Ptolemies and the Pharaohs; while popes and princes are lying as unregarded as the fleas that are shaken out of the window. Upon my life, Francesco! to think of this is enough to make a man presumptuous. _Petrarca._ No, Giovanni! not when the man thinks justly of it, as such a man ought to do, and must. For so mighty a power over Time, who casts all other mortals under his, comes down to us from a greater; and it is only if we abuse the victory that it were better we had encountered a defeat. Unremitting care must be taken that nothing soil the monuments we are raising: sure enough we are that nothing can subvert, and nothing but our negligence, or worse than negligence, efface them. Under the glorious lamp entrusted to your vigilance, one among the lights of the world, which the ministering angels of our God have suspended for His service, let there stand, with unclosing eyes, Integrity, Compassion, Self-denial. _Boccaccio._ These are holier and cheerfuller images than Dante has been setting up before us. I hope every thesis in dispute among his theologians will be settled ere I set foot among them. I like Tuscany well enough: it answers all my purposes for the present: and I am without the benefit of those preliminary studies which might render me a worthy auditor of incomprehensible wisdom. _Petrarca._ I do not wonder you are attached to Tuscany. Many as have been your visits and adventures in other parts, you have rendered it pleasanter and more interesting than any: and indeed we can scarcely walk in any quarter from the gates of Florence without the recollection of some witty or affecting story related by you. Every street, every farm, is peopled by your genius: and this population cannot change with seasons or with ages, with factions or with incursions. Ghibellines and Guelphs will have been contested for only by the worms, long before the _Decameron_ has ceased to be recited on our banks of blue lilies and under our arching vines. Another plague may come amidst us; and something of a solace in so terrible a visitation would be found in your pages, by those to whom letters are a refuge and relief. _Boccaccio._ I do indeed think my little bevy from Santa Maria Novella would be better company on such an occasion, than a devil with three heads, who diverts the pain his claws inflicted, by sticking his fangs in another place. _Petrarca._ This is atrocious, not terrific nor grand. Alighieri is grand by his lights, not by his shadows; by his human affections, not by his infernal. As the minutest sands are the labours of some profound sea, or the spoils of some vast mountain, in like manner his horrid wastes and wearying minutenesses are the chafings of a turbulent spirit, grasping the loftiest things and penetrating the deepest, and moving and moaning on the earth in loneliness and sadness. _Boccaccio._ Among men he is what among waters is The strange, mysterious, solitary Nile. _Petrarca._ Is that his verse? I do not remember it. _Boccaccio._ No, it is mine for the present: how long it may continue mine I cannot tell. I never run after those who steal my apples: it would only tire me: and they are hardly worth recovering when they are bruised and bitten, as they are usually. I would not stand upon my verses: it is a perilous boy's trick, which we ought to leave off when we put on square shoes. Let our prose show what we are, and our poetry what we have been. _Petrarca._ You would never have given this advice to Alighieri. _Boccaccio._ I would never plough porphyry; there is ground fitter for grain. Alighieri is the parent of his system, like the sun, about whom all the worlds are but particles thrown forth from him. We may write little things well, and accumulate one upon another; but never will any be justly called a great poet unless he has treated a great subject worthily. He may be the poet of the lover and of the idler, he may be the poet of green fields or gay society; but whoever is this can be no more. A throne is not built of birds'-nests, nor do a thousand reeds make a trumpet. _Petrarca._ I wish Alighieri had blown his on nobler occasions. _Boccaccio._ We may rightly wish it: but, in regretting what he wanted, let us acknowledge what he had: and never forget (which we omitted to mention) that he borrowed less from his predecessors than any of the Roman poets from theirs. Reasonably may it be expected that almost all who follow will be greatly more indebted to antiquity, to whose stores we, every year, are making some addition. _Petrarca._ It can be held no flaw in the title-deeds of genius, if the same thoughts reappear as have been exhibited long ago. The indisputable sign of defect should be looked for in the proportion they bear to the unquestionably original. There are ideas which necessarily must occur to minds of the like magnitude and materials, aspect and temperature. When two ages are in the same phasis, they will excite the same humours, and produce the same coincidences and combinations. In addition to which, a great poet may really borrow: he may even condescend to an obligation at the hand of an equal or inferior: but he forfeits his title if he borrows more than the amount of his own possessions. The nightingale himself takes somewhat of his song from birds less glorified: and the lark, having beaten with her wing the very gates of heaven, cools her breast among the grass. The lowlier of intellect may lay out a table in their field, at which table the highest one shall sometimes be disposed to partake: want does not compel him. Imitation, as we call it, is often weakness, but it likewise is often sympathy. _Boccaccio._ Our poet was seldom accessible in this quarter. Invective picks up the first stone on the wayside, and wants leisure to consult a forerunner. _Petrarca._ Dante (original enough everywhere) is coarse and clumsy in this career. Vengeance has nothing to do with comedy, nor properly with satire. The satirist who told us that Indignation made his verses for him, might have been told in return that she excluded him thereby from the first class, and thrust him among the rhetoricians and declaimers. Lucretius, in his vituperation, is graver and more dignified than Alighieri. Painful; to see how tolerant is the atheist, how intolerant the Catholic: how anxiously the one removes from among the sufferings of Mortality, her last and heaviest, the fear of a vindictive Fury pursuing her shadow across rivers of fire and tears; how laboriously the other brings down Anguish and Despair, even when Death has done his work. How grateful the one is to that beneficent philosopher who made him at peace with himself, and tolerant and kindly toward his fellow-creatures! how importunate the other that God should forgo His divine mercy, and hurl everlasting torments both upon the dead and the living! _Boccaccio._ I have always heard that Ser Dante was a very good man and sound Catholic: but Christ forgive me if my heart is oftener on the side of Lucretius![17] Observe, I say, my heart; nothing more. I devoutly hold to the sacraments and the mysteries: yet somehow I would rather see men tranquillized than frightened out of their senses, and rather fast asleep than burning. Sometimes I have been ready to believe, as far as our holy faith will allow me, that it were better our Lord were nowhere, than torturing in His inscrutable wisdom, to all eternity, so many myriads of us poor devils, the creatures of His hands. Do not cross thyself so thickly, Francesco! nor hang down thy nether lip so loosely, languidly, and helplessly; for I would be a good Catholic, alive or dead. But, upon my conscience, it goes hard with me to think it of Him, when I hear that woodlark yonder, gushing with joyousness, or when I see the beautiful clouds, resting so softly one upon another, dissolving ... and not damned for it. Above all, I am slow to apprehend it, when I remember His great goodness vouchsafed to me, and reflect on my sinful life heretofore, chiefly in summer time, and in cities, or their vicinity. But I was tempted beyond my strength; and I fell as any man might do. However, this last illness, by God's grace, has well-nigh brought me to my right mind again in all such matters: and if I get stout in the present month, and can hold out the next without sliding, I do verily think I am safe, or nearly so, until the season of beccaficoes. _Petrarca._ Be not too confident! _Boccaccio._ Well, I will not be. _Petrarca._ But be firm. _Boccaccio._ Assuntina! what! are you come in again? _Assunta._ Did you or my master call me, Riverenza? _Petrarca._ No, child! _Boccaccio._ Oh! get you gone! Get you gone! you little rogue you! Francesco, I feel quite well. Your kindness to my playful creatures in the _Decameron_ has revived me, and has put me into good humour with the greater part of them. Are you quite certain the Madonna will not expect me to keep my promise? You said you were: I need not ask you again. I will accept the whole of your assurances, and half your praises. _Petrarca._ To represent so vast a variety of personages so characteristically as you have done, to give the wise all their wisdom, the witty all their wit, and (what is harder to do advantageously) the simple all their simplicity, requires a genius such as you alone possess. Those who doubt it are the least dangerous of your rivals. FOOTNOTE: [17] Qy. How much of Lucretius (or Petronius or Catullus, before cited) was then known? FIFTH DAY'S INTERVIEW It being now the last morning that Petrarca could remain with his friend, he resolved to pass early into his bedchamber. Boccaccio had risen and was standing at the open window, with his arms against it. Renovated health sparkled in the eyes of the one; surprise and delight and thankfulness to Heaven filled the other's with sudden tears. He clasped Giovanni, kissed his flaccid and sallow cheek, and falling on his knees, adored the Giver of life, the source of health to body and soul. Giovanni was not unmoved: he bent one knee as he leaned on the shoulder of Francesco, looking down into his face, repeating his words, and adding: 'Blessed be Thou, O Lord! who sendest me health again! and blessings on Thy messenger who brought it.' He had slept soundly; for ere he closed his eyes he had unburdened his mind of its freight, not only by employing the prayers appointed by Holy Church, but likewise by ejaculating; as sundry of the fathers did of old. He acknowledged his contrition for many transgressions, and chiefly for uncharitable thoughts of Fra Biagio: on which occasion he turned fairly round on his couch, and leaning his brow against the wall, and his body being in a becomingly curved position, and proper for the purpose, he thus ejaculated: 'Thou knowest, O most Holy Virgin! that never have I spoken to handmaiden at this villetta, or within my mansion at Certaldo, wantonly or indiscreetly, but have always been, inasmuch as may be, the guardian of innocence; deeming it better, when irregular thoughts assailed me, to ventilate them abroad than to poison the house with them. And if, sinner as I am, I have thought uncharitably of others, and more especially of Fra Biagio, pardon me, out of thy exceeding great mercies! And let it not be imputed to me, if I have kept, and may keep hereafter, an eye over him, in wariness and watchfulness; not otherwise. For thou knowest, O Madonna! that many who have a perfect and unwavering faith in thee, yet do cover up their cheese from the nibblings of vermin.' Whereupon, he turned round again, threw himself on his back at full length, and feeling the sheets cool, smooth, and refreshing, folded his arms, and slept instantaneously. The consequence of his wholesome slumber was a calm alacrity: and the idea that his visitor would be happy at seeing him on his feet again, made him attempt to get up: at which he succeeded, to his own wonder. And it was increased by the manifestation of his strength in opening the casement, stiff from being closed, and swelled by the continuance of the rains. The morning was warm and sunny: and it is known that on this occasion he composed the verses below: My old familiar cottage-green! I see once more thy pleasant sheen; The gossamer suspended over Smart celandine by lusty clover; And the last blossom of the plum Inviting her first leaves to come; Which hang a little back, but show 'Tis not their nature to say no. I scarcely am in voice to sing How graceful are the steps of Spring; And ah! it makes me sigh to look How leaps along my merry brook, The very same to-day as when He chirrupt first to maids and men. _Petrarca._ I can rejoice at the freshness of your feelings: but the sight of the green turf reminds me rather of its ultimate use and destination. For many serves the parish pall, The turf in common serves for all. _Boccaccio._ Very true; and, such being the case, let us carefully fold it up, and lay it by until we call for it. Francesco, you made me quite light-headed yesterday. I am rather too old to dance either with Spring, as I have been saying, or with Vanity: and yet I accepted her at your hand as a partner. In future, no more of comparisons for me! You not only can do me no good, but you can leave me no pleasure: for here I shall remain the few days I have to live, and shall see nobody who will be disposed to remind me of your praises. Beside, you yourself will get hated for them. We neither can deserve praise nor receive it with impunity. _Petrarca._ Have you never remarked that it is into quiet water that children throw pebbles to disturb it? and that it is into deep caverns that the idle drop sticks and dirt? We must expect such treatment. _Boccaccio._ Your admonition shall have its wholesome influence over me, when the fever your praises have excited has grown moderate. ... After the conversation on this topic and various others had continued some time, it was interrupted by a visitor. The clergy and monkery at Certaldo had never been cordial with Messer Giovanni, it being suspected that certain of his _Novelle_ were modelled on originals in their orders. Hence, although they indeed both professed and felt esteem for Canonico Petrarca, they abstained from expressing it at the villetta. But Frate Biagio of San Vivaldo was (by his own appointment) the friend of the house; and, being considered as very expert in pharmacy, had, day after day, brought over no indifferent store of simples, in ptisans, and other refections, during the continuance of Ser Giovanni's ailment. Something now moved him to cast about in his mind whether it might not appear dutiful to make another visit. Perhaps he thought it possible that, among those who peradventure had seen him lately on the road, one or other might expect from him a solution of the questions, What sort of person was the _crowned martyr_? whether he carried a palm in his hand? whether a seam was visible across the throat? whether he wore a ring over his glove, with a chrysolite in it, like the bishops, but representing the city of Jerusalem and the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate? Such were the reports; but the inhabitants of San Vivaldo could not believe the Certaldese, who, inhabiting the next township to them, were naturally their enemies. Yet they might believe Frate Biagio, and certainly would interrogate him accordingly. He formed his determination, put his frock and hood on, and gave a curvature to his shoe, to evince his knowledge of the world, by pushing the extremity of it with his breast-bone against the corner of his cell. Studious of his figure and of his attire, he walked as much as possible on his heels, to keep up the reformation he had wrought in the workmanship of the cordwainer. On former occasions he had borrowed a horse, as being wanted to hear confession or to carry medicines, which might otherwise be too late. But, having put on an entirely new habiliment, and it being the season when horses are beginning to do the same, he deemed it prudent to travel on foot. Approaching the villetta, his first intention was to walk directly into his patient's room: but he found it impossible to resist the impulses of pride, in showing Assunta his rigid and stately frock, and shoes rather of the equestrian order than the monastic. So he went into the kitchen where the girl was at work, having just taken away the remains of the breakfast. 'Frate Biagio!' cried she, 'is this you? Have you been sleeping at Conte Jeronimo's?' 'Not I,' replied he. 'Why!' said she, 'those are surely his shoes! Santa Maria! you must have put them on in the dusk of the morning, to say your prayers in! Here! here! take these old ones of Signor Padrone, for the love of God! I hope your Reverence met nobody.' _Frate._ What dost smile at? _Assunta._ Smile at! I could find in my heart to laugh outright, if I only were certain that nobody had seen your Reverence in such a funny trim. Riverenza! put on these. _Frate._ Not I indeed. _Assunta._ Allow me then? _Frate._ No, nor you. _Assunta._ Then let me stand upon yours, to push down the points. ... Frate Biagio now began to relent a little, when Assunta, who had made one step toward the project, bethought herself suddenly, and said: 'No; I might miss my footing. But, mercy upon us! what made you cramp your Reverence with those ox-yoke shoes? and strangle your Reverence with that hangdog collar?' 'If you must know,' answered the Frate, reddening, 'it was because I am making a visit to the Canonico of Parma. I should like to know something about him: perhaps you could tell me?' _Assunta._ Ever so much. _Frate._ I thought no less: indeed I knew it. Which goes to bed first? _Assunta._ Both together. _Frate._ Demonio! what dost mean? _Assunta._ He tells me never to sit up waiting, but to say my prayers and dream of the Virgin. _Frate._ As if it was any business of his! Does he put out his lamp himself? _Assunta._ To be sure he does: why should not he? what should he be afraid of? It is not winter: and beside, there is a mat upon the floor, all round the bed, excepting the top and bottom. _Frate._ I am quite convinced he never said anything to make you blush. Why are you silent? _Assunta._ I have a right. _Frate._ He did then? ay? Do not nod your head: that will never do. Discreet girls speak plainly. _Assunta._ What would you have? _Frate._ The truth; the truth; again, I say, the truth. _Assunta._ He _did_ then. _Frate._ I knew it! The most dangerous man living! _Assunta._ Ah! indeed he is! Signor Padrone said so. _Frate._ He knows him of old: he warned you, it seems. _Assunta._ Me! He never said it was I who was in danger. _Frate._ He might: it was his duty. _Assunta._ Am I so fat? Lord! you may feel every rib. Girls who run about as I do, slip away from apoplexy. _Frate._ Ho! ho! that is all, is it? _Assunta._ And bad enough too! that such good-natured men should ever grow so bulky; and stand in danger, as Padrone said they both do, of such a seizure? _Frate._ What? and art ready to cry about it? Old folks cannot die easier: and there are always plenty of younger to run quick enough for a confessor. But I must not trifle in this manner. It is my duty to set your feet in the right way: it is my bounden duty to report to Ser Giovanni all irregularities I know of, committed in his domicile. I could indeed, and would, remit a trifle, on hearing the worst. Tell me now, Assunta! tell me, you little angel! did you ... we all may, the very best of us may, and do ... sin, my sweet? _Assunta._ You may be sure I did not: for whenever I sin I run into church directly, although it snows or thunders: else I never could see again Padrone's face, or any one's. _Frate._ You do not come to me. _Assunta._ You live at San Vivaldo. _Frate._ But when there is sin so pressing I am always ready to be found. You perplex, you puzzle me. Tell me at once how he made you blush. _Assunta._ Well then! _Frate._ Well then! you did not hang back so before him. I lose all patience. _Assunta._ So famous a man!... _Frate._ No excuse in that. _Assunta._ So dear to Padrone.... _Frate._ The more shame for him! _Assunta._ Called me.... _Frate._ And _called_ you, did he! the traitorous swine! _Assunta._ Called me ... _good girl_. _Frate._ Psha! the wenches, I think, are all mad: but few of them in this manner. * * * * * ... Without saying another word, Fra Biagio went forward and opened the bedchamber door, saying briskly: 'Servant! Ser Giovanni! Ser Canonico! most devoted! most obsequious! I venture to incommode you. Thanks to God, Ser Canonico, you are looking well for your years. They tell me you were formerly (who would believe it?) the handsomest man in Christendom, and worked your way glibly, yonder at Avignon. 'Capperi! Ser Giovanni! I never observed that you were sitting bolt-upright in that long-backed armchair, instead of lying abed. Quite in the right. I am rejoiced at such a change for the better. Who advised it?' _Boccaccio._ So many thanks to Fra Biagio! I not only am sitting up, but have taken a draught of fresh air at the window, and every leaf had a little present of sunshine for me. There is one pleasure, Fra Biagio, which I fancy you never have experienced, and I hardly know whether I ought to wish it you; the first sensation of health after a long confinement. _Frate._ Thanks! infinite! I would take any man's word for that, without a wish to try it. Everybody tells me I am exactly what I was a dozen years ago; while, for my part, I see everybody changed: those who ought to be much about my age, even those.... Per Bacco! I told them my thoughts when they had told me theirs; and they were not so agreeable as they used to be in former days. _Boccaccio._ How people hate sincerity! Cospetto! why, Frate! what hast got upon thy toes? Hast killed some Tartar and tucked his bow into one, and torn the crescent from the vizier's tent to make the other match it? Hadst thou fallen in thy mettlesome expedition (and it is a mercy and a miracle thou didst not) those sacrilegious shoes would have impaled thee. _Frate._ It was a mistake in the shoemaker. But no pain or incommodity whatsoever could detain me from paying my duty to Ser Canonico, the first moment I heard of his auspicious arrival, or from offering my congratulations to Ser Giovanni, on the annunciation that he was recovered and looking out of the window. All Tuscany was standing on the watch for it, and the news flew like lightning. By this time it is upon the Danube. And pray, Ser Canonico, how does Madonna Laura do? _Petrarca._ Peace to her gentle spirit! she is departed. _Frate._ Ay, true. I had quite forgotten: that is to say, I recollect it. You told us as much, I think, in a poem on her death. Well, and do you know! our friend Giovanni here is a bit of an author in his way. _Boccaccio._ Frate! you confuse my modesty. _Frate._ Murder will out. It is a fact, on my conscience. Have you never heard anything about it, Canonico! Ha! we poets are sly fellows: we can keep a secret. _Boccaccio._ Are you quite sure you can? _Frate._ Try, and trust me with any. I am a confessional on legs: there is no more a whisper in me than in a woolsack. I am in feather again, as you see; and in tune, as you shall hear. April is not the month for moping. Sing it lustily. _Boccaccio._ Let it be your business to sing it, being a Frate; I can only recite it. _Frate._ Pray do, then. _Boccaccio._ Frate Biagio! sempre quando Quà tu vieni cavalcando, Pensi che le buone strade Per il mondo sien ben rade; E, di quante sono brutte, La più brutta è tua di tutte. Badi, non cascare sulle Graziosissime fanciulle, Che con capo dritto, alzato, Uova portano al mercato. Pessima mi pare l'opra Rovesciarle sottosopra. Deh! scansando le erte e sassi, Sempre con premura passi. Caro amico! Frate Biagio! Passi pur, ma passi adagio. _Frate._ Well now really, Canonico, for one not exactly one of us, that canzone of Ser Giovanni has merit; has not it? I did not ride, however, to-day; as you may see by the lining of my frock. But _plus non vitiat_; ay, Canonico! About the roads he is right enough; they are the devil's own roads; that must be said for them. Ser Giovanni! with permission; your mention of eggs in the canzone has induced me to fancy I could eat a pair of them. The hens lay well now: that white one of yours is worth more than the goose that laid the golden: and you have a store of others, her equals or betters: we have none like them at poor St. Vivaldo. _A riverderci, Ser Giovanni! Schiavo! Ser Canonico! mi commandino._ * * * * * ... Fra Biagio went back into the kitchen, helped himself to a quarter of a loaf, ordered a flask of wine, and, trying several eggs against his lips, selected seven, which he himself fried in oil, although the maid offered her services. He never had been so little disposed to enter into conversation with her; and on her asking him how he found her master, he replied, that in bodily health Ser Giovanni, by his prayers and ptisans, had much improved, but that his faculties were wearing out apace. 'He may now run in the same couples with the Canonico: they cannot catch the mange one of the other: the one could say nothing to the purpose, and the other nothing at all. The whole conversation was entirely at my charge,' added he. 'And now, Assunta, since you press it, I will accept the service of your master's shoes. How I shall ever get home I don't know.' He took the shoes off the handles of the bellows, where Assunta had placed them out of her way, and tucking one of his own under each arm, limped toward St. Vivaldo. The unwonted attention to smartness of apparel, in the only article wherein it could be displayed, was suggested to Frate Biagio by hearing that Ser Francesco, accustomed to courtly habits and elegant society, and having not only small hands, but small feet, usually wore red slippers in the morning. Fra Biagio had scarcely left the outer door, than he cordially cursed Ser Francesco for making such a fool of him, and wearing slippers of black list. 'These canonicoes,' said he, 'not only lie themselves, but teach everybody else to do the same. He has lamed me for life: I burn as if I had been shod at the blacksmith's forge.' The two friends said nothing about him, but continued the discourse which his visit had interrupted. _Petrarca._ Turn again, I entreat you, to the serious; and do not imagine that because by nature you are inclined to playfulness, you must therefore write ludicrous things better. Many of your stories would make the gravest men laugh, and yet there is little wit in them. _Boccaccio._ I think so myself; though authors, little disposed as they are to doubt their possession of any quality they would bring into play, are least of all suspicious on the side of wit. You have convinced me. I am glad to have been tender, and to have written tenderly: for I am certain it is this alone that has made you love me with such affection. _Petrarca._ Not this alone, Giovanni! but this principally. I have always found you kind and compassionate, liberal and sincere, and when Fortune does not stand very close to such a man, she leaves only the more room for Friendship. _Boccaccio._ Let her stand off then, now and for ever! To my heart, to my heart, Francesco! preserver of my health, my peace of mind, and (since you tell me I may claim it) my glory. _Petrarca._ Recovering your strength you must pursue your studies to complete it. What can you have been doing with your books? I have searched in vain this morning for the treasury. Where are they kept? Formerly they were always open. I found only a short manuscript, which I suspect is poetry, but I ventured not on looking into it, until I had brought it with me and laid it before you. _Boccaccio._ Well guessed! They are verses written by a gentleman who resided long in this country, and who much regretted the necessity of leaving it. He took great delight in composing both Latin and Italian, but never kept a copy of them latterly, so that these are the only ones I could obtain from him. Read: for your voice will improve them: TO MY CHILD CARLINO Carlino! what art thou about, my boy? Often I ask that question, though in vain, For we are far apart: ah! therefore 'tis I often ask it; not in such a tone As wiser fathers do, who know too well. Were we not children, you and I together? Stole we not glances from each other's eyes? Swore we not secrecy in such misdeeds? Well could we trust each other. Tell me then What thou art doing. Carving out thy name, Or haply mine, upon my favourite seat, With the new knife I sent thee over sea? Or hast thou broken it, and hid the hilt Among the myrtles, starr'd with flowers, behind? Or under that high throne whence fifty lilies (With sworded tuberoses dense around) Lift up their heads at once, not without fear That they were looking at thee all the while. Does Cincirillo follow thee about? Inverting one swart foot suspensively, And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp Of bird above him on the olive-branch? Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed, That fear'd not you and me ... alas, nor him! I flattened his striped sides along my knee, And reasoned with him on his bloody mind, Till he looked blandly, and half-closed his eyes To ponder on my lecture in the shade. I doubt his memory much, his heart a little, And in some minor matters (may I say it?) Could wish him rather sager. But from thee God hold back wisdom yet for many years! Whether in early season or in late It always comes high-priced. For thy pure breast I have no lesson; it for me has many. Come throw it open then! What sports, what cares (Since there are none too young for these) engage Thy busy thoughts? Are you again at work, Walter and you, with those sly labourers, Geppo, Giovanni, Cecco, and Poeta, To build more solidly your broken dam Among the poplars, whence the nightingale Inquisitively watch'd you all day long? I was not of your council in the scheme, Or might have saved you silver without end, And sighs too without number. Art thou gone Below the mulberry, where that cold pool Urged to devise a warmer, and more fit For mighty swimmers, swimming three abreast? Or art thou panting in this summer noon Upon the lowest step before the hall, Drawing a slice of water-melon, long As Cupid's bow, athwart thy wetted lips (Like one who plays Pan's pipe) and letting drop The sable seeds from all their separate cells, And leaving bays profound and rocks abrupt, Redder than coral round Calypso's cave? _Petrarca._ There have been those anciently who would have been pleased with such poetry, and perhaps there may be again. I am not sorry to see the Muses by the side of childhood, and forming a part of the family. But now tell me about the books. _Boccaccio._ Resolving to lay aside the more valuable of those I had collected or transcribed, and to place them under the guardianship of richer men, I locked them up together in the higher story of my tower at Certaldo. You remember the old tower? _Petrarca._ Well do I remember the hearty laugh we had together (which stopped us upon the staircase) at the calculation we made, how much longer you and I, if we continued to thrive as we had thriven latterly, should be able to pass within its narrow circle. Although I like this little villa much better, I would gladly see the place again, and enjoy with you, as we did before, the vast expanse of woodlands and mountains and maremma; frowning fortresses inexpugnable; and others more prodigious for their ruins; then below them, lordly abbeys, overcanopied with stately trees and girded with rich luxuriance; and towns that seem approaching them to do them honour, and villages nestling close at their sides for sustenance and protection. _Boccaccio._ My disorder, if it should keep its promise of leaving me at last, will have been preparing me for the accomplishment of such a project. Should I get thinner and thinner at this rate, I shall soon be able to mount not only a turret or a belfry, but a tube of macarone, while a Neapolitan is suspending it for deglutition. What I am about to mention will show you how little you can rely on me! I have preserved the books, as you desired, but quite contrary to my resolution: and, no less contrary to it, by your desire I shall now preserve the _Decameron_. In vain had I determined not only to mend in future, but to correct the past; in vain had I prayed most fervently for grace to accomplish it, with a final aspiration to Fiametta that she would unite with your beloved Laura, and that, gentle and beatified spirits as they are, they would breathe together their purer prayers on mine. See what follows. _Petrarca._ Sigh not at it. Before we can see all that follows from their intercession, we must join them again. But let me hear anything in which they are concerned. _Boccaccio._ I prayed; and my breast, after some few tears, grew calmer. Yet sleep did not ensue until the break of morning, when the dropping of soft rain on the leaves of the fig-tree at the window, and the chirping of a little bird, to tell another there was shelter under them, brought me repose and slumber. Scarcely had I closed my eyes, if indeed time can be reckoned any more in sleep than in heaven, when my Fiametta seemed to have led me into the meadow. You will see it below you: turn away that branch: gently! gently! do not break it; for the little bird sat there. _Petrarca._ I think, Giovanni, I can divine the place. Although this fig-tree, growing out of the wall between the cellar and us, is fantastic enough in its branches, yet that other which I see yonder, bent down and forced to crawl along the grass by the prepotency of the young shapely walnut-tree, is much more so. It forms a seat, about a cubit above the ground, level and long enough for several. _Boccaccio._ Ha! you fancy it must be a favourite spot with me, because of the two strong forked stakes wherewith it is propped and supported! _Petrarca._ Poets know the haunts of poets at first sight; and he who loved Laura.... O Laura! did I say he who _loved_ thee? ... hath whisperings where those feet would wander which have been restless after Fiametta. _Boccaccio._ It is true, my imagination has often conducted her thither; but there in this chamber she appeared to me more visibly in a dream. 'Thy prayers have been heard, O Giovanni,' said she. I sprang to embrace her. 'Do not spill the water! Ah! you have spilt a part of it.' I then observed in her hand a crystal vase. A few drops were sparkling on the sides and running down the rim: a few were trickling from the base and from the hand that held it. 'I must go down to the brook,' said she, 'and fill it again as it was filled before.' What a moment of agony was this to me! Could I be certain how long might be her absence? She went: I was following: she made a sign for me to turn back: I disobeyed her only an instant: yet my sense of disobedience, increasing my feebleness and confusion, made me lose sight of her. In the next moment she was again at my side, with the cup quite full. I stood motionless: I feared my breath might shake the water over. I looked her in the face for her commands ... and to see it ... to see it so calm, so beneficent, so beautiful. I was forgetting what I had prayed for, when she lowered her head, tasted of the cup, and gave it me. I drank; and suddenly sprang forth before me many groves and palaces and gardens, and their statues and their avenues, and their labyrinths of alaternus and bay, and alcoves of citron, and watchful loopholes in the retirements of impenetrable pomegranate. Farther off, just below where the fountain slipped away from its marble hall and guardian gods, arose, from their beds of moss and drosera and darkest grass, the sisterhood of oleanders, fond of tantalizing with their bosomed flowers and their moist and pouting blossoms the little shy rivulet, and of covering its face with all the colours of the dawn. My dream expanded and moved forward. I trod again the dust of Posilipo, soft as the feathers in the wings of Sleep. I emerged on Baia; I crossed her innumerable arches; I loitered in the breezy sunshine of her mole; I trusted the faithful seclusion of her caverns, the keepers of so many secrets; and I reposed on the buoyancy of her tepid sea. Then Naples, and her theatres and her churches, and grottoes and dells and forts and promontories, rushed forward in confusion, now among soft whispers, now among sweetest sounds, and subsided, and sank, and disappeared. Yet a memory seemed to come fresh from every one: each had time enough for its tale, for its pleasure, for its reflection, for its pang. As I mounted with silent steps the narrow staircase of the old palace, how distinctly did I feel against the palm of my hand the coldness of that smooth stone-work, and the greater of the cramps of iron in it! 'Ah me! is this forgetting?' cried I anxiously to Fiametta. 'We must recall these scenes before us,' she replied: 'such is the punishment of them. Let us hope and believe that the apparition, and the compunction which must follow it, will be accepted as the full penalty, and that both will pass away almost together.' I feared to lose anything attendant on her presence: I feared to approach her forehead with my lips: I feared to touch the lily on its long wavy leaf in her hair, which filled my whole heart with fragrance. Venerating, adoring, I bowed my head at last to kiss her snow-white robe, and trembled at my presumption. And yet the effulgence of her countenance vivified while it chastened me. I loved her ... I must not say _more_ than ever ... _better_ than ever; it was Fiametta who had inhabited the skies. As my hand opened toward her: 'Beware!' said she, faintly smiling; 'beware, Giovanni! Take only the crystal; take it, and drink again.' 'Must all be then forgotten?' said I sorrowfully. 'Remember your prayer and mine, Giovanni. Shall both have been granted ... oh, how much worse than in vain?' I drank instantly; I drank largely. How cool my bosom grew; how could it grow so cool before her! But it was not to remain in its quiescency; its trials were not yet over. I will not, Francesco! no, I may not commemorate the incidents she related to me, nor which of us said, 'I blush for having loved _first_;' nor which of us replied, 'Say _least_, say _least_, and blush again.' The charm of the words (for I felt not the encumbrance of the body nor the acuteness of the spirit) seemed to possess me wholly. Although the water gave me strength and comfort, and somewhat of celestial pleasure, many tears fell around the border of the vase as she held it up before me, exhorting me to take courage, and inviting me with more than exhortation to accomplish my deliverance. She came nearer, more tenderly, more earnestly; she held the dewy globe with both hands, leaning forward, and sighed and shook her head, drooping at my pusillanimity. It was only when a ringlet had touched the rim, and perhaps the water (for a sunbeam on the surface could never have given it such a golden hue), that I took courage, clasped it, and exhausted it. Sweet as was the water, sweet as was the serenity it gave me ... alas! that also which it moved away from me was sweet! 'This time you can trust me alone,' said she, and parted my hair, and kissed my brow. Again she went toward the brook: again my agitation, my weakness, my doubt, came over me: nor could I see her while she raised the water, nor knew I whence she drew it. When she returned, she was close to me at once: she smiled: her smile pierced me to the bones: it seemed an angel's. She sprinkled the pure water on me; she looked most fondly; she took my hand; she suffered me to press hers to my bosom; but, whether by design I cannot tell, she let fall a few drops of the chilly element between. 'And now, O my beloved!' said she, 'we have consigned to the bosom of God our earthly joys and sorrows. The joys cannot return, let not the sorrows. These alone would trouble my repose among the blessed.' 'Trouble thy repose! Fiametta! Give me the chalice!' cried I ... 'not a drop will I leave in it, not a drop.' 'Take it!' said that soft voice. 'O now most dear Giovanni! I know thou hast strength enough; and there is but little ... at the bottom lies our first kiss.' 'Mine! didst thou say, beloved one? and is that left thee still?' '_Mine_,' said she, pensively; and as she abased her head, the broad leaf of the lily hid her brow and her eyes; the light of heaven shone through the flower. 'O Fiametta! Fiametta!' cried I in agony, 'God is the God of mercy, God is the God of love ... can I, can I ever?' I struck the chalice against my head, unmindful that I held it; the water covered my face and my feet. I started up, not yet awake, and I heard the name of Fiametta in the curtains. _Petrarca._ Love, O Giovanni, and life itself, are but dreams at best. I do think Never so gloriously was Sleep attended As with the pageant of that heavenly maid. But to dwell on such subjects is sinful. The recollection of them, with all their vanities, brings tears into my eyes. _Boccaccio._ And into mine too ... they were so very charming. _Petrarca._ Alas, alas! the time always comes when we must regret the enjoyments of our youth. _Boccaccio._ If we have let them pass us. _Petrarca._ I mean our indulgence in them. _Boccaccio._ Francesco! I think you must remember Raffaellino degli Alfani. _Petrarca._ Was it Raffaellino who lived near San Michele in Orto? _Boccaccio._ The same. He was an innocent soul, and fond of fish. But whenever his friend Sabbatelli sent him a trout from Pratolino, he always kept it until next day or the day after, just long enough to render it unpalatable. He then turned it over in the platter, smelt at it closer, although the news of its condition came undeniably from a distance, touched it with his forefinger, solicited a testimony from the gills which the eyes had contradicted, sighed over it, and sent it for a present to somebody else. Were I a lover of trout as Raffaellino was, I think I should have taken an opportunity of enjoying it while the pink and crimson were glittering on it. _Petrarca._ Trout, yes. _Boccaccio._ And all other fish I could encompass. _Petrarca._ O thou grave mocker! I did not suspect such slyness in thee: proof enough I had almost forgotten thee. _Boccaccio._ Listen! listen! I fancied I caught a footstep in the passage. Come nearer; bend your head lower, that I may whisper a word in your ear. Never let Assunta hear you sigh. She is mischievous: she may have been standing at the door: not that I believe she would be guilty of any such impropriety: but who knows what girls are capable of! She has no malice, only in laughing; and a sigh sets her windmill at work, van over van, incessantly. _Petrarca._ I should soon check her. I have no notion.... _Boccaccio._ After all, she is a good girl ... a trifle of the wilful. She must have it that many things are hurtful to me ... reading in particular ... it makes people so odd. Tina is a small matter of the madcap ... in her own particular way ... but exceedingly discreet, I do assure you, if they will only leave her alone. I find I was mistaken, there was nobody. _Petrarca._ A cat, perhaps. _Boccaccio._ No such thing. I order him over to Certaldo while the birds are laying and sitting: and he knows by experience, favourite as he is, that it is of no use to come back before he is sent for. Since the first impetuosities of youth, he has rarely been refractory or disobliging. We have lived together now these five years, unless I miscalculate; and he seems to have learnt something of my manners, wherein violence and enterprise by no means predominate. I have watched him looking at a large green lizard; and, their eyes being opposite and near, he has doubted whether it might be pleasing to me if he began the attack; and their tails on a sudden have touched one another at the decision. _Petrarca._ Seldom have adverse parties felt the same desire of peace at the same moment, and none ever carried it more simultaneously and promptly into execution. _Boccaccio._ He enjoys his _otium cum dignitate_ at Certaldo: there he is my castellan, and his chase is unlimited in those domains. After the doom of relegation is expired, he comes hither at midsummer. And then if you could see his joy! His eyes are as deep as a well, and as clear as a fountain: he jerks his tail into the air like a royal sceptre, and waves it like the wand of a magician. You would fancy that, as Horace with his head, he was about to smite the stars with it. There is ne'er such another cat in the parish; and he knows it, a rogue! We have rare repasts together in the bean-and-bacon time, although in regard to the bean he sides with the philosopher of Samos; but after due examination. In cleanliness he is a very nun; albeit in that quality which lies between cleanliness and godliness, there is a smack of Fra Biagio about him. What is that book in your hand? _Petrarca._ My breviary. _Boccaccio._ Well, give me mine too ... there, on the little table in the corner, under the glass of primroses. We can do nothing better. _Petrarca._ What prayer were you looking for? let me find it. _Boccaccio._ I don't know how it is: I am scarcely at present in a frame of mind for it. We are of one faith: the prayers of the one will do for the other: and I am sure, if you omitted my name, you would say them all over afresh. I wish you could recollect in any book as dreamy a thing to entertain me as I have been just repeating. We have had enough of Dante: I believe few of his beauties have escaped us: and small faults, which we readily pass by, are fitter for small folks, as grubs are the proper bait for gudgeons. _Petrarca._ I have had as many dreams as most men. We are all made up of them, as the webs of the spider are particles of her own vitality. But how infinitely less do we profit by them! I will relate to you, before we separate, one among the multitude of mine, as coming the nearest to the poetry of yours, and as having been not totally useless to me. Often have I reflected on it; sometimes with pensiveness, with sadness never. _Boccaccio._ Then, Francesco, if you had with you as copious a choice of dreams as clustered on the elm-trees where the Sibyl led Aeneas, this, in preference to the whole swarm of them, is the queen dream for me. _Petrarca._ When I was younger I was fond of wandering in solitary places, and never was afraid of slumbering in woods and grottoes. Among the chief pleasures of my life, and among the commonest of my occupations, was the bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and the unfortunate, as most interested me by their courage, their wisdom, their eloquence, or their adventures. Engaging them in the conversation best suited to their characters, I knew perfectly their manners, their steps, their voices: and often did I moisten with my tears the models I had been forming of the less happy. _Boccaccio._ Great is the privilege of entering into the studies of the intellectual; great is that of conversing with the guides of nations, the movers of the mass, the regulators of the unruly will, stiff, in its impurity and rust, against the finger of the Almighty Power that formed it: but give me, Francesco, give me rather the creature to sympathize with; apportion me the sufferings to assuage. Ah, gentle soul! thou wilt never send them over to another; they have better hopes from thee. _Petrarca._ We both alike feel the sorrows of those around us. He who suppresses or allays them in another, breaks many thorns off his own; and future years will never harden fresh ones. My occupation was not always in making the politician talk politics, the orator toss his torch among the populace, the philosopher run down from philosophy to cover the retreat or the advances of his sect; but sometimes in devising how such characters must act and discourse, on subjects far remote from the beaten track of their career. In like manner the philologist, and again the dialectician, were not indulged in the review and parade of their trained bands, but, at times, brought forward to show in what manner and in what degree external habits had influenced the conformation of the internal man. It was far from unprofitable to set passing events before past actors, and to record the decisions of those whose interests and passions are unconcerned in them. _Boccaccio._ This is surely no easy matter. The thoughts are in fact your own, however you distribute them. _Petrarca._ All cannot be my own; if you mean by _thoughts_ the opinions and principles I should be the most desirous to inculcate. Some favourite ones perhaps may obtrude too prominently, but otherwise no misbehaviour is permitted them: reprehension and rebuke are always ready, and the offence is punished on the spot. _Boccaccio._ Certainly you thus throw open, to its full extent, the range of poetry and invention; which cannot but be very limited and sterile, unless where we find displayed much diversity of character as disseminated by nature, much peculiarity of sentiment as arising from position, marked with unerring skill through every shade and gradation; and finally and chiefly, much intertexture and intensity of passion. You thus convey to us more largely and expeditiously the stores of your understanding and imagination, than you ever could by sonnets or canzonets, or sinewless and sapless allegories. But weightier works are less captivating. If you had published any such as you mention, you must have waited for their acceptance. Not only the fame of Marcellus, but every other, Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo; and that which makes the greatest vernal shoot is apt to make the least autumnal. Authors in general who have met celebrity at starting, have already had their reward; always their utmost due, and often much beyond it. We cannot hope for both celebrity and fame: supremely fortunate are the few who are allowed the liberty of choice between them. We two prefer the strength that springs from exercise and toil, acquiring it gradually and slowly: we leave to others the earlier blessing of that sleep which follows enjoyment. How many at first sight are enthusiastic in their favour! Of these how large a portion come away empty-handed and discontented! like idlers who visit the seacoast, fill their pockets with pebbles bright from the passing wave, and carry them off with rapture. After a short examination at home, every streak seems faint and dull, and the whole contexture coarse, uneven, and gritty: first one is thrown away, then another; and before the week's end the store is gone, of things so shining and wonderful. _Petrarca._ Allegory, which you named with sonnets and canzonets, had few attractions for me, believing it to be the delight in general of idle, frivolous, inexcursive minds, in whose mansions there is neither hall nor portal to receive the loftier of the Passions. A stranger to the Affections, she holds a low station among the handmaidens of Poetry, being fit for little but an apparition in a mask. I had reflected for some time on this subject, when, wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and finding a soft old molehill, covered with grey grass, by the wayside, I laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was before a species of dream or vision came over me. Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but the wings were hanging down, and seemed ill adapted to flight. One of them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me frequently, said to the other: 'He is under my guardianship for the present: do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow; and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point; although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at first to discover more than a palm's length of it: the rest of the shaft, and the whole of the barb, was behind his ankles. 'This feather never awakens any one,' replied he, rather petulantly; 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of cherished dreams, than you without me are capable of imparting.' 'Be it so!' answered the gentler ... 'none is less inclined to quarrel or dispute than I am. Many whom you have wounded grievously, call upon me for succour. But so little am I disposed to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to whisper a few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms, as upon you!' 'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike,' said Love, contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance to you: the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly. Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love recapitulated them; but only that he might assert his own above them. Suddenly he called on me to decide, and to choose my patron. Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose ... and knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and declared he would cross me throughout the whole of my existence. Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity, I now felt too surely the conviction that he would keep his word. At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell how I knew him, but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and lastly beautiful: those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less harmonious, less composed. Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried: 'Go away! go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives.' 'Say rather, child!' replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.' Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the stiff short feathers on his arrow-head; but replied not. Although he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less, and scarcely looked toward him. The milder and calmer Genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor arrow, as the others did; but, throwing back the clusters of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity: for I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's. By degrees, I became ashamed of my ingratitude; and turning my face away, I held out my arms, and felt my neck within his. Composure strewed and allayed all the throbbings of my bosom; the coolness of freshest morning breathed around: the heavens seemed to open above me; while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on my head. I would now have looked for those others; but knowing my intention by my gesture, he said, consolatorily: 'Sleep is on his way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to these he hastens; for every call only makes him fly farther off. Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.' 'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I would propitiate and appease him.' 'He who cannot follow me, he who cannot overtake and pass me,' said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive thee.' I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue sky, and something brighter above it. POEMS I She I love (alas in vain!) Floats before my slumbering eyes: When she comes she lulls my pain, When she goes what pangs arise! Thou whom love, whom memory flies, Gentle Sleep! prolong thy reign! If even thus she soothe my sighs, Never let me wake again! II Pleasure! why thus desert the heart In its spring-tide? I could have seen her, I could part, And but have sigh'd! O'er every youthful charm to stray, To gaze, to touch.... Pleasure! why take so much away, Or give so much? III Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth; 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Soon shall Oblivion's deepening veil Hide all the peopled hills you see, The gay, the proud, while lovers hail These many summers you and me. IV Ianthe! you are call'd to cross the sea! A path forbidden _me_! Remember, while the Sun his blessing sheds Upon the mountain-heads, How often we have watcht him laying down His brow, and dropt our own Against each other's, and how faint and short And sliding the support! What will succeed it now? Mine is unblest, Ianthe! nor will rest But on the very thought that swells with pain. O bid me hope again! O give me back what Earth, what (without you) Not Heaven itself can do, One of the golden days that we have past; And let it be my last! Or else the gift would be, however sweet, Fragile and incomplete. V The gates of fame and of the grave Stand under the same architrave. VI Twenty years hence my eyes may grow If not quite dim, yet rather so, Still yours from others they shall know Twenty years hence. Twenty years hence tho' it may hap That I be call'd to take a nap In a cool cell where thunder-clap Was never heard, There breathe but o'er my arch of grass A not too sadly sigh'd _Alas_, And I shall catch, ere you can pass, That winged word. VII Here, ever since you went abroad, If there be change, no change I see, I only walk our wonted road, The road is only walkt by me. Yes; I forgot; a change there is; Was it of _that_ you bade me tell? I catch at times, at times I miss The sight, the tone, I know so well. Only two months since you stood here! Two shortest months! then tell me why Voices are harsher than they were, And tears are longer ere they dry. VIII Tell me not things past all belief; One truth in you I prove; The flame of anger, bright and brief, Sharpens the barb of Love. IX Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak Four not exempt from pride some future day. Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek Over my open volume you will say, 'This man loved _me_!' then rise and trip away. X FIESOLE IDYL Here, where precipitate Spring, with one light bound Into hot Summer's lusty arms, expires, And where go forth at morn, at eve, at night, Soft airs that want the lute to play with 'em, And softer sighs that know not what they want, Aside a wall, beneath an orange-tree, Whose tallest flowers could tell the lowlier ones Of sights in Fiesole right up above, While I was gazing a few paces off At what they seem'd to show me with their nods, Their frequent whispers and their pointing shoots, A gentle maid came down the garden-steps And gathered the pure treasure in her lap. I heard the branches rustle, and stept forth To drive the ox away, or mule, or goat, Such I believed it must be. How could I Let beast o'erpower them? When hath wind or rain Borne hard upon weak plant that wanted me, And I (however they might bluster round) Walkt off? 'Twere most ungrateful: for sweet scents Are the swift vehicles of still sweeter thoughts, And nurse and pillow the dull memory That would let drop without them her best stores. They bring me tales of youth and tones of love, And 'tis and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die (Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart) Among their kindred in their native place. I never pluck the rose; the violet's head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproacht me; the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoil'd, nor lost one grain of gold. I saw the light that made the glossy leaves More glossy; the fair arm, the fairer cheek Warmed by the eye intent on its pursuit; I saw the foot that, although half-erect From its grey slipper, could not lift her up To what she wanted: I held down a branch And gather'd her some blossoms; since their hour Was come, and bees had wounded them, and flies Of harder wing were working their way thro' And scattering them in fragments under-foot. So crisp were some, they rattled unevolved, Others, ere broken off, fell into shells, For such appear the petals when detacht, Unbending, brittle, lucid, white like snow, And like snow not seen thro', by eye or sun: Yet every one her gown received from me Was fairer than the first. I thought not so, But so she praised them to reward my care. I said, 'You find the largest.' 'This indeed,' Cried she, 'is large and sweet.' She held one forth, Whether for me to look at or to stake She knew not, nor did I; but taking it Would best have solved (and this she felt) her doubt. I dared not touch it; for it seemed a part Of her own self; fresh, full, the most mature Of blossoms, yet a blossom; with a touch To fall, and yet unfallen. She drew back The boon she tender'd, and then, finding not The ribbon at her waist to fix it in, Dropt it, as loath to drop it, on the rest. XI Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee. XII With rosy hand a little girl prest down A boss of fresh-cull'd cowslips in a rill: Often as they sprang up again, a frown Show'd she disliked resistance to her will: But when they droopt their heads and shone much less, She shook them to and fro, and threw them by, And tript away. 'Ye loathe the heaviness Ye love to cause, my little girls!' thought I, 'And what had shone for you, by you must die.' XIII Ternissa! you are fled! I say not to the dead, But to the happy ones who rest below: For, surely, surely, where Your voice and graces are, Nothing of death can any feel or know. Girls who delight to dwell Where grows most asphodel, Gather to their calm breasts each word you speak: The mild Persephone Places you on her knee, And your cool palm smooths down stern Pluto's cheek. XIV Various the roads of life; in one All terminate, one lonely way We go; and 'Is he gone?' Is all our best friends say. XV Yes; I write verses now and then, But blunt and flaccid is my pen, No longer talkt of by young men As rather clever: In the last quarter are my eyes, You see it by their form and size; Is it not time then to be wise? Or now or never. Fairest that ever sprang from Eve! While Time allows the short reprieve, Just look at me! would you believe 'Twas once a lover? I cannot clear the five-bar gate, But, trying first its timber's state, Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait To trundle over. Thro' gallopade I cannot swing The entangling blooms of Beauty's spring: I cannot say the tender thing, Be 't true or false, And am beginning to opine Those girls are only half-divine Whose waists yon wicked boys entwine In giddy waltz. I fear that arm above that shoulder, I wish them wiser, graver, older, Sedater, and no harm if colder And panting less. Ah! people were not half so wild In former days, when, starchly mild, Upon her high-heel'd Essex smiled The brave Queen Bess. XVI ON SEEING A HAIR OF LUCRETIA BORGIA Borgia, thou once wert almost too august And high for adoration; now thou'rt dust. All that remains of thee these plaits unfold, Calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold. XVII Once, and once only, have I seen thy face, Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue Run o'er my breast, yet never has been left Impression on it stronger or more sweet. Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years, What wisdom in thy levity, what truth In every utterance of that purest soul! Few are the spirits of the glorified I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven. XVIII TO WORDSWORTH Those who have laid the harp aside And turn'd to idler things, From very restlessness have tried The loose and dusty strings. And, catching back some favourite strain, Run with it o'er the chords again. But Memory is not a Muse, O Wordsworth! though 'tis said They all descend from her, and use To haunt her fountain-head: That other men should work for me In the rich mines of Poesie, Pleases me better than the toil Of smoothing under hardened hand, With Attic emery and oil, The shining point for Wisdom's wand, Like those thou temperest 'mid the rills Descending from thy native hills. Without his governance, in vain Manhood is strong, and Youth is bold If oftentimes the o'er-piled strain Clogs in the furnace, and grows cold Beneath his pinions deep and frore, And swells and melts and flows no more, That is because the heat beneath Pants in its cavern poorly fed. Life springs not from the couch of Death, Nor Muse nor Grace can raise the dead; Unturn'd then let the mass remain, Intractable to sun or rain. A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, And showing but the broken sky, Too surely is the sweetest lay That wins the ear and wastes the day, Where youthful Fancy pouts alone And lets not Wisdom touch her zone. He who would build his fame up high, The rule and plummet must apply, Nor say, 'I'll do what I have plann'd,' Before he try if loam or sand Be still remaining in the place Delved for each polisht pillar's base. With skilful eye and fit device Thou raisest every edifice, Whether in sheltered vale it stand Or overlook the Dardan strand, Amid the cypresses that mourn Laodameia's love forlorn. We both have run o'er half the space Listed for mortal's earthly race; We both have crost life's fervid line, And other stars before us shine: May they be bright and prosperous As those that have been stars for us! Our course by Milton's light was sped, And Shakespeare shining overhead: Chatting on deck was Dryden too, The Bacon of the rhyming crew; None ever crost our mystic sea More richly stored with thought than he; Tho' never tender nor sublime, He wrestles with and conquers Time. To learn my lore on Chaucer's knee, I left much prouder company; Thee gentle Spenser fondly led, But me he mostly sent to bed. I wish them every joy above That highly blessed spirits prove, Save one: and that too shall be theirs, But after many rolling years, When 'mid their light thy light appears. XIX TO CHARLES DICKENS Go then to Italy; but mind To leave the pale low France behind; Pass through that country, nor ascend The Rhine, nor over Tyrol wend: Thus all at once shall rise more grand The glories of the ancient land. Dickens! how often, when the air Breath'd genially, I've thought me there, And rais'd to heaven my thankful eyes To see three spans of deep blue skies. In Genoa now I hear a stir, A shout ... _Here comes the Minister!_ Yes, thou art he, although not sent By cabinet or parliament: Yes, thou art he. Since Milton's youth Bloom'd in the Eden of the South, Spirit so pure and lofty none Hath heavenly Genius from his throne Deputed on the banks of Thames To speak his voice and urge his claims. Let every nation know from thee How less than lovely Italy Is the whole world beside; let all Into their grateful breasts recall How Prospero and Miranda dwelt In Italy: the griefs that melt The stoniest heart, each sacred tear One lacrymatory gathered here; All Desdemona's, all that fell In playful Juliet's bridal cell. Ah! could my steps in life's decline Accompany or follow thine! But my own vines are not for me To prune, or from afar to see. I miss the tales I used to tell With cordial Hare and joyous Gell, And that good old Archbishop whose Cool library, at evening's close (Soon as from Ischia swept the gale And heav'd and left the dark'ning sail), Its lofty portal open'd wide To me, and very few beside: Yet large his kindness. Still the poor Flock round Taranto's palace door, And find no other to replace The noblest of a noble race. Amid our converse you would see Each with white cat upon his knee, And flattering that grand company: For Persian kings might proudly own Such glorious cats to share the throne. Write me few letters: I'm content With what for all the world is meant; Write then for all: but, since my breast Is far more faithful than the rest, Never shall any other share With little Nelly nestling there. XX TO BARRY CORNWALL Barry! your spirit long ago Has haunted me; at last I know The heart it sprung from: one more sound Ne'er rested on poetic ground. But, Barry Cornwall! by what right Wring you my breast and dim my sight, And make me wish at every touch My poor old hand could do as much? No other in these later times Has bound me in so potent rhymes. I have observed the curious dress And jewelry of brave Queen Bess, But always found some o'ercharged thing, Some flaw in even the brightest ring, Admiring in her men of war, A rich but too argute guitar. Our foremost now are more prolix, And scrape with three-fell fiddlesticks, And, whether bound for griefs or smiles, Are slow to turn as crocodiles. Once, every court and country bevy Chose the gallant of loins less heavy, And would have laid upon the shelf Him who could talk but of himself. Reason is stout, but even Reason May walk too long in Rhyme's hot season. I have heard many folks aver They have caught horrid colds with her. Imagination's paper kite, Unless the string is held in tight, Whatever fits and starts it takes, Soon bounces on the ground, and breaks. You, placed afar from each extreme, Nor dully drowse nor wildly dream, But, ever flowing with good-humour, Are bright as spring and warm as summer. Mid your Penates not a word Of scorn or ill-report is heard; Nor is there any need to pull A sheaf or truss from cart too full, Lest it o'erload the horse, no doubt, Or clog the road by falling out. We, who surround a common table, And imitate the fashionable, Wear each two eyeglasses: _this_ lens Shows us our faults, _that_ other men's. We do not care how dim may be _This_ by whose aid our own we see, But, ever anxiously alert That all may have their whole desert, We would melt down the stars and sun In our heart's furnace, to make one Thro' which the enlighten'd world might spy A mote upon a brother's eye. XXI TO ROBERT BROWNING There is delight in singing, tho' none hear Beside the singer: and there is delight In praising, tho' the praiser sit alone And see the prais'd far off him, far above. Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's, Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walkt along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. But warmer climes Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where The Siren waits thee, singing song for song. XXII AGE Death, tho' I see him not, is near And grudges me my eightieth year. Now, I would give him all these last For one that fifty have run past. Ah! he strikes all things, all alike, But bargains: those he will not strike. XXIII Leaf after leaf drops off, flower after flower, Some in the chill, some in the warmer hour: Alike they flourish and alike they fall, And Earth who nourisht them receives them all. Should we, her wiser sons, be less content To sink into her lap when life is spent? XXIV Well I remember how you smiled To see me write your name upon The soft sea-sand--'_O! what a child!_ _You think you're writing upon stone!_' I have since written what no tide Shall ever wash away, what men Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide And find Ianthe's name again. XXV I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart. XXVI Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear: Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear. XXVII A PASTORAL Damon was sitting in the grove With Phyllis, and protesting love; And she was listening; but no word Of all he loudly swore she heard. How! was she deaf then? no, not she, Phyllis was quite the contrary. Tapping his elbow, she said, 'Hush! O what a darling of a thrush! I think he never sang so well As now, below us, in the dell.' XXVIII THE LOVER Now thou art gone, tho' not gone far, It seems that there are worlds between us; Shine here again, thou wandering star! Earth's planet! and return with Venus. At times thou broughtest me thy light When restless sleep had gone away; At other times more blessed night Stole over, and prolonged thy stay. XXIX THE POET WHO SLEEPS One day, when I was young, I read About a poet, long since dead, Who fell asleep, as poets do In writing--and make others too. But herein lies the story's gist, How a gay queen came up and kist The sleeper. 'Capital!' thought I. 'A like good fortune let me try.' Many the things we poets feign. I feign'd to sleep, but tried in vain. I tost and turn'd from side to side, With open mouth and nostrils wide. At last there came a pretty maid, And gazed; then to myself I said, 'Now for it!' She, instead of kiss, Cried, 'What a lazy lout is this!' XXX DANIEL DEFOE Few will acknowledge what they owe To persecuted, brave Defoe. Achilles, in Homeric song, May, or he may not, live so long As Crusoe; few their strength had tried Without so staunch and safe a guide. What boy is there who never laid Under his pillow, half afraid, That precious volume, lest the morrow For unlearnt lessons might bring sorrow? But nobler lessons he has taught Wide-awake scholars who fear'd naught: A Rodney and a Nelson may Without him not have won the day. XXXI IDLE WORDS They say that every idle word Is numbered by the Omniscient Lord. O Parliament! 'tis well that He Endureth for Eternity, And that a thousand Angels wait To write them at thy inner gate. XXXII TO THE RIVER AVON Avon! why runnest thou away so fast? Rest thee before that Chancel where repose The bones of him whose spirit moves the world. I have beheld thy birthplace, I have seen Thy tiny ripples where they play amid The golden cups and ever-waving blades. I have seen mighty rivers, I have seen Padus, recovered from his fiery wound, And Tiber, prouder than them all to bear Upon his tawny bosom men who crusht The world they trod on, heeding not the cries Of culprit kings and nations many-tongued. What are to me these rivers, once adorn'd With crowns they would not wear but swept away? Worthier art thou of worship, and I bend My knees upon thy bank, and call thy name, And hear, or think I hear, thy voice reply. Transcriber's Note: Minor errors (missing or transposed letters, omitted punctuation, etc.) have been corrected without note. The author used a lot of archaic spelling, which remains unchanged. The single Greek word in this work has been transliterated, and is surrounded by plus signs +like this+.