UC-NRLF JSHSr 5 * 4 r \ /I r- ^.fe ^^ A Club of One PASSAGES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A MAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN SOCIABLE WITH MARGINAL SUMMARY BY THE EDITOR BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1895 Copyright, 1887, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO, All rights reserved. TWELFTH EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. EDITOR'S PREFACE A PRETTY good-si^ed drawer, locked and padlocked, was found filled with the manu- scripts from which these Passages were taken. I have presumed to give them the title they hear, the author of them having departed this life. It is very evident they were not de- signed for the public. They were written purely for occupation, there is not a doubt of it. The author, a reader and thinker, though an invalid, could not be idle. He read and he thought, and sometimes he re- corded. He has said some things that have not been said before, and has said them in his own way. Except in the earlier pages, almost all that related to his aches and ailments has been omitted, the editor knowing perfectly well that his many complaints would very soon weary if not disgust the reader, when w Editor's Preface the purpose constantly in view was to enter- tain and enlighten him. Another effect has been to keep down the hulk, as the fashion seems to he going out of rating books by the pound. CONTENTS PAGE A Birthday Lamentation 9 His Left Ear Now to Snowing Again /2 His Hair Trimmed Too Close /^ An Unaccountable Twitching 14 The Duke of Queensberry Plan ...... 75 The Bit of Potato SHn 77 " The Abominable Sparrows" 18 Discharges Ms Doctor 20 The Apothecary's Bill 2 i Blue Glass Experience 23 Too Much Blue Glass 24 The New Doctor 26 It Rains Studies Dante 29 Continues the Study of Dante $6 Exhaustion Then and Now 40 The Blinds Left Open 4$ Horn-Blowing . . . 43 Marriage of December and May 48 Importance of Taking Care of his Health ... 57 Hates Disputation . . * . 56 m Contents Pledge-Making and Pledge-Taking 60 The North East Wind 60 Age and Want 64 Town and Country 68 The Children 75 Is Life Worth Living? 81 The Stupid Doctors Old Remedies 82 Diseased Sensibility 86 Politeness p2 Compliments of the party. I went home a sadder man, with the distressing certainty, that such scenes must continue to be acted before high Heaven, and increase, with the growth of what all men call civilization. For two or three days I have suffered 52 A Club of One supremely, and the utmost I could do was to take care of myself. So long a sufferer, I have learned to do that. I should have been dead long ago if I had trusted other people to look after me. Some very im- portant matter they would have regarded as a very little thing, and I should be no more. So, long since, I perceived the importance of attentive, perpetual observation and care A little book of myself. I have a little book of duties, which I have religiously kept for years, in which is set down mathematically every little and great thing pertaining to my health when to do certain things, to the minute, and when to avoid them altogether ; by which means, and by reason of special sagacity and acumen in all things in which I myself am interested, 1 have become a A genius in very genius in self -observation and care- takingi (Coddling, the brute of a doctor I lately discharged called it, on one of his last visits.) But, with all my care, I sometimes forget a duty, and suffer in consequence. When I had concluded my last bit of desk- work, the time had arrived for my ninety- two paces on the veranda. To my horror, and, I fear, my everlasting injury, I took ninety-eight ! And, not observing the tem- perature as I should (fifteen degrees above A Club of One 53 freezing), I wore my light-weight muffler, and my heavy gloves, without lining. The effect of the excess in exercise, and neglect Effectofex- cess, in not sufficiently protecting myself against the severe cold, very soon announced itself in a cough, the most distressing I have had for years. The doctor, however, was prompt, with heroic remedies, and I am better again, thank the Lord ! The man seems to know his business, and me, es- pecially. Though he did miscalculate, when he asked me my age ! Impertinence ! I did n't have the patience or self-possession of About's Greek servant, who, when asked About* ser- his age, answered, imperturbably, " My m mother wrote it on a piece of paper, and the wind blew it away." Better for doctor and patient if both had had the tact and kindness displayed under not dissimilar cir- cumstances by two eminent English peo- ple. Horace Walpole, dining (it is stated) waipoieana, with the Duchess of Queensberry on her theduch * ss - birthday (when she had just finished her eightieth year), soon after the cloth was removed, very politely drank her health in a bumper, and added, " May you live, my Lady Duchess, till you begin to grow ugly ! " "I thank you, Mr. Walpole," re- plied her Grace ; " and may you long con- 54 ^ Club of One Age and tinue your taste for antiquities ! " Ah ! age and ugliness ! " I remember," says the mother of Fanny Kemble, " the dreadful impression made upon me by a story Sir Thomas Lawrence told my mother of Lady J , (George the Fourth's Lady J ,) who, standing before her drawing-room looking-glass, and unaware that he was in the rooms, exclaimed : ' I swear it would be better to go to hell at once than to live to grow old and ugly.' " Some one asked Fonteneiie. Fontcnelle how old he was. He parried the impertinence delicately : " Hush ! Pray don't speak so loud ; death seems to have forgotten me, and you may perhaps put him in mind of me." When I get de- cidedly better, and the conditions are favor- able, I mean to express myself at length of this detestable practice. Meantime, discre- tion ! To live to do so important a thing Living. I must look to living. Living ! Could some one teach the art ! We should all flock to him to learn. Other people we are very wise about. Of ourselves we are ig- norant enough. We are constructed to see other peo- outwardly, says old Montaigne. Other peo- ple's sins trouble us. But here I am, run- ning on. Philosophy to the moon ! What care I for it or anything in comparison with A Club of One 55 myself. It is when I forget myself that I suffer most. The consequences of even a moment's abstraction have sometimes been nearly fatal to me. Dreaming one day over some choice sweet amid the treasures of my library, I mistook the tiger on my rug for the veritable beast from Bengal, and started, in a manner to upset all my His nerves nerves. Yet " Blessed are the Books, I say, For honey of the soul are they." And I will enjoy them, and dream over them, to the end. Any deprivation before that. The doctor, by the by, promises me an evening of social converse in my library soon. We shall enjoy it together, I think. He has the stuff of a thinker in him : I hope he has good taste. If he should be- tray a liking for the modern society novel The modem J . . societynovel. written to be read without reflection as a procession or masquerade is viewed, in which one has the slightest interest I could not help losing respect for him. I do not expect the man to be a Solomon in wisdom, an Emerson in taste, or an angel in virtue. I should be unfit for him if he were. As to angels, they are fancies. Leigh Hunt's conception is the very best, HunCsidea I think, that literature has produced. An J 55 A Club of One angel (he says) is the chorister of heaven, the page of martyrdom, the messenger from the home of mothers. He comes to the tears of the patient, and is in the blush of a noble anger. He kisses the hand that gives an alms. He talks to parents of their, departed children, and smooths the pil- low of sickness, and supports the cheek of the prisoner against the wall, and is the knowledge and comfort which a heart has of itself when nobody else knows it, and is the playfellow of hope, and the lark of as- piration, and the lily in the dusk of adver- sity. After such a passage, to be twisted contortions. . ' . . . . ,.- into contortions by a toe-ache is to surfer a pang of memory and a discouragement to hope unknown outside the nethermost abyss of the doomed. A twinge of the gout, I suspect. Hates dispu- I hate disputation. My wife It is not tation. discussion. It is next thing to scolding. Gentlemen ought to be able to talk without disputing ; though no gentleman will intro- duce into conversation a subject upon which gentlemen might differ with feeling. That is the test. A very good man, as the world goes, sometimes comes in to sit with me an evening. The politenesses have hardly A Club of One 57 been exchanged, when he asks my view of something. The view he at once takes to be a deliberate opinion, and falls to com- bating it, by giving me his opinion of it, to the contrary. As if I cared particularly what he thought about it ! He is too good a man to cultivate tempestuousness. It has been said wisely that no dispute is managed without passion, and yet there is scarce a dispute worth a passion. Anthony Trollope is said to have been very fond of disputation for its own sake, and once at dinner to have roared out to some one at the end of the table, " I totally disagree with you. What was it you said ? " Fen- imore Cooper related to Moore an anec- dote of a disputative man. " Why, it is as plain as that two and two make four." " But I deny that too ; for 2 and 2 make twenty-two." On one occasion when they were together, Dr. Campbell said some- Dr. camf>- , . t-w "* i T *j bell and Dr. thing, and Dr. Johnson began to dispute it. Johnson. " Come," said Campbell, " we do not want to get the better of one another ; we want to increase each other's ideas." When the erudite Casaubon visited the Sorbonne Casaut>on. they showed him the hall in which, as they proudly told him, disputations had been held for four hundred years. " And what," 58 A Club of One said he, "have they decided?" It is ex- pected by nearly every one that everybody will take a side of everything presented, and at the same time show very marked feelings of partisanship to the point, even, of belligerence. On first nights, in in the time the time of Voltaire, when play-goers were of Voltaire. .. . ' . , unusually excited, each spectator was asked, as he entered the parquette, " Do you come to hiss ?" " Yes." " Then sit over there." But if he answered, " I come to applaud," he was directed to the other side. Thus the antagonistic bodies were massed for action. So, in society, every man is ex- pected to range himself on one side or the other of every subject. Whatever the in- sufficiency - of information and light, he must decide the question, and all questions, at once, that may be presented to him. Alas ! to reflection nothing could be more Man- ridiculous. Montesquieu, in one of the p ers i an Letters, says : " The other day I was at a gathering where I saw a very amusing man. In a quarter of an hour he decided three questions in morals, four his- torical problems, and five points in physics. I have never seen such a universal de- cider." Unreasonable and intemperate partisanship prevents intelligent agree- A Club of One 59 ment. Lord Burleigh, we are told, was once very much pressed by some of the divines of his time, who waited on him in a body, to make some alterations in the Lit- urgy. He desired them to go into the next room by themselves, and bring him in their unanimous opinion upon some of the disputed points. They returned, however, to him very soon, without being able to agree. " Why, gentlemen," said he, " how can you expect that I should alter any point in dispute, when you, who must be more competent, from your situation, to judge than I can possibly be, cannot agree Doctors dis- , . . agree, among yourselves in what manner you would have me alter it." Benjamin Lay, a violent reformer and enthusiast, was con- temporary with Dr. Franklin, who some- times visited him. Among other schemes of reform he entertained the idea of con- verting all mankind to Christianity. This was to be done by three persons himself and two other enthusiasts, assisted by Dr. Franklin. But on their first meeting at the doctor's house, the three " chosen ves- sels " got into a violent dispute on points of doctrine, and separated in ill-humor. The philosopher, who had been an amused listener, advised the three sages to give up 60 A Club of One the project of converting the world until they had learned to tolerate one another. It was Froude, I believe, who sometimes in impatient moments wished that the laity s would treat their disputatious divines as divines. two gentlemen once treated their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without knowing what they were quar- reling about. As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them whis- pered to the other, " If you will shoot your second, I will shoot mine." A man called to ask me to sign the Total Abstinence Pledge. He seemed to be a man of sense. I begged him to stay till I prepared a little pledge for him to sign. piedge-mak- He went away. As if pledge-making and iedge-tak- pledge-taking were not for two ! As if any one existed who could not be embar- rassed by a pledge of some sort. As if any man on earth could subscribe to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount without reservation or qualifica- tion. As if The north- The wind is from the northeast. I felt east wind. . it approaching very sensibly, long before it came, and prepared for it as I could. I A Club of One 61 put on my pink shirt over a chamois jacket. I poured some Number Six into my boots. I breakfasted appropriately. I looked to the window stripping, and double-sashed the windows. Forewarned, forearmed. When it came I was ready for it. Mad to be Mad to be barred out, it went skirring round and round for a hole to get in at. It dashed down the flue, filling the room with poison- ous gases and smoke. It appeared where least expected, and where nothing would keep it out. Ah, the northeast wind ! the universal dread. Once hear a Britisher assail it ! Boreas is a ruffian and a bully, but the northeast is a rascal. ^Eolus has A rascal not such a vicious, ill-conditioned blast in his puffy bags. It withers like an evil eye ; it blights like a parent's curse ; is less kind than ingratitude ; more biting than forgot- ten benefits. It comes with sickness on its wings, and rejoices only the doctor and the sexton. When Charon hoists a sail, it is the northeast that swells it ; it purvey? for famine and caters for pestilence. From the savage realms of the Czar it comes with desolating sweep, laden with moans Laden with from Siberian mines, and sounding like echoes of the knout ; but not a fragrant breath brings it from all the rosaries of 62 A Club of One Persia, so destitute is it of grace and char- ity. While it reigns, no fire heats, no rai- ment comforts, no walls protect cold without bracing, scorching without warmth. It deflowers the earth, and it wans the sky. The ghastliest of hues overspreads the face Nature of things, and collapsing nature seems ex- seetns expir- . . ins- pinng of cholera. The cock in the barn- yard is sullen and solitary ; the horse in the stable has a whipped look ; the donkey at the stack erects his ears, and shows metal in his heels ; the pigeons moan, like the undercurrent of the brook ; all men are shy and silent; the children are quarrel- some and perverse ; the sparrows, even, are Engines dumb and comfortless looking; engines groan with their loads, and spit spitefully their scalding steam ; engineers see obsta- cles at every curve, and shiver ; passengers snuggle poutingly into corners, and wonder if ever so many disagreeable people were in the same space before ; the boy munches his apple with tenfold offensiveness ; the baby misses the way to its mouth with its candied fist ; the pug on the rug snaps and Marrow snarls like mad ; marrow congeals ; the spi- nal column gives sign of insecurity under the burden of a leaden brain. Alas, alas ! A northeast wind must have been blowing A Club of One 63 to account for an incident at a military exe- incident / TT i T-I i i -i Hyde Park cution m Hyde Park long ago mentioned by Gilly Williams. A grave man, witness- ing it, turned about, and said to a by- stander, " By G , I thought there was more in it ! " And shot himself very soon afterwards. A northeast wind must have been blowing to account for an event in Event in Paris streets the day Robespierre was guil- lotined noted by Carlyle. From the Pa- lais de Justice to the Place de la Revolu- tion, it is one dense stirring mass ; all windows crammed ; the very roofs and ridge-tiles budding forth curiosity, in strange gladness. All eyes are on Robespierre's tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty fflJfc linen, with his half-dead brother, and half- dead Henriot, lie shattered ; their seven- teen hours of agony about to end. The gendarmes point their swords at him, to show the people which he is. A woman springs on the tumbril ; clutching the side of it with one hand ; waving the other sib- yl-like ; and exclaims : " The death of thee gladdens my very heart." Robespierre [thought by many to be dead] opened his opens his eyes : " Scoundrel ! Down to hell with the curses of all wives and mothers ! " I can imagine an east wind blowing when they 64 A Club of One took Jesus out bearing the cross for him- self to the place of a skull, and crucified him, between two thieves. I like to think of something to palliate the crime of Pilate and the mob. My Uncle Toby had a word to say for Satan, and Burns too, I think, in one of his poems. Age and Age and Want, oh! ill-matched pair! A beggar was just now at the door an old man. Seventy-five years of age, I should say, at least. The air was cold, and I did not encourage him to linger ; though he did not seem inclined to relate a pitiful tale. He had evidently seen better days, and ap- peared to have a good deal of the pride of manhood left. There was nothing of obse- quiousness in his manner, and the thankful- ness he expressed was in the language of Irish beg- self-respect and intelligence. The Irish beggars, as Thackeray describes them, come crawling round you with lying prayers and loathsome compliments, that make the stomach turn ; they do not even disguise that they are lies ; for, refuse them, and the wretches turn off with a laugh and a joke, a miserable grinning cynicism that creates distrust and indifference, and must be, one would think, the very best way to close the A Club of One 65 purse, not to open it, for objects so un- worthy. An old man, obliged to beg, is a pitiable character. I do not like to think of the extremity. Preserve, just Providence ! (exclaims Jean Paul) the old man from /* *"*'* exclama- want ! for hoary years have already bent <*. him low, and he can no longer stand upright with the youth, and bear heavy burdens on his shoulders. I know of nothing more ter- rible to contemplate than the inconceiv- able poverty and distress of the people of The people of Thibet, as described by a traveler in that country. There are no plains save flats in the bottoms of the valleys, and the paths lead over lofty mountains. Sometimes, when the inhabitants are obliged from fam- ine to change their habitations in winter, the old and feeble are frozen to death standing and resting their chins on their staves, remaining as pillars of ice, to fall Menasfii- only when the thaw of the ensuing spring commences ! " Did you ever observe," asks Macdonald, in one of his novels, " that there is not one word about the vices of the poor in the Bible from beginning to end?" "We talk," said Douglas Jerrold, " of the intemperance of the poor ; why, when we philosophically consider the crush- ing miseries that beset them the keen 66 A Club of One The mock- suffering of penury, and the mockery of ery of lux- . , c i i ury. luxury and prolusion with which it is sur- rounded the wonder is, not that there are so many who purchase temporary ob- livion of their misery, but that there are so few." The blessedness of life, remarks the Scotch author quoted, depends far more on its interest than upon its comfort. The need of exertion and the doubt of success Life more render life much more interesting to the o the poor, poor than it is to those who, unblessed with anxiety for the bread that perisheth, waste their poor hearts about rank and reputation. If men could discriminate be- tween needs and wants, what fortunate changes would occur in their condition. Goldsmith wrote, " Man wants but little here below." Man needs but little here below, would have been nearer the truth. His necessities are few indeed ; his wants include everything. They are as hungry as his desires. Sense can support- herself Cariyie. (says Carlyle) handsomely, in most coun- tries, for some eighteen pence a day ; but for fantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice. It is right that poverty in old age should be impressively held up to young people, and economy intelligently inculcated as the means to forefend it. A Club of One 67 " Ye immortal gods ! " exclaimed Cicero ; " men know not how great a revenue econ- omy is." "Economy," said Voltaire, "is the source of liberality." Thackeray, com- mending Macaulay's frugality, admonishes, " To save be your endeavor, against the frugallty ' night's coming, when no man may work ; when the arm is weary with long day's labor ; when the brain perhaps grows dark ; when the old, who can labor no more, want warmth and rest, and the young ones call for supper." An aged husbandman, as the German allegory runs, was working in his A German rich and wide-spread fields, at the decline egor * of day, when he was suddenly confronted by a spectral illusion, in the form of a man. " Who, and what are you ? " said the aston- ished husbandman. "I am Solomon, the soiomon,the wise," was the reply, " and I have come to w inquire what you are laboring for ? " "If you are Solomon," said the husbandman, "you ought to know that I am following out the advice you have given. You re- ferred me to the ant for instruction, and hence my toil." "You have," said the ap- parition, " learnt but half your lesson ; I directed you to labor in the proper season The fa for labor, in order that you might repose in the proper season for repose." r season for 68 A Club of One Very wretched. Modern humorists* The saga- tiortsfellow. I have been very wretched for the last few days. Every ill, it seems to me, that could afflict a man, has attacked me. Pains, pains, the most searching and excruciating, in every part of my miserable body. I thought again and again that my poor brain would split into pieces. The doctor seemed attentive and anxious, and his pow- ders and drops have brought me to a toler- able state again. And he himself continues to be endurable, though he did last night quote from one of the modern humorists there are dozens of them who rely upon extravagance, bad grammar, bad orthogra- phy, and slang, to relieve the essential stu- pidity of their pages. Seeing my blank expression, he said, "You haven't read him, perhaps." I didn't reply. The sa- gacious fellow, not to know my detestation of such stuff ! Still, he seems a good doc- tor, and reads to me sometimes, as a solace. He is a natural reader. His reading is like good talking. After his allusion to the coarse humorist, he read to me, in a charm- ing way, one of Zschokke's tales, and I for- gave him. Again he declared his intention to spend a long evening with me in my li- brary, socially. I want to enlighten him a little as to one thing. His limited means, A Club of One 69 he thinks, will not permit him to purchase books, so, I suspect, he has fallen into the easily acquired habit of relying too much . , r ,, . quired habit. upon newspapers and such books as fall in his way for intellectual food. He pleads a want of time too, and sets down to that his ignorance of good literature and defec- tive literary taste. I hope, when I have the opportunity, to give him an object-les- son that will cure him effectually of his complaints. Ah ! that searching pain in my left elbow ! I can hardly hold the pen for the agony I suffer ; but I must write a little now and then for occupation and va- riety. I cannot be always reading, and re- cording my pains. (Another book, for the doctor's special edification.) I feel myself about worn out. Everything distresses me. I am tired of the town, man made it ; I Town and pine for the country, that God made. (Pope for authority.) Oh, the noises, the noises of the eternal Babel ! The rattling milk-carts ; the lumbering ice-wagons ; the cries of the street-venders ; the jingle of the bells of the horse-cars, day and night, that always seem to stop just before my door ; the squeaking hand-organs ; the in- fernal brass-bands ; the roar and roar of multitudinous wheels, wheels , the whirr of 70 A Club of One the locomotive, like a hurricane, thank Heaven, several blocks away ; the dashing state carriages till far into the early morn- ing, when wise people should be asleep, at least be left undisturbed ; all together, enough to hammer the brain into a jelly, and destroy every vestige of humanity in the soul. How any one should be in love with the town is past my comprehension. Johnson and Johnson thought that when a man tired of London he was tired of his life. Macau- lay was alike infatuated with London. Jekyll used to say that, if compelled to live in the country, he would have the road be- fore his door paved like a street, and hire a hackney-coach to drive up and down all day. Lamb had a like aversion to the aversion to i i i the country, country, and pronounced a garden the prim- itive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned him- self out of it. For my part, I hate the town cordially, and at times everything in it. The stock-subjects are detestable to me, the last fashion, the last actor, the last dance, the last swindler, in all of which you are expected to be profoundly inter- ested. The cits will babble away to you about evanescent nothings without limit I do not permit them. And their devotion A Club of One 77 and worship of Mammon ! And how they worship of r . , Mammon. submit to the few without a wish to escape the despotism ! The common individual submits to be an atom, without responsibil- ity or feeling. He is so small a part that he feels no shame for the sins of the whole. " Multitudes never blush." With Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, I have the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion, sat down and composed, at his leisure, fit forms of swearing suitable for all cases, Forms of from the lowest to the highest provoca- tions, which could possibly happen to him ; which forms being well considered by him, and such moreover as he could stand to, he kept them ever by him on the chim- ney-piece, within his reach, ready for use. Think of it ! an imprecation ever ready for every annoyance of my detestable city life ! Capital idea ! But as big a book it would be as the Hermit of Bellyfulle's encyclo- pedia of cookery, who died, I believe, after completing only a part of it, a few volumes only. Cities ! How to account for them ! Charon, I think it was (in Lu- cian), who, surveying the earth one day (from above) with Mercury his one only day of furlough under the bright sun 72 A Club of One Hiding. called them "hiding-places." A shrewd places. man sees a kettle boil, and others adapt the thing called steam to locomotive purposes ; and forthwith, one says, every fool goes everywhere for what he calls his holidays, but which, indeed, are his most laborious days. Ultimately he sticks himself down in a place where he finds the greatest number of people like himself. Hence these huge contrast of cities ! Ah, the contrast of fields and for- ests ! Trees ! Think of them ! In the United States thirty-six varieties of oak, thirty-four of pine, nine of fir, five of spruce, four of hemlock, two of persimmon, twelve of ash, eighteen of willow, nine of poplar, and I don't know how many of the beauti- ful beech. I once counted over thirty dif- leaves. p , J ferent varieties of trees in the space of one acre. And the leaves! their number, their individuality, their variety of shape and tint, the acres of space that those of one great tree would cover if spread out and laid together. In the autumn to watch them fall how slowly ! how rapidly ! yet they say nobody ever saw one of them let go ! Homer's comparison to the lives of men how fine ! Better than Lucian's An October to the bubbles. I remember very well one "' October day in Ohio. It was long ago A Club of One 73 " In life's morning march, when my bosom was young." (I like to quote from that poem of Campbell's, it is incomparable of its kind.) A delightful tramp ! Elder- berries. (The great Boerhaave held the elder in such pleasant reverence for the multitude of its virtues, that he is said to have taken off his hat whenever he passed it.) Grapes. Haws. Papaws. (Nature's custard.) Spicewood. Sassafras. Hickory " nuts. Nearly a primeval forest. Vines reminding one of Brazilian creepers. Trees that were respectable saplings when Colum- bus landed. The dead roots of an iron- wood so like a monster as to startle. Behemoth I thought of. (" He moveth his Behemoth. tail like a cedar.") Thistle-down. Diffused like small vices. Every seed hath wings. Here and there a jay, or a woodpecker. Grape vines, fantastically running over the tops of tall bushes, grouping deformi- ties, any one of which, if an artist drew it, would be called an exaggeration, worse than anything of Dore's. Trees, swaying and bowing to one another, like stilted suited clowns in Nature's afterpiece of the Sea- cl sons. Trees incorporated, sycamore and elm, maple and hickory, modifying and partaking each other's nature ; resembling 74 4 Club of One so much as to appear one tree. A jolly gray squirrel, hopping from limb to limb, like a robin ; swinging like an ori- ole ; flying along the limb like a weaver's A scudding shuttle ; scared away, at length, by a scud- ding cloud of pigeons, just brushing the tallest tree-tops, as if kissing an annual farewell. Clover. Sorrel. Pennyroyal. A drink of cider from a bit of broken crock- ery. ("Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen ves- sel than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices for fear of poison, and sleeps in armor, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for his safety ? ") " All is fair all glad, from grass to sun ! " Not a " melancholy " day. Keats's cholyday. . J . . , poem on Autumn comes to mind ; and Crabbe's. " Welcome pure thoughts, wel- come, ye silent groves ; these guests, these courts, my soul most dearly loves." In- dian summer. Balzac's comparison to ripe womanhood. The significant worn walk round the mean man's field ; its crooked outline impressively striking. All in all, a white day. Memory of it supplies these notes. They might be expanded into an essay. The country, the country ! Though the man who would truly relish A Club of One 75 and enjoy it (thought Dodsley in a letter to TO relish _ N . i r i i i and enjoy bpence) must be previously furnished with the country. a large and various stock of ideas, which he must be capable of turning over in his own mind, of comparing, varying, and con- templating upon with pleasure ; he must so thoroughly have seen the world as to cure him of being over fond of it ; and he must have so much good sense and virtue in his own heart as to prevent him from being disgusted with his own reflections, or uneasy in his own company. Alas ! The wits, most of them, have had their joke about the children. Sydney Smith, Sydney . . , J Smith's joke . . , writing to Countess Grey of a new grand- a child, says, " I am glad it is a girl ; all lit- ' tie boys ought to be put to death." Lamb, after being plagued all the morning by noisy children, proposed a toast to "the memory of the m - m - much - abused and m-m-much calumniated good King Herod." A foolish woman once asked Barnes (editor Bames\ of the London Times) whether he were fond of children, and received the answer, " Yes, ma'am ; boiled." Coleridge, in his fondness for them, called them " King- Kingdom dom-of-Heavenites." Appropriate, I think, after spending a few minutes with a pretty 76 A Club of One little girl who brought me some fruit this morning. She was a lovely creature. In a plain dress of dark cloth ; roses in her cheeks ; sunshine in her hair ; innocence in her eyes ; in her face the light of heaven. Father Ryan, a Catholic priest, once told and the little , child. me how, while he was preaching, on a great occasion, a child he was fond of came sud- denly inside the railing, and pulling at his robe, and looking up sweetly into his face, said, " Father Ryan, are you going to kith me ? " At which, of course, many in the great audience laughed. But when he took the darling up in his arms, and said, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven," and descanted upon the innocency and purity of childhood, there was not a dry eye in the church, and sobs not a few were dis- tinctly heard in every part of the as- sembly. There is no doubt that children y ean Paul, of a certain depth, as Jean Paul says, like buildings of a certain size, give echoes. Responses, we should call them, heard out of Paradise , repeated in the children. Thackeray. " I love," says Thackeray, " to see the kind eyes of women fondly watching children as they gambol about; a female face, be it ever so plain, when occupied in regarding children, becomes celestial almost, and a A Club of One 77 man can hardly fail to be good and happy while he is looking on such sights. ' Ah, sir ! ' says an enormous man, whom you would not accuse of sentiment, 'I have a Acoupieof , , , those things couple of those things at home; and he at home. stops and heaves a great big sigh and swal- lows down a half tumbler of cold something and water. We know what the honest fel- low means well enough. He is saying to himself, 'God bless my girls and their mother ! ' " " It is very easy," says Holmes, in his remarkable Elsie Venner, " to criti- cise other people's modes of dealing with other p eo - ple^s chil- their children. Outside observers see re- suits ; parents see processes. They notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this or that ancestor ; they can detect the irrepressible move- ment of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common observer. To be a parent is almost to be robe a par, a fatalist. This boy sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw ; his grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty temper of the other." No wonder, said one who was acquainted with Lady Byron as Miss Mil- 78 A Club of One Lord and banke, that the marriage of Lord Byron Lady Byron. - . . was never one of reasonable promise. The bridegroom and the bride were ill- assorted. They were two only children, and two spoilt children. The best way of piatoon training the young, that loftiest teacher of training the , i ir young. the ancients, Plato, said, is to tram yourself at the same time ; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own principles in practice. It was the conclu- sion of Professor Venable, one of the most accomplished of his profession, that many A mistake teachers of morality destroy the good effect of teachers of morality, of judicious counsel by too much talk, as a chemical precipitate is redissolved in an excess of the precipitating agent. " Train up a child in the way he should go : and when he is old he will not depart from it." "Generally speaking," thought Southey, " it will be found so ; but is there any other rule to which there are so many excep- tions ? Ask the serious Christian, as he calls himself, or the professor (another and more fitting appellative which the Chris- tian Pharisees have chosen for themselves), ask him whether he has found it hold good. Whether his sons, when they attained to years of discretion (which are the most in- discreet years in the course of human life), A Club of One 79 have profited as he expected by the long extemporaneous prayers to which they lis- tened night and morning, the sad Sabbaths which they were compelled to observe, and the soporific sermons which closed the do- mestic religiosities of those melancholy days. Ask them if this discipline has pre- vented them from running headlong into the follies and vices of the age, from be- ing bird-limed by dissipation, or caught in the spider's web of sophistry and unbe- lief. ' It is no doubt a true observation/ says Bishop Patrick, 'that the ready way HOW to make . . . minds grow to make the minds of youth grow awry is awry. to lace them too hard, by denying them their just freedom.' Ask the old faithful servant of Mammon, whom Mammon has rewarded to his heart's desire, and in whom the acquisition of riches has only increased his eagerness for acquiring more, ask him whether he has succeeded in training up his heir to the same service. He will tell you that the young man is to be found Experience , , . , of the ser- upon race grounds, and in gaming-houses, vantof ... .... . /. Mammon. that he is taking his swing or extravagance and excess, and is on the high road to ruin. Ask the wealthy Quaker [Southey hated the Quakers], the pillar of the meet- ing most orthodox in heterodoxy, who 8o A Club of One the tailor. Doubtful results of school edu- cation. never wore a garment of forbidden cut or color, never bent his body in salutation, or his knees in prayer, never uttered the heathen name of a day or month, nor ever addressed himself to any person without religiously speaking illegitimate English, ask him how it has happened that the tailor has converted his sons. He will fold his hands, and twirl his thumbs mourn- fully in silence. It has not been for want of training them in the way wherein it was his wish that they should go. You are about, sir, to send your son to a famous school. He may come from it an accom- plished scholar to the utmost extent that school education can make him so ; he may be the better both for its discipline and its want of discipline ; it may serve him excel- lently well as a preparatory school for the world into which he is about to enter. But also he may come away an empty cox- comb or a hardened brute a spendthrift a profligate a blackguard or a sot. To put a boy in the way he should go is like sending out a ship well found, well manned and stored, and with a careful cap- tain ; but there are rocks and shallows in her course, winds and currents to be en- countered, and all the contingencies and A Club of One 81 perils of the sea." As to the training and conduct of the children of my own body, I choose to speak in the language of John Buncle, who was seven times a hus- John band, and, one would infer, the father of a very numerous progeny. " As I mention," he says, " nothing of any children by so many wives, some readers may perhaps wonder at this ; and therefore, to give a general answer, once for all, I think it suf- ficient to observe, that I had a great many, to carry on the succession ; but as they never were concerned in any extraordi- nary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things, that I heard of, only rise and break- fast, read and saunter, drink and eat, it would not be fair, in my opinion, to trouble any one with their history." Is life worth living ? Pecuniarily, hard- is life worth ly, one would think, to very many, after reading Dr. Farr's interesting chapter on the pecuniary value of life. A certain amount of expense, he says, has to be in- curred in any class before a child can attain such an age and such strength that it can earn its own livelihood. It is very difficult to estimate what the expenses of even a careful man who passes through the ordi- 82 A Club of One nary university career must have been be- fore he is able to earn anything for himself. Among the lower ranks the problem is simpler, though the facts and the general course of events have, making due allow- ance for difference in station, a considera- ble similarity. The value, says the doctor, life. va< of any class of lives is determined by valu- ing first at birth, or at any age, the cost of future maintenance ; and then the value of the future earnings. Thus proceeding, I found the value of a Norfolk agricultural laborer to be ^246 at the age of twenty- five ; the child is by this method worth only $ at birth ; ,56 at the age of five ; .117 at the age of ten ; the youth .192 at the age of fifteen ; the young man ^234 at the age of twenty ; the man .246 at the age of twenty-five ; ^241 at the age of thirty, when the value goes on declining to ,136 at the age of fifty-five ; and only one At seventy pound at the age of seventy; the cost of becomes maintenance afterwards exceeding the earn- ings, the value becomes negative ; at eighty the value of the cost of maintenance ex- ceeds the value of the earnings by The^ stupid The stupid doctors, little as they know, it must be admitted, have made some ad A Club of One 83 vance since Hippocrates. One of the court physicians, in the reign of Charles II., in- vented an instrument to cleanse the stom- ach and wrote a pamphlet on it ; and ridic- ulous as a stomach scrubbing-brush may A stomach appear, it afterward got a place among sur- KS* ff ' gical instruments, and received a Latin name, meaning cleanser of the stomach ; * but the moderns not having stomach for it have transferred it to the wine-merchant, who more appropriately applies it to the scouring of the interior of bottles. Heister gives a minute description of it. Many of the remedies recommended and recorded by the great and good Sir Thomas Browne are not a bit less ridiculous or absurd than those mentioned in the compilation follow- ing. There was a special water procured by distillation from a peck of garden shell snails and a quart of earth worms, besides other things ; this was prescribed, not for For con- consumption alone, but for dropsy and all ** obstructions. For broken bones, bones out of joint, or any grief in the bones or sinews, oil of swallows was pronounced exceedingly sovereign, and this was to be procured by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar with about as many different herbs ! A mole, male or female according 84 A Club of One to the sex of the patient, was to be dried in an oven whole as taken out of the earth, and administered in powder for the epi- lepsy. A gray eel, with a white belly, was to be inclosed in an earthen pot, and bur- ied alive in a dung-hill, and at the end of a fortnight its oil might be collected to "help '^ hearing." A mixture of rose leaves and pigeon's dung quilted in a bag, and laid hot upon the parts affected, was thought to For the help a stitch in the side ; and for the quinsy, "give the party to drink," says one of the old books, " the herb mouse-ear, steeped in ale or beer ; and look when you see a swine rub himself, and there upon the same place rub a slick stone, -and then with it slick all TO make the the swelling, and it will cure it." To make hair grow on a bald part of the head, gar- den snails were to be plucked out of their houses, and pounded with horse leeches, bees, wasps, and salt, an equal quantity of each ; and the baldness was to be anointed with a moisture from this mixture after it had been buried eight days in a hotbed. Toremove For the removal and extirpation of super- fluous hairs, a depilatory was to be made by drowning in a pint of wine as many green frogs as it would cover (about twenty was the number), setting the pot forty days in A Club of One 85 the sun, and then straining it for use. A water specially good against gravel or For dropsy. dropsy might be distilled from the dried and pulverized blood of a black buck or he- goat, three or four years old. The animal was to be kept by himself, in the summer- time when the sun was in Leo, and dieted for three weeks upon certain herbs given in prescribed order, and to drink nothing but red wine, if you would have the best preparation, though some persons allowed him his fill of water every third day. But there was a water of man's blood, which water of ^ -,-,. i ,1 i man's blood. in Queen Elizabeth s days was a new in- vention, " whereof some princes had very great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force, and, as they thought, to live long." A strong man was to be chosen, in his flourishing youth, and of twenty-five years, and somewhat choleric by nature. He was to be well dieted for one month with light and healthy meats, all kinds of spices, good strong wine, and, moreover, "kept with mirth;" at the TO be kept ., , , . i ^i witfl mirth. month s end, veins in both arms were opened, and as much blood let out as he could "tolerate and abide." One handful of salt was added to six pounds of this blood, and this was seven times distilled, 86 A Club of One pouring the water upon the residuum after every distillation, till the last. This was AH ounce at to be taken three or four times a year, an a time. ounce at a time. Diseased sensibility is one of my worst maladies. I suffer from it, at times, as no mortal could know. It takes every form of mental misery. Now I am down to a point so low that the machinery of thinking all stops ; again I just touch insanity itself, where the mental machinery is all ready to fly to pieces. Noises, scarcely heard by another, pain me to the limit of distress. In every nerve and fibre I tremble in terror, His scared and my scared faculties lose all power of resistance. I envy, from my soul, the Lapp '' er of resist- ,,.,, ., , . , once. who drinks tobacco oil as a stomachic, and has a skin as insensible as his stomach. In Lapland, as Montesquieu puts it, " you must flay a man to make him feel." I can well Byron -when understand the sensitiveness of Lord By- ron, who, even in dying, shrunk away when those about him put their hands near his foot, as if fearing that they should uncover it. In his last sickness it was thought right to apply blisters to the soles of his feet. When on the point of putting them on, the poet asked the attendant whether it A Club of One 87 would answer the purpose to apply both on TH* poet's the same leg. Guessing immediately the ** motive that led him to ask this question, the nurse told him that he would place them above the knees. " Do so," was the reply. I once knew a man eminent in his pro- fession who carried an unsightly birth- mark in his face. I never met him without perceiving a slight shock of apprehension, lest I might observe too closely his misfor- tune. Dr. Franklin mentions a gentleman who, having one very handsome and one shriveled leg, was wont to test the dispo- A novel test sition of a new acquaintance by observing *T*" whether he or she looked first or most at the best or worst leg. Erskine was intensely sensitive, and his acute sensibility being in- dependent of any and every other malady, as my sensitiveness is not (to my ever- lasting distress), it helped him as an advo- cate and orator. Once, we are told, he was confused and put out in an impassioned address to a jury by a yawning attorney, placed by malice prepense exactly in his line Malice pre- r i A P ense ' of view under the jury-box. Arrested in his own despite by the absent or desponding look of Garrow, who was with him in the cause, he whispered," Who do you think can get on with that wet blanket of a face of 88 A Club of One Erskine^ yours before him ? " His maiden effort in jfort n the House of Commons was marred by the real or affected indifference of Pitt, who, after listening a few minutes, and taking a note or two as if intending to reply, dashed pen and paper upon the floor with a con- temptuous smile. Erskine could not re- cover from this expression of disdain ; " his voice faltered, he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame." On Pitt 1 * utter- another occasion, Pitt rose after Erskine and began : " I rise to reply to the right honorable gentleman (Fox) who spoke last but one. As for the honorable and learned gentleman who spoke last, he did no more than regularly repeat what fell from the gentleman who preceded him, and as regularly weakened what he repeated." No man ever existed, I believe, with more acute and unavoidable antipathies than my- A story told self . I can well believe the story told by Charles Lamb, of two persons meeting (who never saw each other before in their lives) and instantly fighting. Blank, said Cole- ridge, " is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of exist- ence ; I mean on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not A Club of One 89 bear to roast him ; he is not so bad as all Not bad that comes to : but then, on the other hand, btw^ud. to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pot-house of heaven is ut- terly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me." There are men who bully me with their immense, swaggering, animal spirits ; and I can imagine the distress of the sensitive Goldsmith in the presence of the high-fed, Goldsmith gigantic, aggressive Foote. That element ** of Macaulay's character, which Palmerston called " cock-sureness," must have had much the same effect upon shrinking and self-distrusting natures brought in contact with it. Thorns, the founder and long the editor of Notes and Queries, met Lord Macaulay in the House of Lords one day, Anecdote of and remarked that he could not quite un- A derstand why Pope satirized Dryden in the Dunciad. Macaulay replied that Thorns must be mistaken, and before an audience of a score of peers spoke with his usual en- ergy and eloquence in support of his view that Pope could not and would not have lampooned Dryden. All this time Thorns had a copy of the Dunciad in his pocket with a leaf turned down at the passage to which he had referred, but he was too well go A Club of One bred to produce the volume. Sydney Smith said of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, "He is fuddled with animal spirits, giddy with animal . _ . . . . ,, _ spirits. with constitutional joy. bucn a man to come into the presence of another all quiv- ering from the effects of every malady known under the sun is a calamity. One objection that I have to my new doctor is that he has too high health. The mercury at zero, he comes steaming in like a loco- motive. His features blaze like a constel- lation. And he is a little bit unceremoni- ous, too, at times. Courtesy we expect, and have a right to, in a fair degree ; in the Courtesy a doctor it is a commodity we pay for it. To the point of obeisance or obsequious- ness, however, it is as offensive as brusque- ness or boorishness. Mrs. Basil Montagu met Burns, and pronounced him " the most royally courteous of mankind." In his sense of manhood he never forgot the man. In that portrait of Nasmyth's he carries Bums a the brow and mien of a natural gentleman. natural . . A . gentleman. Ah, a gentleman ! A rarer thing, thought Thackeray, than some of us think for. Which of us can point out many such in his circle, men whose aims are generous, whose truth is constant and elevated ; who can look the world honestly in the face, with A Club of One 91 an equal manly sympathy for the great and Great and the small ? We all know a hundred whose coats are well made, and a score who have excellent manners ; but of gentlemen how many ? Let us take a little scrap of paper and each make out his list. An amusing illustration of obeisance is in that most gro- tesque figure in Serjeant Ballantine's book of Experiences, of a decently dressed, quiet- looking man who used to present himself A grotesque . scene. after dinner to the judges and counsel on the last day of the Old Bailey sessions. Upon his appearance he was always pre- sented with a glass of wine, and this he drank to the health of his patrons, express- ing " with becoming modesty his gratitude for past favors and his hopes for favors to come." It was Calcraft, the hangman ! In contrast with that is the royal language of Byron, in one of his Dedications. After the words " Scott alone," Byron inserted, in a parenthesis, " He will excuse the Mr. we do not say Mr. Caesar." Good- breeding is not wholly acquired ; to some extent, like genius, it is the gift of God. When two persons of exceptional good- breeding (says Holmes) meet in the midst of the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the natural law 92 A Club of One Elective of elective affinities. It is wonderful how affinities, , _ r men and women know their peers. If two strange queens, sole survivors of two ship- wrecked vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once address the other as " Our Royal Sister." Louis Louis xiv. XIV. was told that Lord Stair was one of the best-bred men in Europe. " I shall soon put hirn to the test," said the king ; and asking Lord Stair to take an airing with him, as soon as the door of the coach was opened, he bade him pass and get in. The other bowed and obeyed. The king said, "The world is in the right, in the character it gives another person would have troubled me with ceremony/' Politeness of It has been said that never was man so Louis XIV. , . _ . ^ rTT _ _ polite as Louis XIV. He never passed a woman, however lowly her position, even though she were one of the menials of his palace, without raising his hat, and the whole time he conversed with a lady he remained uncovered. And yet never was man more selfish and indifferent to the convenience of both man and woman ; no matter what might be the state of the weather, no matter how delicate might be their health, he insisted upon all the la- A Club of One 9} dies of the court attending him in his long selfishness .. . . , incarnate. drives or promenades, sometimes continued through several hours, beneath a burning sun or in frost and snow. Sometimes they fell fainting from their horses with illness, or fatigue, but such incidents never moved him. " Tell Murray," said Sydney Smith to Jeffrey, " that I was much struck with the politeness of Miss Markham the day after he went. In carving a partridge, I splashed her with gravy from head to foot ; and though I saw three distinct brown rills of animal juice trickling down her cheek, she had the complaisance to swear that not a drop had reached her ! " I have heard Mr. Eraser say (says Wraxall, in his Historical Memoirs), who was, during many years, under-secretary of state, that in 1 760, a few months before the king died, having occa- sion to present a paper to him for his sig- nature, at Kensington, George the Second George //. took the pen in his hand ; and having, as he conceived, affixed his name to it, re- turned it to Fraser. But so defective was his vision, that he had neither dipped his pen in the ink, nor did he perceive that of course he had only drawn it over the paper, without making any impression. Fraser, Fraser's aware of the king's blindness, yet unwill- 94 4 Club of One ing to let his majesty observe that he dis- covered it, said, " Sir, I have given you so bad a pen, that it will not write. Allow me to present you a better for the purpose." Then dipping it himself in the ink, he re- turned it to the king, who, without making any remark, instantly signed the paper. It is said that towards a chancellor whom Sir sugden and Edward Sugden liked he could be as sweet as summer. Lord Cottenham one day fell asleep on the bench. Sir Edward imme- diately paused. The cessation of sound had the customary effect of awakening the chancellor. "Why don't you go on, Sir Ed- ward ? " "I thought your lordship might be looking over your notes," was the bland response. This, of course, pleased the chan- cellor, who was liable to doze, and hated anybody noticing it. Horace Greeley said he had never been beaten in politeness but once. That happened, he said, many years before. Early one morning he left Bragg's Hotel, at Utica, in the stage-coach, west- ward bound. There was but one passenger besides himself, a gentleman of very pre- possessing appearance, with whom he soon fell into conversation. After a while the stranger slowly and, as it were, mechani- cally drew a cigar-case from his pocket, and, A Club of One 95 opening it, tendered it to Mr. Greeley, who declined the kind offer. The conversation Declines a was resumed ; and presently the stranger, extracting a cigar from the case, placed it in his mouth, and returned the case to his pocket. Another interval of talk ensued, when the stranger abruptly but deferen- tially remarked to Mr. Greeley, " I hope, sir, you have no objection to a cigar?" " None in the world, sir," replied Mr. Greeley, "when it is not alight." "Oh," said his companion, " I had not the most remote thought of lighting it." There- Conquered upon Mr. Greeley felt that he had been ** conquered in politeness. As to compliments, I employ myself rec- ollecting a few that are remarkable in lit- erature. It was told of Lord Ashbrook, who never touched a feather during an entire day's shooting at Holkham, that the keeper, by way of consolation, remarked that he had seen people shoot worse than his lordship. " How can that be when I have missed bird after bird?" "Ay, but AH amusing iii' i i i A r compliment. your lordship misses them so clean ! Af- ter his overthrow, Hannibal took refuge at the court of Prusias, King of Bithynia. There Scipio came on an embassy. The g6 A Club of One two great rivals met, and in conversation Scipio asked Hannibal whom he considered the greatest commander. "Alexander," was the reply. " And who next ? " " Pyrrhus." " And who after him ? " " Myself." " And what would you have said if you had beaten me at Zena ? " " In that case I should have put myself before Alexander and Pyrrhus and all other generals." Mademoiselle Ra- Racheiand chel was very anxious to have her portrait taken by Ingres, and made an appointment with him at his studio to talk the mat- ter over. In the course of conversation he remarked that in order to do justice to his model he should require at least fifty sittings of from two to three hours each. " How long will it be before the portrait is completed ? " she inquired. " Four or five years," was the painter's reply. " Misery ! " exclaimed Rachel ; " then I must abandon the idea, for I may be dead and buried be- fore you have immortalized me." "Ma- demoiselle," answered Ingres, with a smile, " I have no such pretension ; your own genius has already saved me the trouble." one of Allen, one of Leigh Hunt's school-fellows, Hunt's school- was so handsome, that running one day fellows. . J against a barrow-woman in the street, and turning round to appease her in the midst A Club of One 97 of her abuse, she said, "Where are you driving to, you great hulking, good-for- nothing, beautiful fellow, God bless you ! " Voltaire, being on a visit to a very lovely Voltaire. woman, said to her, " Your rivals are the curious works of art ; you are the most com- plete work of nature." Dr. Johnson paid a fine compliment to the wife of Dr. Beattie, when he wrote to Boswell, "Of Dr. Beattie Johnson to Boswell. I should have thought much, but that his lady puts him out of my head ; she is a very lovely woman." Colley Gibber alluded to coiiey the Duchess of Marlborough as possessing something that distinguished her above all the women of her time, a distinction which she received not from earthly sover- eigns, but "from the Author of Nature;" that of being " a great-grandmother with- Duchess out gray hairs." But the most extravagant loratgk. compliment the most magnificent dis- play of gallantry is recorded by Madame de Genlis, in her Memoirs. Madame de Blot, then very young, one day said in the presence of the Prince of Conti, that she wished to have the portrait of her canary in a ring. The prince offered to give her the portrait and the ring, which Madame Madame Bleak House. " For," said he, "it 's being ground to bits in a slow mill ; it 's being roasted at a slow fire ; it 's being stung to death by single bees ; it 's being drowned by drops ; it's going mad by grains." As to advocacy, I have long thought with Carlyle, that it is a strange trade. " Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift, hung io6 A Club of One up in the shop-window like a loaded pistol for sale ; will either blow out a pestilent scoundrel's brains, or the scoundrel's salu- tary sheriff's officer's (in a sense), as you please to choose for your guinea." Some- times, in a generous mood, I am re- in minded of Paddy 's suggestion of economy in justice, and feel like commending it as a stroke of policy. It occurred in the case of an outlaw, who was a blacksmith, con- demned to transportation for life, but who excited powerful sympathy on the score of his professional merits. He lived in a hunting county where his aid was thought so valuable that an application was made to the judge in order that his sentence might be mitigated. " He is the only man, your honor," said the influential dep- utation, " who can shoe a horse for miles about us." " Impossible, gentlemen," re- impiacabie plied the Rhadamanthus ; " an example thus. * l ~ must be made." "Very true," observed the applicants ; " but, you see, we have got only one blacksmith, whilst we have a number of attorneys. Could n't you take one of the attorneys ? " Though com- mending the suggestion, I am happy to re- cord that I know at least one lawyer who is an honest man. His big brain is the A Club of One 707 home of wisdom, and " the Ten Command- ments are written on his countenance." Integrity, entireness, soundness to the integrity. core. I do like an honest man. He re- alizes the precept, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently ex- cited nor torpid, nor playing the hypo- crite. He stands a man, responsible to all men for all the manhood there is in him. He is known and read, and his life is in no sense a lie. He so lives with man " as considering that God sees him, and so speaks to God as if men heard him." " I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty," says Emerson, veracity " as the root of all that is sublime in char- M acter. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or under- mined, to all the e"clat in the universe." Society could not exist for a day without moral honesty ; it is as the hair in the Moral kon- mortar which holds the elements together. There must be integrity, if everything is not to be artificial and conventional. Gen- eral Thomas said that the prime essential io8 A Club of One in dealing with the Indians was to tell the tell the truth ,, , , , , , to the in- truth, to tell the truth always, and to keep a promise, because to the white man when you failed to keep a promise you could give an apology that might be compre- hended, but the Indian never understood if you did not keep your agreement. Va- lerius records that Fabius redeemed cer- tain captives by the promise of a sum of money ; which when the senate refused to confirm, he sold all the property he pos- sessed, and with the produce paid down the stipulated sum, caring less to be poor in lands than poor in honesty. Confucius A saying of said, "At first, my way with men was to Confucius- hear their words, and give them credit for their conduct. Now, my way is to hear their words, and look at their conduct." " They that cry down moral honesty," said old John Selden, " cry down that which is a great part of religion, my duty towards God, and my duty towards man. What care I to see a man run after a sermon, if he cozens and cheats as soon as he comes home ? " Religion were emptiness and oraihon- pretence without moral honesty ; and only sentimentalists and illuminists in religion denounce it. When a preacher, of good sense, fairly upon his feet, inveighs against wit. mm esty A Club of One 109 morality, I set it down mathematically that he is either uncandid or mercenary. I have noticed that such (when not irre- sponsible from enthusiasm) almost invari- m ably illustrated their discourses in a way unconsciously to denote their irrepressi- ble, constitutional thrift ; and threatened to resign their pastorates if their salaries were not promptly paid. It was apparent enough that they knew perfectly well that houses are not built by beginning at the roof ; yet they reasoned preposterously that characters could be built in that ab- surd manner. Balloons, that move with the air, are not structures to resist the tempests ; temples, that outlast the storm, have rock foundations. At the bottom of the edifice which is destined to stand, and to show no crack or flaw for ages, are great, invisible, well-dressed stones, per- fectly leveled, and perfectly laid in ce- ment. So at the foundation of the charac- Attke/o ter of every honest man there are virtues and elements, cemented and established, that are destined to make it worthily ev- erlasting. They are invisible, and were not for a moment thought of as to be seen by the architect. The honest man feels himself continually searched bv the eve of 1 10 A Club of One Substance and shadow* Conscience and con- sciousness. God, and the observation and estimate of the world are of secondary importance to him. He distinguishes between the real substance, character, and its shadow, repu- tation. He is careful about repeating the Lord's Prayer, as he cannot help regard- ing it as a test of himself, as well as an act of adoration to the Deity. Before pronouncing the words, Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debt- ors, he hesitates, and inquisition begins. Conscience dons the ermine, and con- sciousness testifies. Conceit of superex- cellence is not a natural result of such self-examination. The ideal seems further from attainment with every effort ; but ef- fort is encouraged to become habitual by increased sense of responsibility. An in- dividual, not responsible to party or sect, he has a conscience directly toward God. Doing his best to live virtuously and walk humbly, he confidently trusts the Creator to take care of the creature. With the highest standards of conduct practicable or attainable, he judges himself not less The Golden severely than others. The Golden Rule he believes to be particularly for self-ap- plication. His moral anchorages are fixed and habitual. There are things that un- A Club of One 1 1 1 der no possible circumstances would he do. His principles are in such constant Principles use that they have the look of instincts, "tine' His morals are so constantly applied that they have the appearance of habits. He has realized the precept of Plutarch, that habit soon makes right conduct easy. Habit, indeed, he has discovered to be omnipotent. "All is habit," says Metas- tasio, "even virtue itself." In brutes, even, he has seen the controlling effect of discipline. It is related that during the Franco-German war, after the slaughter at Vionville, a strange and touching spectacle A touching was presented. On the evening call being *** sounded by the first regiment of Dragoons of the Guard, six hundred and two rider- less horses answered to the summons, jaded, and in many cases maimed. The noble animals still retained their disci- plined habits. But deeper than discipline or habit far down below either the character of a thoroughly honest man takes root. Hawthorne said of his trusted as- sistant in the custom-house at Salem, that his integrity was a law of nature with him integrity a J law ofna- rather than a choice or a principle. The ** life of the thoroughly honest man, as I have said, is in no sense a lie. His acts 112 A Club of One Awful hy- pocrisy. Acts and are better than his professions. He per* fro/en. . ormSj jf possible, his promises. In a pub- lie or fiduciary capacity he acts as if his re- sponsibilities were personal. He does not turn thief when elected to office. He does not sink his soul in a corporation. He knows no friend in court. He does not deliberately swallow up estates by manipu- lating weak judges and procuring straw- bail, and afterward mercifully call the at- tention of the Almighty to the sins and short-comings of the women and children and imbeciles he has swindled and ruined. He does not live and flourish at a great rate at others' expense. The dollar in his pocket is not his if he owes any man a dol- lar. Scrupulous in meeting his obliga- tions, he is careful about incurring them. Patches on his clothing are of little mo- ment compared with blotches of discredit on his character. If by fraud or an act of God his affairs have suffered, his creditors are the first to be notified. He does not go on from bad to worse till his neighbors who have trusted him are cheated and con- founded. He does not with the wheels of his equipage splash the mud of the streets upon poor pedestrians, when his whole ef- fects would pay only a small part of his Conduct in extremity. A Club of One indebtedness. He makes a clean breast to his butcher and baker, as well as to his "' banker, that neither may have any advan- tage over the other. He takes no advan- tage of oversight or neglect, and meets misfortune more than half way. His pre- cepts and practices agree. If he or one of his children finds a sum of money, the act is not so hidden as to make it a theft. He will not have one penny that is not his that cannot be accounted for. Clean hands, a clean conscience. There is a story of an old merchant who, on his death- Death-bed bed, divided the result of long years of m^n. labor, some few hundreds in all, amongst his sons. " It is little enough, my boys," were almost his last words, "but there isn't a dirty shilling in the whole of it." Every man with a generous share of good blood in him begins life a democrat and a reformer. " I am no more ashamed of hav- ing been a republican," says Southey, sayings of "than I am of having been a child." /**&. Lord Eldon said in his old age, that " if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as agitator." There was a time in my own life when making the whole world over seemed to H4 A Club of One me not a very difficult or gigantic thing. For six For as much as six whole weeks the proc- fermer. ess seemed very simple and easy. All that was requisite, it appeared to me, was for the sinless to get together and deter- mine upon a plan to convert the sinful, - to make them sinless as themselves. Sim- plicity itself ! and as practicable as easy. The good had only to agree upon the man- ner of making over the bad, and the work was accomplished, neatly, and with dis- patch. An old Latin author gives an ac- A po-iverfui count of a woman who believed that she "could shake all the world with her fin- ger," and was afraid to close her hand, lest she should crush it like an apple. So easy the achievement of universal reformation seemed to be that the obvious reason for delaying it was the same that restrained the powerful woman, a merciful hesita- tion of power, a shuddering dread of dis- turbing things. Ah ! the omnipotence of edict, fiat, decree, ukase, act of parliament, act of congress, act of assembly, ordinance of council ! I did not then know of the Deadstat- countless statutes that are inoperative or dead from indisposition or inability to en- force them. What suggestive great books could be made by collecting them ! mock- A Club of One 115 ing commentaries upon the conceit and im- potence of statesmanship. My scheme for His scheme. delivering the world from evil was for the reformed of every place to assemble them- selves together ; those who never drink ; who use no pernicious drugs ; who never gorge themselves at table ; who are never concupiscent ; who are never unchaste in thought, lan- guage, or conduct ; who perfectly control their appetites and passions ; who never deceive ; who never lie, prevaricate, or conceal the The good. truth ; who do not love money ; who do not oppress or insult the poor ; who do not envy or impugn the rich ; who do no wrong thing ; to take into consideration the miserable multitude, who do drink ; who do make use of deleterious drugs ; who do overtax their digestive powers ; who are now and then concupiscent ; The bad. who are sometimes unchaste in thought, language, and conduct ; who do not control their desires and appe- tites ; u 6 A Club of One who deceive ; Those who who lie, prevaricate, and conceal the truth ; who underestimate and grind the poor ; who love money ; who envy the rich, and impugn their mo- tives and conduct ; who do many wrong things ; and at once, then and there, devise irref- ragable prohibitory laws for the absolute and complete reformation of their imper- Thegoodto feet brethren. To prohibit was to pro- convert the . , . A . . ... bad, andkiii hibit. An exceeding great army to kill the devil. The earth to be made a paradise again. But the world got in and possessed me before the great scheme was an- nounced. My opportunity was lost, and things have gone on in the usual bad way. Can it be, at last, that reforming is much a personal matter, to each one of us ? Each to " cease to do evil, and learn to do well." It would seem so. The agony I suffered all of last night ! I believe it is the gout. The doctor doesn't think so ; but doctors differ. " If your A saying of physician," says Montaigne, "does not itaigne. . f or QU to gjgg {Q drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself ; I will find you another A Club of One 117 that shall not be of his opinion." He calls it acute rheumatism, and says I read too much ! As if that had anything to do with gout ! Though I do admit the close relation of mind and body, and know how Mind and curiously they sometimes affect each other. I mean to make a study of their interde- pendence, and know more of it. But how a few hours of study in my library could produce a fit of the gout is incomprehen- sible to me. From whatever cause, it is here, and must be removed. My limb in a vise, with two giants twisting it, would not be more horrible than the ag- ony I suffer. The Duke of Northumber- land suffered from gout. He had tried, he said, every remedy for it, as he believed, except one, which, in the case of a friend of his, proved efficacious, viz., the basti- Thebasu- Hfido fov nado. This had been applied to his friend gout. when traveling in Turkey, who was dis- abled by gout from descending from his palanquin to pay the required homage to the Grand Vizier ; and it actually cured him ! I trust so fearful a remedy may not be necessary in my case. I feel, and watch, and count my pulsa- counts his _. pulsations. tions by the hour sometimes George A Club of One Haller did the same. And Har- vey. The heart a wonderful thing. A ccidents and contin- gencies. Washington died watching his pulse, and I believe I shall do the same. Haller kept feeling his pulse to the last moment, and when he found that life was almost gone, he turned to his brother physician, observing, " My friend, the artery ceases to beat," and almost instantly expired. The same remarkable circumstance had occurred to the great Harvey ; he kept making observations on the state of his pulse when life was drawing to its close ; "as if," as was said, "that he who had taught us the beginning of life, might him- self, at his departing from it, become ac- quainted with that of death." Everything I know about the circulation terrifies me. The heart what a wonderful thing it is ! To it we refer our joys, our sorrows, and our affections ; yet when grasped with the fingers, it gives no information of the fact to the possessor, unmistakably responding at the same time to the varied emotions of the mind. I think of these mysteries, in hours of sleeplessness, till I am almost dis- tracted. Then the accidents and contin- gencies of life appear to vex me. A thou- sand of them, it seems to me, appear to my mind at the same time. Though happen- ings, I try to think they are not always A Club of One 1 1 9 misfortunes. There was that remarkable Dinner at T- Barrere" 1 s, dinner, one hot day, at Barrere s men- tioned by Carlyle in his History. At this dinner, the day being so hot, the guests all stript their coats, and left them in the drawing - room : whereupon Carnot glided out ; groped in Robespierre's pocket ; found a list of forty [to be butchered by the guil- lotine], his own name among them ; " and tarried not at the wine - cup that day ! " At that fearful time, human life was noth- ing, and human bodies were treated as brutes. At Meudon, says Montgaillard, there was a tannery of human skins ; such A tannery of the guillotined as seemed worth flay- afewJ!"** ing : of which perfectly good wash-leather was made ; for breeches and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was su- perior in toughness and quality to cham- ois ; that of the women was good for al- most nothing, being so soft in texture. Which reminds me that after the battle of Munda, on the Guadalquivir, near Cor- dova, where Caesar routed the Pompeians, Munda (says Froude in his life of Caesar) was at once blockaded, the inclosing wall A waii bum . i /. , f , of dead savage evidence of the temper of the bodies conquerors being built of dead bodies pinned together with lances, and on the 720 A Club of One top of it a fringe of heads on sword's points with the faces turned towards the town. A man and a woman called to know if I was supplied with the Bible ! There was nothing about them to remind me of " the shepherd " and " the mother-in-law " in Pickwick. Oh, no \ Though I did detect self-right- a degree of self-righteousness lurking in their countenances. I might have shown them our Bible in every English version, and the bible of the Hindoos, of the Par- sees, of the Mahometans, and of the Mor- mons. Respectfully they retired. I did not remark the least condescension. The woman had, I thought, somewhat the look of old grandmother Falconer, who was a terror to her neighborhood ; be- cause, being a law to herself, she would therefore be a law to other people. The healthy heart that said to itself, " How healthy am I ! " was already fallen into the fatalest sort of disease. Is not sen- timentalism (I am quoting Carlyle) twin sister to cant, if not one and the same with it ? Is not cant the materia prima of the devil ; from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations body them- Sentimen- talism and cant. A Club of One 121 selves ; from which no two things can come ? For cant is itself properly a dou- ble-distilled lie ; the second power of a lie. The brain (says Dean Swift), in its natural position and state of serenity, dis- poseth its owner to pass his life in the common forms without any thought of subduing multitudes to his own power, his reasons, or his visions ; and the more he shapes his understanding by the pattern of human learning, the less he is inclined to form parties after his particular notions ; because that instructs him in his private infirmities, as well as in the stubborn ig- norance of the people. But when a man's fancy gets astride on his reason; when imagination is at cuffs with the senses ; imagination ' at cuffs with and common understanding, as well as <*** common sense, is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself; and when that is once compassed, the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others ; a strong delusion always operating from without, as vigorously as from within. For cant and vision are to the ear and the eye the same that tickling is to the touch. Those entertainments and pleasures we The enter- 1 ..... . tainments most value in lite are such as dupe and andpieas- 1.1 . , . - ures we most play the wag with the senses. For, if we 722 A Club of One Hood's de- testation of canters. Less rever- ential than a Mohawk tguaw. take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition : that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. Thomas Hood, of all men, had the greatest detestation of canters. An awful widow, it is stated, having long pes- tered him with her insolent tracts and impious admonitions, he at length turned upon her, and wrote her a letter, his Tract, as he styled it, in which, perhaps, he used language somewhat too violent. He seems to have thought so himself, and concluded his performance with an apol- ogy. "And now, madam, farewell. Your mode of recalling yourself to my memory reminds me that your fanatical mother insulted mine in the last days of her life (which was marked by every Christian virtue) by the presentation of a Tract ad- dressed to Infidels. I remember also that the same heartless woman intruded her- self, with less reverence than a Mohawk squaw would have exhibited, on the cham- ber of death, and interrupted with her jargon almost my very last interview with my dying parent. Such reminiscences war- A Club of One 123 rant some severity ; but if more be want- ing, know that my poor sister has been excited by a circle of canters like yourself into a religious frenzy, and is at this mo- ment in a private mad-house." Goodness, Goodness , . blows no says Lamb, blows no trumpet, nor desires trumpet. to have any blown. " How beautiful, great, and pure goodness is ! It paints heaven on the face that has it; it wakens the sleeping souls that meet it." "The throne of the gods is on the brow of a righteous man." Alas ! the devil lurks in many faces. The Arabs tell a thousand stories of certain hot waters in a grotto, which they call Pharaoh's Bath ; among others, that if you put four eggs in it, you can take out but three, the devil always keep- ing one for himself. Innocence, unmiti- gated, is with the angels in heaven, and in pure little children on earth. " You wished to see Adam and Eve, who were our first parents ; there they are ; " said the dau- phine to her children. Then she left them in great astonishment before Titian's pic- picture. ture, and seated herself by the bedside of the king, who delighted to watch the chil- dren. " Which of the two is Adam?" said Francis, nudging his sister Margaret's elbow. " You silly," replied she ; " to know 124 A Club of One that, they would have to be dressed." Said a sweet little boy, five years old, to his mother, " Which am I, a boy or a girl ? I forget." Pretty incidents like these, in contrast with the ugly philanthropy that invaded my quiet with its self-righteous- A 3tgnif : ness, recalls the significant Hindoo fable : %%&? Vishnu spake, " O Bal ! take thy choice ; with five wise men shalt thou enter hell, or with five fools pass into paradise." Gladly answered Bal, " Give me, O Lord, hell with the wise ; for that is heaven where the wise dwell, and folly would make of heaven itself a hell ! " A -visit from Cousin Tom, whom I have not seen for his cousin f , , , Tom. forty years, came unexpectedly to spend a few days with me. He has, to say the least, interested me very much. He is one of those persons they call professional invalids. The first words he said after his arrival were words of complaint. The great, lusty fellow came steaming in, com- plaining of the cold, when the mercury was only about twenty degrees above zero. I was glad to see him, and glad to have an An interest- opportunity of studying such an interest- ing charac- , ^,.,. r i t i i i ter. mg character. Tidings of him had reached me from time to time through letters from A Club of One 125 my aunt Jane, who always mentioned him kindly, but with slight expression of inextinguishable disgust at some of his ways. He troubles everybody about him with his perpetual complaints, but never Always com- u- i-r i- -1-1 TT t lainin s- in his life was he seriously sick. He weighs two hundred pounds, and is as round-limbed and muscular as he was at twenty. His teeth are all sound, and shine like ivory. " Sovereignty would have pawned her jewels for them." A marvel of health, he is ever repeating the litany of his little miseries. To see him eat, and then to hear him complain of his digestion ! He clears voraciously his plate, piled up heaping with the richest viands, and then laments that he is not an Laments , ... . . . , that he is not anaconda ! It makes a sick man ashamed an ana- COHtltt* to see a well man such a fool. Nothing in the world is the matter with him but crop-sickness the disgusting result of habitual over-feeding. His cough, that he has been dying of for twenty years, is of the stomach, sheerly and unmistakably. He feeds excessively, and suffers some- what, of course why not ? Is the man's His head of head of no use to him ? Else, why persist *" in his folly ? Is there, to think of it, any- thing so common that is of so little use as 726 A Club of One heads ? The eggs and the sausages that the man ate for breakfast yesterday, and the cups of strong coffee that he drank to hasten them down ! And then to hear swears at ' him swear at his digestion, and envy the tion'anden- healthy ! I had to endure it all, though vies the .. healthy. suffering at the time most acutely from an abscess, or rupture, or something, that is threatening my life. While he was moan- ing and groaning over his slight uneasi- nesses the result of his enormous indul- gence and intemperance I could n't help wishing that he could be really sick awhile, to know what real sickness is, and be cured of his pretenses. Later in the day his scolds his abused nerves came in for a share of scold- ing, when he had devoured and burned to- bacco enough to poison a peccary. But why lecture him about his disgusting ap- petites ? The stomach has no ears. Self- command does n't come of preaching it is a result of self-training, self-denial, and Madame de endurance. Madame de Genlis was born with numberless little antipathies ; she had a horror of all insects, particularly of spiders and frogs. She was also afraid of mice, and her father made her feed and bring up one. He obliged her to catch spiders with her fingers, and to hold toads A Club of One 127 in her hands. At such times, though she felt that the blood had forsaken her veins, she was forced to obey. And so a habit The habit of self-com- of self-command was established in the ** woman who afterward became so com- manding in the French capital and at the court of France. Lamenting and wishing in such a case would have done no good, while discipline accomplished so much. Says Saadi : " Had the cat wings, no sparrow could live in the air ; A verse Had each his wish, what more would Allah have to from Saadl spare ? " If some such a result attended my cousin's indulgence as the story illustrates, there would be some compensation in it. It is of a workman pulling his wife out of a ditch, with the remark, " Why, Nanny, you are drunk." "And what do that ar- gify, if I am happy ? " Charles Mathews, one of . f . . . . , Charles in one ot his amusing entertainments, used to tell a story of a certain innkeeper, who * made it a rule of his house, to allow a candle to a guest only on condition of his ordering a pint of wine. Whereupon the guest contends, on the reciprocity system, for a light for every half-bottle, and finally drinks himself into a general illumination. But the belly-gods get no pleasure from 128 A Club of One their indulgence except while they are eat- ing. They are hardly away from the ta- ble, when they begin to complain of their aches. It is a wonder that they don't get Crabb Rob- provoked at their own growling. Crabb Robinson refers to the continued barking of a dog, irritated by the echo of his own voice, which was made by Wordsworth the subject of a sonnet. In human life this is constantly occurring. It is said that a dog has been known to contract an illness by the continued labor of barking at his own echo. My cousin Tom is invariably seized with a fit f coughing whenever a cough is recollected, referred to, or heard. A re- membrance of his own pretended ailment is sure to be followed by a violent, sono- rous expiration. It is a wonder that his whole breathing and swallowing apparatus was not long ago torn to pieces by his per- sistent straining ; and not a bit surprising that something like an asthma should have crept into his chest the direct result, not so much of his stomach cough, as the habit of indulging and cultivating it. At- tending to his cough has been a great part of his business for twenty years a trans- idleness. parent excuse for his chronic idleness. If he had had to earn each one of his dollars excuseor A Club of One 129 by ten hours in the sun, his cough, as he calls it, would never have existed. Occu- occupation . 11* i the great pation is the great blessing ; we must be blessing engaged at something or suffer. Diana was chaste because she was never idle, but always busy about her hunting. But for every day's diligence in my library I do believe I should not myself be able to sur- vive. Nothing but my books could enable me to endure my distresses. There is a story of a gentleman who was under close confinement in the Bastile seven years ; ^ ^.y */ * ' the Bastile. during which time he amused himself with scattering a few small pins about his chamber, gathering them up again, and placing them in different figures on the arm of a great chair. He often told his friends afterwards that unless he had found out this piece of employment, he verily believed he should have lost his senses. Sir Astley Cooper, when in re- tirement, satiated with wealth and honors, is described as looking over the trees of his park with a conviction that some day he should hang himself from one of them. He had spent his life in routine work, and it was too late to educate his mind to any- thing else. Ennui, as Madame Roland de- fines it, is the disease of hearts without idleness the cause of ennui. A Club of One feeling, and of minds without resources. A writer in the London Spectator calls it a mental low fever. It has also been de- fined to be an afflicting sensation for want of a sensation. Whatever it is, idleness is the prime cause of it. Montaigne relates that when once walking in the fields he was accosted by a beggar of Herculean frame, who solicited alms. " Are you not ashamed to beg ? " said the philosopher, with a frown, " you who are so palpably able to work ? " " Oh, sir," was the sturdy knave's drawling rejoinder, "if you only knew how lazy I am ! " Jeremy Taylor said to a lady of his acquaintance, who had been very neglectful of the education of ^ er son > " Madam, if you do not choose to fill your boy's head with something, be- lieve me, the devil will." The Turks have a proverb that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil. In general, says Montesquieu, we place idleness among the beatitudes of heaven ; it should rather be put among the tor- ments of hell. w For one, I believe and affirm that the idle, self-indulgent, professional invalid ought to be put out of the way. He de< A Club of One 131 presses and irritates and aggravates and infuriates everybody who is much with him or about him. The atmosphere he carries with him is blighting. The infi- nite ill effects of permitting him to live is Effects of permitting illustrated in the results of the mistaken him to u ill-ustrated. humanity of the philosopher in his treat- ment of the flea, described so felicitously by a veracious Frenchman. Causes and effects are set down numerically. I. The former, having been bitten by the latter, seized and was about to dispatch his foe, when he reflected that the little insect had only acted from instinct, and was not to be blamed. Accordingly, he deposited the flea on the back of a passing dog. II. This dog was the poodle of a lady, and she was Thepoodk J of a lady. very fond of the pretty animal. On his return to the house, his mistress took him upon her lap to caress him, and the flea embraced the opportunity to change his habitat. III. The flea having in the course of the night engaged in active business operations, awakened the lady. Her hus- band was sleeping peacefully beside her, and in the silence of the chamber she heard him in his dreams whisper, with an j ea imis y access of ineffable tenderness, a name ! " The name was that of her most intimate rhe big damning discovery, A Club of One friend. IV. As soon as it was day the outraged wife hurried to the house of her rival, and told the rival's husband of the big damning discovery she had made. He, . r i 11 i being a man oi decision, at once called out the destroyer of his household's peace, and ran him through. V. The widow, when her husband was taken home to her on a shutter, was so terribly smitten with re- morse that she precipitated herself from the fourth story window. VI. The other lady convinced her husband that he had wronged her by entertaining any suspicion Reconciled, as to her fidelity, and, becoming reconciled with him, seized an early opportunity of poisoning him. VII. Inasmuch as the ju- rors of that country had never heard of " ex- tenuating circumstances," and the Chief Magistrate, thinking that he could not put a murderer to better uses than by guillo- tining him, the guilty woman was duly be- headed, and the sole survivors of the trag- edy were the philosopher and the flea. It * would not do to provide hospitals for the professional invalids. The effect of herd- ing them would be much the same as that resulting from the habit of old Jews from all parts of the world, who go to lay their bones upon the sacred soil (described so vivors the philosopher andtheflea. A Club of One vividly by Kinglake in his matchless little book of travel). "As these people," he A suggestive i ' i r passage says. " never return to their homes, it f ol- from King- lake* lows that any domestic vermin which they may bring with them are likely to become permanently resident, so that the popula- tion is continually increasing. No recent census had been taken when I was at Tibe- rias, but I know that the congregation of fleas which attended at my church alone [what could be more remindful of the numberless irritating effects of voluntary invalidism ?] must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking A carnal, congregation, wholly inattentive to the S c books I years ago, that ten million volumes, first and last, had been published since the art of printing was discovered with an av- erage edition of three hundred aggregat- ing three thousand million volumes ! Yet tradition in Cambridge has recorded that Bentley said he desired and thought him- self likely to live to fourscore, an age long enough, he thought, to read everything which was worth reading. But single books, and little ones what influence they have exerted ! Elizabeth Wallbridge, The Dairyman's Daughter, is known to The Dairy- every tract distributor in the world. The tract containing the story of her life has been translated into nineteen languages, and has had a circulation of four million copies. The circulation of Uncle Tom's /5 2 A Club of One Cabin has been even more remarkable. And Thomas a Kempis's Imitation think of the influence of that. Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, speaks of a riot at Lyons about an equestrian statue of Louis XIV., meant to overawe the city with Bourbon memories. We met, he says, the statue on the road. I had bought in that city a volume of the songs of Beranger, and I thought to myself, as I met the statue, " I have a little book in my pocket which will not suffer you to last long." And surely enough, down it went : for down went King Charles, Books, thought Mrs. Barbauld, are a kind of per- petual censors on men and manners ; they judge without partiality, and reprove with- out fear or affection. There are times when the flame of virtue and liberty seems almost to be extinguished amongst the ex- istmg generation ; but their animated pages are always at hand to rekindle it. The despot trembles on his throne, and the bold, bad man turns pale in his closet at the sentence pronounced against him ages before he was born. Happily, the best books are the commonest, and are always in use. Erskine used to say that in ad- dressing juries he had found there were A Club of One 153 three books, and only three, which he could always quote with effect, Shakespeare, Mil- ton, and the Bible. Milton's favorite vol- Poets* favor* umes were Homer, Ovid, and Euripides ; * ' Dante's was Virgil ; Schiller's was Shake- speare ; Gray's was Spenser ; Goethe's was Spinoza's Ethics ; Bunyan's was the old legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton. The two books which most impressed John Wesley, when young, were the Imitation of Christ, and Taylor's Holy Living and ^ Dying. De Quincey's favorite few were Donne, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Mil- ton, South, Barrow, and Sir Thomas Browne. Napoleon never wearied of read- ing Ossian and the Sorrows of Werther. Miss Austen's novels were favorites with Macaulay ; he enjoyed them especially for their serenity. Thackeray was particularly fond of Humphry Clinker ; he believed it Humphry Clinker. to be " the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began." Douglas Jerrold had an almost reverential fondness for books books themselves and said he could not bear to treat them, or to see them treated, with disrespect. It always gave him pain to see them turned on their faces, stretched open, or dog's eared, or carelessly flung ^ Club of One down, or in any way misused. Bayle, it is known, gave up every sort of recreation, Delicious in- except that delicious inebriation of his fac- ulties which he drew from his books. If the riches of both Indies, said Fe"nelon ; if the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe were laid at my feet, in exchange for my love for reading, I would spurn them all. Pope to At this day, said Pope to Spence, as much Spence. r r company as I have kept, and as much as I love it, I love reading better. I would rather be employed in reading than in the most agreeable conversation. There is a story that Dante, having gone one day to the house of a bookseller, from one of whose windows he was to be a spectator of a pub- lic show exhibited in the square below, by chance took up a book, in which he soon Dante ab- got so absorbed that on returning home, after the spectacle was over, he solemnly declared that he had neither seen nor heard anything whatever of all that had taken place before his eyes. Scott, in Waverley, describes the Baron of Bradwardine as a scholar, according to the scholarship of Scotchmen ; that is, his learning was more diffuse than accurate, and he was rather a zeal for reader than a grammarian. Of his zeal for the classic authors he is said to have given A Club of One 155 an unconscious instance. On the road be- AM uncon- tween Preston and London he made his stance. escape from his guards ; but being after- wards found loitering near the place where they had lodged the former night, he was recognized and again arrested. His com- panions, and even his escort, were sur- prised at his infatuation, and could not help inquiring why, being once at liberty, he had not made the best of his way to a place of safety ; to which he replied, that he had intended to do so, but, in good faith, he had returned to seek his Titus Livius, which he had forgot in the hurry of his escape. Plato's cave, in which he Piatfscav supposes a man to be shut up all his life with his back to the light, and to see noth- ing of the figures of men or other objects that pass by but their shadows on the op- posite wall of his cell, so that when he is let out and sees the real figures he is only dazzled and confounded by them, seemed to Hazlitt an ingenious satire on the life satire on of a bookworm. I confess to the French- man's hatred of a dirty book. It is in truth an error to suppose that the dirt on the cover and pages of a book is a sign of its studious employment. Those who use books to most purpose handle them with A Club of One Book-bar- loving care. And as to persistent book- borrowing, book-owners can hardly trust themselves to speak of it. Its common- ness does not excuse the offense. It is said that Lord Eldon, when chancellor, greatly augmented his library by borrow- ing books quoted at the bar ; and forget- ting to return them, he would say of such borrowers, " Though backward in account- ing, they were well-practiced in book-keep- Book-thiev- ing." But deliberate book-thieving what crime is there to compare with it in the estimation of the student and librarian ? In Chambers's Journal there is an account of a memorable literary virtuoso who piqued himself upon his collection of scarce edi- tions and original manuscripts, most of which he had purloined from the libraries of others. He was always borrowing books of acquaintances with a resolution never to return them ; sending in a great hurry for a particular edition which he wanted to subterfuges, consult for a moment, but when its return was solicited he was not at home ; or he had lent the book to somebody else ; or he could not lay his hand upon it just then ; or he had lost it ; or he had himself al- ready delivered it to the owner. Some- times he contented himself with stealing A Club of One 757 one volume of a set, knowing where to pro- cure the rest for a trifle. After his death his library was sold at auction, and many of his defrauded friends had the pleasure of buying their own property back again Bu at an exorbitant price. Reading lately of *^~ book-titles, I was amused with a statement of how misleading many of them have been. The Diversions of Purley, at the Diversions time of its publication, was ordered by a * village book-club, under the impression that it was a book of amusing games. The Essay on Irish Bulls was another work which was thought by some folks to deal with live stock. The Ancient Mar- iner was sold largely to sea-faring men, who concluded from the name that it had some relation to nautical matters. The TheExcur- .,-, . r . sion. .bxcursion expensive copies or it were sold to tourists and to keepers of country inns and boarding-houses, as likely to be of especial interest to excursionists. James Smith used to dwell with much pleasure on the criticism of a Leicestershire clergy- man : " I do not see why they (the Ad- Rejected A& dresses) should have been rejected : I think * some of them very good." This, he would add, is almost as good as the avowal of the Irish bishop, that there were some good / $8 A Club of One things in Gulliver's Travels which he Tocqve- could not believe. Tocqueville preferred living with books to living with authors. One is not always happy with the latter ; while books are intelligent companions, without vanity, ill-humor, or caprice ; they do not want to talk of themselves, do not dislike to hear others praised ; clever peo- ple whom one can summon and dismiss just as one pleases. I often derive a pe- steme's culiar satisfaction, says Sterne, in convers- ing with the ancient and modern dead, who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, and yet at such times I am in com- pany with more than five hundred mutes each of whom, at my pleasure, commu- nicates his ideas to me by dumb signs, quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by the uttering of words. They al- ways keep the distance from me which I direct, and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please. I lay hands on fifty of them sometimes in an evening, and handle them as I like ; they never complain of ill-usage ; and when dis- missed from my presence, though ever so Hmuto abruptly, take no offense. How to read ? is a grave question to readers. Goethe A Club of One 159 said he had been employed for eighteen years trying to learn the art, and had not attained it. Richter, speaking of miscella- neous reading, inquires, quaintly, " Does more depend on the order in which the meats follow each other or on the diges- tion of them ? " In 1731, Atterbury wrote his last letter to Pope, and asks, " How many books have come out of late in your parts which you think I should be glad to peruse ? Name them. The catalogue, I believe, will not cost you much trouble. They must be good ones indeed to chal- lenge any part of my time, now I have so little of it left. I, who squandered whole days heretofore, now husband hours when the glass begins to run low, and care not to spend them on trifles. At the end of the lottery of life our last minutes, like tickets left in the wheel, rise in their valu- ation." "Marvelous power of mind ! " ex- claims Souvestre, reflecting on the value of books in old age. " From a corner of my chamber from the arm-chair which I oc- cupy I can traverse the immense abysses of the past. I am present at the founda- tion of cities, the birth and growth of em- pires ; I accompany various races as they wander over the earth, establish them- i6o A Club of One Takes note ef human- ity. Distances nothing. Magnificent empire of memory I A strange dream, or vision. selves, and found nations ; I take note o*f that perpetual movement of humanity, as it seeks its level on the globe which has been given to it for an inheritance. Or, fatigued with these generalities, I repose in the tent of the patriarch Abraham, or beneath the oak of St. Louis. From the tribune of Cicero I pass to the pulpit of Bossuet ; distances are nothing to me ; I traverse them by an instantaneous bound, whether those of space or time. From the east I hasten to the west, from the early days of the world I pass on to the hour which has just struck ; wherever an at- tractive spectacle summons me, I am there in spirit ; or a noble action or an elevated conversation invites me, I am present to applaud or take part. Magnificent empire of memory ! vast power and inexhaustible activity of thought ! I cease to be troubled now at my solitude and forced inaction." I had a strange dream last night or vision rather. I record it as a curious freak or exercise of the faculties. The doctor must have put a little too much opium in his last powders. Methought my pretty round table in the library was en- larged to many times its real size. I was A Club of One 161 contemplating its polished surface, and wondering if any wood could be richer and more beautiful than our American black walnut, when a pill-box made its appear- , , . , . , . . -made its ap- ance on the table, rolling about in an pearance. erratic way describing all sorts of circles and semicircles, in the easiest and most ec- centric manner possible. It was a diminu- tive thing the tiniest of the kind I had The tiniest . , of its kind. ever seen not greater in diameter than the smallest thimble. It was so small in- deed that a close eye was necessary to ob- serve its movements. Soon, another pill- box, a size larger, presented itself, and the two immediately began chasing each other in a very amusing manner sometimes in straight lines and sometimes in graceful curves. Then another pill-box, a size big- ger than the last, made its appearance, and joined with the others in freakish gambols. A fourth next showed itself still a little stm larger. larger than the third in a still more rol- licking humor than any of the rest, and it became very difficult indeed to watch them, so rapid and peculiar were their move- ments. Then another and another, each one a little bigger, till the table was pretty well filled with animated pill-boxes. There must have been as many as forty or fifty 162 A Club of One of every of them, of every size and variety, from Variety. the minute smallest to that of greatest proportions. No apothecary ever saw a greater array and intermixture. And each was marked with a cabalistic label, such as I had seen many a time in the handwriting of the numerous forgotten doctors my mul- tiplied diseases have baffled. The myste- rious characters inscribed on each would A study for have been an interesting study to the ar- thearchaol- , J ogist. chaeologist. I wish I had a memorandum of them. The gravest of all my doctors would have laughed at their queerness, their variety, and their multiplicity. Away they all ran the whole forty or fifty in infinite variation describing, it seemed Every fig- to me, every known figure in geometry, MrvM{wfr ^j st j nct an( j j n combination. Sometimes I thought their movements described the orbits of the solar system better than any planetarium I had seen. Then in a long curved line they ranged themselves, the first in the procession being the tiniest, and the last the most gigantic as big as Gibbon's snuff-box that he tapped so grace- muff-box. .. . 1-111 fully, and a pinch from which he always let fall at just the right moment to empha- size his story. In that long serpentine line how they did crawl about ; then wrig- A Club of One 163 gled and twisted into all sorts of contor- tions and convolutions; then stretched themselves into something like order again. Their speed was interesting their revo- lutions, I mean. The big ones had stately lutions ' movements, like the great wheels of great engines. There was an expression of power in their slowness, and of apparent contempt for the little bustling fellows that had to be constantly hurrying to keep up. Then they were all mixed up the little ones and the big ones together. Big and ut- They were so involved that I could not tell one from another ; and the wonder was that there was no collision. Then they went leaping and leaping, till it ap- peared there must be a universal smash. I trembled for the consequences. Then the tops or coverings came off, and mingled miscellaneously with the other parts, show- ing fresh vigor in the chase, as so many fresh foxes. The boxes that had contained so many incompatibles fused together in close companionship. The opium was not at all disgusted with the lobelia. The jalap and the pleasantest of all soothing rem- edies affiliated, as if they had been friends since Galen. Then they ranged them- selves again into long serpentine lines 164 A Club of One Playing at leap-frog. Dance of the Pill- Boxes. the boxes and the lids separate. After al- ternate slow and rapid movements, they began playing at leap-frog the smallest being vaulted by the next in size, until the whole lines were changed the most dimin- utive bringing up the rear, and the largest leading the column. And so they went on with their varied and indescribable gyra- tions and convolutions ; when, suddenly leaping into one another, they nested them- selves snugly together ; then as quickly and mysteriously disappeared, and the re- markable scene was ended. No Roman emperor in the Flavian amphitheatre was ever better entertained. I call it The Dance of the Pill-Boxes. Talks of books exclu- sively. By appointment, the doctor spent a couple of hours with me last night in my library. I had anticipated his visit in every way that I could, and was glad to see him. The place was cheerfully illumi- nated, and the wine was the best that my cellar afforded. I was pleased to see that he was disposed to be attentive and recep- tive, as my purpose was to talk to him of books exclusively, with a view to enlight- ening him as to some of the best, and to show him what a comparatively small sum A Club of One 165 of money would put him in possession of them. For, time and again, he has lamented to me his lack of intelligence on the subject, as well as of the requisite cash to buy, even though he knew what books he should purchase. To convince him that a TO convince good proportion of the famous books that have been produced could be put into a small space, and that not a very large amount of money would be necessary to purchase them, I caused two hundred or more volumes to be placed together in one contents of case with seven shelves, each of four feet m in length, that he might be convinced by seeing, as well as by my didactic instruc- tion. To have the whole before us as a sort of object-lesson, our easy chairs were so placed that we could view the collection to the best advantage. The first shelf The first (the lowest) was just filled with the Bible, ***** in four volumes (Samuel Bagster & Sons, London) ; Webster's Unabridged Diction- ary ; Anthon's Classical Dictionary ; and Appleton's Cyclopaedia, 16 volumes ; (22 volumes in all). The second shelf was The second filled with octavos (some of them of two ** and more volumes) of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Homer, Dante, Virgil, Faust, Chambers' Encyclopaedia of English Liter- 1 66 A Club of One ature (London and Edinburgh) ; and Bry- ant's Library of Poetry and Song. These are all good editions, well printed, and ap- propriately (as I said) in octavo. The other five shelves contained the following, named in the order in which the books happened to be placed, and not according to preference. They are in crown octavo, I2mo, and i6mo a very few of the lat- ter only such as could not be conven- iently purchased of a larger size. Plato's Republic and Phaedo, 2 volumes (from Bohn's Standard Library). Emerson's A beautiful Prose Works, 2 volumes. Montaigne's Essays, 4 volumes (the beautiful Riverside edition exquisite letter-press the proof- sheets of the perfect pages having been read by Mr. H. O. Houghton himself, long before he attained the head of the pub- lishing house of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company). Swift's Works, 6 volumes. Goldsmith's works, 4 volumes. Seneca's Morals (London, 1702). Carlyle's Essays, Sartor Resartus, and French Revolution, 6 volumes. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (his masterpiece). Holmes's Autocrat, and Elsie Venner, 2 volumes (the cream of his genius.) Curtis' s Prue and I (a little vol- ume of exquisite sketches). Uncle Tom's A Club of One 167 Cabin. Souvestre's Attic Philosopher, and Leaves from a Family Journal, 2 volumes (suited to serene moods). De Quincey's Opium Eater. Sydney Smith (a volume of selections, including the Peter Plymley Letters). Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae One volume (a volume made up from the five original volumes, containing most that is best and of general interest). Miss Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Arabian Nights. Lamb's Essays, and Talfourd's Life and Letters, 3 volumes. Pascal's Thoughts. Epictetus (a beautiful edition, Little, Brown & Com- pany). La Rochefoucauld's Maxims (Wil- liam Gowans, Nassau Street, that in- A i i i % . i ingbiblio- terestmg bibhopolist, known to so many poiist. book-lovers : I could gossip about him for an hour). Irving's Sketch-Book, Knick- erbocker's History of New York, and Life of Goldsmith, 3 volumes (his complete works would fill a whole shelf). Foster's Essays. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Mill on Liberty. Gil Bias. Burns (with marginal glossary, John S. Marr & Sons, Glasgow, the most convenient edition A conven- of Burns for English readers that I know). Godwin's Caleb Williams. Junius's Let- ters. Crabb Robinson's Diary. Tragedies of ^Eschylus. Butler's Hudibras. Bun- 168 A Club of One yan's Pilgrim's Progress. Cicero's Offices, etc. (a single volume from Bonn's). Hol- bein's Dance of Death. Macaulay's Es- says, 6 volumes. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Darwin's Voyage. Selections from Savage Landor, by Hillard. (A rich little book.) Boswell's Johnson, 4 vol- umes. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 volumes. (It would not do to be without Burton.) Reveries of a Bachelor. (This Books that is another of those little books that have flavor, and must live.) Disraeli's Curiosi- ties of Literature, 4 volumes. Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici, A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals, and Urn Burial, in one attractive volume, imprint, Ticknor & Fields). Fenelon (a selection from his writings, Munroe & Company, Boston and Cambridge). Robinson Crusoe. Wilhelm Meister. Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Da- vid Copperfield, and Tale of Two Cities, 3 volumes. (His humor, his pathos, and his power are best displayed in these three masterpieces.) Letters of Madame de Se- vigne". Letters of Lady Mary Wort- ley Montagu. Rasselas. Walton's Angler. White's History of Selborne. Thoreau's Walden. Charles O'Malley. Of the Imi- tation of Christ. Fielding's Tom Jones A Club of One 169 and Humphry Clinker, 2 volumes. Pic- ciola. Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying, 2 volumes. Book of Scottish A good book Songs (a volume of the Illustrated London " Library, an admirable collection, and a beautiful book). Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane States, and Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 2 volumes (selections from the works of the old worthy). Confucius, and the Chinese Classics. Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects (the volume con- ,, , -r- i r T t \ ticle on the taming the article on the Book of Job). Book of job. Vanity Fair and The Newcomes. Cooper's Spy. Balzac's Petty Annoyances of Mar- ried Life (one of the most amusing and acute books in literature, whatever may be thought of its tone and spirit). Rabelais. Ecce Homo. (Why has the Professor never published the promised companion volume ?) Spence's Anecdotes. Vathek. Lewis's Monk (a queer, crazy old copy, printed on different fonts of type, and con- taining pictures of the veritable devils). Sel- den's Table Talk. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, 2 volumes (to get the Life of Savage : why don't some publisher print A suggestion it separately?) Aristotle's Ethics. Lu- *** ther's Table Talk. Hazlitt's Round-Table volume (containing Conversations of North- i jo A Club of One cote). Life of John Brown of Ossawat- tomie. Montesquieu, 4 volumes. Don Quixote. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. Kinglake's Eothen. Jerrold's Mrs. Cau- dle's Curtain Lectures, and Chronicles of Clovernook, 2 volumes. Evelyn's Diary. Pepys' Diary. The Spectator, 8 volumes (a beautiful edition, Little, Brown & Com- pany). Southey's Wesley, Nelson, and The Doctor, 3 volumes. Machiavelli's Prince. Plutarch's Lives, 4 volumes. Plutarch's Morals, 4 volumes. Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Lon- don, 1708). La Bruyere's Characters (Lon- don, 1702). Erasmus's Praise of Folly, and Colloquies, 2 volumes (London, 1711. These authors should be read in old edi- Blowing the tions. It is like blowing dust off vellum). * '~ Coleridge's Table Talk. Sir Thomas More's Utopia. (How the figments of his imagi- nation have been realized in the later life of the race ! Original thinking seems like commonplace.) Scott's Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, and Guy Mannering. (These three embody the magician's genius, and save space and money.) Bulwer's My Novel. Reynard the Fox. Lover's Le- The story gends and Stories of Ireland (to get the story of Barny O'Reirdon). Joubert's A Club of One 171 Thoughts. Parton's Voltaire, 2 volumes. Manzoni's Betrothed Lovers. John Wool- man's Journal. Paul and Virginia ("the swan-song of old dying France"). Alger's Oriental Poetry. Sterne's Works, 4 vol- umes. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, 2 volumes. (A work that is destined, as Swift would say, to "go down the gutter of time," for its boldness and originality, notwithstanding its burning by the Middle- sex grand jury.) And lastly (deserving to The last, but be mentioned amongst the first) Xeno- ITst. phon's Memorabilia of Socrates. In all, something like 220 volumes. As to cost, I once saw a rich Californian pay as much for sets of Irving and Cooper in tree calf as would have bought the whole collection, including a respectable case to put it in. My friend the doctor wears a stone in his shirt-front, which makes him ridiculous with sensible people, and excites the cupid- ity of every ruffian that meets him, that would buy the whole precious collection twice over. I believe I shall call it My "My Grind- Grindstone Library. What mind would not be sharpened by consulting it ? And where, pray, would one begin to weed ? I think I shall have an artisan inscribe the significant name at the top, just under the 172 A Club of One moulding. It is not likely that many ap- plications will be made to borrow from it. One of my best friends is an old-time man type. Quaker, of the John Woolman type, which is rapidly disappearing. He is an excellent man, and a call from him always refreshes me. He carries an atmosphere of peace and good-will with him. He is an honest man. He is what he seems to be, and seems to be what he is. No wonder that such men, under the leadership of George George FOX. Fox, should have disturbed the compla- cency of conformists in England. Macau- lay describes the tempest of derision the sturdy shoemaker raised by declaring that it was a violation of Christian sincerity to designate a single person by a plural pro- noun, and that it was an idolatrous homage to Janus and Woden to talk about January and Wednesday. Teufelsdrockh, in Sartor, pronounces the most remarkable incident in modern history, not the Diet of Worms, still less the battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other battle, but George Making to Fox's making to himself a suit of leather. !t of a " Sitting in his stall ; working on tanned leather. . . , . , hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rub- A Club of One 173 bish, this man had nevertheless a living spirit belonging to him." It is very evident that Macaulay had anything but a warm side for the sect that by its zeal and direct- ness and courage had done so much toward turning all that had been considered estab- lished upside down. South ey, too, never let an opportunity pass without hitting the rev- olutionary peace sect a blow. And Cole- ridge how merciless! as exhibited in a passage in his Table Talk. He is speaking of modern Quakerism, be it remembered unlike the original type, exemplified by my worthy and amiable friend. " Modern Quakerism," he says, " is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches ; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveter- ate bark alone. Bark a Quaker, and he is a poor creature." One of the most distin- guished ministers of the Society of Friends in America at an early day thought it necessary, when speaking in his Journal of a morning walk outside Geneva (where he 1 74 A Club of One was tarrying in the interest of his society), to apologize for taking a look at Geneva Lake and the mountains. " I walked," he says, " out of the city (Geneva) and viewed Asceticism, the Alps and the lake ; this I did for the sake of the walk." The peculiar style of the sect more in vogue a few years ago than now is shown in the letter pro- nounced to be authentic : " Friend John : I desire thee to be so kind as to go to one of those sinful men in the flesh called an at- torney, and let him take out an instrument, with a seal fixed thereto ; by means where- " The out- of we may seize the outward tabernacle of George Green, and bring him before the lambskin men at Westminster, and teach him to do as he would be done by : and so I rest thy friend in the light. M. G." Their sermons, too, were sometimes very peculiar and concise, though their meetings were apt to be silent. On one occasion, when a large audience was assembled, the only words spoken were by a lady very A short ser- deliberately : " Help yourselves, and your friends will like you the better." I have heard my mother say that she once went several miles, on horseback with her two boys, to a Quaker meeting in the woods, and that the remarkable sermon preached at A Club of One 175 the time (by a lady too) had made such an impression upon her that she could never forget it. It also was delivered in a very measured, deliberate manner, and did not disturb in the least the stillness, serenity, and solemnity of the meeting : " Beware of Another stui puff edupness ! " Its brevity and conciseness made it memorable ; and my mother often repeated it with effect when her half-dozen self-conceited boys were most intolerable. The early hostility of the sect to music was a part of their religion, and was very decided. When Jenny Lind appeared in a y enn yLind. Western city in 185 1, and a limited number of the society in a neighboring town had announced their intention of hearing the " Nightingale," the conscientious " head of the meeting" "felt a concern" to arise in fourth day (Wednesday) meeting and ad- monish his hearers that there was a "for- eign girl named Jane Lynde trapesing up and down the land whose voice was said to provoke the birds to sing, and he would warn Provoking . 111 f * the birds to especially the young of the meeting to be- sing. ware the wiles of all such worldly persons." One John M., a Friend of like strictness, was shocked to learn that his son-in-law, Jonathan T., who kept a country store in a village some miles away, was selling musical 176 A Club of One instruments. The venerable good man, after a night of prayers and tears, deter- mined to visit his son-in-law, and break up the sinful traffic. Arriving in front of his son-in-law's store, he called him into the street refusing peremptorily to go in, till the object of his visit was accomplished. "Jonathan ! " sternly spake John, " I hear thee keeps musical instruments for sale ; does thee ? " "A few ; but " The zeal- ous John interrupting demanded that they be produced at once, to be destroyed promising to refund whatever they had cost. They were accordingly brought out, and in the presence of the interested wan the crowd in the street with the manner of a *t??ph!i of a prophet of Israel destroying the images of Baal he proceeded violently to tear out their tongues. They were jews-harps ! It is recorded that some one at a dinner- table in England remarked that Landseer must have been once a dog himself, as he Landseer^ could see his resemblance to one ; remark- resemblance , , . ....... to a dog. mg at the same time upon the distinguished painter's arrogant manner, love of contra- diction, and despotic judgment. I have myself remarked the resemblance referred to in some of the portraits of the great A Club of One 777 man ; and thought how natural that he should have painted his canine friends so perfectly. Charles Darwin's resemblance D . likeness to a to a monkey is certainly very marked : one monkey. engraving I have seen of him makes him the very image of a well-known species of ape. His long and peculiar investigations may have had the effect to develop the likeness in him, latent perhaps in us all. For three generations we know that the Darwins were engaged in much the same line of study. Erasmus, the grandfather of Charles, must have been deep in " species " questions, for he had inscribed upon a seal which he used the significant words, "om- nia ex conchis " all from oysters. Per- haps there never existed a more honest ^ investigator than Charles Darwin, and it is impossible to estimate the effect of his investigations upon society and thought. The new civilization of Japan seems to a great extent to have accepted his conclu- sions and teachings, along with those of kindred contemporary scientists and phi- losophers ; and it is said that many of the most enlightened of that strange people are interested in them above everything else even above Christianity itself. Whatever men may think of Darwin's 178 A Club of One facts and philosophy, they must admire his industry, his enthusiasm, and, above all, A remark- his candor. He even went so far as to ffcStto? make a list of thirty-four authors and works in which he finds his theory of evo- lution more or less distinctly foreshadowed. As to his conclusions, always so guardedly expressed, what close observer has not time and again been led to suspect the pos- sible truth of them ? Once I took an in- telligent monkey by the hand (extended to me at the request of the keeper), and look- ing him in the face, I found it impossible A feeling of to repress a certain feeling of brotherhood. Its little palm felt like the shriveled hand of an infant, and its eyes had a look of comprehension and affinity. I shall never forget the sensation that came over me on the occasion. Important events, a hundred of them, have occurred to me since that time, and been forgotten, but that leave- taking with the poor performing man-ani- mal is as fresh as any event of yesterday. Hawthorne Hawthorne, after observing a sick monkey M* * in the Zoological Gardens in London, went home and wrote in his note-book, " In a future state of being, I think it will be one of my inquiries, in reference to the mys- teries of the present state, why monkeys A Club of One 179 were made. The Creator could not surely have meant to ridicule his own work. It might rather be fancied that Satan had perpetrated monkeys, with a malicious purpose of parodying the masterpiece of creation." Swift must have been struck in some such way, or we should not have had the remarkable passage in Gulliver, relating to the conduct of the gigantic monkey in Brobdingnag as big as an ele- phant which seized the famous traveler in his bed-room, and carried him to the top of an out-house, sixty feet high, where the monster was seen by hundreds in the court, sitting upon the ridge of the build- ing, holding Gulliver like a baby in one of Guiiiver in his fore-paws, and feeding him with the other, by cramming into his mouth some victuals he had squeezed out of the bag on one side of his chaps, and patting him when he would not eat. Wilkie Collins must have been impressed with the appar- ent close relationship existing between man and monkey or he could never have had his hero, Count Fosco (a great creation), Cffunt Foscc do as he did with the organ-grinder in the story. Fosco stopped at a pastry-cook's, went in (probably to give an order), and came out immediately with a tart in his i8o A Club of One preference- hand. An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shriveled monkey was sitting on the in- strument. The count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely The counts handed the rest to the monkey. " My poor little man ! " he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch ! " The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benev- olent stranger. The count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed on. When Frederick the Great made short ex- cursions he was in the habit of carrying Voltaire with him. In one of these Vol- taire was alone in a post-chaise which fol- lowed the king's carriage. A young page, whom Voltaire had some days previous caused to be severely scolded, resolved to have revenge ; accordingly, when he went before to cause the horses to be prepared, he told all the postmasters and postillions that the king had an old monkey, of which he was so fond, that he delighted in dress- ing him up like a person belonging to the court, and that he always made this ani- mal accompany him in his little excursions ; that the monkey cared for no one but the Voltaire. The king's monkey. A Club of One 181 king, and was extremely mischievous ; and that, therefore, if he attempted to get out of the chaise, they were to prevent him. After receiving this notice, all the ser- vants of the different post-houses, when- */ " ever Voltaire attempted to get out of the carriage, opposed his exit, and when he thrust out his hand to open the carriage- door, he always received two or three sharp blows with a stick upon it, accompanied with shouts of laughter. Voltaire, who did not understand a word of German, could not demand the least explanation of these singular proceedings ; his fury became ex- treme, but it only served to redouble the gayety of the postmasters ; and a large crowd constantly assembled in consequence of the page's report, to see the king's monkey, and to hoot him. Throughout the journey, things passed off in this fash- ion ; but what completed the anger and vexation of Voltaire was, that the king thought the trick so pleasant, that he re- fused to punish the inventor of it. This story is set down in Madame de Genlis' Monkeys Memoirs. Monkeys form an article of food ' food throughout tropical America, and the difference between feeding upon them and man-eating, to the susceptible traveler, is 182 A Club of One not very apparent. The meat is tough, and keeps longer than any other in that climate. They boil it with unripe papaws to make it tender. The Indians told Gib- bon that " the tail is the most delicate part wbea the hair is properly singed." In Japan, monkey meat is prepared in a chaf- ing-dish with onions and sweet sauce. A traveler in that country says he found it tender, but almost tasteless. At one inn he saw the freshly severed head of a very large monkey hung to the chain supporting an iron pot for cooking. It was ghastly, Painfully grim, and pallid, painfully human in color and expression, and the dead face seemed to change in the rising smoke. He had no desire to taste monkey after that. In- stances of imitativeness in monkeys are sometimes curiously suggestive of human- ity. In the following instance the conse- quences were disastrous. It is a story of a monkey brought home by a sailor to his A household wife. The animal got to be a household pet. pet, and was always about the kitchen when the woman was at work. The yard was full of chickens, and every now and then they would come into the room to pick up crumbs. Whenever they became too much of a nuisance, the good woman A Club of One 183 would throw a few grains of powder in the fire to frighten them out with the flash. One day the sailor's wife was away, and the monkey undertook to manage the kitchen. He watched the chickens very His conduct. carefully, and when the kitchen was pretty well filled with them, he took down the powder-horn and threw it all in the fire, blowing himself and everything sky high. I once saw a swinging monkey in a zoolog- ical garden who seemed to consider and estimate the angles and distances with as much apparent accuracy and skill as the greatest expert in a gymnasium. He never missed his purpose a single time, and his aims were as varied as they were interest- ing. Lord Sandwich trained up a huge baboon that he was fond of to play the part of a clergyman, dressed in canonicals, and make some buffoon imitation of saying grace. One of the species of baboon called the mandrill, was well known in London some years ago. He was called " Happy Jerry." He was excessively fond of gin yerry ' and water, and of tobacco. An ape, one of the gibbons, produces an exact octave of musical sounds : ascending and descending the scale by half-notes, so that this mon- key " alone of brute mammals may be said 184 A Club of One A minute tail. to sing." Various kinds of monkeys make laughing or tittering sounds when pleased. when much The face of one species at least, when much enraged, grows red. Mr. Sutton carefully observed for Darwin a young orang and chimpanzee, and he found that both always closed their eyes in sneezing and coughing. Keepers of monkeys in zoological gardens say that a common disease with them is softening of the brain. Many of the pe- culiar diseases of the females are the same as in the human species of the same sex. A writer in Nature says that in the human skeleton a minute tail is to be seen, though none is visible in the unmutilated adult body. In the earliest stages of our exist- ence, however, there is for a short time a real tail of considerable relative extent, but in the development of the body it becomes stationary, so as rapidly to be- come altogether overshadowed and hidden. " Many years ago (says Darwin) in the Zo- ological Gardens, I placed a looking-glass on the floor before two young orangs, who, as far as it was known, had never before seen one. At first they gazed at their own images, with the most steady surprise, and often changed their point of view. They then approached close, and protruded Two young orangs. A Club of One 185 their lips towards the image, as if to kiss it, in exactly the same manner as they had previously done towards each other, when first placed, a few days before, in the same room. They next made all sorts AH sorts of of grimaces, and put themselves in various grn ' attitudes before the mirror; they pressed and rubbed the surface ; they placed their hands at different distances behind it ; and finally seemed almost frightened, started a little, became cross, and refused to look any longer." When Dr. Duchesne gave to a monkey some new article of food, it ele- E ievatedit* vated its eyebrows a little, thus assuming e y ebrow5 - an appearance of close attention. It then took the food in its fingers, and, with low- ered or rectilinear eyebrows, scratched, smelt, and examined it, an expression of reflection being thus exhibited. Some- times it would throw back its head a little, and again with suddenly raised eyebrows reexamine and finally taste the food. But more remarkable than all is the seeming consciousness of evil, and apparent instinct instinct of of Satan, that these very human animals, under certain circumstances, seem to ex- hibit. Turtles and serpents are sometimes put into the cells of the poor captives. They do not much care for the turtles, but the snakes are the very devil. i86 A Club of One Certain so- called sci- ences. Depressed. As I walked up and down my library to-day, stopping occasionally to turn over musingly some old well-worn volumes, I could not help wondering if the time spent upon certain so-called sciences was not about all lost. Like every other young man of studious habits, I thought I must know the mind, and so I read metaphysics. I read Locke, until my brain was weary, trying to comprehend his theory of "in- nate ideas." I was depressed, feeling acutely that my failure to comprehend him was on account of my own mental inabil- ity. I read Dugald Stewart ; and though delighted with his didactic eloquence, I did not understand his system as I thought I should. I read Sir William Hamilton : the result was the same. I was discouraged especially with my own estimate of my- self. Sometimes I lamented that I had read these books at all ; but never could tell why, till, years after, I met with the judgment of Thomas Carlyle, which per- ^^ rested my uneasy m i n d. This study of metaphysics, I say, had only the result, after bringing me rapidly through different phases of opinion, at last to de- NO right i>e- liver me altogether out of metaphysics. I found it altogether a frothy system, no Carlyle. A Club of One 187 right beginning to it, no right ending. I began with Hume and Diderot, and as long as I was with them I ran at atheism, at blackness, at materialism of all kinds. If I read Kant I arrived at precisely op- posite conclusions, that all the world was spirit, namely, that there was nothing ma- terial at all anywhere ; and the result was what I have stated, that I resolved for my part on having nothing more to do with metaphysics at all." I thought, too, with all other studious boys and young men, that I must become acquainted with what Archbishop Whately called " catallactics, or the science of exchanges " (political ** economy). I read Smith, and Mai thus, and Ricardo, and others ; and as I pro- gressed the less I knew, or the more I became lost in the endless complication of conflicting calculations and theories. All the time vaguely suspecting not having the courage or ability to conclude, with De Quincey that " nothing could be postu- lated, nothing demonstrated, for anarchy Nothing <& as to first principles was predominant." And I was never quite at ease with my- self on the subject till I encountered Dan- iel Webster's dictum as to the so-called science, very clearly expressed in a letter i88 A Club of One Not a sci- ence. Lord, have Christian charity. to a friend : " For my part," says the great lawyer, and statesman, and profound thinker, " though I like the investigation of particular questions, I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and in- variable that their aggregate constitutes a science. I believe I have recently run over twenty volumes, from Adam Smith to Professor Dew ; and from the whole, if I were to pick out with one hand all mere truisms, and with the other all the doubt- ful propositions, little would be left." Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner. In my wretched physical and moral state, I like to think upon the pos- sible good man, as I find him outlined in George Herbert, Goldsmith, and others, to say nothing of the New Testament. I like to think of that pleasant Sunday morn- ing, when I heard the good Episcopalian, Dr. Muhlenberg, preach a sermon in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian church, in behalf of a Lutheran mission. The theme was Chris- tian charity. And the spirit of the Teacher was in every word. Once or twice he lost his place from (it appeared to me) pure ex- A Club of One 189 altation of feeling being lifted up out of himself into a higher medium. Rapt, trans- ported, for the moment, his countenance showed him to be. The heaven of his hopes, and the heaven of the hopes of all, he was in a sense already enjoying. The - falL smile of the Lord was the feast of his soul. The difficulty of finding his place again, seemed only to be the difficulty of readjust- ment. The good man ! And many and many good men there are, though not so conspicuous. The bigot's calculation, that nine hundred and ninety-nine of every thou- ca sand souls are predestined to be lost, is not the calculation of the possessor of a human heart which knows itself, or feels at all a tithe of the irremediable that lies about it. A right-minded man has some conscious- ness of human weakness and of the difficulty of the human lot neither of which exist- ent verities should for a moment be lost sight of while considering any system of philosophy, government, or religion espe- cially. Religion is for men, as government Religion. and philosophy are ; and as men cannot violently be made over, they must be taken as they exist. Any system must fail that requires the impossible. A true Christian Church has been defined to be an associa- /po A Club of One tion of men for the cultivation of knowl- edge, the practice of piety, and the promo- tion of virtue. The temple of theology is ever crumbling. Extremes and nice dis- tinctions in faith are being more and more forgotten or subordinated ; and while a common basis is being discovered, it is felt to be wise by the sects to " press differ- ences tenderly. Religion is too essential to cling to any dogma." It is the amalgam Christian- of Christianity that is destined to fuse the churches. The elements are slowly prepar- ing, to be inevitably compounded. There are encouraging signs. A recent traveler in Europe speaks of visiting an immense brown church in Heidelberg, with imposing steeple, and statues in the niches on the walls, which he supposed to be a Catholic cathedral. On entering he observed that it was divided in two parts by a wall in the centre, and discovered that one end of the church was Catholic, and the other end Lutheran, both worshiping under one roof. imagine a i Imagine an American village of five thou- sand souls, with a dozen or more sects of Christians, all worshiping together in one temple. How soon the different sects would become ashamed of their petty differences, and what a power such a compound organ- A Club of One 191 ization would become. It would soon be an influence from the centre to the ends of the earth. As it is, the different sects all claiming a common purpose find it impossible to hold a few meetings together without bickering. How the devil laughs The devil at all such proceedings, and rejoices at aus every new device to divide his enemies. Whenever in any religious faith, dark or bright (says a recent writer), we allow our minds to dwell upon the points in which we differ from other people, we are wrong, and in the devil's power. This is the es- sence of the Pharisee's thanksgiving Tke Phari . " Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other %f v * men are." At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them ; and the moment we can agree as to anything that should be done, kind or good (and who but fools could n't ?) then do it ; push at it together ; you can't quarrel in a side-by-side push ; but the mo- ment that even the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their pug- nacity for piety, and it 's all over. Chris- tianity, said Warburton to Spence, seems to have received more hurt from its friends than its enemies. By their making things A Club of One part of it, which are not so ; or talking of things as very material to it, which are very little so. The sects discuss one an- other somewhat as they use whetstones, Coleridge said, to sharpen their moral dis- crimination and consciences. But the bat- tle-cries of Sobieski and Ibrahim are not for this day. All the world knows with Swift, that you may force men, by interest or punishment, to say or swear they be- lieve, and to act as if they believed : you can go no further. Beliefs, therefore, are less and less regarded, in comparison with Christianity itself. Men, it has been said, special?*- rnay be tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the pat- terns of all earth's thousand tribes. " 'T is not the dying for a faith that 's so hard, Master Harry," said the trooper [Dick Steele], " 't is the living up to it that is dif- ficult." Ah ! what mighty intellects have been employed in the world to divide it, in matters of religious faith, and what multi- tudes of lives have been sacrificed to keep Gloomy the- it divided ! When the gloomy and awful theologies become curiosities, how prodig- ious will the intellects of their inventors A Club of One appear ! Robert Hall pronounced Jona- than Edwards the greatest of the sons of men. "That he was a man of extraor- dinary endowments (remarks Dr. Holmes, in his defense of the doctors against the clergy) and of deep spiritual nature, was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as con- vincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumaniz- ing ideas were mixed up with his concep- tions of man, and so many diabolizing at- tributes embodied in his imagination of attributes ' the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, ' are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vi- pers '; when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of, prepared for ' the bulk of mankind '; when he cruelly pictures a fu- f ture in which parents are to sing hallelu- jahs of praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they are to lie ' roasting ' forever, we have a right to say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expres- A burden, sions, is a burden and not a support in refer- ence to the creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever ap- proached the horrors of this conception of human destiny ? It is not an abuse of lan- guage to apply to such a system of beliefs ptZ^Sm. the name of Christian pessimism." It has been said that if the Christian apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, could return to Rome they might perchance inquire the name of the Deity who is worshiped with such mysterious rites in its magnificent temple: at Oxford or Geneva they would experience less surprise ; but it might still be incum- bent on them to peruse the catechism of the church, and to study the orthodox com- mentators on their own writings and the words of words of their Master. It certainly would appear to them that the sects had departed far away from the teachings and example of the Founder, and that love to God and love for man were in danger of being buried forever under the rubbish of dogmas and A Club of One 195 symbols. At the same time it would ap- pear very evident to them that materialism was speciously deified, and that mammon in all its forms was exalted, if not worshiped. It was only the other day that I happened to be looking out of the window, and wit- A signifi- cant scene. nessed, at the corner of the street opposite, the meeting of a priest and a poor working- man of his church. The uncovered head of the poor man immediately and obeisantly went down in reverence half-way to the pavement; while the priest made no move- ment, nor gave the slightest sign of recog- nition. The priest and the one rich man The priest e . . .. . and the rich of his congregation next met, an instant man. after, near the same spot. The scene was significantly changed. The rich man in this instance gave no sign of recognition that could be perceived ; the priest it was the recognized priest of the Most High that bowed down abjectly to Mammon. No man ever existed, I suppose, who did not regret the acquaintance and association of certain persons, on account of their par- ticular bad influence over him. The evils that men suffer and inflict are so often di- rectly traceable to the influence and exam- i . n Evilcom- ple of evil communications, that reflective 796 A Club of One persons find it difficult to separate them. One remarkable man it was my ill-fortune to know intimately for a time in my early life, of whom I am constantly reminded in all my evil thoughts and short-comings. His unusual ability and nature made him a very dangerous acquaintance. There was so much subtile penetration in his dis- paraging observation, and so much genius in his malice, that he was fascinating per- force. For forty years I have been trying to rid myself of the effects of a few months' association with him, and for forty years regretting that I ever met him. The con- siderable distinction he afterwards attained did not much modify his character; so that often aston- I have often been astonished that he died in his bed a natural death that some- body did n't kill him, or that he did n't kill himself. I have wondered, too, that, as he was always secreting venom, he did not die of an excess of it. In Brazil, an opin- ion prevails that whoever has been bitten by a boa-constrictor has nothing to fear from any other reptile. Adapting the lan- guage of Sydney Smith applied to O'Con- nell What a happy condition that of the man who had suffered abuse from my ven- omous acquaintance. It did not enter into A Club of One 797 the head of Goethe that the publication of Werther would be followed by an epidemic of suicide. It would have surprised Dick- suicide* ens to learn that a copy of Martin Chuzzle- wit, open at the chapter describing the suicide of Jonas Chuzzlewit, was found by the side of a man who committed suicide in New York. Evil influence, like the "damned spot," will not "out." In a cor- ner of the Black Museum in London hang the clothes of a clergyman who murdered his wife some years ago. So carefully had the murderer washed his trousers and his coat-sleeves, that the blood-stain^ could Biood~staitu. only be discerned with difficulty at the time of the investigation. But since the coat and trousers have been hanging on the Black Museum's walls, the stains have come out close and thick. "We many times notice that here," the visitor is told. It deserves to be noticed (says Hawthorne, in his English Note-Books) that some small figures of Indian Thugs, represented as en- Indian gaged in their profession and handiwork Tkus *' of cajoling and strangling travelers, have been removed from the place which they formerly occupied in the part of the Brit- ish Museum shown to the general public. They are now in the more private room, 198 A Club of One and the reason of their withdrawal is, that, according to the chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian Thugs. Said James T. Fields in a lecture on Fiction in Brooklyn, " I re- cently paid a visit to the Pomeroy boy, who was sentenced to be hanged for killing three children, but whose sentence was afterward commuted to imprisonment for life. I asked him if he read much. He said that he did. ' What kind of books do you read ? ' said I. * Mostly one kind,' he Dime novels, said ' mostly dime novels.' ' What is the best book you have read ? ' I asked. ' Well, I liked Buffalo Bill best/ he replied. ' It was full of murders, and pictures about murders.' * Well,' I asked, 'how did you feel after reading such a book ? ' ' Oh,' said he, ' I felt as if I wanted to do the same.' ' Another remarkable instance of the direct influence of bad literature upon boys, I remember to have seen referred to authentically in a Western newspaper. Murdered The bodies of three murdered women were discovered in a house in a village. They were considerably decomposed lime hav- ing been sprinkled over them ; and dime novels of the most objectionable character women. A Club of One 199 were found in the room, which had to all appearance been read by the murderer af- ter the murders had been committed. The suspected murderer was a son of one of the murdered women, and committed sui- cide soon after the crime was discovered. It was proven, at least, that he had bor- rowed the novels. He was but eighteen years old. Sin and bile, in the judgment of the ex- sin cellent Hannah More, are the two bad things in this world. As to the unmiti- gated badness of the latter, my sufferings for the last few days fully attest. My whole system is inundated by it, and my complexion is a miserable yellow. My doc- tor talks wisely about it, but does not re- lieve me. My mind, too, is affected by it, and I find it very difficult indeed to think clearly or healthfully. Ah ! exclaimed an intellectual giant suffering as I suffer from this distressing malady what a dis- mal, debasing, and confusing element is that of a sick body on the human soul or A sick body thinking part ! But for the counteracting influence of my good books, I know not what I should do. On the front of the first national library founded in Egypt was en- 2oo A Club of One graved, "The medicine of the mind." The body, however, is often a despot, and the thinking part is in such subserviency that it can only very feebly exert itself. In all countries, says Leigh Hunt, the devil (to speak after the received theory of good and ill) seems to provide for a due dimi- nution of health and happiness by some- thing in the way of meat and drink. The northern nations exasperate their bile with beer, the southern with oil, and all with butter and pastry. I would swear that Dante was a great eater of " fries." Poor Buttered Lord Castlereagh had had his buttered toast served up for breakfast the day he killed himself. The opinion of a book, it has often been remarked, depends very much on the state of the liver. It has even been suggested that some charitable reformer may have been sagacious enough to discover a way to fuse sects and harmo- nize Christians, but that the liver of the book -taster consigned the desideratum, Therespon- above every other, to oblivion. The respon- S frinlers. sibility of printers ! A very eminent phy- sician firmly believed that he had more than once changed the moral character of a boy by leeches to the inside of the nose. On the other hand, the mind affects the A Club of One 201 body as directly, and sometimes very curi- ously. George Eliot wrote to one of her friends, " If you were to feel my bump of acquisitiveness, I dare say you would find it in a state of inflammation, like the ' ven- eration' of that clergyman to whom the phrenologist said, ' Sir, you have recently Religion , . ,. T T i -i and science. been engaged in prayer. Jean Paul ob- served that the stomach of the butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. Sin and bile ! Bile and sin ! It has been said, by a profound student of human nature, that when an elevated mind looks into the abyss of evil beyond a certain depth, it is The abyss of seized with a vertigo, and can no longer n distinguish anything. In the Crystal Pal- ace, Hawthorne saw nothing in the sculp- tural way, either modern or antique, that impressed him so much as a statue of a nude mother by a French artist. In a sit- ting posture, with one knee over the other, she was clasping her highest knee with both hands ; and in the hollow cradle thus formed by her arms lay two sweet little TWO sweet . . . * 1111 Mtle babies. babies, as snug and close to her heart as if they had not yet been born, two little love blossoms, and the mother encir- cling and pervading them with love. But an infinite pathos and strange terror were 202 A Club of One given to this beautiful group by some faint bas-reliefs on the pedestal, indicating that Cain and the happy mother was Eve, and Cain and Abel the two innocent babes. Cain and Abel ! Abel and Cain ! Alas ! There is, says a writer upon mental disease, a des- tiny made for a man by his ancestors ; and no one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his organization. The power of hereditary influence in determin- ing an individual's nature, which, when plainly stated, must needs appear a tru- ism, has been more or less distinctly recog- nized in all ages. Solomon proclaimed it to k e the S p ec i a i me rit of a good man that he leaves an inheritance to his children's children ; on the other hand it has been declared that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. It was a proverb in Israel that when the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children's teeth are set on edge ; and it was deemed no marvel that those whose fathers had stoned the proph- ets should reject Him who was sent unto them " Ye are the children of those who stoned the prophets." Complaint having Caligula's been made to Caligula that his daughter, daughter. ^ WQ vears o ^ scratched the little children A Club of One 20 j who were her play-fellows, and even tried to tear out their eyes, he replied, with a laugh, " I see ; she is my daughter." Ri- bot speaks of a native New Zealander, in- telligent and curious, connected with the chief families of his country, who accom- panied an English traveler to London for education, but owing to the imperfect de- Education velopment of his mind he could under- VSm ******* stand nothing of European civilization, and interpreted everything according to the notions of a savage. Thus, when a rich man passed, he would say, " That man has a good deal to eat," unable to understand wealth in any other way. The missionary societies sometimes adopt Chinese infants Chinese i*. and have them educated in European insti- fan tutions at great expense ; they go back to their own country with the resolve to prop- agate the Christian religion, but scarcely have they disembarked when the spirit of their race seizes upon them ; they forget their promises, and lose all their Christian beliefs. It might be supposed that they had never left China. The fact itself (says Mill, in his great little book On Liberty), of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake 204 A Club of One this responsibility to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing un- less the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. Especially, another has re- marked, no one who transmits defects of his or her own, whether physical or moral, can help feeling that he has wronged the child in handing them down to it. The compunction must be particularly painful when the defect is moral. When a father in his son, or a mother in her daughter, Perversities sees weaknesses and perversities outcrop- cro&ng. p m g W j 1 j c j 1 they c i ear iy recognize as old personal property, they must doubt whether they are the persons who should punish the young offenders ; and it is not difficult to fancy that children, by some dim kind of instinct, partially discover the injustice of being scolded for teeth set on edge by the very people who have eaten the sour Grievous in- grapes. It seemed grievous indeed to Charlotte Bronte" that those who have not sinned should suffer so largely. I have been thinking how very remark- able is the thoroughly enlightened, culti- vated man of this age of the world : he is A Club of One 205 a marvel. Open and receptive to every A suggestion and influence, every thing has taught him, as every thing is constantly teaching him. Intelligence is in the air, and flies on the wings of the wind. It is not possible for him to avoid breathing and absorbing it. There is a character in A character Dickens, or somewhere in fiction, whose lnDlckens - occupation was in the wine-cellar amongst the butts and pipes ; he never drank any- thing, but he was always comfortable by absorption. So it is at this day with an open, healthy nature ; it has but to open its eyes and ears and pores (so to speak) to be enlightened. What we call study is study not as not so necessary to intelligence as once. Every thing is an object-lesson, and teaches irresistibly. The results of genius and skill are everywhere, and they have been so intelligently worked out that they tell the processes of development. Machines are so much like the men they compete with and so often eclipse that they com- municate. Printed pages are to be had for the picking up. Science opens its doors gratuitously. Art everywhere adorns and Art^adoms instructs. A good brain cooperating with a good heart, with all opportunities and facilities at every turn, must develop good 206 A Club of One character and sovereign enlightenment. The possible man, of full growth, under such encouraging and stimulating circum- stances, is pleasant to contemplate. On an island in the sea, one bright Sunday morn- A good rep- ing, not many years ago, I met a good resentative specimen, representative specimen of high manhood, which sometimes appears to my memory, filling it full, to the exclusion of everything beside. It was after breakfast that I had A favorite sauntered down to my favorite rock, where I delighted to lounge when the weather was favorable. It sloped gently to the west, and was sheltered from the morning sun by the ledge behind. It overlooked a Thediminu- diminutive bay (the size of this library tivebay. i i , . , , . room), which was always particularly inter- esting to me at low tide. At such times the kelp lay exposed, and specimens of star-fish and sea-urchins were sometimes visible. The puff of the locomotive was seen but not heard ten miles away, on the mainland. In favorable atmospheres I thought I could discern Mt. Washington, defining itself as a cloud in the distance. It was an interesting spot to dream at, as it is an interesting spot to dream of. I A gentleman found my rock occupied, by a gentleman in gray say of fifty years of age ; but A Club of One 207 there was room enough for two, he in- sisted, and moved over. I had never seen him before ; but his manner and atmos- phere of gentility and good-breeding were assuring, and I sat down. Something was said of the morning, or the tide, or a pass- ing sail. The little bay, that he had just The little discovered, seemed as interesting to him as it was to me. Its situation and accesso- ries were referred to in a compendious sen- tence or two, that denoted his full compre- hension of them. His observations upon the rock formations visible, showed him familiar with the theories and conclusions tl of geology. His reference to a sea-urchin had the observation and intelligence of a naturalist in it. He called particular atten- tion to a long serpentine line of kelp, and Kelp. in a few sentences gave me an amount of information of the remarkable sea-weed that I have never wholly forgotten. How it grows in lower latitudes on every rock from low water mark to a great depth, both on the outer coast and within the chan- nels ; how every rock near the surface is buoyed by this floating weed, thus af- fording good service to vessels navigating of service to near the stormy land, and saving many a w one from being wrecked. Three hundred 208 A Club of One Creatures that would ferish. and sixty feet is the length it had been known to attain. He compared the great aquatic forests of the southern hemisphere with the terrestrial ones in the intertrop- ical regions, and said that if in any country a forest was destroyed, he believed not nearly so many species of animals would Effects of its perish as in the former, from the destruc- tion of the kelp. Amidst the leaves of this plant numerous species of fish live, which nowhere else could find food or shel- ter ; with their destruction the many cor- morants and other fishing-birds, the otters, seals, and porpoises, would soon perish also ; and the. Fuegian savage, the misera- ble lord of that miserable land, would re- double his cannibal feast, decrease in num- bers, and perhaps cease to exist. From considering the remarkable plant of the sea, and discoursing upon it, he naturally passed, in contrast, to the ship of the des- ert. Alive or dead, his information was, The camel, that almost every part of the camel is ser- viceable to man : her milk is plentiful and nutritious ; the young and tender flesh has the taste of veal ; a valuable salt is ex- tracted from the urine ; dung supplies the deficiency of fuel ; and the long hair, which falls each year and is renewed, is coarsely A Club of One 209 manufactured into the garments, the furni- ture, and the tents of the Bedouins. It struck him, as it strikes the traveler, as something extremely romantic and myste- rious, the noiseless step of the camel, from m* noise* the spongy nature of his foot ; whatever be - the substance of the ground sand, or rock, or turf, or loose stones you hear no foot- fall ; you see an immense animal approach- ing you, stilly as a cloud floating on air ; and, unless he wears a bell, your sense of hearing, acute as it may be, will give you no intimation of his presence. The Arabs, he said, could live five days without vict- uals, and subsist for three weeks on noth- ing else but the blood of their camels, who His blood. could lose so much of it as would suffice for that time, without being exhausted. Thence the interesting man passed in the same intelligent way to the populations of the East to the effects of commerce and Western ideas upon China and Japan ; to the opening of Africa, the wonderful dis- coveries there, and their probable influ- ence upon European trade and emigration. Thence to the adaptation of governments Adaptatio to the new growth of nations. How all the religions were perceptibly changing in a similar manner. Noting, as he passed, 2i o A Club of One some of the effects of the rushing progres- sion upon the habits and dispositions of men increased restlessness, growing ma- terialism, and apparent diminution of faith being of the few results suggestively re- ferred to. His acute and comprehensive comprehen- , . .. sive. view his easy passage from one remote part of the world to another reminded me of a sermon I had lately heard preached by Dr. Hitchcock certainly one of the most vigorous pulpit thinkers in the world The whole m which the whole round earth was r tfoeye! h made to appear apart to the hearer's eye ; he turned it about as a teacher turns his revolving globe, and pointed to spots here and there, dimly or conspicuously lighted by Christianity and Christian civilization all with so much freedom, simplicity, and intelligence, that it hardly occurred to me to guess, much less to conceive the prodigious diligence and exhausting study that had been necessary to the presenta- tion of the subject so comprehensively, so easily, and so naturally. This many-sided, A cosmopoii- cosmopolitan man, on my rock, talked of finance, but not of the machinery of the banker's office ; of commerce, but not of lines of railway or steamships ; of govern- ment, but not of office-holders or of office- A Club of One 211 holding ; of polity, not politics ; of religion, not churches. I could not have guessed, at the end of his conversation, in what part of the world he lived ; with what political party, if any, he acted ; with what denomi- nation he worshiped ; in what occupation he had made his money. He had asked He asked no questions, nor anticipated any. In all ^r^td- that he had said, there was no show of **. vanity, bigotry, intolerance, dogmatism, or aggressiveness. He had talked and I had listened. There was that in his manner which said, It happens so ; next time a re- verse ; you will talk and I will listen. The bell at the hotel called us to a late dinner. At the table, a glass of wine was brought A glass of to me by a servant from another part of w the dining-hall, with the name and compli- ments of my companion of the morning. I returned my own name, of course, with the usual acknowledgment. After dinner he came to me as if he had known me always, extending his hand, and calling me by name saying, that he wished to present me to his wife. With the accomplished His wife. lady I walked up and down the piazza for a few minutes, when my acquaintance (it seemed to me for ages in another state of being) made his appearance again, regret- 212 A Club of One ting to take leave, as they were to embark in an hour for New York, to sail thence by Wednesday's steamer for Europe. I have never seen or heard of the remarkable man since ; yet he made such an impression upon me, and I remember him so distinctly, that I cannot help setting him down as a specimen of the thoroughly enlightened and cultivated man referred to in the be- ginning. The business The business of reforming re-forming ine* * making over how interesting ! An occupation for saints, philosophers, and heroes. The instinct to unmake and re- make is very prevalent, and develops early. Only now and then a man is found who is not a born reformer. Himself perfect, the reformer would have everybody like him- self. If a hundred persons were stopped at haphazard in the streets of Paris, says Dumont, and a proposal were made to them to take charge of the Government, Ninety-nine ninety-nine would accept it. Mirabeau ac- of 'one hun- 1,1 r i dred. cepted the post of reporter to the com- mittee on mines without having the slight- est tincture of knowledge on the subject. Men enter upon politics like the gentle- man who, on being asked if he knew how A Club of One 213 to play the harpsichord, replied, " I cannot tell, I never tried, but I will see." Socrates used to say, that although no man under- takes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest, yet every one thinks himself suffi- Every man ciently qualified for the hardest of all trades, * that of government. As I have said, the instinct to govern re-form unmake re-make re-create develops very early. A boy only thirteen years old, who had been reading newspapers of one party till he became impressed with the belief that the opposite party was in every way and in every thing essentially and totally corrupt, asked his mother, impatiently and indig- nantly, "Why don't the Government abol- ish the Democrats ? " His question was radical, and in the spirit of the reformer. A little legislation, in his estimation, was all that was necessary. Bolingbroke, though, understood such matters very differently. " It is a very easy thing to divine good laws ; the difficulty is to make them effec- tive. The great mistake is that of looking TJ^ great upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by. laws." "Publish few edicts," said Don Quixote to Governor Sancho Panza, " but let them be good ; and, above all, see that they are well observed ; 214 A Club of One for edicts that are not kept are the same as not made, and seem only to show that the prince, though he had wisdom and author- ity to make them, had not the courage to insist upon their execution. Laws that threaten, and are not enforced, become King Log** like King Log, whose croaking subjects first feared, then despised him." Canon Wilberforce, in a sermon in York Minster, speaking of the impossibility of restraining men's appetites and passions, said, " This is not the platform ; and yet, before this altar, I declare that there is nothing at which the devils laugh more than at an act of parliament." " Man," said Douglas Jer- rold, " will not be made temperate or virtu- ous by the strong hand of the law, but by the teaching and influence of moral power. Acts of par- A man is no more made sober by act of parliament than a woman is made chaste." There is a speech by the blunt Duke du Sully to an assembly of popish ladies, who were railing very bitterly at Henry the Fourth, at his accession to the French The Duke throne ; "Ladies," said he, "you have a ^wfrphh very good king, if you knew when you are well. However, set your hearts at rest, for he is not a man to be scolded or scratched out of his kingdom." " The A Club of One 215 idea of reform," says Judge Brackenridge, in Modern Chivalry, " delights the imagi- nation. Hence, reformers are prone to re- Reformers form too much. There is a blue and a bet- ter blue ; but in making the better blue, a small error in the proportion, of the drug, or alkali, will turn it black." Leigh Hunt, when a very young man, wrote a comedy which was never acted or pub- lished. It was entitled A Hundred a Year, and turned upon a hater of the country, who, upon having an annuity to that amount given him, on condition of his never going out of London, becomes a hater of the town. "I cannot, for my traryeffeci ' part," says an acute essayist, " understand how the frame of mind which is eager for proselytes should survive very early youth. I would not conceal my own views, but neither could I feel anxious to thrust them upon others ; and that, for the very simple reason that conversion appears to me to be an absurdity. You cannot change a man's thoughts about things as you can change the books in his library. The mind is not The mind i a box, which can have opinions inserted and extracted at pleasure. No belief is good for anything which is not part of an organic growth and the natural product of 216 A Club of One a man's mental development under the va- rious conditions in which he is placed. To promote his intellectual activity, to encour- age him to think, and to put him in the way of thinking rightly, is a plain duty; Ready-made but to try to insert ready-made opinions opinions not . i i i t'^r i to be in- into his mind by dint of authority is to con- tradict the fundamental principles of free inquiry." " Attempt to shape the world ac- cording to its poetry," said Dr. Riccabocca, "and you fit yourself for a mad-house. The farther off the age is from the realiza- tion of their projects, the more the philos- ophers have indulged them. Thus, it was amidst the saddest corruptions of court A fashion in manners that it became the fashion in Paris to sit for one's picture, with a crook in one's hand as Alexis or Daphne. Just as liberty was fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander were founding their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp all states save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy Atlantis. Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over sir Thomas his head, Sir Thomas More gives us his \he axe ^er Utopia." The error of Jeremy Bentham his head. and of John Locke, it has been remarked, A Club of One 2/7 was in supposing that they in their closets could frame de novo a code for the people. The latter prepared a code more than a century ago for one of the North Ameri- can colonies, which proved a signal failure. Burke, upon being conducted by Erskine to his garden, through a tunnel under the road that divided the house from the shrub- bery, all the beauty of Kenwood (Lord Mansfield's place) and the distant prospect suddenly burst upon them. "Oh," said Burke, "this is just the place for a reformer c ' all the beauties are beyond your reach." " Sun ! how I hate thy beams ! " exclaimed the sick philosopher ; but the sick philoso- pher could not tear the sun out of the sky. This old world has been several thousand ages a part of the universe, and she cannot be easily jostled out of her place. The race of man has been as long developing ; and to go back to the beginning to begin the work of working it over re-forming it re-creating it would discourage any but courageous reformers of the aggressive type, who, in their zeal and sublime confi- dence, think all things possible of accom- plishment. At the beginning they must begin, to be thorough. The evil accu- mulating for thousands of ages must be 218 A Club of One Pretty and Christian. Movement not always Progress-, The arch- enemy. radically eliminated, to make room for the good that was lost at the Fall. Hobhouse saw it differently. He once said to Hunt that " the only real thing in life was to be always doing wrong, and always to be for- given for it." Commenting upon the re- mark, the poet asks, " Is not that pretty and Christian ? " Whoever would transform a character, it has been well said, must undo a life history. The fixed and un- changing laws by which events come to pass hold sway in the domain of mind as in every other domain of nature. As things are, it is not always easy to know what is right or best. Movement is not always progress. Parry, in his Polar expedition, while urging northward along the ice his sleighs and Samoyede dogs, found, when the sun, bursting through the fog, revealed his position, that he had been unconsciously traveling several degrees to the southward, since he had been journeying on a mass of floating ice borne by the ocean currents to the south. The devil the principle of evil whatever you call him or it all men agree in regarding the arch-enemy. Resist him until resistance becomes habit, and he will not much trouble you ; permit him liberties, and you are his, body and A Club of One 219 spirit. King Zohak, as Southey relates it, gave the devil leave to kiss his shoulders. Instantly, two serpents sprang out, who, in the fury of hunger, attacked his head, and attempted to get at his brain. Zohak pulled them away, and tore them with his nails. But he found that they were insep- arable parts of himself, and that what he p a rt so f was lacerating was his own flesh. Alas ! Alas ! I am troubled now with Troubled my eyes. Fortunately, with all my varied y. hls and multiplied diseases and ailments, my eyesight has remained unimpaired, until within a very few days. My doctor is not quite clear as to the trouble, and suggests that I should consult a specialist. The thought of blindness terrifies me. To sit in darkness the remainder of my days, without the resource of vision to fortify me against innumerable distresses, would be awful. Without my usual supply of honey from my library I should starve. Honey from My faculties must be generously fed, and the food they require is of the richest and daintiest varieties. " My mind my king- dom is." As I sit in my easy-chair, how- ever rheumatism may rack me, my eye can run along the shelves, and my mind enjoy 22O A Club of One the society of a century of worthies of all the ages. With the companionship of the gods, the gout, even, may be endured. The gods The gods sympathize. They all have sympathize. ]^ nown suffering, and derision, and isola- tion. "To live alone is the chastisement of whoever will raise himself too high.'* Tortured, imprisoned, beheaded, many of them were. " Awful is the duel between man and the age in which he lives ! " Starved often, they fed on ambrosia, and Jacob and are immortal. Jacob, with the heavens for a tent, and the stones for a pillow, saw the angels ascending and descending. Daniel, declining the king's wine and meat, and living on vegetables and water, interpreted the king's vision. Generous memory must supply me for a while. My doctor says I must not read : that a little reading, even, is perilous. And writing the least he absolutely prohibits. This record of my idleness, therefore, must be laid aside. Sorry ; for this essaying at composition is more nearly an amusement than anything that I attempt. In a limited way I shall A cherished be driven to adopt a scheme that has long been in my mind. I long have thought that if I were a rich man I should have a dozen competent persons, or more, to read A Club of One 221 for me. They should be selected for their special fitness, and paid generous salaries, that their minds might be entirely at ease, and wholly at my service. The world abounds in scholars, who would be glad of scholars to such employment. Books would be sup- *. * plied to them liberally. Twenty thousand dollars a year I should enjoy expending in that way. I should then feel that I might be fairly acquainted with the moral, intel- lectual, and material progress of the whole earth. Certain of the sciences I should have men employed upon of the highest of the high- order that could be obtained. Certain parts " of the world I should have explored and studied to the utmost extent that books would permit. Eleemosynary and mission- ary efforts of every description I should have known and tabulated. The great growth of the Great West known to The Great geographers only a few years ago as the ** Great American Desert I should have noted as intelligently as swift progress would allow. I should have a man for South America and the Pacific Islands, south who should report to me every sign of Amertca - growth and civilization in those isolated regions. I should have another for Africa, who should be specially competent for that 222 A Club of One most interesting field. The rivers and The Dark the lakes of the Dark Continent he should explore with Livingstone and Stanley, and others, and carefully set down every new settlement, with its resources and pur- poses, as far as could be ascertained. In- dia should be invaded and ransacked by a china. competent reader. And China, with all her peculiarities, philosophies, and supersti- tions, should be carefully and searchingly studied. China ! that strange country, where "objects terrestrial and celestial, objects visible and invisible, and objects real and imaginary, are made the recipients A strange of homage ; but among them all there is not one the object of the worship of which is to make the devotee more pure and more sincere, more honest, more virtuous, or more holy. The object whose attain- ment is desired is always selfish, sensual, or secular." And Japan a more wonderful country still I should keep a man, or two men, constantly engaged in investigating. If practicable, a thoroughly intelligent per- son who had traveled in that country should be employed. The decaying religion of the Japanese he should be instructed to comprehend if possible ; and especially he should be instructed to observe whatever 1 he gloom- iest fatalism. A Club of One is taking its place. The awful poverty of that old country where humanity is such a drug, and where the graveyards are greater in population than the towns ; yet Dai- koku, the god of wealth, is in every house and worshiped by every inhabitant, with body and spirit ; where the children are taught the gloomiest fatalism from the ear- liest moment of comprehension ; where soap is not used, only a little sand in a running stream ; where the children do not cry ; where the process of milking a cow is unknown ; where such necessary articles as pins are never seen. A traveler in the interior of the country for hundreds and hundreds of miles never heard a child NO chad cry ! " Such queer crowds," she says ; " so cried ' silent and gaping, remaining motionless for hours, the wide awake babies, on the moth- ers' backs and in the fathers' arms, never crying." " In Yusowa," she writes, " I took my lunch in a yard, and the people A scene. crowded in hundreds to the gate, and those behind being unable to see me, got ladders and climbed on the adjacent roofs, where they remained till one of the roofs gave way with a loud crash, and precipitated about fifty men, women, and children into the room below, which fortunately was va- 224 A Club of One Scant cos- tumes. A strange sight. fan. cant. Nobody screamed ! " The scant cos- tumes of a large proportion of the popula- tion in the interior are curious. The same traveler reports that the younger children wear nothing at all but a string and an am- ulet. " Could anything," she asks, " be a stranger sight than a decent-looking, mid- dle-aged man, lying on his chest in the veranda, raised on his elbows, and intently reading a book, clothed only in a pair of spectacles ? " Many of the men in the A hat and a rice-fields wear only a hat, with a fan at- tached to a girdle. As the lady rode through Yokote, a town of ten thousand souls, the people rushed out from the baths to see her, men and women alike, without a particle of clothing. Art, too, I should have a competent reader in an artist if possible to report the achievements of the greatest painters and sculptors. The Literature, novel fields of literature should be scoured ; in a word, every thing knowable, present and past, should be known, as far as was practicable, and communicated to me, at stated hours, to suit my convenience intelligently, enthusiastically, exuberantly. Twenty thousand dollars a year expended in that delightful way, for enlightenment, entertainment, and occupation, I should consider cheap and magnificent pleasure. Art. $20,000 a year. A Club of One 225 "The burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world/' " Through mys- Through tery to mystery." There is nothing beau- 7^7^ tiful, sweet, or grand in life, it has been said, but in its mysteries. The sentiments which agitate us most strongly are envel- oped in obscurity : modesty, virtuous love, sincere friendship, have all their secrets, with which the world must not be made acquainted. Hearts which love understand each other by a word ; half of each is at all times open to the other. Innocence itself innocence is but a holy ignorance, and the most inef- ****., fable of mysteries. Infancy is only happy because it as yet knows nothing ; age mis- erable because it has nothing more to learn. Happily for it, when the mysteries of life are ending, those of immortality commence. Heraclitus, it is known, com- posed a book On Nature, which he depos- ited in the temple of Diana. The style in which it was written was purposely ob- scure, that it might be read only by the learned, he being afraid, if it were to af- ford entertainment to the people generally, that it would soon become so common as to procure him only contempt. This book, says Lucretius, gained extraordinary repu- tation, because nobody understood it. Da- 226 A Club of One rius, king of Persia, having heard of it, wrote to the author to induce him to come and explain it to him, offering him, at the same time, a handsome reward and a lodg- ing in his own palace ; but Heraclitus re- fused to go. Swift's profound knowledge of human nature led him to envelop his publications in all the mystery possible. After the Tale of a Tub and Battle of the Books had been handed about in manu- script for years, they were published anon- ymously. Voltaire's latest French editors give a list of his one hundred and eight pseudonyms. The mystery and obscurity of The Divine Comedy gave it the inter- est and almost the importance of a new religion for a century or more. Steele says the art of managing mankind is only to make them stare a little to keep up their astonishment ; to let nothing be fa- miliar to them, but ever to have some- thing in their sleeve, in which they must Rabelais, think you are deeper than you are. Rab- elais struck terrible blows, then hid him- self in his humor. His general incompre- hensibleness was his strength with the multitude, which laughed without always knowing what it was laughing about the object satirized being presented in all sorts A Club of One 227 of disguises. The wisdom and beauty of Tristram Shandy : how few readers discover or appreciate them, compared with the greater number who delight in its nonsense and coarseness. The influence and fame of the Letters of Jimius were more the /**** result of the mystery of their authorship than of their essential ability. The fact that they have been attributed to so many is evidence that many were thought capa- ble of producing them. While books con- tinue to be printed upon the subject of their origin, and the wisest of men exercise themselves in speculating upon the same, copies of the famous Letters will multiply, The f and be thought necessary to every library, though the events which produced them have long ceased to be of much interest, except to the most curious student. What were romance - writing without mystery ? The story-writer must not only be ingen- ious in inventing his mysteries, but he must be skillful in carrying them, to suc- ceed with the public. Great is the mys- The mystery tery of godliness. In the attempt to know ' the unknowable, creeds have been pro- duced and sects organized. If its teach- ers had taught the practice of Christianity continually, and not expended themselves 228 A Club of One in developing systems of theology, all christen. Christendom would long ago have been dom would . . have been a united army against Satan. Quiet is thought to be proof of reserved force. The individual who keeps his own counsel is always overestimated by the public. The same is the case with the estate of a man who is careful to be out of debt. The lady who does not cheapen herself by careless association and much display, is invested and clothed by the public with every vir- tue. All the world acknowledges that fe- licitous reserve which La Rochefoucauld The mystery has called " the mystery of the lady." An air of success how imposing ! The world pays court to it unconsciously. Boswell said Beauclerk told a story with that air of the world that had an inexpressibly im- pressive effect, as if there were something more than was expressed, or than perhaps could be perfectly understood. The influ- A compound ence of what Grammont calls " a compound countenance. ... . . countenance, is not merely puzzling, it is powerful. Squeers, when introducing Nich- olas to his school, looked very profound, as if he had a perfect apprehension of what was inside all the books, and could say every word of their contents by heart if he only chose to take the trouble. Lord A Club of One 229 Thurlow carried himself with such a ma- jestic air that only the more intelligent ever asked themselves whether any one could really be as wise as Lord Thurlow al- ways seemed. Talleyrand was a mysteri- Talleyrand. ous character. No one, it appears, could even intelligently guess his motives or pur- poses. Suspicion, caution, wickedness, subtilty, alertness, were natural to him, at the same time they were so mysteriously hidden in the recesses of his character, that their existence as essential parts of him were hardly thought of. At the very time he was most ready for a deadly when ready spring, he appeared as quiescent as if all his faculties were dormant. " What does he mean by it ? " he asked, when a cele- brated diplomatist fell ill. The report of the death of George III. having just obtained circulation throughout Paris, a banker, by hook or by crook, managed to obtain an audience with Talleyrand, who was then Minister for Foreign Affairs. The banker, who, like many of his financial brethren, j wished to make a good hit, and thought the present a favorable opportunity, had the indiscretion to reveal to the minister the real object of his visit. Talleyrand listened to him without moving a muscle 230 A Club of One of his phlegmatic visage, and at length re- plied in a solemn tone, " Some say that the king of England is dead, others say that he is not dead; but do you wish to know my opinion ? " " Most anxiously, Not very prince ! " " Well, then, I believe neither ! 9ry ' I mention this in confidence to you ; but I rely on your discretion : the slightest im- prudence on your part would compromise me most seriously." Madame Flamelin one day reproached M. de Moutron with his attachment to Talleyrand. " Good God ! madame," replied M. de Moutron, " who A compu- could help liking him, he is so wicked ! " It was a maxim of his, that a man should make his d^but in the world as though he were about to enter a hostile country ; he must send out scouts, establish sentinels, and even be upon the watch himself. Madame de Stael said of him, " The good Maurice is not unlike the manikins which children play with dolls with heads of cork and legs of lead ; throw them up which way you please, they are sure to fall on their feet." Motley describes the mys- terious, the Jesuitical, the powerful Philip II. at his writing-table, " scrawling his apos- tilles." "The fine, innumerable threads which stretched across the surface of Chris- A Club of One 231 tendom, and covered it as with a net, all converged in that silent cheerless cell. France was kept in a state of perpetual France in civil war; the Netherlands had been con- avii verted into a shambles ; Ireland was main- tained in a state of chronic rebellion ; Scot- land was torn with internal feuds, regularly organized and paid for by Philip ; and its young monarch * that lying king of Scots,' as Leicester called him was kept in a leash ready to be slipped upon Eng- land, when his master should give the word ; and England herself was palpitating England with the daily expectation of seeing a dis- ciplined horde of brigands let loose upon her shores ; and all this misery, past, pres- ent, and future, was wholly due to the existence of that gray-haired letter-writer at his peaceful writing-table." But there was a man in Holland, more mysterious, more taciturn, more impenetrable, named William the Silent, who somehow con- wuiiam the trived, every night, while the wily monarch slumbered, to have his writing-desk care- fully examined, its contents intelligently noted, and scrupulously reported the most interesting secret in history. George Washington was a mysterious personage, washing- His nature was impenetrable : it was not * A Club of One comprehended, and is not, to this day. No A charmed wonder he was believed to have a charmed life. Some years after the battle known as Braddock's Defeat, an old Indian sa- chem visited Washington, and told him that he was one of the warriors in the ser- vice of the French, who lay in ambush on the banks of the Monongahela, and wrought such havoc in Braddock's army. He de- clared that he and his young men had singled him out, as he made himself con- spicuous riding about the field of battle with the general's orders, and had fired at him repeatedly, but without success; whence they had concluded that he was Protected under the protection of the Great Spirit, spirit. ' had a charmed life, and could not be slain in battle. The mysterious and the incom- prehensible were readily believed to be superhuman. An eminent English woman has remarked it as a singular fact that whenever we find out how anything is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it. The greater the igno- rhe power ranee, the greater the power of mystery over it. Ives, head-jailer while Leigh Hunt was a prisoner, was a self-willed, ignorant creature. He was not proof, however, against a Greek copy of Pindar, which he A Club of One happened to light upon one day amongst Hunt's books. " Its unintelligible charac- ter," says the poet, " gave him a notion /% that he had got somebody to deal with who might really know something which he did not. Perhaps the gilt leaves and red mo- rocco binding had their share in the magic. The upshot was, that he always showed himself anxious to appear well with me, as a clever fellow, treating me with great civility on all occasions but one, when I made him very angry by disappointing him in a money amount. The Pindar was a mystery that staggered him. I remember " very well, that giving me a long account one day of something connected with his business, he happened to catch with his eye the shelf that contained it, and whether he saw it or not, abruptly finished by observing, 'But, mister, you knows all these things as well as I do.' " Naturalists refer to the mysterious hypocrisies of nature, and how Them ys t e - they repeat themselves with more or less r , , ture. completeness and consciousness in the mental life of man. What, it is asked, is the vast force exerted by habit in mould- ing men into the likeness of the society to which they belong, except a device for making them safe by preventing them from A Club of One being conspicuous, just as the small green caterpillar is made safe and unconspicuous by its resemblance to the color of the A suggestive leaves on which it feeds. And is there really any human analogy for the harmless snake and the sphinx caterpillar, which succeed by appearing to possess dangerous qualities which they have not, or more dangerous qualities than any they really Hypocrisy, have ? Hypocrisy is the most specious, the most artful, the most impenetrable, the most mysterious of all the crimes, or sins, or vices. It was only pardonable, one when one of would think, " when theological controver- the necessa- . . sics were converted into engines of oppres- sion, which filled prisons, ruined families, and exiled virtuous men, rendering hypoc- risy one of the necessaries of life." When deliberate and voluntary, it has marvelous advantages. " It is an act," says Moliere, "of which the imposture is always re- spected ; and though it may be discovered, no one dares to do anything against it. All the other vices of man are liable to censure, and every one has the liberty of boldly attacking them ; but hypocrisy is a A privileged privileged vice, which with its hand closes everybody's mouth, and enjoys its repose with sovereign impunity." But how odi- A Club of One 235 ous to God are hypocrites, is denoted in the force of that dreadful expression, And his portion shall be with the hypocrites. "You will find in the Holy Scriptures," says Sir Roger L' Estrange, "that God has given the grace of repentance to persecu- tors, idolaters, murderers, adulterers, etc., but I am mistaken if the whole Bible af- T %? sat* off or as no fords any one instance of a converted *%* hypocrite." &*** Yes ; I am a fogy, and not a reformer. While I cannot help lamenting certain ten- dencies in our civilization, I do not pretend to know a way of correcting or diverting them. Nor am I in any sense a preacher, in no sense a My physical disabilities and isolation pre- *** vent me from being anything but a spec- tator. I see, and muse, and rarely utter myself; knowing perfectly well that my views of many things, when I express them, are sure to be considered distempered. It is possible, I admit, that my conclusions ffu cott f u . may sometimes be colored by my dis- sums ' tresses ; but what are they in influence, compared with the active man's prejudices, jealousies, and interests ? If the sick man be more or less a coward, and only able to utter feebly his half-truths, the well man Half-truth*. A Club of One is ambitious, aggressive, and very much a bully. With his two big fists, ,and his round veins filled with hot blood, he crushes his way, as often in defiance of reason as in compliance with it. I here who sit in solitude, deploring, am as apt to be right, The lusty possibly, as the lusty partisan or bigot, Ugot. with his battle-axe of violence. " Reason," says Goethe, " is the property of an elect few." Soundness, equanimity, and true courage, are its legitimate offspring. Few there be that are healthy, in the full sense, and fewer that are wise, and they only at times, under favorable conditions. As an- Passion the ger is madness, so is passion the opposite opposite of reason. of reason. At one time, the passionate man is Herculean and inflexible ; at another, he is powerless and plastic. Confucius said, " I have not seen a firm and unbend- ing man." Some one replied, " There is Sin Ch'ang." " Ch'ang," said the Master, " is under the influence of the passions ; how can he be pronounced firm and un- bending ? " And this leads me to speak one of the of one of the modern tendencies in my modern ten- . . mind when I began this paragraph. It is, to unman men, to disindividualize them. Morals therefore, as a result, it seems to me, less and less, are based upon personal A Club of One responsibility. Man, in the old-fashioned view, was held a man, responsible per- sonally for his conduct. His ambition was rheamM- to breast the current, and to avoid being turned about, as the twig, by every little eddy. If he made the voyage successfully, there was heroism in him. Character was so much effort, and resistance, and endur- ance. Manliness was held to be accretive and cumulative. Every trial was thought to give another resource, and every con- quest to add new power. Each achieve- ment gave increased confidence. Growth was obvious, and calculable, and applica- ble. To cut the cable, and launch away from conventional helps and restraints, was the common ambition. The individual felt ** fettered and shorn, if dependent. Before he consented to surrender himself and be subordinate, he must be tried by trusts, perils, and calamities. He aspired to stand an individual man, responsible to all men Personal re- for all the manhood that was in him. Now, * the tendency is directly the other way, to underestimate, if not totally to sink, the individual. The theory is rapidly becom- ing ascendant that the business of Govern- ment is to take care of the citizen. Man is transcended by the machine, and he is organiza- tions. Individual- ity. A Club of One societies o/ disindividualized by societies of every sort. every sort. J The state educates him ; his social set gov- erns his conduct ; he admits his inability to take care of his earnings, and trusts the savings bank for extremities ; the insur- ance company provides for his family af- ter his death ; orders and organizations, ready-made, of every description, for every- thing, divine and human, to take charge of his soul, his body, and his estate, here and hereafter. Instead of boiling up individ- uals into the species, I would, with Jane Carlyle, draw a chalk circle round every in- dividuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity at the expense of ever so much lost gilt of other people's "isms." It seems to me as it did to Emerson, that the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communi- cable to other men, and sending it to per- form one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote "Not transferable," and " Good for this trip only," on these gar- ments of the soul. In the war of civiliza- tion upon man, the growth of the individ- ual is systematically discouraged. Soon he finds himself underestimating himself, in contrast with the omnipotence of organi- Not trans- ferable. A Club of One 239 zation and machinery ; then he surren- ders, and begins living for the day, to be warmed by the sun, and to be cared for as warmed by -I ^ sun " an incompetent. His efforts cease to be continuous and persistent. They are not consciously continued from yesterday, to be extended throughout to-morrow and to- morrow, until his work is accomplished or scheme realized. " The height charms, the steps to it do not ; with the summit in view, we walk along the plain." Thor- Thorough- oughness is less and less in vogue. The and less in VOgliC* world is filling up with Dick Tintos, who begin to paint without any notion of draw- ing. Sir Thomas Lawrence's drawings were so perfect that it seemed a sin to add any color to them. The same may be said of Lessing's. Dick was for a time patron- Patronized . , . for a time. ized, as the story goes, by one or two of those judicious persons who make a virtue of being singular, and of pitching their own opinions against those of the world in mat- ters of taste and criticism. But they soon tired of poor Tinto, and laid him down as a load, upon the same principle that a spoilt child throws away its plaything. Misery Misery took took him up, and accompanied him to a premature grave, to which he was carried from an obscure lodging, where he had 240 A Club of One been dunned by his landlady within doors, and watched by bailiffs without, until death came to his relief. Another So another President has been peace- fully inaugurated (with less than the usual measure of nonsense), after all the excite- ments and threats of a long period of par- tisan violence. I feel an impulse to expa- tiate about it all a little ; but my eyes are a perpetual warning. I cannot help, how- An acute re- ever, quoting an extremely acute remark of Harriet Martineau's, in her Society in America, published as long ago as 1837: " Irish emigrants occasionally fight out the battle of the Boyne in the streets of Phila- delphia, but native Americans bestow their apprehensions and their wrath upon things future, and their philosophy upon things past. While they do this, it will not be in the power of any President to harm them much or long." The dimen- Some nice calculations as to the dimen- sions of hell are to be found in the old books, and are interesting. Ribera, a cu- rious divine, calculated hell to be " a mate- rial and local fire in the centre of the earth, two hundred Italian miles in diam- A Club of One 241 eter." But Lessius, another divine, " would have this local hell far less, one Dutch mile in diameter, all filled with fire and brim- stone ; because, as he demonstrated, that space, cubically multiplied, would make a sphere able to hold eight hundred thou- Eight hun . sand millions of damned bodies (allowing each body six cubic feet), which would abundantly suffice." What a thing is the human brain! Phys- The human iologists tell us that a fragment of the gray substance of it, not larger than the head of a small pin, contains parts of many thousands of commingled globes and fibres. Of ganglion globules alone, according to the estimate of Meynert, there cannot be less than six hundred millions in the six hundred convolutions of a human brain. They are indeed in such infinite numbers that pos- sibly only a small portion of the globules provided are ever turned to account in even the most energetic brains. "What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest A mighty is the human brain ? " exclaims De Quin- * a ***** cey. " Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, fall upon it as softly as light. Each succession seems to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one A Club of One is extinguished." Coleridge tells a story of a servant maid, who, in a fever, spoke Remarkable Greek, Hebrew, and Latin ; Erasmus men- tions an Italian who spoke German, though he had forgotten that language for twenty years ; there is also a case recorded of a butcher's boy who, when insane, recited passages from the Phedre which he had heard only once. Every experience a man has, it is asserted, lies dormant within The human him : the human soul is like a deep and soul like a ' F ^ombrfiake som ^ re lake* of which light reveals only the surface ; beneath there lives a whole world of animals and plants, which a storm or an earthquake may suddenly bring to light before the astonished consciousness. A rush of a little alcoholized blood to The brain a the brain, the fumes of opium or hasheesh, delicate -ma- . . - chine. may produce the most surprising results in the mental machine. A few drops of bel- ladonna or of henbane give rise to fearful visions. A little pus accumulated in the brain, a lesion so slight that the microscope can scarce detect it, gives rise to mental disorganizations called delirium, insanity, monomania. Some years ago, for a change, I spent a few weeks at a country water- ing place. My condition, at the particular time I am to speak of, was peculiar, so A Club of One 243 strange indeed that I believed myself on the point of a dangerous fever. I had not At the point consulted a physician, from a lack of con- *H*%MT. fidence in the only one to be had nearer than the neighboring city. One night, as I lay in my bed, the full moon pouring in its light with such splendor and strength as to make the smallest objects in the room visible, I reflected in terror upon the risk of passing another hour without medical advice. My brain was so excited the whole mental machinery was run- The mental ning at such a tremendous speed that it ru****gai* . . . tremendous seemed in the very act of flying to pieces, speed. The thought of sleep in such a state was terrifying to me ; to remain awake was more terrible still. I employed every men- tal device I could think of to quiet myself, at the same time I did everything possible to preserve consciousness. In spite of me, while contemplating with such composure as I could the full round moon pouring its flood of light over me, my eyelids closed, and I thought I was present early at a At a great meeting in great meeting, assembling in Union Square union . . . Square. to take into consideration the condition of the Republic, and to devise such means as might be thought best to aid her in her distressing extremity. The civil war was 244 A Club of One Every inter' est in peril. Gathering, gathering. A hundred thousand. Brooding anxiety. A list of vice-presi- dents. raging in all its fury. Whole divisions of troops had been cut up, and the tempests had scattered the fleets. All interests seemed to be in peril, and every citizen was soberly anxious. I had gone to the great meeting early, as I have said. The people were gathering rapidly. They came in carriages, in omnibuses, in horse-cars, on foot. Every vehicle appeared to be crowd- ed, and to leave each one of its passen- gers. Soon the people filled the square, and then the broad pavements around the square, and then the broad streets around the broad pavements, and then the broad pavements on the opposite sides of the broad streets, and then the door-steps all round, and windows, and house-tops a hundred thousand. I looked under each hat rim and into each hat, and saw every face of every man and woman. I recog- nized the faces of many familiar acquaint- ances and the faces of many that I only occasionally saw. The same brooding anx- iety marked the multitude of visages. The vast assemblage was called to order by Mr. Elliot C. Cowdin, a well-known mer- chant. His little speech was neat and ap- propriate : I heard each word of it, and every intonation. A long list of vice-pres- A Club of One 245 idents was then read including more than a hundred well-known names represent- A hundred ,,. i 11 11 well-known mg intelligently all interests and all pro- names. fessions of the metropolis. The names most conspicuous for intelligence, and honor, and wealth, were all there, not one, it seemed to me, was omitted. I lis- Listened at- tened to each one attentively as it was read out. Now a conspicuous and hon- ored name in Wall street was pronounced. Now the name of a flour merchant in South street. Now a name well known in importing circles. Now a familiar name in " the swamp," the leather region. Jour- nalism was represented in a few famous . represented. names. The law, and medicine, and sci- ence, and architecture, and ship-building, and the pulpit, were all honorably repre- sented. Of course there was a generous sprinkling of politicians and office-holders. I thought, with what prodigious care the list had been selected, showing a minute acquaintance with every interest of the great town and its best representatives. Then followed a dozen or more resolutions, rheremark- . , r i i i vbfe resolu- expressing the sense of the people in the 0. Nation's extremity. They were read with much intelligence by the secretary, in a rich full voice, and appeared to be dis- 246 A Club of One Expressing a thorough, knowledge of the crisis. Cut and pol- ished. Surpris- ingly com- pendious. A distin- guished ex- senator. His remark- able power. tinctly heard by each one of the vast con- course. Every word seemed to have been considered and weighed, expressing from first to last a thorough knowledge and comprehension of the situation, in all its complication and gravity. I thought how long the writer of the resolutions must have carried them in his brain and in his pocket, and how many enlightened persons he must have consulted in the course of their preparation. They were cut and pol- ished with the skill of a lapidary. The veins of thought were as conspicuously ap- parent as the lines in a precious stone. Their scope was broad, and their observa- tion and purpose surprisingly compendious. Patriotism, experience, and statesmanship uttered themselves throughout. The re- markable resolutions would have filled one of the broad columns of The Tribune. Then Daniel S. Dickinson was called on for a speech. The distinguished ex-senator was at his best. I had never before seen his mind in such trim. He seemed able to say what he thought, and to express all shades and phases of meaning. There was logic that went to the marrow of whatever he touched, and sarcasm and wit that en- forced it. His remarkable power as an im A Club of One passioned orator never before had struck me as it did then. His speech was a long one, and more than senatorial in breadth and in- More than cisiveness. The old flag filled the heavens as Rodman Drake unfurled it there. The vast assemblage was electrified. Then Sal- mon P. Chase, the secretary of the treas- ury, was called out. Six feet in height, he appeared that day to be six feet six in his majestic proportions. He was indeed statuesque, as he stood for a time, in the midst of the vast human sea, seemingly un- impassioned, without uttering a word. His His great great two-storied brain seemed teeming train. full of important things to be said. I had heard him speak many times, and had lis- tened to him many an hour in conversa- tion. Always circumspect in speech be- fore an assembly, he appeared on this occasion to be unusually and excessively unusually deliberate' deliberate. His words, every one, had prodigious weight, as they fell, one after another, from his lips, in solemn cadence. The knowledge and experience of many years were close behind every sentence. The scholar, the jurist, the statesman, The scholar, ,., -ii'-i-i TT- the jurist. all were embodied in the orator. His thought was as clear as the mountain air, his passion was incandescent. Once or 248 A Club of One twice he unconsciously put back his head and gazed, as I have seen a lion look off apparently thousands of miles into his The saga- native jungle, the sagacious statesman r ious states- ***- seeming to see, through the smoke of bat- tle and turn of events, the upshot of the mighty struggle. His speech, also, was a long one, longer by half than any I had ever before heard him deliver. At the con- rhe great elusion of it the great audience dissolved, a ed! e( " '*' and I opened my eyes. I had not changed position in the slightest. The moon was riding the sky through the top of the same pane exactly as when I had seen it last, filling it full with its overflowing glory. The remark. The whole thing, in reality, would have op?rt e n a occupied four or five hours, and, reported, would have filled many columns of the daily journal. It is not possible that I could have been unconscious for more than a minute or two. I got up in terror, shut sends for a down the windows, and sent off for a heroic physician. What wonder that I express amazement at the human soul, and lose myself trying to conceive the perpetual growth and expansion of the immortal substance, when relieved and emancipated A hopeful from all earthly entanglements, limits interroga- . ... tion. tions and miseries ? A Club of One 249 My wife But I have scrupulously re- frained from gossiping about her in these hours of my idleness. She herself is too A tribute to wise to keep any sort of personal record. h ' As was said of the Duchess de Praslin's murder, " What could a poor fellow do with a wife who kept a journal but murder her?" INDEX OF PERSONS REFERRED TO About, 53. Adams, Dr., 188. Addison (The Spectator), 170. ^Eschylus, 148, 167. ^Esop, 148. Alexander, 96, 216. Alger, 171. Anthon, 165. Antoninus, Marcus, 148, 170. Arbuthnot, 140. Aristotle, 169. Ashbrook, Lord, 95. Atterbury, 159. Austen, Jane, 150, 153, 167. Bacon, 27, 165. Ballantyne, Serjeant, 91, 101. Balzac, 74, 169. Barbauld, Mrs., 152. Barnes, 75. Barrere, 119. Barrow, 149, 153. Beaconsfield (Disraeli), 30. Beattie, Dr., 97. Beauclerk, 228. Beckford (Vathek), 169. Bentham, 216. Bentley, 151. Beranger, 152. Blot, Madame de, 97, 98. Boerhaave, 73. Bossuet, 149, 160. Boswell, 97, 168, 228. Bourdaloue, 149. Brackenridge, 215. Bronte", Charlotte, 150, 167, 204. Brougham, Lord, 98. Brown, John, 170. Browne, Sir Thomas, 83, 149, 153, 168. Bryant, 166. Bulwer, 170. Buncle, John (Amory, Thomas), 81. Bunyan, 153, 168. Burke, 217. Burleigh, Lord, 59. Burns, 27, 64, 90, 140, 141, 142, 150, 167. Burton, 149, 168. Butler, 167. Byron, 78, 86, 91, 142. Byron, Lady, 77. Caesar, 91, 119. Calcraft, 91. Campbell, 73. Campbell, Dr., 57. Carlyle, 63, 66, 105, 119, 120, 150, 166, 1 86. Carlyle, Jane, 238. Carlyle, John, 31. Carnot, 119. Gary, 30. Casaubon, 57. Castlereagh, Lord, 200. Cervantes (Don Quixote), 70. Chalmers, 149. Charles (Charlemagne), 46. Charles II., 83. Chase, Salmon P., 247. Chillingworth, 183. Gibber, Colley, 97. Cicero, 64, 148, 160, 168. Cleopatra, 139. Coleridge, 29, 75, 88, 134, 150, 170, 173, 192, 242. Collins, Wilkie, 179. Columbus, 73. Confucuis, 108, 169, 236. Conti, Prince of, 97, 98. Cooper, 57, 169, 171. Cooper, Sir Astley, 129. Cottenham, Lord, 94. Cowdin, Elliot C., 244. Cowper, 140. Crabbe, 74. Curtis, 166. Dana, 168. 252 Index of Persons referred to Dante, 30, 31, 3?, 44, 144, 149, 153, 154, 165, 200. Darius, 225. Darwin, 168, 177, 184. De Foe (Robinson Crusoe), 168. De Quincey, 150, 153, 167, 187, 241. Dew, Prof., 188. Dickens, 150, 168, 197, 205. Dickinson, Daniel S., 246. Diderot, 187. Disraeli, Isaac, 149, 168. Dodsley, 75. Donne, 153. Dore", 30, 32, 36, 73. Drake, Rodman, 247. Dryden, 89. Dumont, 212. Edge worth, Richard Lovell, 90. Edwards, Jonathan, 193. Eldon, 113, 156. Eliot, George, 201. Elizabeth, Queen, 85. Emerson, 26, 55, 107, 150, 166, 238. Epictetus, 148, 167. Erasmus, 170, 177, 242. Erskine, 87, 88, 152, 217. Esquirol, 24. Euripides, 153. Evelyn, 170. Fabius, 108. Farr, Dr., 81. Fe"nelon, 154, 168. Fielding, 168. Fields, 168, 198. Flamelin, Madame, 230. Fontenelle, 54. Foote, 89. Foster, 136, 137, 139, 149, 167. Fox, 88. Fox, George, 172. Franklin, 59, 87. Fraser, 93. Frederick the Great, 180. Froude, 60, 119, 169. Fuller, Margaret, 141. Fuller, Thomas, 169. Fuseli, 44. Galen, 163. Garrow, 87. Gay, 140. Genlis, Madame de, 97, 126, 181. George II., 93. George III., 229.' George IV., 54. Gibbon, 162. Gibbon, Lieut., 182. Godwin, 167. Goethe, 26, 103, 153, 158, 168, 197, 236. Goldsmith, 37, 66, 89, 150, 166, 188. Grammont, 228. Gray, 153. Grey, Countess, 75. Greeley, 94, 95. Hahnemann, 15. Hall, Robert, 149, 193. Haller, 118. Hamilton, Sir William, 186. Hannibal, 95, 96. Harvey, 1 18. Hawthorne, in, 134, 135, 147, 150, 166, 197, 201. Hay ward, 31. Hazlitt, 150, 155, 169. Heine, 36. Heister, 83. Henriot, 163. Henry IV., 214. Henry, Patrick, 47. Heraclitus, 225, 226. Herbert, George, 188. Herodotus, 136. Hillard, 168. Hitchcock, Dr., 2 10. Hippocrates, 22. Hobhouse, 218. Holmes, 10, 41, 91, 150, 166, 193. Homer, 31, 148, 153, 165. Hood, 122. Holbein, 168. Houghton, H. O., 166. Hume, 187. Hunt, 37, 55, 96, 102, 150, 152, 200, 215, 218, 232, 233. Ibrahim, 192. Ingres, 96. Irving, 30, 167, 171. effrey, 93. ekyll, 70. errold, 65, 153, 170, 214. ohnson, 43, 70, 97, 98, 150, 168, 169. oubert, 170. Kant, 187. Keats, 37, 75, 150. Kemble, Fanny, 54. Kempis, Thomas a, 152, 168. Kinglake, 170. La Bruyere, 170. La Rochefoucauld, 167, 228. Index of Persons referred to Lamb, 27, 70, 75, 88, 123, 134, 167. Lamartine, 144. Landor, 100, 168. Landseer, 176. Lawrence, 54, 147, 239. Lay, Benjamin, 59. Lee, Jack, 144, 145. Le Sage (Gil Bias), 167. L'Estrange, 235. Lessing, 239. Lessius, 241. Lever (Charles O'Malley), i6a Lewis, 169. Lind, Jenny, 175. Livius, Titus, 155. Locke, 186, 216. Louis XIV., 92. Lover, 170. Lowell, 150. Lucian, 71, 72. Lucretius, 225. Luther, 169. Macaulay, 67, 70, 89, 150, 153, 168, 172, 173. Macdpnald, 65. Machiavelli, 170. Mahomet, 34. Malthus, 187. Mandeville, 171. Mansfield, Lord, 217. Manzoni, 171. Markham, Miss, 93. Marlborough, Duchess of, 97. Martineau, Harriet, 240. Massillon, 149. Mathews, 127. Metastasio, in. Meynert, 241. Mifflin, George H., 166. Mill, 167, 203. Milton, 148, 153, 165. Mirabeau, 212. Mitchell (Reveries of a Bachelor), 168. Moliere, 234. Montaigne, 54, 116, 130, 135, 149, 166. Montagu, Basil, 90. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 168. Montesquieu, 58, 86, 130, 170. Montgaillard, 119. Moore, 57, 139- More, Hannah, 199. More ; Sir Thomas, 170, 216. Morris, Gouverneur, 147. Motley, 230. Mountjoy, Lord, 147. Moutron, de, 230. Muhlenberg, Dr., 188. Murray, 31, 93. Napoleon, 153. Nasmyth, 90. Nelson, 170. Northcote, 169. Northumberland, Duke of, 117. O'Connell, 196. Ossian, 153. Ovid, 153. Parry, 218. Parton, 171. Pascal, 40, 149, 167. Patrick, Bishop, 79. Peterborough, 100. Petrarch, 144. Philip II., 230. Pindar, 232, 233. Pitt, 88. Plato, 78, 148, 150, 155, 166. Pleasonton, 23. Plutarch, 170. Pope, 31, 69, 89, 140, 154, 158. Prashn, Duchess de, 249. Pyrrhus, 96. Queensbury, Duchess of, 53. Queensbury, Duke of, 15. Rabelais, ri, 149, 169, 226. Rachel, Mile., 96. Ribera, 240. Ricardo, 187. Richelieu, 144. Richter, Jean Paul, 65, 76, 142, 159, 201. Robespierre, 63, 1 19. Robinson, 128, 167. Rogers, 44. Roland, Madame, 129, 143. Rosch, 24. Ryan, Father, 76. Saadi, 127. Saint Pierre (Paul and Virginia), 171. Sandwich, Lord, 183. Savage, 169. Schiller, 149, 153. Scipio, 95, 96. Scott, 91, 154, 170. Seeley (Ecce Homo), 169. Selden, 108, 169. Seneca, 166. Se'vigne', Madame de, 168. Shakespeare, 27, 149, 153. Shelley, 150. 154 Index of Persons referred to Sheridan, 142. Sheridan, Tom, 100. Smith, Adam, 187, 188. Smith, James, 157. Smith, Sydney, 75, 90, 93, 167, 196. Smollett (Humphry Clinker), 169. Snopke, Miss Maria, 137. Sobieski, 192. Socrates, 148, 171. South, 149 153. Southey, 78, 79, 113, 170, 219. Souvestre, 149, 159, 167. Spence, 75, 154, 169, 191. Spenser, 153. Spinoza, 153. Stael, Madame de, 230. Stair, Lord, 92. Steele, 192, 226. Sterne, 71, 158, 171. Stewart, Dugald, 186. Stowe, Mrs. (Uncle Tom's Cabin), 151, 167. Suetonius, 148. Sugden, 94. Sully, 214. Swift, 13, 121, 140, 149, 166, 171, 179, 192, 226. Taine, 102. Talfourd, 167. Talleyrand, 104, 229. Tasso, 144, 170. Taylor, 130, 153. Thackeray, 64, 67, 76, 90, 145, 150, 153, 169. Thomas, General, 107. Thorns, 89. Thoreau, 168. Thurlow, 229. Ticknor, 168. Titian, 123. Tocqueville, 158. Trollope, 57. Valerius, 108. Venable, William H., 78. Virgil, 31, 46, t53, 165. Voltaire, 58, 67, 97, 100, 180, 181, 227, Wallace, 105. Waller, 50. Walpole, 53. Walton, 168. Warburton, 191. Washington, 118, 231. ' Webster, Daniel, 187. Webster, Noah, 165. Wesley, 149, 153, 170. Whately, 187. White, 168. Wilberforce, Canon, 214. William the Silent, 231. Williams, Gilly, 63. Wilson, 167. Woolman, 171, 172. Wordsworth, 128, 150. Wycherley, 48, 49, 50. Wycherley, Mrs., 49, 50. Xenophon, 171. Zenobia, 139. Zoroaster, 10. Zschokke, 68. THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ This book is due on the last DATE stamped below. 7 REC'D )w-12,'70(Pl251s8)2373-3A,l -x *>/H *- ^oy^; 4 PS2738.R4C6 1895 3 2106 00208 0338 ' '* '.