/* -
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS
 
 SENTENCES 
 
 AND PARAGRAPHS 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Author of * Scaramouch in Naxos,' 
 
 fttftXiov yueya KOKOV 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & CO, PUBLISHERS. 
 1895.
 
 SKIS 
 
 URC 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Magnanimity ... ... i 
 
 II. How to please all a Man's Friends ... i 
 
 III. Prolific Writers 2 
 
 IV. Science and Philosophy dismissed in 
 
 a Sentence ... ... ... ... 4 
 
 V. Animals,: Improvement of Human, 
 
 Deterioration of Lower 5 
 
 VI. Musical Analysis ... ... ... 9 
 
 VII. Spontaneity ... ... ... ... 10 
 
 VIII. Over-indulgence in Imaginative Com- 
 position ... ... ... ... ii 
 
 IX. Keats 12 
 
 X. Tact and Principle ... ... ... 13 
 
 XI. Absurd Attempt of Criticism ... ... 13 
 
 XII. Ibsen's Plays 14 
 
 XIII. Adaptability of the True Cosmopolite 17 
 
 XIV. No Time to read Literature 19 
 
 XV. Want of Poetical Power a Great 
 
 Source of Verse 21 
 
 XVI. The Better Part 22 
 
 XVII. English Historical Names 22
 
 vi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XVIII. Ruskin's Poetry 24 
 
 XIX. Modern Troubadours ... ... 28 
 
 XX. Definition of Dignity 30 
 
 XXI. Evolution ... ... ... ... 30 
 
 XXII. Definition of Logic ... ... ... 30 
 
 XXIII. "L'EtSdes Toasts" 31 
 
 XXIV. A Sun-gazer of Gotham ... ... 32 
 
 XXV. The Stories about the Wise Men of 
 
 Gotham put into a Connected 
 
 Narrative ... ... ... 33 
 
 XXVI. Fanny Burney 42 
 
 XXVII. Smollett's " Regicide " 44 
 
 XXVIII. The Finest Kid 47 
 
 XXIX. The Age of Poetry 47 
 
 XXX. -I. Heather in Literature. Emily 
 
 Bronte and Lenau 48 
 
 XXXII. Matter-of-fact Writing 61 
 
 XXXIII. Henry Lemoine, a Forgotten Book- 
 
 seller, Baker, Satirist, Novelist, 
 
 &c. 62 
 
 XXXIV. Advice of Worldly Wiseman to his 
 
 Son 71 
 
 XXXV. Angels' Visits 71 
 
 XXXVI. Exercise for a Healthy Mind .. 71 
 XXXVII.-LVIII. Nietsche's Philosophy. 
 
 Aphorisms ... ... ... 72
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LIX. Truth 84 
 
 LX. The Advantages of Want of Method 85 
 LXI.-II. Carlyle's "Excursion to Paris" 
 
 and " Wotton Reinfred " ... 88 
 LXIII. Definition of the "New Journalism" 97 
 
 LXIV. Anthropomorphism 97 
 
 LXV. A Mistake in Criticism 98 
 
 LXVI. The Age of Bovril 100 
 
 LXVII. Attempts at Blank Verse in French 102 
 
 LXVIII. A Meredith Society 103 
 
 LXIX. Difficulty of Thinking 104 
 
 LXX.-I. "Shop" ... ... ... ... 105 
 
 LXX1I. Merlin and Vivien 
 
 LXXIII. William Hazlitt 
 
 LXXIV. Publicity 
 
 LXXV. Literature a Trade 
 
 LXXVI. Three Kinds of Poets 
 LXXVII. -LXXXII. Fin de Siecle 
 
 no 
 
 "3 
 116 
 118 
 1 20 
 
 122
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 THE first step towards magnanimity is to 
 perceive no lack of it in others. 
 
 II. 
 
 If you praise a man you please only him- 
 self. In order to provide the greatest 
 happiness for the greatest number, you 
 must damn with faint praise, for then you 
 please all a man's friends. 
 
 B
 
 2 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 III. 
 
 It has been remarked that there is a 
 great discovery still to be made in 
 literature that of paying literary men by 
 the quantity they do not write. Without 
 seeing altogether how proper estimates 
 could be drawn up of the kind required 
 by this suggestion, most people have 
 doubtless great sympathy with the view of 
 literature it involves. Talk is not neces- 
 sarily literature, and of the numerous 
 living novelists who have produced more 
 than a dozen novels apiece, what is to be 
 said of many of them except that they 
 have talked too much ? A dozen substan- 
 tial three-volume novels and few modern 
 novelists are content with that number 
 will be found to contain nearly two 
 millions of words more than Shakespeare
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 3 
 
 and the Bible put together. Is it reason- 
 able to suppose that more than one or 
 two writers in a century can produce, not 
 two millions, but two hundred thousand 
 words, that can justly be called literature ? 
 One would not ask these prolific writers to 
 think of fame instead of guineas, but one 
 would like to ask them how it would stand 
 with their interests as rational beings pro- 
 vided with consciences, if they were to 
 cease producing new matter for a time, and 
 to employ themselves in taking what they 
 have already written seriously to task. It 
 would be a severe punishment, bringing 
 with it a rude awakening, if many of our 
 popular novelists were forced to study 
 their own books so as to be able to pass 
 an examination on their import and style. 
 
 B 2
 
 4 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 When the heart and motives of con- 
 duct are in question, science may as 
 well poison itself with its last discovery, and 
 philosophy drown itself in its tub, as 
 pretend to lay down the law.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 5 
 
 V. 
 
 The human animal has steadily 
 improved, ridding itself as civilization 
 advanced of all monstrous and malformed 
 races, such as the one-legged tribe with 
 mushroom feet that did for tents, the 
 headless men whose faces were in their 
 chests, the people whose ears served them 
 for Inverness capes, the one-eyed men, 
 the dog-headed men, the elephant-headed 
 men, the centaurs, the satyrs, and the 
 sphinxes. These long ago disappeared so 
 completely from the face of the earth, 
 that if poets, historians, and draughtsmen 
 had not made descriptions and drawings 
 while they were extant, at least in memory, 
 we should have lost all authentic trace of 
 them ; even Africa can now boast of 
 nothing more curious than a tribe of
 
 6 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 pigmies, well enough formed, and with 
 all their members. Perhaps one may be 
 allowed to confess to a lingering wish that 
 it were still possible to make the acquain- 
 tance of some gentle lady centaur ; on the 
 whole, however, one is glad to be rid of all 
 those other unfortunate miscreations. 
 But the brute beasts have sadly degener- 
 ated. It is not so much that remarkable 
 species have become extinct ; it is the 
 lamentable deterioration in those that 
 remain. The fox, for example what a 
 beast he once was. His craft is probably 
 as distinguished as ever, but his medicinal 
 qualities seem all to have faded. His 
 flesh, his blood, his lungs, his liver, his 
 lights, powdered, or baked, or boiled, were 
 sovereign remedies for wounds, and bruises, 
 and putrefying sores, and all the internal 
 diseases flesh is heir to. Then the zebra
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. ^ 
 
 he was indeed an animal. His skin, 
 half an inch thick, was attached to his 
 body only here and there, and came down 
 to his ankles slashed and puffed like 
 trunk-hose. Some of the cats were also 
 most original quadrupeds ; one, of which 
 a portrait is still extant, was a mere 
 articulation of Catherine-wheels and curly 
 crackers. The hippopotamus may be a wise 
 beast, but it is questionable if he still knows 
 how to phlebotomise himself. But the 
 most marvellously transformed of all 
 animals is the antelope. This comparatively 
 gentle and now proverbially timid creature 
 had formerly tusks like a boar, a horny 
 snout, a terrible eye, the tail of a lion, 
 beards all over his body, and horns like 
 saws with which to defeat armies and cut 
 down trees; and not half his virtues 
 were known even to Suidas. Of the
 
 8 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 extinct animals the least to be regretted 
 are the eale, which had swivel horns of a 
 cubit in length, and the leucrocotta, whose 
 mouth extended from ear to ear, with one 
 continuous bone for teeth, and which 
 could imitate the human voice. The 
 bread-fruit tree is doubtless an admirable 
 contrivance; but how much better off 
 were our forefathers with lambs growing 
 in gourds, like natural pumpkin pies ? We 
 may not be sorry that the jaduah, a plant 
 bearing a baby, no longer blossoms, 
 although Philina would have liked it ; 
 but who will not regret the barnacle-geese, 
 or claiks, as they called them in Buchan, 
 which grew on trees, and were to be had 
 for the getting ? Indeed, indeed, sirs, 
 the lower creation seems to be going 
 backwards.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 9 
 
 VI. 
 
 It is difficult to sympathize with the 
 French and German musical analysts, who 
 examine every note in the scale, and 
 pulverize every feeling and idea experienced 
 through the influence of music, in order 
 to discover its soul : as satisfactory a 
 method, one would think, as that of the 
 biologist of Gotham, who put a body 
 through a mincing-machine in hopes of 
 detecting the vital principle.
 
 10 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Inaccuracy may be voluble, a lie may 
 be glib, but neither can be spontaneous. 
 Indeed, it may be said that spontaneity is 
 the vesture of veracity, of that veracity 
 which is clothed in mere accuracy of 
 statement, as well as of the higher veracity 
 of the imagination, which can never be 
 invested in the white light, the robe of 
 truth, but must remain divinely discon- 
 tented in its dazzling raiment, passionately 
 woven of many colours. And this is no 
 grievance. We can best contemplate 
 light as it decks itself in the green and 
 golden land, the pearl and sapphire sea. 
 The Gothamite who stared all day at the 
 sun to sharpen his eyes on the celes- 
 tial grindstone was blind when evening 
 fell.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, n 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Like all bad habits, the indulgence in 
 unrestrained imaginative composition 
 soon tyrannizes over the writer, be he 
 small or great. In youth incontinence of 
 utterance is expected, and has marked the 
 earliest work of some of the greatest men 
 of letters ; but it is an unnatural fury that 
 drives septuagenarians into the market- 
 place with indiscretions and ineptitudes, 
 with thoughts that should be secret and 
 feelings that should be shamefaced.
 
 12 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Setting aside his rapid progress, Keats 
 is the best illustration of the natural 
 development of a poet. Beginning and 
 ending his intemperate period with the too 
 ample verge and room, the trailing fringe 
 and sampler-like embroidery of " Endy- 
 mion," he was soon writing the most 
 perfect odes in the language ; he 
 elaborated in a few months a style, the 
 like of which greater men have failed 
 to achieve even in half a century of 
 uninterrupted work.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, 13 
 
 X. 
 
 We must carefully distinguish between 
 the absence of tact and the presence of 
 principle. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Literary criticism is constantly attempting 
 a very absurd thing the explanation of 
 passionate utterance by utterance that is 
 unimpassioned : it is like trying to 
 paint a sunset in lamp-black.
 
 14 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XII. 
 
 In Ibsen's later plays we seem at last to 
 be shown men and women as they are ; 
 and it is at first more than we can endure. 
 It sets the brain whirling, this array of 
 naked souls. Bernick, Rosmer, Ellida, 
 Mrs. Alving, Rebecca, Hedda, Lovborg 
 men and women, weak or strong, they have 
 all to yield up their secret to this new 
 Wizard of the North. All Ibsen's charac- 
 ters speak and act as if they were hypno- 
 tized, and under their creator's imperious 
 command to reveal themselves. There 
 never was such a mirror held up to nature 
 before : it is too terrible. One cannot 
 read Dickens after a play of Ibsen's, hardly 
 even Thackeray. Refuge may be found 
 in Scott, whose men and women are 
 hidden in the trappings of romance ; or in
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS., 15 
 
 Shakespeare, where, though souls are 
 sometimes naked, they appear in " the 
 light that never was on sea or land," and 
 fill us with the melancholy we have learned 
 to love. Yet we must return to Ibsen 
 with his remorseless surgery, his remorse- 
 less electric light, until we, too, have 
 grown strong, and learned to face the 
 naked, if necessary, the flayed and 
 bleeding reality. It is well, once in a 
 lifetime, once in an age, to go down to the 
 roots of things, to put a thermometer in 
 the central fire, to grope about in caves 
 and mines, to search the bottom of the 
 sea ; but the earth is not a naked geologi- 
 cal specimen. It is a place to live on, 
 clothed with grass and forests, and 
 enamelled with flowers, with the atmo- 
 sphere for cloak, and sun, moon, and 
 stars for lamps. After a volume of the
 
 16 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 later Ibsen it is refreshing to enumerate 
 these commonplaces. Neither is man, as 
 was long ago remarked, a naked animal, 
 nor is his soul unclothed : even those who 
 strip it of religion and duty are ready with 
 another garment, if it were only some 
 fantastic new protestantism of Every Man 
 His Own God. There is no such thing as 
 naked reality ; the attempt at it in litera- 
 ture is unreal, inasmuch as it is incomplete. 
 The trees and flowers are as real as the 
 soil from which they spring, and the so- 
 called illusions with which the soul clothes 
 itself are also a part of reality. To see 
 the soul stripped of these, and held out 
 like a heart plucked throbbing from a 
 living breast, is perhaps in our time a 
 necessary lesson. But once is enough.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 17 
 
 XIII. 
 
 There is a little water-creature revealed 
 by that great thaumaturge, the micro- 
 scopist, which has two coats, and can endure 
 without inconvenience a dry heat up to 
 212 Fahr. He may lie for years desic- 
 cated in some out-of-the-way corner, but 
 as soon as a drop of rain touches him he 
 becomes all alive, and goes grubbing 
 about among the water-plants in a most 
 independent manner. If the sun should 
 suck him up into a cloud he doesn't care, 
 but wraps himself tightly in his two coats, 
 and content and self-contained, floats 
 between heaven and earth awaiting the 
 next episode. This enviable and almost 
 invisible little fellow is the counterpart in 
 the inferior creation of that species of men 
 who, if they have James Howell's in- 
 
 c
 
 18 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 capacity to lay a large grasp on the world, 
 are blessed like him with the good humour, 
 self-satisfaction, and adaptability of a true 
 cosmopolite. Though such a man may 
 "have many aspiring and airy, odd 
 thoughts," and be "on occasion of a 
 sudden distemper, sometimes a madman, 
 sometimes a fool, sometimes a melan- 
 choly odd fellow, having the humours 
 within that belong to all three," since 
 common sense is the chief quality of his 
 mind he can endure his flights of fancy 
 even to 212 Fahr. : and whether he be 
 lifted up above the earth in a glowing 
 cloud of royal or popular favour, or laid 
 aside waiting for the drop of rain that shall 
 swell him out once more to his portly 
 proportions, he is always patient, self- 
 reliant knows himself, and knows the 
 world.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 19 
 
 XIV. 
 
 People complain nowadays that they 
 have no time for literature, there are so 
 many newspapers to read, every right- 
 thinking person being expected to know 
 daily the current news of the world, not 
 later in the evening than the issue of the 
 " extra special." It is supposed that this 
 is quite a modern excuse for the decay of 
 the reading of literature; and sighs are 
 deeply breathed for the time when 
 " Clarissa Harlowe " was deemed too 
 short, when " Evelina " was voted brilliant, 
 or when nobody found the Waverley 
 Novels tiresome. And yet, since we 
 began to have a prose literature this com- 
 plaint has always existed. The melan- 
 choly Butler, as far back as 1614, puts it 
 thus, speaking of the majority: "if they 
 
 C 2
 
 20 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 read a book at any time, 'tis an English 
 chronicle, 'St. Huon of Bordeaux,' 
 'Amadas de Gaul,' etc., a play-book or 
 some pamphlet of news." The major 
 part of the reading public has been peren- 
 nially interested in current events, and the 
 man who says he can't find time to read 
 literature because it is a social duty to be 
 acquainted with news, makes a virtue of 
 curiosity, like any Greek frequenter of the 
 Areopagus or Jacobean subscriber to the 
 " Staple of News."
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 21 
 
 XV. 
 
 The want of poetical power is the 
 impelling force in the case of most 
 versifiers. They would fain be poets, 
 and imagine that the best way is to try to 
 write poetry, and to publish what they 
 write. They will never see their mistake. 
 Equus asinus still believes that the 
 possession of an organ of noise is suffi- 
 cient, with a little practice, to enable him 
 to sing like a nightingale.
 
 22 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 He who dares manfully to lounge and 
 take his leisure, no matter what his calling 
 or what his necessity, often chooses the 
 better part. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 It does one good to find that there are 
 still Willoughbys in Oxfordshire and 
 Bucks, Beaumonts, titled and untitled, 
 in Yorkshire, Leicester, Surrey, Notts, 
 Northumberland, and Ferrers in Warwick- 
 shire; Fanhope and Erpingham are un- 
 known to " Walford," nor is there now an 
 Earl of Oxford, or a Duke of Gloster. 
 But a Howard is Earl of Suffolk, and Guy 
 is Earl of Warwick. What though the 
 former title now dates from James I.,
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 23 
 
 and the latter from George II. ? In 
 honour of the glorious names let us say 
 the glorious verse : 
 
 " Warwick in blood did wade, 
 Oxford the foe invade, 
 And cruel slaughter made, 
 
 Still as they ran up ; 
 Suffolk his axe did ply, 
 Beaumont and Willoughby 
 Bare them right doughtily, 
 
 Ferrers and Fanhope."
 
 24 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Jean Paul found that he had done all 
 his thinking and imagining before his 
 eighteenth year, and that he had spent his 
 life in realizing in his writings and in his 
 conduct the dreams of his boyhood. 
 Ruskin, doubtless like other men of 
 letters, has had a similar experience. 
 He says in his old age, " I find in myself 
 nothing whatsoever changed. Some of 
 me is dead, more of me is stronger. I 
 have learned a few things, forgotten 
 many ; in the total of me I am but the 
 same youth, disappointed and rheumatic." 
 That the holder of such an opinion 
 should preserve his juvenilia from seven 
 years onwards, and " yielding to the 
 request of his friends" should permit
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 25 
 
 their publication, although not exactly 
 foregone conclusions, are things that should 
 surprise no one. It is not, perhaps, 
 too much to say that the Ruskin of 
 " Modern Painters," " The Stones of 
 Venice," " Fors Clavigera," &c., is to be 
 found in the two volumes of " Poems of 
 John Ruskin ; " but one unacquainted 
 with that later Ruskin could not possibly 
 detect in them the art critic, political 
 economist, moral censor, and latter-day 
 prophet whom the English - speaking 
 world knows, admires, and disbelieves, or 
 disobeys. And this remark is intended 
 to apply to the earlier poems on the 
 typical nature of which Ruskin himself 
 lays stress, as well as to those written 
 after he had attained his majority. It is 
 beyond expression childish to ask us to 
 recognize in this couplet, written at the
 
 26 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 age of eight, the political economist in 
 embryo : 
 
 " And the water wheel turns slowly round 
 Grinding the corn that requires to be ground ; " 
 
 and equally absurd to point to the follow- 
 ing verses from the same piece as fore- 
 telling " Stones of Venice," and " Queen 
 of the Air": 
 
 " And quarries with their craggy stones, 
 And the wind among them moans." 
 
 To a mind excessively analogical like 
 Ruskin's, any one thing can stand for any 
 other : a bee may appear only a more 
 highly developed bull's foot. It would be 
 just as easy to detect a future Ruskin in 
 the juvenilia of Tennyson or Browning as 
 in Ruskin's own early verse. No man 
 can be other than himself, even under 
 conditions the most adverse to his
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 27 
 
 development. But the fact is, that in 
 Ruskin's poetry there is much less of him- 
 self than young writers of capacity usually 
 contrive to put into their early work. The 
 great prose stylist, as he himself long ago 
 confessed, made a false start when he 
 donned the Byronic collar and set off to 
 climb Parnassus.
 
 28 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Those modern troubadours, those 
 Parisian Sordellos, the Felibres and Ciga- 
 liers, have as yet only attempted to resusci- 
 tate the Langue d*Oc. There is no word 
 of the re-establishment of Courts of Love, 
 or the drawing of a code for the regulation 
 of affairs of the heart or rather of the 
 fancy. Should the modern professors of 
 the Gay Science extend their revival to 
 the reconstitution of the whole fantastic 
 polity of the Provencal love-makers, it is 
 to be hoped that the head, as of yore, and 
 not the heart, will be the source of the 
 poetical passion, especially when it is 
 remembered that, according to the old 
 articles, as reported by Raynouard, "true 
 love cannot exist between husband and 
 wife," and that " nothing prevents a
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 29 
 
 woman from being loved by two men, or 
 a man from being loved by two women." 
 Probably our modern troubadours will 
 remain satisfied with the composition of 
 poems after the manner of Mistral and 
 Jasmin chants, chansons, sons, sonets, 
 albas, serenas, and planhs ; and with their 
 annual August escape into Provence from 
 the exigencies of a time too much con- 
 cerned about ways and means, social, 
 political, and economic, to take any but 
 the most transitory interest in artificial 
 revivals of long-forgotten manners, or to 
 listen even in passing to the " stretched 
 metre of an antique song."
 
 30 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XX. 
 
 Dignity is impudence. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Those who are convinced of the 
 absolute truth of Evolution are merely 
 bigots, as intolerant as those who formerly 
 believed in witchcraft or a concrete hell. 
 No mind is so much given over to 
 delusions as the logical one. 
 
 XXII; 
 
 Logic is the strong delusion which God 
 sends.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 31 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 The French christened the summer 
 of 1891 " F'et'e des toasts." Fraternization 
 in every language and every latitude 
 marked it. One Frenchman imagined 
 himself exclaiming twenty years hence 
 when he is an Academician, " Ah ! mes 
 enfants ! What a lovely time that was ! 
 So fertile in miracles ! The very English 
 were polite ! " The French still believe 
 what Froissart said five hundred years ago, 
 that the " English are the most outrage- 
 ous people in the world ; " and they think 
 it specially good of us to have tamed our 
 native savagery on the occasion of their 
 visit.
 
 32 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 We can see only as far as our sight will 
 carry ; and paltry souls detect paltriness 
 everywhere. It was a man of Gotham 
 who first perceived, after staring at it with 
 his naked eyes for an hour, that the sun 
 was only a spot with some splashes of 
 light on it.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 33 
 
 XXV. 
 
 Here follpw, strung together for the 
 first time, such of the chapbook stories 
 of the Wise Men of Gotham as will bear 
 the light : 
 
 Gotham attained its notoriety in the 
 reign of King John. That misguided 
 monarch, being on a journey to Notting- 
 ham, desired to pass through Gotham, 
 and sent word of his intention. The 
 inhabitants, already apparently in an 
 incipient state of Gothamic wisdom, 
 assembled to consider the King's message. 
 One of the townsmen, a more fully 
 developed wiseacre than the others, 
 explained to his fellows that the ground 
 over which the King passed must for ever 
 after be a public road, and advised them, 
 if they wished to avoid that calamity, to 
 
 D
 
 34 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 entreat the King to go by some other way, 
 and even to take steps to prevent his 
 Majesty from passing through Gotham. 
 An indefinable terror took possession 
 of the people. A public road through 
 their town ! It was not to be thought of. 
 No one stopped to inquire what evils were 
 dreaded, but sent incontinently to the 
 King praying him to choose another road, 
 and plainly stating that they would oppose 
 his passage if he did not. There can 
 have been no particular advantage in 
 going by Gotham, for the King did take 
 another way. He was, however, as 
 became a King, deeply incensed at the 
 proceedings of the Gothamites, and sent 
 to inquire of them the reason of their 
 incivility and ill-treatment, with the 
 comforting assurance that it would 
 need to be a very good reason indeed
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 35 
 
 if they wished to escape punishment. 
 The people of Gotham, hearing of the 
 nature of the royal message before its 
 arrival, developed all of them into wise- 
 acres of the first water, and hit upon 
 an expedient worthy of Ulysses. When 
 the King's messengers came, they could 
 find no one whom they deemed able to 
 give an answer " in any constant 
 question," not to speak of such a delicate 
 matter as a reply to an incensed monarch. 
 The first sign of the strange mental con- 
 dition of the Gothamites that the King's 
 messengers met was a cheese, which came 
 rolling down the hill to Nottingham. A 
 little way up the hill they saw a man 
 standing watching the cheese with a 
 wallet full of cheeses on his back. This 
 man, when they came close to him, took 
 no notice of them, but continued watch- 
 
 D 2
 
 36 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 ing the cheese ; and when it was out of 
 sight, " So," said he to himself, " what a 
 fool I am to sweat under this burden ! " 
 With that he unstrapped his wallet, and 
 taking out cheese by cheese, sent them all 
 off, charging them solemnly to meet him 
 in Nottingham market-place. With a 
 light heart and a lighter wallet he then 
 sauntered down the hill, laughing and 
 saying to himself, "Well, I never knew 
 cheeses could go alone before." The 
 messengers looked at each other in 
 amazement, but before they could 
 exchange a word they heard a shouting, 
 and shortly a number of men and boys 
 appeared about the banks of a stream that 
 ran down the hill. On approaching the 
 crowd, they saw several men dragging an 
 eel up and down the water; and when 
 they asked why this was done, they were
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 37 
 
 told that the eel was to b,e drowned ; 
 " For look you," said a wise man of 
 Gotham, " this is a very gluttonous and 
 irreligious eel. On Lady-day last year 
 we stocked a pond on this side of the 
 town with red herrings, good salt fish, 
 sprats, and smoked haddocks, that they 
 might breed against next Good Friday ; and 
 when we went to the pond we found 
 nothing but this great swollen eel. 
 Does it not deserve drowning ? " The 
 King's messengers answered nothing, but 
 turned with increasing amazement to 
 another crowd, which had almost made an 
 end of planting a thorn hedge about a 
 bush. " Wherefore do ye this, honest 
 neighbours ? " asked the messengers. 
 " Sirs," said a wise man of Gotham, 
 " in that bush there is a cuckoo, and 
 because we want it to remain with us all
 
 38 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 the year round, we are planting a hedge 
 about its bush." At that very moment 
 the cuckoo rose into the air, and flew 
 away to a wood. " Vengeance on her ! " 
 said the men of Gotham, " we made not 
 our hedge high enough." The messen- 
 gers turned away laughing, and soon came 
 to the top of the hill, where they found 
 men dragging waggons up from the town, 
 and ranking them together as close as 
 they might be. When they inquired their 
 purpose in doing this, the men of Gotham 
 informed them that they were sheltering a 
 wood from the sun. After that the 
 messengers were prepared for anything, 
 and no new wonder that they saw dis- 
 turbed their gravity much, except, indeed, 
 a man whom they met in the gate of the 
 town. This man was riding a worn-out 
 horse that bore also a sack of corn. As
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 39 
 
 he passed out, a sudden thought seemed 
 to strike him, for he lifted the sack from 
 the horse's shoulders and laid it on his 
 own, saying, " A merciful man is merciful 
 to his beast. Now thou hast only thy 
 master to carry." The messengers then 
 passed through the town, and everybody 
 they saw was doing something absurd. 
 On the other side of Gotham they came 
 upon twelve men who had been fishing in 
 the stream. In their eagerness they had 
 all waded into the water, and on returning 
 to land, to make sure that none of them 
 had been drowned, they fell to counting 
 each other. The whole twelve tried it, 
 but the counter always omitting to 
 reckon himself, they could only make out 
 eleven. One of the messengers said, 
 "What will you give me if I find the 
 twelfth man ? " " All the money we
 
 40 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 have," answered the men of Gotham. 
 The messenger had of course no need to 
 include'himself to make out the twelve, and 
 the men of Gotham gave him their money 
 thankfully, looking on him as a kind of 
 magician. Enough had been seen to con- 
 vince the messengers that the people of 
 Gotham were not responsible for their 
 actions, so they returned to Nottingham. 
 But when they arrived there they began to 
 wonder if they had not been bewitched, 
 all that they had seen being so strange and 
 unlikely. Before bearing their answer to 
 the King, they went into an ale-house 
 in the market-place to think it over. 
 There they found the first Gothamite they 
 had met, the man of the cheeses, bargain- 
 ing for a horse. "Well, friend," said one 
 of the messengers, " did your cheeses sell 
 themselves ? " " That I do not know yet,"
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 41 
 
 answered the man, " I waited all day in 
 the market-place here, and when the 
 market was over, and my cheeses not to 
 hand, I consulted with my father-in-law, a 
 good man of Gotham. He very wisely 
 pointed out that since the cheeses were 
 not in Nottingham, they must have rolled 
 on to York, and I am cheapening the hire 
 of a horse to follow." This was sufficient 
 for the messengers. They went straight 
 to the King, who was much amused at 
 their story, and forgave the people of 
 Gotham.
 
 42 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Fanny Burney is one of the best exam- 
 ples of what has been called the originality 
 of ignorance. She was positively illiterate. 
 Even Queen Charlotte found it impossi- 
 ble to talk about books with her. Her 
 ignorance was chiefly attributable to 
 deficiency in imaginative power. Satisfac- 
 tion in life consisted for her in having her 
 fancy employed. The parties in her 
 father's house, the round of visits, her 
 husband's gardening, her travels, her son's 
 education, her adventures in Paris, were 
 sufficient entertainment ; and when there 
 was leisure to be occupied, or money 
 required, she copied from her memory in 
 her lively way characters and scenes 
 which she had observed. Quick observa- 
 tion, quick fancy, were her chief gifts. A
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 43 
 
 little more study of the writings of others, 
 a few more ideas, would have stifled her 
 genius. Had she had a spark of imagina- 
 tion with her limited intellect, she would 
 probably have been unable to write at all ; 
 but the absence of any transcendental 
 quality made her fearless and successful 
 in paths where more distinguished abilities 
 dared not tread. The want of imagina- 
 tion which made her practically unaware 
 of her ignorance took away also all diffi- 
 dence when she sat down to her desk. 
 As it was, an extensive acquaintance with 
 authors, however ignorant she was of their 
 books, while it could not destroy her 
 inoffensive and sometimes delightful self- 
 confidence, gradually spoiled the ingenuous 
 freshness of her writing.
 
 44 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 The romantic history of James I. of 
 Scotland, the poet-king, and perhaps the 
 greatest ruler of his time> has attracted 
 many writers, including Tobias Smollett. 
 It is probably news to many that the 
 author of " Roderick Random " wrote a 
 blank-verse tragedy. He called it The 
 Regicide. Its history has a peculiar 
 interest. In attempting to bring it on the 
 stage Smollett suffered endless mortifica- 
 tion, and complained that he was "an 
 egregious dupe to the insincerity of mana- 
 gers." The Regicide was written at 
 the age of eighteen, and altered over and 
 over again during the ten years it went in 
 search of a theatre. Managers and patrons 
 practised on Smollett " the whole art 
 of procrastination." Now his play is
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS-. 45 
 
 " retrieved by pure accident from the most 
 dishonourable room in his lordship's 
 house ; " now " a gentleman speaks to a 
 nobleman," and in conformity with his 
 remarks the plot is immediately altered ; 
 then the distracted author " fails to acquire 
 the approbation of an eminent wit," by 
 whose advice he has made some amend- 
 ments ; at length a " humane lady of 
 quality " sends it back to Drury Lane, 
 where it had been more than once before ; 
 but Drury Lane is incensed at the ' c up- 
 braidings of a gentleman," and pronounces 
 the play a " wretched piece, deficient in 
 language, sentiment, character, and plan." 
 In the end the patroness interferes, and 
 Smollett is promised for next winter, and 
 offered obligations in writing which he 
 dispenses with, "lest he should seem to 
 doubt the authority of her ladyship."
 
 46 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 Next winter, of course, the manager had 
 forgotten all about him and his play, and 
 so in high dudgeon Smollett published it. 
 After such adventures a play is approached 
 with respect; but except for some fiery 
 passages, Smollett's Regicide is not of 
 much account. Smollett was constitu- 
 tionally able to express anger, and there 
 are indignant explosions in almost every 
 scene, often very forcible, but without real 
 feeling. The persistent writing of irate 
 lines made a fire in the author's ears, but 
 his heart remained untouched.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 47 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 From calamities that seem to flay the 
 very soul art elaborates sweetness and 
 delight. They say the finest kid is made 
 of human skin. 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 Except to the poet, the age of poetry is 
 always past.
 
 48 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 The undeniable truth of Claverhouse's 
 remark reminding false Whigs that " there 
 are hills beyond Pentland, and lands 
 beyond Forth " has sunk very deeply into 
 the Scotch mind. The untravelled Scot 
 is apt to forget the existence of heather 
 across the border, and has been known to 
 reject with scorn the suggestion of its 
 growing anywhere at all on the other 
 side of the English Channel. It is 
 possible, however, that no Scotch poet 
 or writer has loved or understood the 
 moor any better, or expressed its spirit 
 more fully, than an English poetess and 
 a German poet have done.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 49 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 The reticent and sadly straitened 
 genius of Emily Bronte found wings only 
 on the Yorkshire moors. In her dusty 
 laborious life as a teacher, always one 
 vision of delight appeared to her : 
 
 "A little and a lone green lane 
 
 That opened on a common wide ; 
 A distant, dreamy, dim, blue chain 
 
 Of mountains circling every side. 
 A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, 
 
 So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air ; 
 And deepening still the dreamlike charm, 
 
 Wild moorsheep feeding everywhere." 
 
 You do not think of " calm " and 
 "charm " as a blemish ; there is a sob in 
 the singer's voice, and it is in the magic 
 mirror of a tear-drop that she sees the 
 " moorsheep feeding everywhere." Sir 
 Walter Scott in Italy longed for a glimpse 
 
 E
 
 50 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 of the heather before he died, but even 
 his homelier, if more masculine, emotion 
 was not keener than this : 
 
 "What language can utter the feeling 
 
 Which rose when an exile afar, 
 On the brow of a lonely hill kneeling, 
 I saw the brown heath growing there ? " 
 
 The plain, the halting directness that 
 stumbles rather than deviate from its 
 meaning, the very weakness of the rhyme, 
 " the brown heath growing there" is proof 
 of an emotion like that which the pilgrim 
 felt on the sight of Jerusalem. Once, for 
 a moment, in her " Day-Dream," Emily 
 Bronte succeeds in singing what the moor 
 was for her : 
 
 ' ' On a sunny bank alone I lay 
 
 One summer afternoon ; 
 It was the marriage time of May 
 With her young lover, June.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 51 
 
 " A thousand thousand gleaming fires 
 
 Seemed kindling in the aitf ; 
 A thousand thousand silvery lyres 
 Resounded far and near. " 
 
 To her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, the 
 moor meant a great deal, but to Emily it 
 was the one temple on earth. So it was 
 with Lenau. The opening of his " Tavern 
 on the Heath " presents the best idea of 
 a Hungarian moor, and of the poet's 
 delight in its wildness, its congenial 
 melancholy, and its expanse. This poem 
 is a magnificent ballad, and recalls Liszt's 
 Hungarian rhapsodies. The following 
 translation of the opening verses does 
 actually succeed here and there in 
 reproducing the surge and strength of the 
 original, but the translator has a due sense 
 of its inadequacy : 
 
 2
 
 52 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 " I wandered through wide Hungary : 
 
 In hamlet, field, or arbour ; 
 There was no happiness for me, 
 For daring thoughts no harbour ; 
 
 " Until, the last bush left behind, 
 
 I reached the heath, and, bright'ning 
 The clouds that sailed the evening wind, 
 Outsprang the silent lightning. 
 
 ' ' And soon the darkening distance sent 
 
 A dull sound to my hearing ; 
 
 My ear upon the heath I bent ; 
 
 It seemed like riders nearing. 
 
 "And fast the sound speeds o'er the land 
 
 Earth's stoutest sinews tremble, 
 
 Like one who fears the levin-brand 
 
 When thunder-clouds assemble. 
 
 ' ' Onward they come, a herd of horse, 
 
 The herdsmen's voices clanging 
 Like flying cranes, o'er grass and gorse, 
 With whips like hammers banging.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 53 
 
 " The stallion lashes up the ground 
 
 With hoofs that long shall last him ; 
 The scolding wind at every bound 
 Like waves he shoulders past him. 
 
 " They fly to where the thunder-clouds 
 
 Are massed in dark battalions ; 
 Then suddenly the dark night shrouds 
 The riders and their stallions. 
 
 ' ' But still I thought to hear again 
 
 The hoofs like thunder clapping, 
 
 To see the coal-black waving mane, 
 
 To hear the long whip slapping. 
 
 " Straightway the clouds, with muffled cries, 
 
 With black, out-streaming tresses 
 And thunder hoofs, rushed up the skies, 
 Heaven's starry wildernesses. 
 
 " The storm came singing high and strong, 
 
 To cheer his skyey horses ; 
 He swung aloft his lightning throng, 
 And kept them in their courses.
 
 54 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 " And when they reached heaven's western banks. 
 
 The chargers paused together ; 
 The sweat dropped from their smoking flanks 
 In rain upon the heather. 
 
 " The twilight came, and far away 
 
 Where hillock perched in hollow, 
 A wet roof caught a sloping ray, 
 And beckoned me to follow. 
 
 " The wind grew soft, the storm was laid, 
 
 And, glad it had departed, 
 A rainbow sprang across and made 
 The whole heath happy-hearted. " 
 
 There are visions more tragic on the 
 Hungarian heath than a troop of "land- 
 loupers." In "The Three," Lenau has 
 expressed with great power the horror and 
 anguish of defeat in battle ; the picture 
 of the vanquished and dying survivors is 
 perhaps too gory, but the pathos redeems 
 it :
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 55 
 
 " How gently, now the battle's done, 
 They ride, these three : their foes have won. 
 
 From deep wounds pours the bright red blood ; 
 The chargers feel the life-warm flood. 
 
 Their bits are red, but not with rust ; 
 Blood rinses down the foam and dust. 
 
 The horses gently step along, 
 
 Or else the blood would flow too strong. 
 
 One grips the other ; close they ride, 
 Their wounds are all so deep and wide. 
 
 They look about with mournful gaze, 
 And one after the other says 
 
 ' At home a maiden waits ; and I, 
 Her darling, am distressed to die.' 
 
 ' I have a farm where green woods wave ; 
 Now all I need is one small grave. ' 
 
 ' The flowery earth, the heavens bestarred, 
 Was all I had ; yet death is hard. '
 
 56 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 And leering at the death-ride there, 
 Three vultures circle in the air. 
 
 The ghastly riders hear them hiss 
 'That one you eat ; you, that ; I, this.'" 
 
 A short poem of Lenau's, "The Sad 
 Heavens," may be taken as a background 
 for this sombre picture : 
 
 "A tragic thought beclouds the face of heaven, 
 
 O'erburdened with unutterable woe ; 
 And like a bed-rid soul with anguish riven, 
 The flowerless heath-plant tosses to and fro. 
 
 "The broken-hearted heavens moaning, call not 
 For help ; dark lashes glisten now and then ; 
 Like human eyes filling with tears that fall not, 
 A feeble ray breaks through the hanging rain. 
 
 "The cold moor shivers, and the wind is sighing, 
 And from the heathland shimmering mists rise 
 
 up: 
 The melancholy sky is slowly dying 
 
 Lo, from its hand the sun drops like a cup ! "
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 57 
 
 Lenau's most popular song is "The 
 Three Gipsies." 
 
 " Gipsies three by a willow I found, 
 Stretched at their ease together ; 
 Whilst my wain with a screeching sound 
 Toiled along through the heather. 
 
 ' ' Sunset bathed with its golden beams 
 
 Out of its golden phial, 
 One who drew with his waking dreams 
 Fiery notes from his viol. 
 
 " One his pipe in a lasting kiss 
 
 Held, and gazed at the wreathing 
 Smoke that curled ; and was sure of this 
 None was happier breathing. 
 
 " One as calm as a little child 
 Under his zither sleeping, 
 Heard the wind in its strings and smiled ; 
 Love had his heart in keeping. 
 
 ' ' Holes and rags were their clothes, I say, 
 
 Broidered with patches uncivil : 
 
 There defying the world they lay, 
 
 Death, and fate, and the devil.
 
 58 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 " Care comes and goes, but there stays our pride 
 
 Here shall dawn a bright morn yet ! 
 Fiddle it, dream it, smoke it aside ; 
 Learn above all to scorn it. 
 
 " Wistfully, as I crawled along, 
 
 I watched that gipsy trio ; 
 The coal-black hair, and the fiery song, 
 And the umber faces . . . Heigh-ho ! " 
 
 This is the mood of "The Jolly 
 Beggars," dashed with Lenau's melancholy. 
 Burns would have left his waggon and 
 joined the gipsies, stealing a day of wild 
 leisure with that fond gaillard which, for 
 the last dozen years of his life, kept him 
 from dying or going mad ; Lenau, " out 
 of his weakness and his melancholy," 
 could only long and let the chance of 
 " daffing the world aside " pass from him 
 with a sigh.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 59 
 
 The wide moor where Lucy Gray 
 dwelt ; the moor " with a name 
 of its own," on which Browning 
 picked up the eagle's feather ; the moor 
 crossed by the highway, where Carlyle 
 heard the frosty silence broken one 
 morning by a regular " click-clack like a 
 far-off spondee or iambus," the sound of 
 his wife's humble friend, old Esther, 
 crippling along to Craigenputtock ; the 
 withered heath in Tennyson's " Vision of 
 Sin " ; the wild tract where Keats met the 
 " knight-at-arms, alone, and palely loiter- 
 ing," whose ruin had been wrought by 
 la belle dame sans merti ; Coleridge's 
 heath, its spring with soft and even pulse 
 sending up cold waters to the traveller, 
 " quietly as a sleeping infant's breath " ; 
 the heath in King Lear ; Scott's many 
 moors; Hardy's heath haunted by the
 
 60 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 reddleman; Exmoor, sacred to Lorna 
 Doone are all thrice welcome to the 
 memory; but none of them are so 
 heathery of the heather as Emily Bronte's 
 and Nicholas Lenau's Yorkshire and 
 Hungarian moors.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 61 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 Our matter-of-fact literature comes from 
 the self-consciousness of our time. It is 
 a self-consciousness not of shame, but of 
 curiosity: shame-faced self-consciousness 
 makes itself an apron of fig-leaves ; the 
 self-consciousness of curiosity sits down 
 with a microscope.
 
 62 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 In Booksellers' Row, Holborn, the east- 
 end of Oxford Street, and wherever in 
 London the trade in second-hand books 
 is carried on, there are still to be seen 
 once or twice in the week melancholy 
 figures that might be mistaken for old- 
 clothes men. They are dressed in black 
 broadcloth, the pile of which has long been 
 replaced by a dull, greasy glaze ; their tall 
 hats are too large for them, and brown 
 with age ; they carry black sacks just as 
 old-clothes men do. In a sense they are 
 old-clothes men ; they are the last of the 
 " walking booksellers," and deal in the 
 cast-off garments in which bookmen 
 and others once clad their minds. They 
 have no connection with the book-hawkers
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 63 
 
 who travel the country with cheap publica- 
 tions ; and they are still further removed 
 from the modern book-canvasser. The 
 traffic of these solemn gentlemen, as befits 
 their sombre appearance, is in mouldy 
 sheepskin, vellum, and black-letter. Into 
 the mysteries of their trade they allow 
 none to pry. They buy at sales for cus- 
 tomers ; they pick up books at one shop 
 and sell them at another, sometimes with 
 a large profit, for they know their busi- 
 ness; but their main source of income, 
 if report be correct, flows from the vicissi- 
 tudes of the learned. Here, however, 
 inquiry is baffled, and it is said that even 
 a Special Commission would fail to extract 
 the truth. The heyday of the walking 
 bookseller was over by the beginning of 
 the present century. There were never 
 many of them, and in a few years the
 
 64 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 species will doubtless be extinct. The 
 most notable representative of the class 
 was one Henry Lemoine, and it may be 
 found worth while to glance at his life, a 
 very dim page in literary history, long 
 forgotten, but deserving such a passing 
 revival as this. 
 
 Henry Lemoine was born at Spital- 
 fields in the year of the Lisbon earth- 
 quake. Of his parents nothing seems 
 to be known. At fourteen he was 
 apprenticed to a man who combined 
 the trades of stationer and rag-merchant. 
 The hybrid business seems to have been 
 unsuccessful, for Lemoine's master found 
 it convenient to defraud a widow of 
 ^3,000 and then emigrate. During 
 his apprenticeship to the stationer 
 and rag-merchant, Lemoine made the
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 65 
 
 acquaintance of a Mr. Toddy, who was an 
 "enormous chronicle of events." This 
 man directed his reading, and encouraged 
 him in his attempts at composition, 
 counteracting the evil influence of the rag- 
 merchant, who hated learning, and had 
 persecuted Lemoine in his studies so 
 persistently that he could read only after 
 his master had retired for the night. It 
 was in these untoward circumstances that 
 Lemoine began to write for the magazines, 
 obtaining a certain degree of success at 
 once. His first employer having 
 absconded, Lemoine joined himself to a 
 Mr. Chatterton, who was quite a charac- 
 ter in his way. He also carried on two 
 trades in one shop those of baker and 
 bookseller, having inscribed over his 
 window this distich borrowed from 
 Roberts, a wine and book merchant in 
 
 F
 
 66 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 the Borough, substituting "bread" for 
 " wine " : 
 
 ' ' Two trades united which you seldom find, 
 Bread to refresh the body, books the mind." 
 
 With Chatterton Lemoine learned to 
 bake, and was besides allowed time to 
 read and write. He acquired a reputa- 
 tion for powers of ridicule and satire with 
 the habitues of the Three Tun Tavern 
 and the Three Morris Dancers in the old 
 'Change, resorts of actors. " The Sting- 
 ing Nettle," a satire, the asperity of which 
 was held to atone in a measure for the 
 faulty form, and the " Reward of Merit," 
 reckoned by his friends to be in Church- 
 hill's best manner, were Lemoine's chief 
 productions at this period. After serving 
 his time with Mr. Chatterton, he hired 
 himself as a foreigner to teach French in
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 67 
 
 a boarding-school at Vauxhall. He was 
 supposed not to know a word of English, 
 and the imposition succeeded admirably, 
 until, finding the restraint intolerable, he 
 took one of the domestics into his con- 
 fidence in order to be able to converse in 
 English. His secret soon reached the 
 ears of his employers, Mannypenny & Co., 
 and he was dismissed, but with a good 
 character, and a testimony to his thorough 
 efficiency as a teacher of French. He 
 then in 1777 took a bookstall in the 
 Little Minories, from which he removed 
 in 1780 to Bishopsgate Churchyard. The 
 day he spent in philosophical conversation 
 with people of note who frequented his 
 stall ; in the evening, unable to shake off 
 the habits contracted in the company 
 of the actors during his apprenticeship, 
 he frequented the taverns, invariably, 
 
 F 2
 
 68 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 however, choosing companions higher in 
 the social scale than himself. His want 
 of thrift finally obliged him to turn his 
 trade of baker to account. Still retaining 
 his stall, he hired himself to a baker's 
 widow, for whom he worked on Sundays, 
 taking also a share of the regular night- 
 work, in return for board and lodging. 
 
 During the latter period of his life 
 Lemoine was very industrious, but the 
 failure of a printer who owed him ^"129 
 reduced him to the necessity of becoming 
 a pedestrian bookseller, which occupation 
 he followed from 1795 till his death in 
 1814. With his long drooping nose, 
 black sack, and slouching gait, he was 
 often derided as a Jew old-clothes man. 
 He bore all such taunts patiently, or some- 
 times he would silence his tormentors with
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 69 
 
 the reminder that the Son of Man had been 
 a Jew. In 1797 he issued his "History 
 of the Art of Printing," which contained 
 a chronological list of the printers of 
 England, Scotland, and Ireland, an 
 account of Walpole's press at Strawberry 
 Hill, and an essay on literary property, 
 compiled from Blackstone. 
 
 Lemoine, besides possessing fair literary 
 capacity, was one of the best judges 
 of an old book in England, a good 
 French and German scholar, and, it is 
 said, an able commentator on Jewish 
 writings. Had he only possessed a little 
 more self-control and habits of thrift he 
 might have anticipated the success of the 
 Chamberses in Edinburgh, or of Charles 
 Knight in London. As it was, he never 
 had more than his chin above the waves ;
 
 70 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 but he never gave in, and it is well to 
 know of men who kept fronting misfortune, 
 and who died in harness because the 
 time had not yet come to put it off. 
 
 It would be impossible to compile a 
 list of Lemoine's works. He translated 
 Lavater's " Physiognomy." He collabor- 
 ated on a book of domestic medicine. 
 He wrote three novels, and conducted 
 successively three magazines, to which he 
 was the largest contributor. He studied 
 in the street, and produced his copy in 
 public-houses. His periodicals, The 
 Conjurors Magazine, The Wonderful 
 Magazine, and The Eccentric Magazine, 
 are a cross between The Gentleman's 
 Magazine and the chapbooks of the time, 
 inheriting more from the latter.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 71 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 " If the party struck turns the other 
 cheek always smite again," said Worldly 
 Wiseman to his son. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Angels' visits, however infrequent, are 
 not as a rule ceremonious. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 If one has a healthy mind it is whole- 
 some to go from extreme to extreme, just 
 as a hardy Russian plunges out of a boiling 
 bath into the snow.
 
 72 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 No German writer is less German than 
 Nietsche. His style is that of a French 
 man : he has a profound horror of disser- 
 tation. All his writings are collections of 
 aphorisms ; and all ideas disgust him when 
 he has considered them for a short time. 
 His writing is a succession of imagery of 
 the most concrete order, but always with 
 a symbolic value. There is no trace of 
 sentiment everywhere a morbid sense of 
 reality, incapable of satisfying itself with 
 any thought of man's heart. His irony is 
 altogether different from the ordinary 
 German humour dry, bitter, cruel, and 
 as perfectly under control as that of Swift. 
 He would be satisfied could he find one 
 certainty. He has compared himself to 
 Diogenes, who went in broad day with a
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 73 
 
 lantern seeking a man. " My misfortune," 
 said he, "is that I cannot even find a 
 lantern." He is the Nihilist of philo- 
 sophy.
 
 74 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 " In the beginning was nonsense, and 
 the nonsense came from God, and the 
 nonsense was God." That is Nietsche's 
 theory of the universe. All is illusion 
 metaphysic, science, religion, art. Here 
 follow some of his sayings. 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 There is nothing left for metaphysic to 
 do but to define things as they are ; and 
 when that is achieved it will be nothing : 
 it is not the world in itself, but the world 
 as it appears that interests us.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 75 
 
 XL. 
 
 It is of as little consequence to know 
 things as they are, as it is for the drowning 
 sailor to know the chemical composition 
 of sea-water. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 Metaphysic is a necessary inevitable 
 illusion the flattering unction the young 
 man lays to his soul that not he but 
 the nature of things is responsible.
 
 76 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XLII. 
 
 Conscience is a pretext which we have 
 invented to save us the trouble of think- 
 ing. 
 
 XLIIL 
 
 Compassion is the most banal of all 
 feelings : when a man is prosperous and 
 eupeptic, compassion is a natural sentiment 
 with him ; but don't be ill too often or too 
 long, or you will be thought to deserve all 
 your troubles.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 77 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 Gratitude is a subtle form of revenge : 
 the receiver of a benefit recovers his 
 superiority in the effort to be grateful. 
 
 XLV. 
 
 It is pretended that self-denial is the 
 sign of a moral action; but there is no 
 action which is not a sacrifice the 
 sacrifice of that which pleases less for that 
 which pleases more : selfishness is the 
 sole law of human nature.
 
 78 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 Vanity is the supreme form of selfish- 
 ness : it is the skin of the soul, and serves 
 to hide the wretchedness within. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 Distinguished actions may be attributed 
 to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and 
 insignificant actions to fear.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 79 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 Friendship is possible only when the 
 individuals are far apart 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 Sexual love is a mixture of sensuality, 
 pity, and humiliation humiliation being 
 a desire to be exalted.
 
 8o SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 Woman has always managed to make 
 man provide for her; her consolidated 
 fund is man's vanity : under the pretext of 
 giving him the upper hand, she has left 
 him all the anxiety and responsibility. 
 
 LI. 
 
 The only question which one ought to 
 put to oneself before marriage is : Do you 
 think you will always be able to keep up 
 a conversation with your wife ? For all 
 the rest passes, and when it is past it is 
 still necessary to have something to talk 
 about.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 81 
 
 LII. 
 
 There are two kinds of art : that which 
 accentuates the sentiment of existence, 
 and that which makes us forget it. 
 
 LIIL 
 
 The worship of genius comes from the 
 vanity of men, who attribute to super- 
 natural power what they know themselves 
 unable to do : we make a god of a man of 
 parts to safeguard our amour propre.
 
 82 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LIV. 
 
 Nietsche's is the most unphilosophic 
 mind that ever attempted philosophy. He 
 is a great poet seeking a system, instead of 
 taking things on trust. He starts from 
 nothing, and ends in nothing. He 
 proves and disproves, believes and dis- 
 believes everything; and he is as un- 
 certain of the Nihilism to which he always 
 harks back as he is of witchcraft. 
 
 LV. 
 
 Nietsche always regarded his Nihilism 
 as a preface to a positive doctrine. But 
 he failed to unlearn the habit of doubt, 
 until he went mad, and discovered that 
 " indubitably it was he who had created 
 the world."
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 83 
 
 LVI. 
 
 It cannot be said too often that there is 
 no greater illusion than disillusion. 
 
 LVII. 
 
 To be a Nihilist in philosophy is to 
 substitute the illusion of blindness for our 
 own trustworthy vision. Goethe went 
 through it and came out serene, with the 
 serenity of faith in art, in science, and in 
 man. Shakespeare did not turn mad 
 after Hamlet and King Lear, but lived 
 to write The Tempest. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 Goethe felt and suffered as much as 
 Nietsche, but being stronger, saw through 
 the Brocken spectre of self which inter- 
 rupted Nietsche's view wherever he 
 turned. 
 
 LIX. 
 
 It has been said, " only that is true of 
 which the converse is also true " ; but 
 truth is liker a diamond than a proposi- 
 tion : a brilliant, every facet and edge of 
 which lightens with veracity.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 85 
 
 LX. 
 
 There are doubtless many ways of see- 
 ing London, but for the Londoner or the 
 visitor who has some time at his disposal, 
 perhaps the best method is the least 
 methodical. Want of method, when 
 rightly considered, is really a kind of 
 faculty, and not the absence of one. It is 
 a gift, and, like other gifts, the possession 
 of it entails an onerous burden of responsi- 
 bility. When once an individual perceives 
 clearly that he has a talent for doing 
 things the wrong way, a bias towards pro- 
 crastination, a power of putting the cart 
 before the horse with infallible exactitude, 
 and an irresistible tendency towards the 
 employment in speech and writing of that 
 figure which grammarians call hysteron- 
 proteron, he is impressed with as deep a
 
 86 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 sense of what he owes the world and him- 
 self, as if he had been dowered with one 
 of the more generally recognized forms of 
 genius. In addition to this heavy respon- 
 sibility, he has the harassing consciousness 
 that he is the most immoderately handi- 
 capped man in the world, and can only 
 arrive at the starting-place long after 
 most of his competitors have reached the 
 goal. But this faculty, which in the long 
 run cannot fail to be disastrous for its pos- 
 sessor, has its pleasures and its compensa- 
 tions. Out of the very impediments and 
 delays in his path the unmethodical man 
 can derive satisfaction. For example, he 
 does not get up to London till he is about 
 forty, to begin the race with men only 
 half his age ; a very difficult thing to find 
 compensation for, one might think. On 
 the contrary, a walk about the streets on a
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 87 
 
 spring or a summer afternoon consoles him 
 for his late beginning. He knew London 
 before he came to it. He had studied its 
 antiquities, and he had an intimate 
 acquaintance with its literary associations. 
 There are countless episodes in his walks 
 which such a man will remember to his 
 dying day. To wander aimlessly along 
 Gray's Inn Road, and suddenly find him- 
 self for the first time in front of the old 
 wooden houses in Holborn that form the 
 entrance to the Staple Inn, is a pleasure 
 to the man of no method, equal, at least, 
 to that of the astronomer "when some new 
 planet swims into his ken " ; and pleasures 
 of that kind are easily attainable in great 
 variety in London still, for it will be a 
 long time before they can improve away 
 all the old landmarks. The unmethodical 
 method of seeing London is doubtless the
 
 88 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 best ; but then it requires the unmethodi- 
 cal man, and he is rare the true un- 
 methodical man, who does not, like the 
 spurious species commoner than black- 
 berries, spend his days and nights in the 
 invention of countless methods for econo- 
 mising time and labour. The true 
 unmethodical man would not have a 
 method if he could ; he would go out of 
 his way if one whose vocation it is to 
 deviate can ever be said to go out of 
 his way to avoid the temptation of pick- 
 ing up the most golden method which 
 could be thrown in his path. 
 
 LXI. 
 
 " Futile " was Carlyle's pet word. 
 Whenever he felt himself genuinely 
 interested in anybody or anything he
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 89 
 
 seems always to have paused and asked 
 himself, " How does it become me, with 
 difficulty balancing myself here on the 
 tight-rope between the two eternities, to 
 exhibit the least concern save in this tight- 
 rope and in myself, the unfortunate spiritual 
 Blondin ? " This in any personal matter 
 he committed to writing is almost his 
 invariable attitude, except where his family 
 is concerned. His " Excursion (futile 
 enough) to Paris " is incomparably naive 
 in its attempts to throw himself off the 
 scent. It is quite evident that he was 
 pleased at the Theatre Frangais. The 
 audience, with Changarnier for figure- 
 head, the actors who are twice pronounced 
 " good," the two pieces he waited to the 
 farce, he was so interested all entertained 
 him, but it mustn't be confessed even to 
 himself: "to me, a very wearisome
 
 90 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 affair." Then when he finds himself so 
 delighted with a neat saying of Royer 
 Callard's that he is forced to quote it, he 
 perceives that as this is mere gossip he 
 ought to be ashamed, so he exclaims the 
 pretence is here much too thin " Heigho, 
 that was Prosper Me'rime'e's account after- 
 wards, heigho ! " But it must be remem- 
 bered that this is no mere posing as a 
 great weary Gulliver among the Lilli- 
 putians. It is the high and dry hypocrisy, 
 the inverted politeness of the lowland 
 Scot, who greets his only son after a long 
 absence with the laconic, " Ay, Jamie." 
 One reason of the immense bulk of Carlyle's 
 writings possibly lies here. His Scotch 
 reticence prevented him from declaring 
 the heart of his message, but he wanted to, 
 and kept on trying : he never wrote his 
 " Exodus from Houndsditch."
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, 91 
 
 Carlyle's egotism was as unconscious and 
 sublime as a child's. " I am told that he 
 (Thiers) is jealous that I respect him 
 insufficiently. Poor little soul, I have no 
 pique at him whatsoever, &c." The 
 greatest Englishman of letters of this 
 century found it indispensable for his con- 
 tentment to belittle almost every man of 
 real importance whom he met.
 
 92 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXII. 
 
 Several passages in "Wotton Rein- 
 fred " are almost identical verbally with 
 passages in "Sartor Resartus." It may 
 be going too far to say that "Wotton 
 Reinfred" was contained in one of the 
 mythical paper bags, " carefully sealed 
 and marked successively in gilt China-ink 
 with the symbols of the six southern 
 Zodiacal signs beginning at Libra," which 
 the Hofrath Henschrecke sent to the 
 English editor of the "Clothes Phil- 
 osophy " in place of an autobiography of 
 Teufelsdrockh ; nevertheless, the resem- 
 blances are so marked that one is forced 
 to the conclusion that Carlyle had actually 
 the manuscript of " Wotton Reinfred " 
 before him while writing certain chapters 
 of "Sartor." The description of the
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 93 
 
 House in the Wold and of the view from 
 the garden-house in the former are the 
 same as descriptions of the Waldschloss 
 and its environment in the chapter entitled 
 "Romance" in the latter; and the 
 incident of the hero silencing the tea- 
 table orator and the circumstances of the 
 love-story are essentially identical in both. 
 Sometimes the wording is the same. 
 " Disbelieving all things, the poor youth 
 never learned to believe in himself," occurs 
 in both. The following are parallel 
 passages : 
 
 "Withdrawn in "Thus in timid 
 proud humility within pride he withdrew 
 his own fastnesses ; within his own fast- 
 solitary from men, yet nesses, where, baited 
 baited by night-spectres by a thousand dark 
 enough, he saw himself spectres, he saw him- 
 with a sad indignation, self constrained to 
 constrained to renounce renounce in unspeak- 
 the fairest hopes of able sadness the fairest
 
 94 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 existence. And now, hopes of existence. 
 
 O, now ! ' She looks And how sweet, how 
 
 on thee, ' cried he : ravishing the contra- 
 
 ' she, the fairest, diction. ' She has 
 
 noblest,'"&c. ("Sartor looked on thee !' cried 
 
 Resartus," book ii., he; 'she, the fairest, 
 
 ch. v.) noblest,' " &c. ("Wot- 
 ton Reinfred," ch. ii.) 
 
 The stiff academic writing m " Wotton 
 Reinfred," excellent in its kind, is in 
 extraordinary contrast with the style Car- 
 lyle was about to develop ; but here and 
 there are passages unsurpassed, even by 
 Carlyle himself. Take the following de- 
 scription of a portrait of Cromwell : 
 
 " Old Noll, as he looked and lived ! 
 The armed genius of Puritanism ; dark in 
 his inward light ; negligent, awkward in 
 his strength, meanly apparelled in his pride, 
 base-born, and yet kingly. Those bushy
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 95 
 
 grizzled locks falling over his shoulders; 
 that high, careworn brow ; the gleam of 
 those eyes, cold and stern as the sheen of 
 a winter moon; that rude, rough-hewn, 
 battered face, so furrowed over with mad, 
 inexplicable traces, the very wart on the 
 cheek, are full of meaning. This is the 
 man whose words no one could interpret, 
 but whose thoughts are clearest wisdom, 
 who spoke in laborious folly, in voluntary 
 or involuntary enigmas, but saw and acted 
 unerringly as fate. Confusion, ineptitude, 
 dishonesty, are pictured on his countenance, 
 but through these shines a fiery strength, 
 nay, a grandeur, as of a true hero. You 
 see that he was fearless, resolute as a 
 Scanderberg, yet cunning and double 
 withal, like some paltry pettifogger. He 
 is your true enthusiastic hypocrite ; at once 
 crackbrained and inspired, a knave and a
 
 96 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 demigod ; in brief, Old Noll, as he looked 
 and lived ! " 
 
 Only he who was to substitute a higher 
 idea of Cromwell could have stated so 
 powerfully the highest then existing.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 97 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 The " New Journalism " is the defiant 
 reply of the " thirty millions mostly fools " 
 to Carlyle's doctrine of silence. 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 The world on the whole and in the 
 mass is neither very strong-minded nor 
 very hard-hearted, and it gradually modi- 
 fies the ideas of its great men to its own 
 likeness ; anthropomorphism is as active 
 in biography and history as it is in 
 theology.
 
 98 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXV. 
 
 Unfailingly, when the critic's capacity 
 to be charmed begins to wane, he declares 
 that it is the charmer who had deceived 
 him, and with a solemn shake of the 
 head advises all and sundry " in the 
 interests of true literature " not to " honour 
 fraudulent draughts upon our imagina- 
 tion." It is always these second thoughts 
 that destroy the value of criticism. If on 
 attempting a second perusal one finds a 
 book that has once pleased beginning to 
 pall, the wisest course is to cease reading, 
 and treasure the first impression ; we may 
 be sure ninety-nine times out of a 
 hundred that the book is as fresh as ever
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 99 
 
 it was, and that it is we who are growing 
 old. 
 
 " Right in thy teeth, or in thy toothless chaps, 
 I swear, antiquity, first thoughts are best." 
 
 This is only one side of the truth, but it 
 is a side people are too easily persuaded 
 to turn from. 
 
 H 2
 
 ioo SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 This is the age of essences. The cattle 
 upon a thousand hills are boiled down and 
 handed about in little earthenware pots ; 
 Bovril takes the place of roast-beef, and 
 tit-bits that of literature. If the Muses 
 are analogical, and recognize the operation 
 of the Zeitgeist in. the wide-spread advertise- 
 ment of, if not indulgence in, beef-extract, 
 they may be expected henceforth to con- 
 centrate their energy on couplets and 
 quatrains. The voluminousness which 
 has characterised the poetry of the 
 Victorian period is perhaps about to end. 
 The long luxurious idylls, the long discur- 
 sive dramatic monologues, the long
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 101 
 
 garrulous story of eld, and the long 
 rhapsodies where thought and emotion are 
 lost in a revel of colour and sound, are 
 probably about to give place to a shorter 
 flight and a compacter form.
 
 102 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 Attempts at blank verse in French are 
 few and far between. Count Bruguiere 
 de Sorsum in the early part of the present 
 century translated a number of Shake- 
 speare's plays, rendering rhyme by rhyme, 
 blank verse by blank verse, and prose by 
 prose with astonishing results. For 
 example, " Come, let me clutch thee ! " a 
 sentence from Macbeth's address to the 
 air-drawn dagger, is expanded into 
 " Instrument dangereux, laisse-moi te 
 saisir ! " Bruguiere was better advised 
 when he translated Southey's " Don 
 Roderick" into prose, a task which he 
 undertook because he was inclined to 
 regard Southey as the greatest poet of hia' 
 age. " The changes that fleeting time 
 procureth."
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 103 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 There was once a rumour of a Meredith 
 Society. George Meredith will surely be 
 spared this infliction in his lifetime at 
 least. But if a Meredith Society must be 
 formed, how would the following general 
 rules work? (i) That the members 
 admire George Meredith in silence. (2) 
 That members shall write as much as they 
 like about George Meredith, and burn 
 their writings without showing them to ' 
 any one. (3) That no publicity shall 
 be given in any shape to the existence of 
 the Society. (4) That the Society shall 
 endeavour not to exist as soon as it can.
 
 104 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 The chief hindrances in the considera- 
 tion of any matter are the thoughts of 
 others. It is not so much a test of 
 genius to think originally as to know what 
 one actually does think. Some men 
 upon most subjects have two judgments : 
 a public one for daily use, and a private 
 one which they deceive themselves into 
 the belief they never held. There are 
 decent, honest men who opine the 
 opinions of others, persuaded that they 
 are their own ; few indeed can detach 
 their proper thought from the mass of 
 ideas.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 105 
 
 LXX. 
 
 The discipline of social life is in nothing 
 more beneficial than in its inculcation of 
 a healthy silence. The first requisite to a 
 proper carriage in almost any social circle 
 is the ability to maintain silence concern- 
 ing that, above all things, with which one 
 is best acquainted until we arrive at 
 Society proper, where there is a rigid 
 elimination of all " shop." It is this that 
 tempts the wealthy soap-boiler or stationer 
 to commit suicide as a tradesman, no 
 matter how high his rank in his own class, 
 and to undergo long years of purgatorial 
 pain, if haply, bald-headed, wrinkled, with 
 heart all gone to vellum, and brains a 
 mere handful of borilla ash, he may at 
 last enter that earthly paradise where all is 
 forgiven and forgotten, and silence upon 
 disagreeable subjects is the order of the
 
 io6 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 day ; where an absolute embargo is laid on 
 every " shop," except indeed on that 
 "shop" which Society prescribes. That 
 all-engrossing subject, the " shop " of 
 Society, is Society itself. Does not 
 Society say, " I'll have no individual 
 egotism, no variety. You must all talk 
 about me ; become mouth-pieces of me ; 
 my happy or scandalous doings or sayings 
 these are to be your staple, and from 
 these you must weave daily and nightly 
 a rainbow-web of talk " ? And is it not a 
 good rule which proscribes all " shop " 
 save the one ? In obeying it we make the 
 nearest approach to silence which human 
 frailty may attain ; and silence, we 
 ought by this time to realise, is the most 
 precious of metals. Who dare blame us 
 if, to make it current, we temper it with 
 a little silvern alloy of speech, to wit ?
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 107 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 Truly this talking of one " shop " is a 
 capital discipline. The mere crocheteer 
 has to conceal his penny trumpet ; the 
 hobby-rider must leave his rocking-horse 
 at home; the man with a grievance 
 requires to bandage up the political wen 
 or the social cancer which he carries about 
 vicariously ; the student of science, 
 tracking with the ardour and perseverance 
 of a beagle some undaunted or unearthed 
 form of death, finds the callousness of 
 society to his worthy aim as refreshing as 
 a dip in the sea, as great an impetus to 
 centrality as the fear of starvation ; the 
 poet, whose boiling brain has exhaled in 
 some new and most difficult verse-form 
 the freshest expression of the highest
 
 io8 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 thought, has the wholesome knowledge 
 impressed on him that, however great a 
 poet he may be, Society is neither a lunatic 
 nor a lover ; and, finding himself de trap, 
 he takes his fine frenzy back to his study, 
 and there lays on that homely word which 
 illuminates his poem and gives it life for 
 ever. The parvenu is taught that he must 
 not speak of his over-decorated house ; the 
 clergyman daren't preach, nor the lawyer 
 lay down the law. And yet and yet, 
 there is no talk worth the expense of 
 breath, and no talk worth listening to, 
 save the arrantest " shop." Diderot over 
 his wine, Johnson with tea-cup in hand, 
 Carlyle smoking his Virginia, all talked 
 " shop " of the most glaring kind ; and 
 who would not give a season's dissipation, 
 once to see Diderot dash his night-cap 
 against the wall, to hear Johnson at his
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 109 
 
 fifteenth cup defend the Church of 
 England, or watch the smile growing in 
 Carlyle's eyes as he ended a chapter from 
 the unwritten " Exodus from Hounds- 
 ditch " with a laugh like the neighing of 
 all Tattersall's, tears streaming down his 
 cheek, pipe held aloft, foot clutched in the 
 air loud, long-continuing, uncontrollable; 
 a laugh not of the face and diaphragm 
 only, but of the whole man from head to 
 heel?
 
 i io SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 Thomas Hey wood in his curious " Life 
 of Merlin," concerned as to whether 
 the magician had been a heathen, does 
 not overcome the difficulty with the ease 
 of William Rowley, who says plainly that 
 his father was the devil. He rather 
 arrives at the conclusion that he was a 
 step-brother of Plato's. A recent writer 
 has solved the matter, and reconciled 
 opposites, by making him an evangelical 
 Christian, with command over the Platonic 
 elemental spirits; from which it may be 
 inferred that if Merlin must have had 
 Apollo for father, his mother, in all 
 likelihood, would be an erring damsel of 
 Britain. It is, perhaps, remarkable that 
 the story of Merlin has produced such a
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, ill 
 
 small quantity of literature. If we except 
 the voluminous prophecies in his name by 
 Partridge, Sidrophel Lilly, and others, the 
 appearances of Merlin in English litera- 
 ture are confined to two or three romances, 
 ballads, and plays until we come to Scott's 
 " Bridal of Triermain " and Tennyson's 
 "Vivien." The very name, Merlin, is 
 fascinating; his story is most romantic, 
 and possesses strong human interest ; yet 
 it was left for Tennyson to discover its 
 value. For centuries it lay in the quarry 
 like a block of marble, hieroglyphs 
 scrawled all over it by almanack makers, 
 bits of it chipped off and carried away for 
 doorsteps and pedestals, until the eye that 
 could see beheld the immortal group in 
 the forest of Broceliaunde, and liberated it 
 from the tomb, where, like the enchanter 
 himself, spell-bound it had slept for
 
 112 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 centuries. That Tennyson has told the 
 story finally it would be unwise to assert. 
 There is as yet no outstanding female 
 embodiment of the "spirit that denies," 
 and in Vivien is a possible she-Mephis- 
 topheles.
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 113 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 If not the greatest critic of his time, 
 Hazlitt is one of the greatest ; and his 
 greatness consists in this that he had 
 " the courage to say as an author what he 
 felt as a man." With Coleridge and 
 Lamb he introduced the new method. 
 Literary criticism had been a scratching of 
 the surface. They turned up the soil and 
 showed the fresh earth ; and Hazlitt was 
 not the least lusty husbandman of the 
 three. Yet his fame is dim compared 
 with that of the others. His gift was 
 single, and his glory is single, though its 
 lustre be dull. Misrepresentation of the 
 man's life, like a corroding vapour, has 
 tarnished the aureoie. He was "paid 
 with contempt while living," and, if not 
 
 i
 
 114 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 " with an epitaph," then with pity, " when 
 dead." Even Lamb, who lived one of the 
 happiest lives of this century, has been 
 pitied ; and while it is to be resented, it 
 cannot be wondered at that the melan- 
 choly Hazlitt should be commiserated, for 
 vanity feeds on the degradation of others. 
 With the exception of his father and his 
 son, his relations were not sources of 
 satisfaction to him ; his wives were any- 
 thing but helpmeets ; he was often in 
 economical straits ; his health was bad : 
 the whole outward circumstances of his 
 life were dingy; but not more so than 
 those of many a hermit who in rags and 
 nameless discomfort communed with 
 heaven night and day. There has been 
 no pleasure in contemplating Hazlitt 
 because he has been considered such a 
 miserable fellow. Pity is akin to love,
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, 115 
 
 but it is also akin to despite ; and it is 
 common to hate the wretchedness that 
 offends. When the great satisfaction that 
 Hazlitt took in living is clearly understood, 
 his fame will grow brighter. His last 
 words were, "Well, I've had a happy 
 life " ; and, since no man is a critic on 
 his deathbed, it may be taken for an un- 
 premeditated, impulsive cry as his years 
 flashed past him, each laden with profound 
 meditation on subjects of his own choos- 
 ing. 
 
 I 2
 
 Ii6 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 It is the age of publicity ; the extension 
 of the franchise has made the people king, 
 and everybody from Prime Minister to 
 Jack Pudding appeals to Caesar ; some 
 with reason, many simply because it is the 
 fashion. Indeed, one is sometimes 
 inclined to regard the habit of forestalling 
 death with autobiographies, memoirs, 
 reminiscences, interviews, as a species of 
 panic. "As the world grows fuller," 
 people seem to say, " the chance of our 
 being remembered decreases. Our jour- 
 nals, our note-books, they will burn them 
 or let the rats eat them when we are dead. 
 Nobody will know the things we said, and 
 the things that were said of us ; the lofty 
 contempt we had for So-and-So, who
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 117 
 
 thought himself such a big man, and the 
 high regard in which that other truly great 
 personality held us. Unless we make a 
 stir now we shall be forgotten. Let us get 
 reporters to put paragraphs about us in 
 the newspapers ; invite interviewers to 
 interview us ; bring out our journals our- 
 selves ; let us publish, publish, publish ! 
 for the night cometh when no man can 
 publish. Let us appeal to the great public 
 at once ; posterity will know nothing of us 
 unless we start an echo now." One 
 would think that a belief in any immor- 
 tality except that of a page in the " Dic- 
 tionary of National Biography " had died 
 out in England altogether.
 
 Ii8 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 A certain barrister of some note, who 
 makes about a thousand a year by his 
 novels and stories in addition to his pro- 
 fessional earnings, is said to have filled up 
 his income-tax schedule as follows : 
 Profession, Law so much ; Trade, 
 Literature so much. True or not, we 
 are here face to face with one fact which 
 has been recognized ever since the open- 
 ing of Grub Street, and with another not 
 perhaps so generally known. That litera- 
 ture, or rather writing, for nearly two 
 hundred years now, has been followed as 
 a trade by hosts of needy or prosperous 
 scholars and others, all the world knows. 
 Does it know also that those who take 
 cheerfully to writing as a trade, and nothing 
 else, are often the very men who, from
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS, lig 
 
 their circumstances, might be expected to 
 produce literature ? The ever-increasing 
 numbers, ambitious of literary distinction, 
 who flock to London yearly, to become 
 hacks and journalists, regard the work 
 by which they gain a livelihood as a mere 
 industry, a stepping-stone to higher things 
 alas ! a stepping-stone on which the 
 great majority of them have to maintain a 
 precarious footing all their lives. But 
 they do not choose the inferior work that 
 pays : they offer, or think they offer, the 
 public, through the publishers, bread ; but 
 the public still the thought of the hack 
 wants stones, and these they are forced 
 sorrowfully to supply. What wonder if 
 they sometimes take to laying about them 
 with scorpions ! And what wonder if they 
 often accept their fate and become fat and 
 flourishing !
 
 120 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 It may be said broadly that there are 
 three kinds of poets employing the word 
 as inclusive of all verse-writers : those who 
 turn out garments, those who put some 
 kind of body into the stuff they shape, and 
 those who inform their work with a soul. 
 As a rule it will be found that diction and 
 passion, the garment and the body, are 
 most delicately wrought, and, in the old- 
 time phrase, most loftily built, when the 
 essence of the poetry is spiritual, when it 
 has a soul. Few poets consciously 
 endeavour to make only garments ; but it 
 is the misfortune of many that they are 
 unable to carry their creative labours 
 further. There is no necessity, in the 
 nature of things, why those poets who,
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 121 
 
 doing their best, succeed in making only 
 the trappings of poetry, should be 
 anathematised, except, perhaps, when the 
 trappings are badly made and that is 
 what too often happens if there be no 
 measurement to work to, no body to fit. 
 Even then, however, it is wise and 
 humane not to invoke the thunder. 
 Torture always undid its purpose ; let the 
 critic be merciful.
 
 122 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXVII 
 
 It is not so very long ago yet, although 
 we have entered the last decade of the 
 nineteenth century, since the phrase fin de 
 stick wakened up one morning and found 
 itself famous. Immediately, it took itself 
 for granted. It rides triumphant on the 
 pen of every ready-writer ; tyrannises over 
 weak imaginations ; and already, by sheer 
 dint of its endeavour to be more than a 
 phrase, has grown into something very like 
 a fact. For there can be no doubt that 
 the primal cause of its quasi-existence is a 
 chronological one : we are at the end of 
 the nineteenth century ; therefore the 
 ideals of the nineteenth century have run 
 to seed. This chronological method of 
 marking off the ages of the world's history
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 123 
 
 is not more arbitrary than it is absurd. A 
 simple reference to a book of dates will 
 show that for the last thousand years the 
 final year of each century has occurred 
 nearer the middle than the end of a 
 well-defined period. Attempts have 
 been made towards the close of most 
 centuries to persuade the world that it was 
 in a parlous state, and many people doubt- 
 less were persuaded. At the present time, 
 when the means of publicity are at the 
 commandment of any one who can write 
 a letter to the newspapers, the detractors 
 of this age have it in their power to create 
 a panic in the thought, if not in the 
 conduct, of the world ; and some of them 
 are busy at it. Probably there are no 
 more well-meaning people in the world 
 than lackeys. For them heroes have no 
 existence; they detect the warts and
 
 124 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 blemishes in the paragons, and are not 
 slow to point them out. If they do not 
 expose the weaknesses of the great, how 
 is that necessary function to be performed? 
 On the whole, it is, doubtless, right that 
 the ages should have their lackeys to be- 
 little them, as well as their poets to praise 
 them ; and if the world still prefers the 
 word of the former, why then the world is 
 consistent !
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 125 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 In America this detraction of the times 
 is loudest ; for a little word whispered in 
 an inner room of London or Paris is soon 
 echoed back from the house-tops of Boston 
 and Phila4elphia. What is a complaint 
 here becomes a boast there ; and The 
 Arena flaunts as its motto the grievous cry 
 of Heine, " We do not take possession of 
 our ideas, but are possessed by them." 
 An anonymous writer, so possessed, will 
 write you a paper entitled, "Would We 
 Live Our Lives Over Again ? " going one 
 better, as he himself might say, than Mr. 
 Mallock's " Is Life Worth Living? " No 
 reflective sober-minded man would live his 
 life over again, if he had the opportunity, 
 when it came to the pinch ; when he saw
 
 126 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 it stretched out before him, complete and 
 distinct. Unless drunkards in American, 
 " men of bibulous habits " forgot the 
 horrors of a debauch, they would be 
 deterred from another. Unless army 
 officers forgot, after a series of campaigns, 
 their privations, anxieties, and wounds, 
 they would resign their commissions. 
 Unless merchants engaged in "mighty 
 enterprises " American for making 
 " corners " forgot the terrible tension of 
 nerve and brain they had often been sub- 
 jected to, they would retire from business 
 in middle life. Our illusions vanish at 
 sixty, if not before, and then the thought 
 of living "the weary uncrowned years over 
 again is chilling, forbidding." There is 
 no such thing as a happy life in any true 
 sense " veritable sense of the adjective " 
 in American; perhaps some happy hours,
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 127 
 
 some happy days ; but even these are sure 
 to be commingled with fragments of un- 
 happiness. Happy lives ! The phrase is 
 itself a self-evident absurdity. The most 
 satisfied and the most unsatisfied agree 
 in the main in their estimate of life. 
 Byron had experienced only two happy 
 days ; and Goethe, who lived "postponed 
 his funeral " in American more than 
 twice as long as Byron, experienced but 
 eleven days' happiness ; so that between an 
 unfortunate and an abnormally fortunate 
 man the difference in happiness is only nine 
 days. Life may be an obligation ; it is 
 neither a delight nor an advantage. Would 
 we live it over again not another life, but 
 this very life which we have lived ? Will, 
 and strength, and philosophy we can 
 command for one journey from crib to 
 grave ; but that is quite enough. Repeti-
 
 128 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 tion would be onerous and execrable, and 
 none but a dolt would choose it. Such is 
 the corporate American answer to the 
 question, " Would We Live Our Lives 
 Over Again ? "
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 129 
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 Here follow a few individual answers, 
 apparently by Englishmen. 
 
 " I am sixty-two," says one man, " and 
 would be very glad indeed to live my life 
 over again. I shall live again after death 
 of course, and be conscious of my 
 existence ; therefore I know that it 
 would be a great waste of time on my 
 part to repeat these sixty-two years 
 exactly as I have lived them in this 
 world, when I might be spending them in 
 a better world under new conditions. 
 But one does get attached to a place; 
 besides, I think I would like to woo my 
 wife again, to marry, and to see my boys 
 and girls growing up about me. On the 
 other hand, my wife died after being bed- 
 
 K
 
 130 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 rid for two years ; my eldest boy made 
 sad mistakes in life ; and two of my 
 daughters are very unhappy in their 
 marriages. If it weren't for the misery it 
 would entail on these, I believe I would 
 like to live my life over again, exactly as 
 it has been."
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 131 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 " So would I," says another. " I'm 
 seventy. I was flogged at school nearly 
 every day, for I was always in mischief, 
 and a dunce besides. I fell in love 
 like a booby with a girl much too good 
 for me, and when she wouldn't have me 
 I began to go the pace ; and I've been 
 going the pace ever since. I've got all 
 kinds of aches and pains ; and I'm 
 blotched and bloated, and most people 
 turn away their eyes from me ; but I'm 
 in love with life. When I die I know 
 it's all up. If there were a choice 
 between another life and this one over 
 again, I would have a try at the new one, 
 of course, for I've been horribly miserable 
 all my days. But it's not. It's this life 
 over again, just as it was, or annihilation. 
 By Jove, I wish I had the choice ! " 
 
 K 2
 
 132 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 " I also am seventy," says a third, " and 
 I've had so much satisfaction in life that 
 if I had the offer, I believe I would live it 
 over again. Happiness ? Well, no ; I 
 don't believe I was ever happy. I don't 
 believe anybody was ever happy. That's 
 my great cure for the world to get people 
 to see that they never can be happy, but 
 that they can have satisfaction. I think 
 one of the best answers to this stupid 
 Yankee question was given before it was 
 put ; and that's Tennyson's ' Northern 
 Farmer.' That fine old pagan was busy all 
 his life too busy to be happy ; but the 
 satisfaction he had in making bad land 
 good land ! Why, it's evident he would 
 have liked nothing better than to live his
 
 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 133 
 
 life a hundred times over again, with a 
 hundred Thurnaby waastes to stub. Poor 
 starving people who have had little to do 
 all their lives, and rich people who have 
 had less, and some poets, artists, and 
 perhaps the whole of Boston which, if it 
 isn't the hub of the universe, is certainly 
 a diseased nervous centre might say, 
 'No, we can't face our lives a second 
 time ' ; but all people who have ever done 
 any work in the world worth doing would 
 only be too glad to do it over again."
 
 134 SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS. 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 Here we have an orthodox man, a 
 reprobate, and one who seems not much 
 of anything, all agreeing that life is not 
 synonymous with torture, and that the 
 present age, although the Jeameses and the 
 Morgans may find it as ill-natured and 
 unheroic as old Major Pendennis appeared 
 to them, is quite a tractable and good- 
 humoured age to the Laura Bells, the 
 Captain Costigans, and the George 
 Warringtons. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Henderson S* Scalding (Ltd.), 3 & 5, Matylebone Lane, I
 
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