THE LIBRARY 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Sara Bard Field Wood 
 

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©10 IKaorlO Series 
 
 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 TWO LECTXJRES BY 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Portland, Maine 
 
 Mdccccp 
 
This Second Edition on 
 Van Gelder paper con' 
 sists of 92 s copies. 
 
 GIFT 
 
'9o£~ 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefaces : 
 
 I TO THE EDITION OF 1882 . ix 
 
 II TO THE FIRST EDITION . . XV 
 
 Lecture I — Sesame 
 OF kings' treasuries ... I 
 
 Lecture II — Lilies 
 OF queens' garden ... 80 
 
 305 
 
PREFACES 
 
PREFACE 
 
 TO THE EDITION OF 1882 
 
 THE present edition of * Sesame and Lilies,* 
 issued at the request of an aged friend, 
 is reprinted without change of a word from 
 the first small edition of the book, withdraw- 
 ing only the irrelevant preface respecting 
 tours in the Alps, which however if the 
 reader care to see, he will find placed with 
 more propriety in the second volume of 
 ' Deucalion/ i The third lecture, added in 
 the first volume of the large edition of my 
 works, and the gossiping introduction pre- 
 fixed to that edition, are withdrawn also, not 
 as irrelevant, but as following the subject 
 too far, and disturbing the simplicity in 
 which the two original lectures dwell on 
 ,their several themes, — the majesty of the 
 
 I This " irrelevant preface " is far too exquisitely 
 written not to be reprinted here, and we therefore 
 include it. The third lecture and " the gossiping 
 introduction " we believe were wisely omitted by 
 Mr. Ruskin. 
 
influence of good books, and of good women, 
 if we know how to read them, and how to 
 honour. 
 
 I might just as well have said, the influ- 
 ence of good men, and good women, since 
 the best strength of a man is shown in his 
 intellectual work, as that of a woman in 
 her daily deed and character; and I am 
 somewhat tempted to involve myself in the 
 debate which might be imagined in illustrat- 
 ing these relations of their several powers, 
 because only the other day one of my friends 
 put me in no small pet by saying that he 
 thought my own influence was much more in 
 being amiable and obliging than in writing 
 books. Admitting, for the argument's sake, 
 the amiableness and obligingness, I begged 
 him, with some warmth, to observe that 
 there were myriads of at least equally good- 
 natured people in the world who had merely 
 become its slaves, if not its victims, but that 
 the influence of my books was distinctly on 
 the increase, and I hoped — etc., etc. — it is 
 no matter what more I said, or intimated; 
 but it much matters that the young reader 
 of the following essays should be confirmed 
 in the assurance on which all their pleading 
 depends, that there is such a thing as essen- 
 tial good, and as essential evil, in books, in 
 art, and in character ; — that this essential 
 
goodness and badness are independent of 
 epochs, fashions, opinions, or revolutions; 
 and that the present extremely active and 
 ingenious generation of young people, in 
 thanking Providence for the advantages it 
 has granted them in the possession of steam 
 whistles and bicycles, need not hope materi- 
 ally to add to the laws of beauty in sound or 
 grace in motion, which were acknowledged 
 in the days of Orpheus, and of Camilla. 
 
 But I am brought to more serious pause 
 than I had anticipated in putting final accent 
 on the main sentences in this — already, as 
 men now count time, old — book of mine, 
 because since it was written, not only these 
 untried instruments of action, but many 
 equally novel methods of education and 
 systems of morality have come into vogue, 
 not without a certain measure of prospect- 
 ive good in them; — college education for 
 women, — out-of -college education for men: 
 positivism with its religion of humanity, 
 and negativism with its religion of Chaos, — 
 and the like, from the entanglement of 
 which no young people can now escape, if 
 they would ; together with a mass of realistic, 
 or materialistic, literature and art, founded 
 mainly on the theory of nobody's having 
 any will, or needing any master; much of it 
 extremely clever, irresistibly amusing, and 
 
PREFACE 
 
 enticingly pathetic; but which is all never- 
 theless the mere whirr and dust -cloud of a 
 dissolutely reforming and vulgarly manufac- 
 turing age, which when its dissolutions are 
 appeased, and its manufactures purified, must 
 return in due time to the understanding of 
 the things that have been, and are, and 
 shall be hereafter, though for the present 
 concerned seriously with nothing beyond its 
 dinner and its bed. 
 
 I must therefore, for honesty's sake, no 
 less than intelligibility's, warn the reader of 
 * Sesame and Lilies,' that the book is wholly 
 of the old school; that it ignores, without 
 contention or regret, the ferment of sur- 
 rounding elements, and assumes for perennial 
 some old-fashioned conditions and existences 
 which the philosophy of to-day imagines to 
 be extinct with the Mammoth and the Dodo. 
 
 Thus the second lecture, in its very title, 
 " Queens' Gardens," takes for granted the 
 persistency of Queenship, and therefore of 
 Kingship, and therefore of Courtliness or 
 Courtesy, and therefore of Uncourtliness 
 or Rusticity. It assumes, with the ideas of 
 higher and lower rank, those of serene 
 authority and happy submission; of Riches 
 and Poverty w^ithout dispute for their rights, 
 and of Virtue and Vice without confusion of 
 their natures. 
 
And farther, it must be premised that the 
 book is chiefly written for young people 
 belonging to the upper, or undistressed 
 middle, classes; who may be supposed to 
 have choice of the objects and command of 
 the industries of their life. It assumes that 
 many of them will be called to occupy 
 responsible positions in the world, and that 
 they have leisure, in preparation for these, to 
 play tennis, or to read Plato. 
 
 Therefore also — that they have Plato to 
 read if they choose, with lawns on which 
 they may run, and woods in which they may 
 muse. It supposes their father's library to 
 be open to them, and to contain all that is 
 necessary for their intellectual progress, 
 without the smallest dependence on monthly 
 parcels from town. 
 
 These presupposed conditions are not 
 extravagant in a country which boasts of its 
 wealth, and which, without boasting, still 
 presents in the greater number of its landed 
 households, the most perfect types of grace 
 and peace which can be found in Europe. 
 
 I have only to add farther, respecting the 
 book, that it was written while my energies 
 were still unbroken and my temper unfet- 
 tered ; and that, if read in connection with 
 ' Unto this Last,' it contains the chief truths 
 I have endeavoured through all my past life 
 
to display, and which, under the warnings I 
 have received to prepare for its close, I am 
 chiefly thankful to have learnt and taught. 
 
 AVALLON, 
 
 August 24th, 1882. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 TO THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 A PASSAGE in the fifty-first page of this 
 book, referring to Alpine travellers, 
 will fall harshly on the reader's ear since it 
 has been sorrowfully enforced by the deaths 
 on Mont Cervin. I leave it, nevertheless, as 
 it stood, for I do not now write unadvisedly, 
 and think it wrong to cancel what has once 
 been thoughtfully said ; but it must not so 
 remain without a few added words. 
 
 No blame ought to attach to the Alpine 
 tourist for incurring danger. There is 
 usually sufficient cause, and real reward, for 
 all difficult work ; and even were it other- 
 wise, some experience of distinct peril, and 
 the acquirement of habits of quick and 
 calm action in its presence, are necessary 
 elements, at some period of life, in the 
 formation of manly character. The blame 
 of bribing guides into danger is a singular 
 accusation, in behalf of a people who have 
 made mercenary soldiers of themselves for 
 centuries, without any one's thinking of 
 
giving their fidelity better employment: 
 though, indeed, the piece of work they did 
 at the gate of the Tuileries, however useless, 
 was no unwise one ; and their lion of flawed 
 molasse at Lucerne, worthless in point of art 
 though it be, is nevertheless a better reward 
 than much pay; and a better ornament to 
 the old town than the Schweizer Hof, or 
 flat new quay, for the promenade of those 
 travellers who do not take guides into danger. 
 The British public are however, at home, 
 so innocent of ever buying their fellow 
 creatures* lives, that we may justly expect 
 them to be punctilious abroad 1 They do 
 not, perhaps, often calculate how many souls 
 flit annually, choked in fire-damp and sea- 
 sand, from economically watched shafts, and 
 economically manned ships ; nor see the fiery 
 ghosts writhe up out of every scuttleful of 
 cheap coals : nor count how many threads of 
 girlish life are cut off and woven annually by 
 painted Fates, into breadths of ball -dresses ; 
 or soaked away, like rotten hemp -fibre, in 
 the inlet of Cocytus which overflows the 
 Grass -market w^here flesh is as grass. We 
 need not, it seems to me, loudly blame any 
 one for paying a guide to take a brave walk 
 with him. Therefore, gentlemen of the 
 Alpine Club, as much danger as you care to 
 face, by all means ; but, if it please you, not 
 
PREFACE 
 
 SO much talk of it. The real ground of 
 reprehension of Alpine climbing is that, with 
 less cause, it excites more vanity than any 
 other athletic skill. A good horseman 
 knows what it has cost to make him one ; 
 everybody else knows it too, and knows 
 that he is one ; he need not ride at a fence 
 merely to show his seat. But credit for 
 practice in climbing can only be claimed after 
 success, which, though perhaps accidental 
 and unmerited, must yet be attained at all 
 risks, or the shame of defeat borne with no 
 evidence of the difficulties encountered. At 
 this particular period, also, the distinction 
 obtainable by first conquest of a peak is as 
 tempting to a traveller as the discovery of a 
 new element to a chemist, or of a new species 
 to a naturalist. Vanity is never so keenly 
 excited as by competitions which involve 
 chance ; the course of science is continually 
 arrested, and its nomenclature fatally con- 
 fused, by the eagerness of even wise and 
 able men to establish their priority in an 
 unimportant discovery, or obtain vested 
 right to a syllable in a deformed word ; and 
 many an otherwise sensible person will risk 
 his life for the sake of a lion in future guide- 
 books, to the fact that " horn was first 
 
 ascended by Mr. X. in the year " ; 
 
 never reflecting that of all the lines in the 
 
page, the one he has thus wrought for will be 
 precisely the least interesting to the reader. 
 It is not therefore strange, however much 
 to be regretted, that while no gentleman 
 boasts in other cases of his sagacity or his 
 courage — while no good soldier talks of 
 the charge he led, nor any good sailor of the 
 helm he held, — every man among the Alps 
 seems to lose his senses and modesty with 
 the fall of the barometer, and returns from 
 his Nephelo -coccygia brandishing his ice -axe 
 in everybody's face. Whatever the Alpine 
 Club have done, or may yet accomplish, is a 
 sincere thirst for mountain knowledge, and 
 in happy sense of youthful strength and play 
 of animal spirit, they have done, and will 
 do, wisely and well ; but whatever they are 
 urged to by mere sting of competition and 
 itch of praise, they will do, as all vain things 
 must be done for ever, foolishly and ill. It 
 is a strange proof of that absence of any 
 real national love of science, of which I have 
 had occasion to speak in the text, that no 
 entire survey of the Alps has yet been made 
 by properly qualified men ; and that, except 
 of the chain of Chamouni, no accurate maps 
 exist, nor any complete geological section 
 even of that. But Mr. Reilly's survey of 
 that central group, and the generally accu- 
 rate information collected in the guide-book 
 
published by the Club, are honourable 
 results of English adventure; and it is to be 
 hoped that the continuance of such work 
 will gradually put an end to the vulgar 
 excitement which looked upon the granite 
 of the Alps only as an unoccupied advertise- 
 ment wall for chalking names upon. 
 
 Respecting the means of accomplishing 
 such work with least risk, there was a 
 sentence in the article of our leading 
 public journal, which deserves, and requires 
 expansion. 
 
 "Their" (the Alpine Club's) "ropes must 
 not break." 
 
 Certainly not! nor any one else's ropes, 
 if they may be rendered unbreakable by 
 honesty of make; seeing that more lives 
 hang by them on moving than on motionless 
 seas. The records of the last gale at the 
 Cape may teach us that economy in the 
 manufacture of cables is not always a matter 
 for exultation ; and, on the whole, it might 
 even be well in an honest country, sending 
 out, and up and down, various lines east and 
 west, that nothing should break ; banks, — 
 words, — nor dredging tackle. 
 
 Granting, however, such praise and such 
 sphere of exertion as we thus justly may, to 
 the spirit of adventure, there is one conse- 
 quence of it, coming directly under my own 
 
cognizance, of which I cannot but speak 
 with utter regret, — the loss, namely, of all 
 real understanding of the character and 
 beauty of Switzerland, by the country's 
 being now regarded as half watering-place, 
 half gymnasium. It is indeed true that 
 under the influence of the pride which gives 
 poignancy to the sensations which others 
 cannot share with us (and a not unjustifiable 
 zest to the pleasure which we have worked 
 for), an ordinary traveller will usually observe 
 and enjoy more on a diflicult excursion than 
 on an easy one; and more in objects to 
 which he is unaccustomed than in those 
 with which he is familiar. He will notice 
 with extreme interest that snow is white on 
 the top of a hill in June, though he would 
 have attached little importance to the same 
 peculiarity in a wreath at the bottom of a 
 hill in January. He will generally find more 
 to admire in a cloud under his feet, than in 
 one over his head ; and, oppressed by the 
 monotony of a sky which is prevalently blue, 
 will derive extraordinary satisfaction from 
 its approximation to black. Add to such 
 grounds of delight the aid given to the effect 
 of whatever is impressive in the scenery of 
 the high Alps, by the absence of ludicrous 
 or degrading concomitants; and it ceases 
 to be surprising that Alpine excursionists 
 
should be greatly pleased, or that they 
 should attribute their pleasure to some true 
 and increased apprehension of the nobleness 
 of natural scenery. But no impression can 
 be more false. The real beauty of the Alps 
 is to be seen, and seen only, where all may 
 see it, the child, the cripple, and the man of 
 grey hairs. There is more true loveliness in 
 a single glade of pasture shadowed by pine> 
 or gleam of rocky brook, or inlet of unsullied 
 lake among the lower Bernese and Savoyard 
 hills, than in the entire field of jagged gneiss 
 which crests the central ridge from the 
 Shreckhorn to the Viso. The valley of 
 Cluse, through which unhappy travellers con- 
 sent now to be invoiced, packed in baskets 
 like fish, so only that they may cheaply reach, 
 in the feverish haste which has become the 
 law of their being, the glen of Chamouni 
 whose every lovely foreground rock has now 
 been broken up to build hotels for them, 
 contains more beauty in half a league of it, 
 than the entire valley they have devastated, 
 and turned into a casino, did in its uninjured 
 pride ; and that passage of the Jura by Olten 
 (between Basle and Lucerne), which is by 
 the modern tourist triumphantly effected 
 through a tunnel in ten minutes, between 
 two piggish trumpet grunts proclamatory of 
 the ecstatic transit, used to show from every 
 
PREFACE 
 
 turn and sweep of its winding ascent, up 
 which one sauntered, gathering wild-flowers, 
 for half a happy day, diviner aspects of the 
 distant Alps than ever were achieved by toil 
 of limb, or won by risk of life. 
 
 There is indeed a healthy enjoyment both 
 in engineers* work, and in school -boy *s play ; 
 the making and mending of roads has its 
 true enthusiasms, and I have still pleasure 
 enough in mere scrambling to wonder not a 
 little at the supreme gravity with which apes 
 exercise their superior powers in that kind, 
 as if profitless to them. But neither macad- 
 amisation, nor tunnelling, nor rope ladders, 
 will ever enable one human creature to 
 understand the pleasure in natural scenery 
 felt by Theocritus or Virgil; and I believe 
 the athletic health of our school-boys might 
 be made perfectly consistent with a spirit of 
 more courtesy and reverence, both for men 
 and things," than is recognisable in the 
 behaviour of modern youth. Some year or 
 two back, I was staying at the Montanvert 
 to paint Alpine roses, and w^ent every day to 
 watch the budding of a favourite bed, which 
 was rounding into faultless bloom beneath a 
 cirque of rock, high enough, as I hoped, and 
 close enough, to guard it from rude eyes and 
 plucking hands. But, 
 
 xxu 
 
" Tra erto e piano era un sentiero ghembo 
 Che ne condusse in fianco del a lacca," 
 
 and on the day it reached the fulness of its 
 rubied fire, I was standing near when it was 
 discovered by a forager on the flanks of a 
 travelling school of English and German 
 lads. He shouted to his companions, and 
 they swooped down upon it; threw them- 
 selves into it, rolled over and over in it, 
 shrieked, hallooed, and fought in it, trampled 
 it down, and tore it up by the roots; breath- 
 less at last with rapture of ravage, they 
 fixed the brightest of the remnant blossoms 
 of it in their caps, and went on their way 
 rejoicing. 
 
 They left me much to think upon ; partly 
 respecting the essential power of the beauty 
 which could so excite them, and partly 
 respecting the character of the youth which 
 could only be excited to destroy. But the 
 incident was a perfect type of that irrever- 
 ence for natural beauty with respect to 
 which I said in the text, at the place already 
 indicated, " You make railroads of the aisles 
 of the cathedrals of the earth, and eat off 
 their altars." For indeed all true lovers of 
 natural beauty hold it in reverence so deep, 
 that they would as soon think of climbing 
 the pillars of the choir Beauvais for a 
 gymnastic exercise, as of making a play- 
 
ground of Alpine snow : and they would not 
 risk one hour of their joy among the hill 
 meadows on a May morning, for the fame or 
 fortune of having stood on every pinnacle of 
 the silver temple, and beheld the kingdoms 
 of the world from it. Love of excitement is 
 so far from being love of beauty, that it ends 
 always in a joy in its exact reverse; joy in 
 destruction, — as of my poor roses, — or in 
 actual details of death ; until, in the literature 
 of the day, " nothing is too dreadful, or too 
 trivial, for the greed of the public."i And 
 in politics, apathy, irreverence, and lust of 
 luxury go hand in hand, until the best 
 solemnisation which can be conceived for 
 the greatest event in modern European 
 history, the crowning of Florence capital of 
 Italy, is the accursed and ill-omened folly of 
 casting down her old walls, and surrounding 
 her with a " boulevard ; " and this at the very 
 time when every stone of her ancient cities 
 is more precious to her than the gems of 
 a Urim breastplate, and when every nerve 
 of her heart and brain should have been 
 strained to redeem her guilt and fulfil her 
 freedom. It is not by making roads round 
 Florence, but through Calabria, that she 
 
 I Pall Mall Gazette^ August 15th, article on the 
 Forward murders. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 should begin her Roman causeway work 
 again ; and her fate points her march, not on 
 boulevards by Arno, but waist-deep in the 
 lagoons at Venice. Not yet, indeed, but 
 five years of patience and discipline of her 
 youth would accomplish her power, and 
 sweep the martello towers from the cliffs of 
 Verona, and the ramparts from the marsh of 
 Mestre. But she will not teach her youth 
 that discipline on boulevards. 
 
 Strange, that while we both, French and 
 English, can give lessons in war, we only 
 corrupt other nations when they imitate 
 either our pleasures or our industries. We 
 English, had we loved Switzerland indeed, 
 should have striven to elevate, but not to 
 disturb, the simplicity of her people, by 
 teaching them the sacredness of their fields 
 and waters, the honour of their pastoral and 
 burgher life, and the fellowship in glory of 
 the grey turreted walls round their ancient 
 cities, with their cottages in their fair groups 
 by the forest and lake. Beautiful, indeed, 
 upon the mountains, had been the feet of 
 any who had spoken peace to their children ; 
 who had taught those princely peasants to 
 remember their lineage, and their league 
 with the rocks of the field ; that so they 
 might keep their mountain waters pure, and 
 their mountain paths peaceful, and their 
 
traditions of domestic life holy. We have 
 taught them (incapable by circumstances and 
 position of ever becoming a great commercial 
 nation) all the foulness of the modern lust of 
 wealth, without its practical intelHgences ; 
 and we have developed exactly the weakness 
 of their temperament by which they are liable 
 to meanest ruin. Of the ancient architecture 
 and most expressive beauty of their country 
 there is now little vestige left ; and it is one 
 of the few reasons which console me for the 
 advance of life, that I am old enough to 
 remember the time when the sweet waves of 
 the Reuss and Limmat (now foul with the 
 refuse of manufacture) were as crystalline as 
 the heaven above them, when her pictured 
 bridges and embattled towers ran unbroken 
 round Lucerne ; when the Rhone flowed in 
 deep-green, softly dividing currents round 
 the wooded ramparts of Geneva ; and when 
 from the marble roof of the western vault of 
 Milan, I could watch the Rose of Italy flush 
 in the first morning light, before a human 
 foot had sullied its summit, or the reddening 
 dawn on its rocks taken shadow of sadness 
 from the crimson which long ago stained the 
 ripples of Otterburn. 
 
 ^^ 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 LECTURE I — SESAME 
 
 OF KINGS* TREASURIES 
 
 "You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten 
 
 pound." 
 
 LuciAN : The Fisherman. 
 
 MY first duty this evening is to ask your 
 pardon for the ambiguity of title 
 under which the subject of lecture has been 
 announced: for indeed I am not going to 
 talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of 
 treasuries, understood to contain wealth; 
 but of quite another order of royalty, and 
 another material of riches, than those usually 
 acknowledged. I had even intended to ask 
 your attention for a little while on trust, and 
 (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a 
 friend to see a favourite piece of scenery) 
 to hide what I wanted most to show, with 
 such imperfect cunning as I might, until we 
 unexpectedly reached the best point of view 
 by winding paths. But — and as also I have 
 heard it said, by men practised in public 
 address, that hearers are never so much 
 fatigued as by the endeavour to follow a 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 speaker who gives them no clue to his pur- 
 pose, — I will take the slight mask off at 
 once, and tell you plainly that I want to 
 speak to you about the treasures hidden in 
 books; and about the way we find them, 
 and the way we lose them. A grave subject, 
 you will say; and a wide one! Yes; so 
 wide that I shall make no effort to touch 
 the compass of it. I will try only to bring 
 before you a few simple thoughts about 
 reading, which press themselves upon me 
 every day more deeply, as I watch the 
 course of the public mind with respect to 
 our daily enlarging means of education; 
 and the answeringly wider spreading on the 
 levels, of the irrigation of literature. 
 
 2. It happens that I have practically 
 some connection with schools for different 
 classes of youth ; and I receive many letters 
 from parents respecting the education of 
 their children. In the mass of these letters 
 I am always struck by the precedence which 
 the idea of a "position in life" takes above 
 all other thoughts in the parents* — more 
 especially in the mothers* — minds. "The 
 education befitting such and such a station 
 in life " — this is the phrase, this the object, 
 always. They never seek, as far as I can 
 make out, an education good in itself; even 
 the conception of abstract rightness in train- 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 ing rarely seems reached by the writers. 
 But, an education " which shall keep a good 
 coat on my son's back ; — which shall enable 
 him to ring with confidence the visitors' bell 
 at double-belled doors ; which shall result 
 ultimately in the establishment of a double- 
 belled door to his own house; — in a word, 
 which shall lead to advancement in life; — 
 this we pray for on bent knees — and this is 
 all we pray for." It never seems to occur to 
 the parents that there may be an education 
 which, in itself, is advancement in Life ; — 
 that any other than that may perhaps be 
 advancement in Death; and that this essen- 
 tial education might be more easily got, or 
 given, than they fancy, if they set about it in 
 the right way; while it is for no price, and 
 by no favour, to be got, if they set about it 
 in the wrong. 
 
 3. Indeed, among the ideas most preva- 
 lent and effective in the mind of this busiest 
 of countries, I suppose the first — at least 
 that which is confessed with the greatest 
 frankness, and put forward as the fittest 
 stimulus to youthful exertion — is this of 
 " Advancement in life." May I ask you to 
 consider with me, what this idea practically 
 includes, and what it should include ? 
 
 Practically, then, at present, "advance- 
 ment in life " means, becoming conspicuous 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 in life ; obtaining a position which shall be 
 acknowledged by others to be respectable or 
 honourable. We do not understand by this 
 advancement, in general, the mere making 
 of money, but the being known to have 
 made it; not the accomplishment of any 
 great aim, but the being seen to have 
 accomplished it. In a word, we mean the 
 gratification of our thirst for applause. That 
 thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is 
 also the first infirmity of weak ones ; and, on 
 the whole, the strongest impulsive influence 
 of average humanity : the greatest efforts of 
 the race have always been traceable to the 
 love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to 
 the love of pleasure. 
 
 4. I am not about to attack or defend 
 this impulse. I want you only to feel how 
 it lies at the root of effort ; especially of all 
 modern effort. It is the gratification of 
 vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil 
 and balm of repose ; so closely does it touch 
 the very springs of life that the wounding of 
 our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as 
 in its measure mortal ; we call it " mortifica- 
 tion," using the same expression which we 
 should apply to a gangrenous and incurable 
 bodily hurt. And although a few of us may 
 be physicians enough to recognise the various 
 effect of this passion upon health and energy, 
 
OF king's treasuries 
 
 I believe most honest men know, and would 
 at once acknowledge, its leading power with 
 them as a motive. The seaman does not 
 commonly desire to be made captain only 
 because he knows he can manage the ship 
 better than any other sailor on board. He 
 wants to be made captain that he may be 
 called captain. The clergyman does not 
 usually want to be made a bishop only 
 because he believes that no other hand can, 
 as firmly as his, direct the diocese through 
 its difficulties. He wants to be made bisliop 
 primarily that he may be called " My Lord.'* 
 And a prince does not usually desire to 
 enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, 
 because he believes that no one else can as 
 well serve the State, upon its throne; but, 
 briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as 
 " Your Majesty," by as many lips as may be 
 brought to such utterance. 
 
 5. This, then, being the main idea of 
 " advancement in life," the force of it 
 applies, for all of us, according to our sta- 
 tion, particularly to that secondary result of 
 such advancement which we call " getting 
 into good society." We want to get into 
 good society not that we may have it, but 
 that we may be seen in it ; and our notion 
 of its goodness depends primarily on its 
 conspicuousness. 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Will you pardon me if I pause for a 
 moment to put what I fear you may think 
 an impertinent question ? I never can go on 
 with an address unless I feel, or know, that 
 my audience are either with me or against 
 me : I do not much care which, in beginning ; 
 but I must know where they are; and I 
 would fain find out, at this instant, whether 
 you think I am putting the motives of popu- 
 lar action too low. I am resolved, to-night, 
 to state them low enough to be admitted as 
 probable; for whenever, in my writings on 
 Political Economy, I assume that a little 
 honesty, or generosity, — or what used to be 
 called " virtue " — may be calculated upon 
 as a human motive of action, people always 
 answer me, saying, " You must not calculate 
 on that : that is not in human nature : you 
 must not assume anything to be common to 
 men but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no 
 other feeling ever has influence on them, 
 except accidentally, and in matters out of 
 the way of business." I begin, accordingly, 
 to-night low in the scale of motives; but I 
 must know if you think me right in doing so. 
 Therefore, let me ask those who admit the 
 love of praise to be usually the strongest 
 motive in men's minds in seeking advance- 
 ment, and the honest desire of doing any 
 kind of duty to be an entirely secondary 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 one, to hold up their hands. (About a dozen 
 hands held up — the audience^ partly^ not being 
 sure the lecturer is serious, and, partly, shy of 
 expressing opinion,) I am quite serious — I 
 really do want to know what you think ; 
 however, I can judge by putting the reverse 
 question. Will those who think that duty 
 is generally the first, and love of praise the 
 second, motive, hold up their hands ? (One 
 hand reported to have been held up, behind 
 the lecturer.) Very good: I see you are 
 with me, and that you think I have not 
 begun too near the ground. Now, without 
 teasing you by putting farther question, I 
 venture to assume that you will admit duty 
 as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. 
 You think that the desire of doing something 
 useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed 
 an existent collateral idea, though a second- 
 ary one, in most men's desire of advancement. 
 You will grant that moderately honest men 
 desire place and office, at least in some 
 measure, for the sake of beneficent power ; 
 and would wish to associate rather with sen- 
 sible and well-informed persons than with 
 fools and ignorant persons, whether they 
 are seen in the company of the sensible ones 
 or not. And finally, without being troubled 
 by repetition of any common truisms about 
 the preciousness of friends, and the influence 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 of companions, you will admit, doubtless, that 
 according to the sincerity of our desire that 
 our friends may be true, and our companions 
 wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness 
 and discretion with which we choose both, 
 will be the general chances of our happiness 
 and usefulness. 
 
 6. But granting that we had both the 
 will and the sense to choose our friends 
 well, how few of us have the power ! or, at 
 least, how limited, for most, is the sphere 
 of choice 1 Nearly all our associations are 
 determined by chance, or necessity; and 
 restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot 
 know whom we would ; and those whom we 
 know, we cannot have at our side when we 
 most need them. All the higher circles of 
 human intelligence are, to those beneath, 
 only momentarily and partially open. We 
 may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a 
 great poet, and hear the sound of his voice ; 
 or put a question to a man of science, and 
 be answered good-humouredly. We may 
 intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet min- 
 ister, answered probably with words worse 
 than silence, being deceptive; or snatch, 
 once or twice in our lives, the privilege of 
 throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, 
 or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. 
 And yet these momentary chances we covet ; 
 
 S 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 and spend our years, and passions and 
 powers in pursuit of little more than these j 
 while, meantime, there is a society contin- 
 ually open to us, of people who will talk to 
 us as long as we like, whatever our rank or 
 occupation ; — talk to us in the best words 
 they can choose, and of the things nearest 
 their hearts. And this society, because it is 
 so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept 
 waiting round us all day long, — kings and 
 statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant 
 audience, but to gain itl — in those plainly 
 furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our book- 
 case shelves, — we make no account of that 
 company, — perhaps never listen to a word 
 they would say, all day long ! 
 
 7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think 
 within yourselves, that the apathy with which 
 we regard this company of the noble, who 
 are praying us to listen to them; and the 
 passion with which we pursue the company, 
 probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or 
 who have nothing to teach us, are grounded 
 in this, — that we can see the faces of the 
 living men, and it is themselves, and not 
 their sayings, with which we desire to become 
 familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you 
 never were to see their faces : — suppose you 
 could be put behind a screen in the states- 
 man's cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would 
 
 9 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 you not be glad to listen to their words, 
 though you were forbidden to advance 
 beyond the screen ? And when the screen 
 is only a little less, folded in two instead of 
 four, and you can be hidden behind the 
 cover of the two boards that bind a book, 
 and listen all day long, not to the casual 
 talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen 
 addresses of the wisest of men ; — this 
 station of audience, and honourable privy 
 council, you despise 1 
 
 8. But perhaps you will say that it is 
 because the living people talk of things that 
 are passing, and are of immediate interest to 
 you, that you desire to hear them. Nay; 
 that cannot be so, for the living people will 
 themselves tell you about passing matters, 
 much better in their writings than in their 
 careless talk. But I admit that this motive 
 does influence you, so far as you prefer 
 those rapid* and ephemeral writings to slow 
 and enduring writings — books, properly so 
 called. For all books are divisible into two 
 classes: the books of the hour, and the 
 books of all time. Mark this distinction — 
 it is not one of quality only. It is not 
 merely the bad book that does not last, and 
 the good one that does. It is a distinction 
 of species. There are good books for the 
 hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I 
 must define the two kinds before I go 
 farther. 
 
 9. The good book of the hour, then, — I 
 do not speak of the bad ones — is simply 
 the useful or pleasant talk of some person 
 whom you cannot otherwise converse with, 
 printed for you. Very useful often, telling 
 you what you need to know ; very pleasant 
 often, as a sensible friend's present talk 
 would be. These bright accounts of travels ; 
 good-humoured and witty discussions of 
 question ; lively or pathetic story-telling in 
 the form of novel; firm fact -telling, by the 
 real agents concerned in the events of pass- 
 ing history; — all these books of the hour, 
 multiplying among us as education becomes 
 more general, are a peculiar possession of 
 the present age : we ought to be entirely 
 thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of 
 ourselves if we make no good use of them. 
 But we make the worst possible use if we 
 allow them to usurp the place of true books : 
 for, strictly speaking, they are not books at 
 all, but merely letters or newspapers in good 
 print. Our friend's letter may be delightful, 
 or necessary, to-day : whether worth keeping 
 or not, is to be considered. The newspaper 
 may be entirely proper at breakfast-time, but 
 assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 though bound up in a volume, the long letter 
 which gives you so pleasant an account of 
 the inns, and roads, and weather last year at 
 such a place, or which tells you that amusing 
 story, or gives you the real circumstances of 
 such and such events, however valuable for 
 occasional reference, may not be, in the real 
 sense of the w^ord, a " book " at all, nor in 
 the real sense, to be " read." A book is 
 essentially not a talked thing, but a written 
 thing ; and written, not with a view of mere 
 communication, but of permanence. The 
 book of talk is printed only because its author 
 cannot speak to thousands of people at once ; 
 if he could, he would — the volume is mere 
 multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk 
 to your friend in India; if you could, you 
 would ; you write instead : that is mere con- 
 veyance of voice. But a book is written, not 
 to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it 
 merely, but to perpetuate it. The author 
 has something to say which he perceives to 
 be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So 
 far as he knows, no one has yet said it ; so far 
 as he knows, no one else can say it. He is 
 bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if 
 he may ; clearly, at all events. In the sum 
 of his life he -finds this to be the thing, or 
 group of things, manifest to him ; — this, the 
 piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 share of sunshine and earth has permitted 
 him to seize. He would fain set it down 
 for ever ; engrave it on rock, if he could ; 
 saying, " This is the best of me ; for the rest, 
 I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, 
 like another; my life was as the vapour, 
 and is not ; but this I saw and knew : this, 
 if anything of mine, is worth your memory." 
 That is his ''writing"; it is, in his small 
 human way, and with whatever degree of 
 true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or 
 scripture. That is a " Book." 
 
 10. Perhaps you think no books were 
 ever so written ? 
 
 But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe 
 in honesty, or at all in kindness ? or do you 
 think there is never any honesty or benevo- 
 lence in wise people ? None of us, I hope, 
 are so unhappy as to think that. Well, 
 whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly 
 and benevolently done, that bit is his book, 
 or his piece of art. i It is mixed always 
 with evil fragments — ill-done, redundant, 
 affected work. But if you read rightly, you 
 will easily discover the true bits, and those 
 are the book. 
 
 11. Now, books of this kind have been 
 written in all ages by their greatest men, — 
 
 I Note this sentence carefully, and compare the 
 ' Queen of the Air/ § io6. 
 
 13 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 by great readers, great statesmen, and great 
 thinkers. These are all at your choice ; 
 and Life is short. You have heard as 
 much before; — yet, have you measured and 
 mapped out this short life and its possibil- 
 ities ? Do you know, if you read this, that 
 you cannot read that — that what you lose 
 to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? Will 
 you go and gossip with your housemaid, or 
 your stableboy, when you may talk with 
 queens and kings ; or flatter yourselves that 
 it is with any worthy consciousness of your 
 own claims to respect, that you jostle with 
 the hungry and common crowd for entree 
 here, and audience there, when all the while 
 this eternal court is open to you, with its 
 society, wide as the world, multitudinous as 
 its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every 
 place and time ? Into that you may enter 
 always ; in that you may take fellowship and 
 rank according to your wish ; from that, once 
 entered into it, you can never be an outcast 
 but by your own fault ; by your aristocracy 
 of companionship there, your own inherent 
 aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the 
 motives with which you strive to take high 
 place in the society of the living, measured, 
 as to all the truth and sincerity that are in 
 them, by the place you desire to take in this 
 company of the Dead. 
 
 14 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 12. "The place you desire," and the 
 place you fit yourself for ^ I must also say ; 
 because, observe, this court of the past 
 differs from all living aristocracy in this : — 
 it is open to labour and to merit, but to 
 nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name 
 overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of 
 those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no 
 vile or vulgar person ever enters there. At 
 the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. 
 Germain, there is but brief question ; " Do 
 you deserve to enter ? Pass. Do you ask to 
 be the companion of nobles ? Make your- 
 self noble, and you shall be. Do you long 
 for the conversation of the wise ? Learn to 
 understand it, and you shall hear it. But on 
 other terms .-^ — no. If you will not rise to 
 us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord 
 may assume courtesy, the living philosopher 
 explain his thought to you with considerate 
 pain ; but here we neither feign nor inter- 
 pret; you must rise to the level of our 
 thoughts if you would be gladdened by 
 them, and share our feelings if you would 
 recognise our presence." 
 
 13. This, then, is what you have to do, 
 and I admit that it is much. You must, in 
 a word, love these people, if you are to be 
 among them. No ambition is of any use. 
 They scorn your ambition. You must love 
 
 IS 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 them, and show your love in these two 
 following ways. 
 
 I . — First, by a true desire to be taught by 
 them, and to enter into their thoughts. To 
 enter into theirs, observe ; not to find your 
 own expressed by them. If the person who 
 wrote the book is not wiser than you, you 
 need not read it ; if he be, he will think 
 differently from you in many respects. 
 
 Very ready we are to say of a book, " How 
 good this is — that's exactly what I think 1 " 
 But the right feeling is, '* How strange that 
 is 1 I never thought of that before, and yet 
 I see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I 
 shall, some day." But whether thus submis- 
 sively or not, at least be sure that you go to 
 the author to get at his meaning, not to find 
 yours. Judge it afterwards if you think 
 yourself qualified to do so ; but ascertain it 
 first. And be sure also, if the author is 
 worth anything, that you will not get at his 
 meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his whole 
 meaning you will not for a long time arrive 
 in any wise. Not that he does not say what 
 he means, and in strong words too ; but he 
 cannot say it all ; and what is more strange, 
 will not, but in a hidden way and in parable, 
 in order that he may be sure you want it. 
 I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor 
 analyse that cruel reticence in the breasts of 
 
 i6 
 
OF KINGS* TREASURIES 
 
 wise men which makes them always hide 
 their deeper thought. They do not give it 
 you by way of help, but of reward ; and will 
 make themselves sure that you deserve it 
 before they allow you to reach it. But it is 
 the same with the physical type of wisdom, 
 gold. There seems, to you and me, no 
 reason why the electric forces of the earth 
 should not carry whatever there is of gold 
 within it at once to the mountain tops, so 
 that kings and people might know that all 
 the gold they could get was there; and 
 without any trouble of digging, or anxiety, 
 or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and 
 coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
 does not manage it so. She puts it in little 
 fissures in the earth, nobody knows where ; 
 you may dig long and find none ; you must 
 dig painfully to find any. 
 
 14. And it is just the same with men's 
 best wisdom. When you come to a good 
 book, you must ask yourself, " Am I inclined 
 to work as an Australian miner would ? Are 
 my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and 
 am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up 
 to the elbow, and my breath good, and my 
 temper ? " And, keeping the figure a little 
 longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is 
 a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are 
 in search of being the author's mind or 
 
 17 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 meaning, his words are as the rock which 
 you have to crush and smelt in order to get 
 at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, 
 wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is 
 your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to 
 get at any good author's meaning without 
 those tools and that fire; often you will 
 need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest 
 fusing, before you can gather one grain of 
 the metal. 
 
 15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you 
 earnestly and authoritatively, ( I know I am 
 right in this,) you must get into the habit 
 of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
 yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable 
 — nay, letter by letter. For though it is only 
 by reason of the opposition of letters in the 
 function of signs, to sounds in the function 
 of signs, that the study of books is called 
 " literature," and that a man versed in it is 
 called, by the consent of nations, a man of 
 letters instead of a man of books, or of 
 words, you may yet connect with that acci- 
 dental nomenclature this real fact, — that 
 you might read all the books in the British 
 Museum (if you could live long enough), and 
 remain an utterly " illiterate," uneducated 
 person ; but that if you read ten pages of a 
 good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, 
 with real accuracy, — you are for evermore in 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 some measure an educated person. The 
 entire difference between education and 
 non-education (as regards the merely intel- 
 lectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. 
 A well-educated gentleman may not know 
 many languages, — may not be able to speak 
 any but his own, — may have read very few 
 books. But whatever language he knows, 
 he knows precisely; whatever word he pro- 
 nounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, 
 he is learned in the peerage of words ; knows 
 the words of true descent and ancient blood, 
 at a glance, from words of modern canaille ; 
 remembers all their ancestry, their intermar- 
 riages, distant relationships, and the extent 
 to which they were admitted, and offices 
 they held, among the national noblesse of 
 words at any time, and in any country. 
 But an uneducated person may know, by 
 memory, many languages, and talk them all, 
 and yet truly know not a word of any, — not a 
 word even of his own. An ordinarily clever 
 and sensible seaman will be able to make his 
 way ashore at most ports ; yet he has only 
 to speak a sentence of any language to be 
 known for an illiterate person ; so also the 
 accent, or turn of expression of a single 
 sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And 
 this is so strongly felt, so conclusively 
 admitted, by educated persons, that a false 
 
 19 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in 
 the parliament of any" civilised nation, to 
 assign to a man a certain degree of inferior 
 Standing for ever. 
 
 1 6. And this is right ; but it is a pity that 
 the accuracy insisted on is not greater, and 
 required to a serious purpose. It is right 
 that a false Latin quantity should excite a 
 smile in the House of Commons ; but it is 
 wrong that a false English meaning should 
 not excite a frown there. Let the accent of 
 words be watched ; and closely : let their 
 meaning be watched more closely still, and 
 fewer will do the work. A few words, well 
 chosen and distinguished, will do work that 
 a thousand cannot, when every one is act- 
 ing, equivocally, in the function of another. 
 Yes ; and words, if they are not watched, 
 will do deadly work sometimes. There are 
 masked words droning and skulking about 
 us in Europe just now, — (there never were 
 so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, 
 blotching, blundering, infectious "informa- 
 tion," or rather deformation, everywhere, 
 and to the teaching of catechisms and 
 phrases at schools instead of human mean- 
 ings) — there are masked words abroad, I 
 say, which nobody understands, but which 
 everybody uses, and most people will also 
 fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 they mean this or that, or the other, of 
 things dear to them : for such words wear 
 chamaeleon cloaks — " groundlion " cloaks, 
 of the colour of the ground of any man's 
 fancy : on that ground they lie in wait, and 
 rend him with a spring from it. There never 
 were creatures of prey so mischievous, never 
 diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so 
 deadly, as these masked words ; they are the 
 unjust stewards of all men's ideas : whatever 
 fancy or favourite instinct a man most 
 cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked 
 word to take care of for him ; the word at 
 last comes to have an infinite power over 
 him, — you cannot get at him but by its 
 ministry. 
 
 17. And in languages so mongrel in 
 breed as the English, there is a fatal power 
 of equivocation put into men's hands, almost 
 whether they will or no, in being able to 
 use Greek or Latin words for an idea when 
 they want it to be awful ; and Saxon or 
 otherwise common words when they want it 
 to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary 
 effect, for instance, would be produced on 
 the minds of people who are in the habit of 
 taking the Form of the " Word " they live 
 by, for the Power of which that Word tells 
 them, if we always either retained, or refused, 
 the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the right expression for "book" — instead 
 of employing it only in the one instance in 
 which we wish to give dignity to the idea, 
 and translating it into English everywhere 
 else. How wholesome it would be for 
 many simple persons if, in such places (for 
 instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained the 
 Greek expression, instead of translating it, 
 and they had to read — " Many of them also 
 which used curious arts, brought their Bibles 
 together, and burnt them before all men ; 
 and they counted the price of them, and 
 found it fifty thousand pieces of silver" 1 
 Or if, on the other hand, we translated 
 where we retain it, and always spoke of 
 " the Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible," 
 it might come into more heads than it does 
 at present, that the Word of God, by which 
 the heavens were of old, and by which they 
 are now kept in store,i cannot be made a 
 present of to anybody in morocco binding; 
 nor sown on any wayside by help either 
 of steam plough or steam press; but is 
 nevertheless being offered to us daily, and 
 by us with contumely refused : and sown in 
 us daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, 
 choked. 
 
 18. So, again, consider what effect has 
 been produced on the English vulgar mind 
 
 I 2 Peter iii. 5-7. 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 by the use of the sonorous Latin form 
 '* damno," in translating the Greek KaTaKpivoj, 
 when people charitably wish to make it 
 forcible ; and the substitution of the temper- 
 ate " condemn " for it, when they choose to 
 keep it gentle; and what notable sermons 
 have been preached by illiterate clergymen on 
 
 — " He that believeth not shall be damned; " 
 though they would shrink with horror from 
 translating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of his 
 house, by which he damned the world," or 
 John viii. lo-ii, "Woman, hath no man 
 damned thee? She saith. No man, Lord. 
 Jesus answered her. Neither do I damn 
 thee : go, and sin no more." And divisions 
 in the mind of Europe, w^hich have cost seas 
 of blood, and in the defence of which the 
 noblest souls of men have been cast away in 
 frantic desolation, countless as forest-leaves 
 
 — though, in the heart of them, founded on 
 deeper causes — have nevertheless been ren- 
 dered practically possible, mainly, by the 
 European adoption of the Greek word for a 
 public meeting, " ecclesia," to give peculiar 
 respectability to such meetings, when held 
 for religious purposes ; and other collateral 
 equivocations, such as the vulgar English one 
 of using the word "priest" as a contraction 
 for " presbyter." 
 
 19. Now, in order to deal with words 
 
 23 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 rightly, this is the habit you must form. 
 Nearly every word in your language has 
 been first a word of some other language — 
 of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek ; 
 (not to speak of eastern and primitive 
 dialects). And many words have been all 
 these; — that is to say, have been Greek 
 first, Latin next, French or German next, 
 and English last: undergoing a certain 
 change of sense and use on the lips of each 
 nation ; but retaining a deep vital meaning, 
 which all good scholars feel in employing 
 them, even at this day. If you do not know 
 the Greek alphabet, learn it ; young or old — 
 girl or boy — whoever you may be, if you 
 think of reading seriously (which, of course, 
 implies that you have some leisure at com- 
 mand), learn your Greek alphabet ; then get 
 good dictionaries of all these languages, and 
 whenever you are in doubt about a word, 
 hunt it down patiently. Read Max Miiller's 
 lectures thoroughly, to begin with; and, 
 after that, never let a word escape you that 
 looks suspicious. It is severe work ; but 
 you will find it, even at first, interesting, and 
 at last, endlessly amusing. And the general 
 gain to your character, in power and preci- 
 sion, will be quite incalculable. 
 
 Mind, this does not imply knowing, or 
 trying to know, Greek, or Latin, or French. 
 
 24 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 It takes a whole life to learn any language 
 perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
 meanings through which the English word 
 has passed; and those which in a good 
 writer's work it must still bear. 
 
 20. And now, merely for example's sake, 
 I will, with your permission, read a few lines 
 of a true book with you, carefully ; and see 
 what will come out of them. I will take 
 a book perfectly known to you all. No 
 English words are more familiar to us, yet 
 few perhaps have been read with less sincer- 
 ity. I will take these few following lines of 
 Lycidas : — 
 
 " Last came, and last did go, 
 
 The pilot of the Galilean lake. 
 
 Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 
 
 ( The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,) 
 
 He shook his mitred locks, and stem bespake. 
 
 ' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain. 
 
 Enow of surh as for their bellies' sake 
 
 Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold ! 
 
 Of ofher care they little reckoning make, 
 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
 
 And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 
 
 Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 
 A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 
 
 That to the faithful herdman's art belongs ! 
 
 What recks it them? What need they ? They are sped ; 
 
 And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
 
 Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw. 
 
 The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. 
 
 But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw. 
 
 25 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 
 Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 
 
 Let US think over this passage, and examine 
 its words. 
 
 First, is it not singular to find Milton 
 assigning to St. Peter, not only his full 
 episcopal function, but the very types of 
 it which Protestants usually refuse most 
 passionately ? His " mitred" locks ! Milton 
 was no Bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to 
 be *' mitred" ? " Two massy keys he bore." 
 Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed 
 by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowl- 
 edged here by Milton only in a poetical 
 licence, for the sake of its picturesqueness, 
 that he may get the gleam of the golden 
 keys to help his effect ? 
 
 Do not think it. Great men do not play 
 stage tricks with the doctrines of life and 
 death : only little men do that. Milton 
 means what he says; and means it with 
 his might too — is going to put the whole 
 strength of his spirit presently into the 
 saying of it. For though not a lover of 
 false bishops, he was a lover of true ones ; 
 and the Lake -pilot is here, in his thoughts, 
 the type and head of true episcopal power. 
 For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto 
 thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven " 
 
 26 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 quite honestly. Puritan though he be, he 
 would not blot it out of the book because 
 there have been bad bishops ; nay, in order 
 to understand hiin^ we must understand that 
 verse first ; it will not do to eye it askance, 
 or whisper it under our breath, as if it were 
 a weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, 
 universal assertion, deeply to be kept in 
 mind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be 
 better able to reason on it if we go on a little 
 farther, and come back to it. For clearly 
 this marked insistence on the power of the 
 true episcopate is to make us feel more 
 weightily what is to be charged against the 
 false claimants of episcopate ; or generally, 
 against false claimants of power and rank in 
 the body of the clergy: they who, "for their 
 bellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb 
 into the fold.'* 
 
 21. Never think Milton uses those three 
 words to fill up his verse, as a loose writer 
 would. He needs all the three ; — specially 
 those three, and no more than those — 
 " creep," and *' intrude," and '* climb ; " no 
 other words would or could serve the turn, 
 and no more could be added. For they 
 exhaustively comprehend the three classes, 
 correspondent to the three characters, of 
 men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical 
 power. First, those who "creep" into the 
 
 27 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 fold ; who do not care for office, nor name, 
 but for secret influence, and do all things 
 occultly and cunningly, consenting to any 
 servility of office or conduct, so only that 
 they may intimately discern, and unawares 
 direct, the minds of men. Then those who 
 " intrude " ( thrust, that is ) themselves into 
 the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, 
 and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly 
 perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and 
 authority with the common crowd. Lastly, 
 those who "climb," who, by labour and 
 learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly 
 exerted in the cause of their own ambition, 
 gain high dignities and authorities, and 
 become "lord's over the heritage," though 
 not " ensamples to the flock." 
 22. Now go on: — 
 
 " Of other care they little reckoning make, 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
 Blind mouths " 
 
 I pause again, for this is a strange expres- 
 sion : a broken metaphor, one might think, 
 careless and unscholarly. 
 
 Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are 
 intended to make us look close at the phrase 
 and remember it. Those two monosyllables 
 express the precisely accurate contraries of 
 right character, in the two great offices of 
 the Church — those of bishop and pastor. 
 
 28 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 A " Bishop " means " a person who sees." 
 A " Pastor " means " a person who feeds." 
 The most unbishoply character a man can 
 have is therefore to be Blind. 
 
 The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, 
 to want to be fed, — to be a Mouth. 
 
 Take the two reverses together, and you 
 have " blind mouths." We may advisably 
 follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the 
 evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
 desiring power more than light. They want 
 authority, not outlook. Whereas their real 
 office is not to rule; though it may be vigor- 
 ously to exhort and rebuke ; it is the king's 
 office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee 
 the flock ; to number it, sheep by sheep ; to 
 be ready always to give full account of it. 
 Now, it is clear he cannot give account of 
 the souls, if he has not so much as numbered 
 the bodies of his flock. The first thing, 
 therefore, that'a bishop has to do is at least 
 to put himself in a position in which, at any 
 moment, he can obtain the history, from 
 childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, 
 and of its present state. Down in that 
 back street, Bill, and Nancy, knocking each 
 other's teeth out ! — Does the bishop know 
 all about it? Has he his eye upon them? 
 Has he had his eye upon them ? Can he 
 circumstantially explain to us how Bill got 
 
 29 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 into the habit of beating Nancy about the 
 head ? If he cannot he is no bishop, 
 though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury 
 steeple ; he is no bishop, — he has sought to 
 be at the helm instead of the masthead; he 
 has no sight of things. " Nay," you say, " it 
 is not his duty to look after Bill in the back 
 street." What ! the fat sheep that have full 
 fleeces — you think it is only those he should 
 look after, while ( go back to your Milton ) 
 " the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
 besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw " 
 (bishops knowing nothing about it ) "daily 
 devours apace, and nothing said " ? 
 
 " But that's not our idea of a bishop." i 
 Perhaps not ; but it was St. Paul's ; and it 
 was Milton's. They may be right, or we 
 may be ; but w^e must not think we are 
 reading either one or the other by putting 
 our meaning into their words. 
 
 23. I go on. 
 " But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 
 
 This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if 
 the poor are not looked after in their bodies, 
 they are in their souls ; they have spiritual 
 food." 
 
 And Milton says, "They have no such 
 thing as spiritual food ; they are only swollen 
 
 I Compare the 13th Letter in ' Time and Tide.' 
 
 30 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 with wind." At first you may think that is a 
 coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
 it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up 
 your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find 
 out the meaning of " Spirit." It is only a 
 contraction of the Latin word " breath," and 
 an indistinct translation of the Greek word 
 for " wind." The same word is used in 
 writing, " The wind bloweth where it listeth ; " 
 and in writing, '* So is every one that is born 
 of the Spirit ; " born of the breathy that is ; 
 for it means the breath of God, in soul and 
 body. We have the true sense of it in our 
 words " inspiration " and " expire." Now, 
 there are two kinds of breath with which the 
 flock may be filled ; God's breath and man's. 
 The breath of God is health, and life, and 
 peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the 
 flocks on the hills ; but man's breath — the 
 word which he calls spiritual — is disease and 
 contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. 
 They rot inwardly with it ; they are puffed 
 up by it, as a dead body by the vapours of 
 its own decomposition. This is literally true 
 of all false religious teaching ; the first, and 
 last, and fatalest sign of it is that " puffing 
 up." Your converted children, who teach 
 their parents; your converted convicts, who 
 teach honest men; your converted dunces, 
 who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction 
 
 31 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 half their lives, suddenly awaking to the fact 
 of their being a God, fancy themselves there- 
 fore His peculiar people and messengers; 
 your sectarians of every species, small and 
 great. Catholic or Protestant, of high church 
 or low, in so far as they think themselves 
 exclusively in the right and others wrong; 
 and pre-eminently, in every sect, those who 
 hold that men can be saved by thinking 
 rightly instead of doing rightly, by work 
 instead of act, and wish instead of work ; — 
 these are the true fog children — clouds, 
 these, without water; bodies, these, of putres- 
 cent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh : 
 blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with 
 — corrupt, and corrupting, — " Swoln with 
 wind, and the rank mist they draw." 
 
 24. Lastly, let us return to the lines 
 respecting the power of the keys, for now 
 we can understand them. Note the differ- 
 ence between Milton and Dante in their 
 interpretation of this power : for once, the 
 latter is weaker in thought ; he supposes 
 both the keys to be of the gate of heaven ; 
 one is of gold, the other of silver: they are 
 given by St. Peter to the sentinel angel ; 
 and it is not easy to determine the meaning 
 either of the substances of the three steps 
 of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton 
 makes one, of gold, the key of heaven ; the 
 
 32 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 other, of iron, the key of the prison in which 
 the wicked teachers are to be bound who 
 *' have taken away the key of knowledge, yet 
 entered not in themselves." 
 
 We have seen that the duties of bishop 
 and pastor are to see, and feed ; and of all 
 who do so it is said, " He that watereth, 
 shall be watered also himself." But the 
 reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, 
 shall be withered himself ; and he that seeth 
 not, shall himself be shut out of sight — 
 shut into the perpetual prison-house. And 
 that prison opens here, as well as hereafter ; 
 he who is to be bound in heaven must first 
 be bound on earth. That command to the 
 strong angels, of which the rock -apostle is 
 the image, "Take him, and bind him hand 
 and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its 
 measure, against the teacher, for every help 
 withheld, and for every truth refused, and 
 for every falsehood enforced ; so that he is 
 more strictly fettered the more he fetters, 
 and farther outcast, as he more and more 
 misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage 
 close upon him, and as " the golden opes, 
 the iron shuts amain." 
 
 25. We have got something out of the 
 lines, I think, and much more is yet to be 
 found in them; but we have done enough 
 by way of example of the kind of word-by- 
 
 33 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 word examination of your author which is 
 rightly called '* reading " ; watching every 
 accent and expression, and putting ourselves 
 always in the author's place, annihilating our 
 own personality, and seeking to enter into 
 his, so as to be able assuredly to say, " Thus 
 Milton thought," not "Thus /thought, in 
 mis -reading Milton." And by this process 
 you will gradually come to attach less weight 
 to your own " Thus I thought " at other 
 times. You will begin to perceive that what 
 you thought was a matter of no serious 
 importance; — that your thoughts on any 
 subject are not perhaps the clearest and 
 wisest that could be arrived at thereupon : — 
 in fact, that unless you are a very singular 
 person, you cannot be said to have any 
 " thoughts " at all ; that you have no mate- 
 rials for them, in any serious matters ; i — no 
 right to " think," but only to try to learn more 
 of the facts. Nay, most probably all your 
 life (unless, as I said, you are a singular 
 person) you will have no legitimate right to 
 an " opinion " on any business, except that 
 instantly under your hand. What must of 
 necessity be done, you can always find out, 
 beyond question, how to do. Have you a 
 
 I Modern " education " for the most part signifies 
 giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on every 
 conceivable subject of importance to them. 
 
 34 
 
OF king's treasuries 
 
 house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, 
 a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse ? There 
 need be no two opinions about the proceed- 
 ings ; it is at your peril if you have not 
 much more than an " opinion " on the way 
 to manage such matters. And also, outside 
 of your own business, there are one or two 
 subjects on which you are bound to have 
 but one opinion. That roguery and lying 
 are objectionable, and are instantly to be 
 flogged out of the way whenever discovered ; 
 
 — that covetousness and love of quarrelling 
 are dangerous dispositions even in children, 
 and deadly dispositions in men and nations ; 
 
 — that in the end, the God of heaven and 
 earth loves active, modest, and kind people, 
 and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones ; 
 
 — on these general facts you are bound to 
 have but one, and that a very strong, opinion. 
 For the rest, respecting religions, govern- 
 ments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on 
 the whole, you can know nothing, — judge 
 nothing; that the best you can do, even 
 though you may be a well-educated person, 
 is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every 
 day, and to understand a little more of the 
 thoughts of others, which so soon as you try 
 to do honestly, you will discover that the 
 thoughts even of the wisest are very little 
 more than pertinent questions. To put the 
 
 35 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to 
 you the grounds for /^decision, that is all 
 they can generally do for you ! — and well for 
 them and for us, if indeed they are able " to 
 mix the music with our thoughts, and sadden 
 us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from 
 whom I have been reading to you, is not 
 among the first or wisest: he sees shrewdly 
 as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to 
 find out his full meaning; but with the 
 greater men, you cannot fathom their mean- 
 ing; they do not even wholly measure it 
 themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had 
 asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakes- 
 peare's opinion, instead of Milton's, on this 
 matter of Church authority ? — or of Dante's ? 
 Have any of you, at this instant, the least 
 idea what either thought about it? Have 
 you ever balanced the scene with the bishops 
 in Richard III. against the character of 
 Cranmer ? the description of St. Francis and 
 St. Dominic against that of him who made 
 Virgil wonder to gaze upon him, — "disteso, 
 tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio " ; or of 
 him whom Dante stood beside, " come '1 
 frate che confessa lo perfido assassin " ? i 
 Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better 
 than most of us, I presume 1 They were 
 both in the midst of the main struggle 
 
 I Inf. xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50. 
 
 36 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 between the temporal and spiritual powers. 
 They had an opinion, we may guess. But 
 where is it ? Bring it into court ! Put 
 Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into articles, 
 and send it up for trial by the Ecclesiastical 
 Courts 1 
 
 26. You will not be able, I tell you again, 
 for many and many a day, to come at the 
 real purposes and teaching of these great 
 men ; but a very little honest study of them 
 will enable you to perceive that what yon 
 took for your own "judgment" was mere 
 chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, 
 entangled weed of castaway thought ; nay, 
 you will see that most men's minds are 
 indeed little better than rough heath wilder- 
 ness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, 
 partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and 
 venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil sur- 
 mise; that the first thing you have to 
 do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and 
 scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the 
 jungle into wholesome ash -heaps, and then 
 plough and sow. All the true literary 
 work before you, for life, must begin with 
 obedience to that order, " Break up your 
 fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. " 
 
 27. II. I Having then faithfully listened 
 to the great teachers, that you may enter 
 
 I Compare § 13 above. 
 
 37 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher 
 advance to make; — you have to enter into 
 their Hearts. As you go to them first for 
 clear sight, so you must stay with them, that 
 you may share at last their just and mighty 
 Passion. Passion, or "sensation." lamnot 
 afraid of the word; still less of the thing. 
 You have heard many outcries against 
 sensation lately ; but, I can tell you, it is not 
 less sensation we want, but more. The 
 ennobling difference between one man and 
 another, — between one animal and another, 
 — is precisely in this, that one feels more 
 than another. If we were sponges, perhaps 
 sensation might not be easily got for us ; if 
 we were earth-worms, liable at every instant 
 to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too 
 much sensation might not be good for us. 
 But being human creatures, it is good for 
 us; nay, we are only human in so far as we 
 are sensitive, and our honour is precisely 
 in proportion to our passion. 
 
 28. You know I said of that great and 
 pure society of the Dead, that it would allow 
 " no vain or vulgar person to enter there. " 
 What do you think I meant by a " vulgar " 
 person ? What do you yourselves mean by 
 "vulgarity".'* You will find it a fruitful 
 subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence 
 of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. 
 
 38 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an 
 untrained and undeveloped bluntness of 
 body and mind ; but in true inbred vulgarity, 
 there is a dreadful callousness, which, in 
 extremity, becomes capable of every sort of 
 bestial habit and crime, without fear, without 
 pleasure, without horror, and without pity. 
 It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, 
 in the diseased habit, in the hardened 
 conscience, that men become vulgar; they 
 are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion 
 as they are incapable of sympathy — of 
 quick understanding, — of all that, in deep 
 insistence on the common, but most accurate 
 term, may be called the "tact" or " touch - 
 faculty, " of body and soul : that tact which 
 the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure 
 woman has above all creatures; — fineness 
 and fullness of sensation, beyond reason ; 
 — the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. 
 Reason can but determine what is true : — it 
 is the God -given passion of humanity which 
 alone can recognise what God has made 
 good. 
 
 29. We come then to that great con- 
 course of the Dead, not merely to know 
 from them what is true, but chiefly to feel 
 with them what is just. Now, to feel with 
 them, we must be like them; and none of us 
 can become that without pains. As the true 
 
 39 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 knowledge is disciplined and tested knowl- 
 edge, — not the first thought that comes, — 
 so the true passion is disciplined and tested 
 passion, — not the first passion that comes. 
 The first that come are the vain, the false, 
 the treacherous; if you yield to them, they 
 will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, 
 in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true 
 purpose and no true passion left. Not that 
 any feeling possible to humanity is in itself 
 wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. 
 Its nobility is in its force and justice; it is 
 wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry 
 cause. There is a mean wonder, as of a 
 child who sees a juggler tossing golden 
 balls, and this is base, if you will. But do 
 you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the 
 sensation less, with which every human soul 
 is called to watch the golden balls of heaven 
 tossed through the night by the Hand that 
 made them ? There is a mean curiosity, as 
 of a child opening a forbidden door, or a 
 servant prying into her master's business ; 
 — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the 
 front of danger, the source of the great 
 river beyond the sand, — the place of the 
 great continent beyond the sea ; — a nobler 
 curiosity still, which questions of the source 
 of the River of Life, and of the space of the 
 Continent of Heaven — things which "the 
 
 40 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 angels desire to look into." So the anxiety 
 is ignoble, with which you linger over the 
 course and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but 
 do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, 
 with which you watch, or ought to watch, 
 the dealings of fate and destiny with the 
 life of an agonised nation ? Alas ! it is 
 the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of 
 your sensation that you have to deplore in 
 England at this day ; — sensation which 
 spends itself in bouquets and speeches ; in 
 revellings and junketings ; in sham fights 
 and gay puppet shows, while you can look 
 on and see noble nations murdered, man by 
 man, without an effort or a tear. 
 
 30. I said "minuteness" and "selfish- 
 ness " of sensation, but it would have been 
 enough to have said "injustice" or "unright- 
 eousness " of sensation. For as in nothing 
 is a gentleman better to be discerned from 
 a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle 
 nation (such nations have been) better to be 
 discerned from a mob, than in this, — that 
 their feelings are constant and just, results 
 of due contemplation, and of equal thought. 
 You can talk a mob into anything; its feel- 
 ings may be — usually are — on the whole, 
 generous and right ; but it has no foundation 
 for them, no hold of them ; you may teas^ or 
 tickle it into any, at your pleasure ; it thinks 
 
 41 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 by infection, for the most part, catching an 
 opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so 
 little that it will not roar itself wild about, 
 when the fit is on ; — nothing so great but it 
 will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. 
 But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, 
 passions are just, measured, and continuous. 
 A great nation, for instance, does not spend 
 its entire national wits for a couple of 
 months in weighing evidence of a single 
 ruffian's having done a single murder ; and 
 for a couple of years see its own children 
 murder each other by their thousands or 
 tens of thousands a day, considering only 
 what the effect is likely to be on the price 
 of cotton, and caring nowise to determine 
 which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither 
 does a great nation send its poor little boys 
 to jail for stealing six walnuts ; and allow its 
 bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thou- 
 sands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with 
 poor men's savings, to close their doors 
 " under circumstances over which they have 
 no control," with a "by your leave"; and 
 large landed estates to be bought by men 
 who have made their money by going with 
 armed steamers up and down the China 
 Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, 
 and altering, for the benefit of the foreign 
 nation, the common highwayman's demand 
 
 42 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 of " your money or your life," into that of 
 " your money and your life." Neither does 
 a great nation allow the lives of its innocent 
 poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, 
 and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, 
 for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week 
 to its landlords ; ^ and then debate, with 
 drivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, 
 whether it ought not piously to save, and 
 nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. 
 Also, a great nation having made up its 
 mind that hanging is quite the wholesomest 
 process for its homicides in general, can yet 
 with mercy distinguish between the degrees 
 of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp 
 like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the 
 blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or 
 grey -haired clodpate Othello, ** perplexed i' 
 the extreme," at the very moment that it is 
 sending a Minister of the Crown to make 
 polite speeches to a man who is bayoneting 
 young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing 
 noble youths in cool blood, faster than a 
 country butcher kills lambs in spring. And, 
 lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven 
 and its Powers, by pretending belief in a 
 revelation which asserts the love of money 
 
 I See note at end of lecture- I have put it in large 
 type, because the course of matters since it was written 
 has made it perhaps better worth attention. 
 
 43 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at 
 the same time, that it is actuated, and 
 intends to be actuated, in all chief national 
 deeds and measures, by no other love. 
 
 31. My friends, I do not know why any 
 of us should talk about reading. We want 
 some sharper discipline than that of reading; 
 but, at all events, be assured, we cannot 
 read. No reading is possible for a people 
 with its mind in this state. No sentence 
 of any great writer is intelligible to them. 
 It is simply and sternly impossible for the 
 English public, at this moment, to under- 
 stand any thoughtful writing, — so incapable 
 of thought has it become in its insanity of 
 avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, 
 little worse than this incapacity of thought ; 
 it is not corruption of the inner nature; we 
 ring true still, when anything strikes home 
 to us ; and though the idea that everything 
 should " pay " has infected our every purpose 
 so deeply, that even when we would play the 
 good Samaritan, we never take out our two- 
 pence and give them to the host, without 
 saying, " When I come again, thou shalt 
 give me fourpence," there is a capacity of 
 noble passion left in our hearts* core. We 
 show it in our work — in our war, — even in 
 those unjust domestic affections which make 
 us furious at a small private wrong, while 
 
 44 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 we are polite to a boundless public one : we 
 are still industrious to the last hour of the 
 day, though we add the gambler's fury to 
 the labourer's patience ; we are still brave 
 to the death, though incapable of discerning 
 true cause for battle; and are still true in 
 affection to our own flesh, to the death, as 
 the sea-monsters are, and the rock -eagles. 
 And there is hope for a nation while this 
 can be still said of it. As long as it holds 
 its life in its hand, ready to give it for its 
 honour (though a foolish honour), for its love 
 (though a selfish love), and for its business 
 (though a base business), there is hope for 
 it. But hope only; for this instinctive, 
 reckless virtue cannot last. No nation can 
 last, which has made a mob of itself, how- 
 ever generous at heart. It must discipline 
 its passions, and direct them, or they will 
 discipline //, one day, with scorpion-whips. 
 Above all, a nation cannot last as a money- 
 making mob: it cannot with impunity, — 
 it cannot with existence, — go on despising 
 literature, despising science, despising art, 
 despising nature, despising compassion, and 
 concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you 
 think these are harsh or wild words ? Have 
 patience with me but a little longer. I will 
 prove their truth to you, clause by clause. 
 32. I. I say first we have despised liter- 
 
 45 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 ature. What do we, as a nation, care about 
 books ? How much do you think we spend 
 altogether on our libraries, public or private, 
 as compared with what we spend on our 
 horses? If a man spends lavishly on his 
 library, you call him mad — a bibliomaniac. 
 But you never call any one a horse- maniac, 
 though men ruin themselves every day by 
 their horses, and you do not hear of people 
 ruining themselves by their books. Or, to 
 go lower still, how much do you think the 
 contents of the book-shelves of the United 
 Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, 
 as compared with the contents of its wine- 
 cellars ? What position would its expendi- 
 ture on literature take, as compared with its 
 expenditure on luxurious eating .? We talk 
 of food for the mind, as of food for the 
 body : now a good book contains such food 
 inexhaustibly ; it is a provision for life, and 
 for the best part of us ; yet how long most 
 people would look at the best book before 
 they would give the price of a large turbot 
 for it 1 Though there have been men who 
 have pinched their stomachs and bared their 
 backs to buy a book, whose libraries were 
 cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than 
 most men's dinners are. We are few of us 
 put to such trial, and more the pity; for, 
 indeed, a precious thing is all the more 
 
 46 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 precious to us if it has been won by work or 
 economy ; and if public libraries were half as 
 costly as public dinners, or books cost the 
 tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish 
 men and women might sometimes suspect 
 there was good in reading, as well as in 
 munching and sparkling; whereas the very 
 cheapness of literature is making even wise 
 people forget that if a book is worth read- 
 ing, it is worth buying. No book is worth 
 anything which is not worth much; nor is it 
 serviceable, until it has been read, and re- read, 
 and loved, and loved again ; and marked, so 
 that you can refer to the passages you want 
 in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he 
 needs in an armoury, or a housewife bring 
 the spice she needs from her store. Bread 
 of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as 
 honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; 
 and the family must be poor indeed which, 
 once in their lives, cannot, for such multi- 
 pliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. 
 We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are 
 filthy and foolish enough to thumb each 
 other's books out of circulating libraries ! 
 
 33. II. I say we have despised science. 
 " What ! " you exclaim, " are we not fore- 
 most in all discovery,! and is not the whole 
 
 I Since this was written, the answer has become 
 definitely — No ; we having surrendered the field of 
 
 47 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our 
 inventions?" Yes, but do you suppose that 
 is national work ? That work is all done in 
 spite of the nation; by private people's zeal 
 and money. We are glad enough, indeed, 
 to make our profit of science; we snap up 
 anything in the way of a scientific bone that 
 has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if the 
 scientific man comes for a bone or a crust 
 to us^ that is another story. What have we 
 publicly done for science ? We are obliged 
 to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of 
 our ships, and therefore we pay for an Observ- 
 atory; and we allow ourselves, in the person 
 of our Parliament, to be annually tormented 
 into doing something, in a slovenly way, for 
 the British Museum ; sullenly apprehending 
 that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds 
 in, to amuse our children. If anybody will 
 pay for their own telescope, and resolve 
 another nebula, we cackle over the discern- 
 ment as if it were our own ; if one in ten 
 thousand of our hunting squires suddenly 
 perceives that the earth was indeed made to 
 be something else than a portion for foxes, 
 and burrows in it himself, and tells us where 
 the gold is, and where the coals, we under- 
 stand that there is some use in that ; and very 
 
 Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as being 
 ourselves too poor to pay for ships. 
 
 48 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 properly knight him : but is the accident of 
 his having found out how to employ himself 
 usefully any credit to us ? (The negation of 
 such discovery among his brother squires 
 may perhaps be some ^/jcredit to us, if we 
 would consider of it.) But if you doubt 
 these generalities, here is one fact for us all 
 to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of 
 science. Two years ago there was a collec- 
 tion of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold 
 in Bavaria : the best in existence, containing 
 many specimens unique for perfectness, and 
 one, unique as an example of a species (a 
 whole kingdom of unknown living creatures 
 being announced by that fossil). This 
 collection, of which the mere market worth, 
 among private buyers, would probably have 
 been some thousand or twelve hundred 
 pounds, was offered to the English nation 
 for seven hundred : but we would not give 
 seven hundred, and the whole series would 
 have been in the Munich museum at this 
 moment, if Professor Owen i had not, with 
 loss of his own time, and patient tormenting 
 of the British public in person of its repre- 
 
 I I state this fact without Professor Owen's permis- 
 sion, which of course he could not with propriety have 
 granted, had I asked it ; but I consider it so important 
 that the public should be aware of the fact, that I do 
 what seems to me right, though rude. 
 
 49 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 sentatives, got leave to give four hundred 
 pounds at once, and himself become answer- 
 able for the other three! which the said 
 public will doubtless pay him eventually, but 
 sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter 
 all the while ; only always ready to cackle 
 if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg 
 of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. 
 Your annual expenditure for public purposes 
 (a third of it for military apparatus,) is 
 at least fifty millions. Now ;^700 is to 
 ;£'5o,ooo,ooo, roughly, as sevenpence to two 
 thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentle- 
 man of unknown income, but whose wealth 
 was to be conjectured from the fact that he 
 spent two thousand a year on his park walls 
 and footmen only, professes himself fond 
 of science ; and that one of his servants 
 comes eagerly to tell him that an unique 
 collection of fossils, giving clue to a new 
 era of creation, is to be had for the sum of 
 sevenpence sterling; and that the gentle- 
 man, who is fond of science, and spends two 
 thousand a year on his park, answers, after 
 keeping his servant waiting several months, 
 " Well ! I'll give you fourpeijce for them, if 
 you w^ill be answerable for the extra three- 
 pence yourself, till next year ! " 
 
 34. III. I say you have despised Art 1 
 " What ! " you again answer, " have we not 
 
 SO 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 Art exhibitions, miles long ? and do not we 
 pay thousands of pounds for single pictures ? 
 and have we not Art schools and institutions, 
 more than ever nation had before ? " Yes, 
 truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. 
 You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, 
 and crockery as well as iron ; you would 
 take every other nation's bread out of its 
 mouth if you could ; i not being able to 
 do that, your ideal of life is to stand in 
 the thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate 
 apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, 
 " What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of 
 your own faculties or circumstances ; you 
 fancy that, among your damp, flat, fat fields 
 of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as 
 the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or 
 the Italian under his volcanic cliffs ; — that 
 Art may be learned as book-keeping is, and 
 when learned, will give you more books to 
 keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no 
 more than you do for the bills pasted on your 
 dead walls. There is always room on the 
 wall for the bills to be read, — never for the 
 pictures to be seen. You do not know what 
 
 I That was our real idea of " Free Trade" — "All 
 the trade to myself." You find now that by *' competi- 
 tion " other people can manage to sell something as 
 well as you — and now we call for Protection again. 
 Wretches ! 
 
 51 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 pictures you have (by repute) in the country, 
 nor whether they are false or true, nor 
 whether they are taken care of or not; in 
 foreign countries, you calmly see the noblest 
 existing pictures in the world rotting in 
 abandoned wreck — (in Venice you saw the 
 Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the 
 palaces containing them), and if you heard 
 that all the fine pictures in Europe were 
 made into sand-bags to-morrow on the 
 Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so 
 much as the chance of a brace or two of 
 game less in your own bags, in a day's 
 shooting. That is your national love of Art. 
 35. IV. You have despised nature; that 
 is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations 
 of natural scenery. The French revolu- 
 tionists made stables of the cathedrals of 
 France ; you have made racecourses of the 
 cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception 
 of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages 
 round their aisles, and eat off their altars. i 
 You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls 
 of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the 
 
 I I meant that the beautiful places of the world — 
 Switzerland, Italy, South Germany, and so on — are, 
 indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to be reverent in, 
 and to worship in ; and that we only care to drive 
 through them ; and to eat and drink at their most 
 sacred places. 
 
 52 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have 
 destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake 
 of Geneva ; there is not a quiet valley in 
 England that you have not filled with 
 bellowing fire; there is no particle left of 
 English land which you have not trampled 
 coal ashes intoi — nor any foreign city in 
 which the spread of your presence is not 
 marked among its fair old streets and happy 
 gardens by a consuming white leprosy of 
 new hotels and perfumers' shops : the Alps 
 themselves, which your own poets used to 
 love so reverently, you look upon as soaped 
 poles in a bear-garden, which you set your- 
 selves to climb and slide down again, with 
 "shrieks of delight." When you are past 
 shrieking, having no human articulate voice 
 to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude 
 of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and 
 rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of 
 conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough 
 of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two 
 sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in 
 humanity, taking the deep inner significance 
 of them, are the English mobs in the valley 
 of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing 
 
 I I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding 
 all the river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in 
 its earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden air from 
 places many miles away. 
 
 53 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 rusty howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of 
 Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for 
 the gift of the vine, by assembling in knots 
 in the "towers of the vineyards," and slowly 
 loading and firing horse -pistols from morn- 
 ing till evening. It is pitiful to have dim 
 conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems 
 to me, to have conceptions like these, of 
 mirth. 
 
 36. Lastly. You despise compassion. 
 There is no need of words of mine for 
 proof of this. I will merely print one of the 
 newspaper paragraphs which I am in the 
 habit of cutting out and throwing into my 
 store-drawer ; here is one from a ' Daily 
 Telegraph ' of an early date this year (1867) ; 
 (date which, though by me carelessly left 
 unmarked, is easily discoverable ; for on the 
 back of the slip, there is the announcement 
 that *' yesterday the seventh of the special 
 services of this year was performed by the 
 Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul's " ; ) it relates 
 only one of such facts as happen now daily; 
 this by chance having taken a form in which 
 it came before the coroner. I will print the 
 paragraph in red. Be sure, the facts them- 
 selves are written in that colour, in a book 
 which we shall all of us, literate or illiterate, 
 have to read our page of, some day. 
 
 54 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. 
 Richards, deputy coroner, at the White 
 Horse tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, 
 respecting the death of Michael Collins, 
 aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable - 
 looking woman, said that she lived with the 
 deceased and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's 
 Court, Christ Church. Deceased was a 
 "translator" of boots. Witness went out 
 and bought old boots ; deceased and his 
 son made them into good ones, and then 
 witness sold them for what she could get 
 at the shops, which was very little indeed. 
 Deceased and his son used to work night 
 and day to try and get a little bread and tea, 
 and pay for the room ( 2s. a week ), so as to 
 keep the home together. On Friday-night 
 week deceased got up from his bench and 
 began to shiver. He threw down the boots, 
 saying, " Somebody else must finish them 
 when I am gone, for I can do no more." 
 There was no fire, and he said, '* I would be 
 better if I was warm." Witness therefore 
 took two pairs of translated boots ' to sell at 
 the shop, but she could only get 14^. for the 
 
 I One of the things which we must very resolutely 
 enforce, for the good of all classes, in our future 
 arrangements, must be that they wear no " translated " 
 article of dress. See the preface. 
 
 55 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 two pairs, for the people at the shop said, 
 "We must have our profit." Witness got 
 141b. of coal, and a little tea and bread. 
 Her son sat up the whole night to make the 
 " translations," to get money, but deceased 
 died on Saturday morning. The family never 
 had enough to eat. — Coroner : " It seems to 
 me deplorable that you did not go into the 
 workhouse." Witness : " We wanted the 
 comforts of our little home." A juror asked 
 what the comforts were, for he only saw a 
 little straw in the corner of the room, the 
 windows of which were broken. The witness 
 began to cry, and said that they had a quilt 
 and other little things. The deceased said 
 he never would go into the workhouse. In 
 summer, when the season was good, they 
 sometimes made as much as ioj. profit in 
 the week. They then always saved towards 
 the next week, which was generally a bad 
 one. In winter they made not half so much. 
 For three years they had been getting from 
 bad to worse. — Cornelius Collins said that 
 he had assisted his father since 1847. They 
 used to work so far into the night that both 
 nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now 
 had a film over his eyes. Five years ago 
 deceased applied to the parish for aid. The 
 relieving officer gave him a 41b. loaf, and 
 told him if he came again he should get the 
 
 56 
 
OF KINGS* TREASURIES 
 
 " Stones." » That disgusted deceased, and 
 he would have nothing to do with them since. 
 
 I This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labour 
 is curiously coincident in verbal form with a certain 
 passage which some of us may remember. It may 
 perhaps be well to preserve beside this paragraph 
 another cutting out of my store-drawer, from the 
 * Morning Post,' of about a parallel date, Friday, March 
 
 loth, 1865 : — ** The salons of Mme. C , who did the 
 
 honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were 
 crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — 
 in fact, with the same male company as one meets at 
 the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame 
 Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members 
 of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the 
 animated and dazzling improper scene. On the second 
 floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy 
 of the season. That your readers may form some idea 
 of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy 
 the menu of the supper, which was served to all the 
 guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice 
 Yquem, Johannisberg, Laffitte, Tokay, and champagne 
 of the finest vintages were served most lavishly 
 throughout the morning. After supper dancing was 
 resumed with increased animation, and the ball termi- 
 nated with a cbatne diabolique and a cancan d'enfer at 
 seven in the morning. (Morning service — 'Ere the 
 fresh lawns appeared, under the opening eyelids of the 
 Mom.') Here is the menu : — * Consomm^ de volaille 
 k la Bagration : 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bouchees k 
 la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets 
 de boeuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, chaudfroid 
 de gibier. Dindes truffles. Vttis de foies gras, buis- 
 sons d'^crevisses, salades v^n^tiennes, geMes blanches 
 aux fruits, gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. 
 Fromages glacis. Ananas. Dessert.'" 
 
 57 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 They got worse and worse until last Friday 
 week, when they had not even a halfpenny 
 to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down 
 on the straw, and said he could not live till 
 morning. — A juror: "You are dying of 
 starvation yourself, and you ought to go into 
 the house until the summer." — Witness : 
 ** If we went in, we should die. When we 
 come out in the summer, we should be like 
 people dropped from the sky. No one 
 would know us, and we would not have even 
 a room. I could work now if I had food, 
 for my sight would get better." Dr. G. P. 
 Walker said deceased died from syncope, 
 from exhaustion from want of food. The 
 deceased had had no bedclothes. For four 
 months he had had nothing but bread to 
 eat. There was not a particle of fat in the 
 body. There was no disease, but if there 
 had been medical attendance, he might have 
 survived the syncope or fainting. The 
 coroner having remarked upon the painful 
 nature of the case, the jury returned the 
 following verdict, *' That deceased died from 
 exhaustion from want of food and the com- 
 mon necessaries of life ; also through want 
 of medical aid." 
 
 37. ** Why would witness not go into the 
 workhouse ? " you ask. Well, the poor seem 
 to have a prejudice against the workhouse 
 
 58 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 which the rich have not ; for of course every 
 one who takes a pension from Government 
 goes into the workhouse on a grand scale : i 
 only the workhouses for the rich do not 
 involve the idea of work, and should be 
 called play-houses. But the poor like to die 
 independently, it appears ; perhaps if we 
 made the play-houses for them pretty and 
 pleasant enough, or gave them their pen- 
 sions at home, and allowed them a little 
 introductory peculation with the public 
 money, their minds might be reconciled to 
 the conditions. Meantime, here are the 
 facts : we make our relief either so insulting 
 to them, or so painful, that they rather die 
 than take it at our hands ; or, for third 
 alternative, we leave them so untaught and 
 foolish that they starve like brute creatures, 
 wild and dumb, not knowing what to do, or 
 what to ask. I say, you despise compassion ; 
 if you did not, such a newspaper paragraph 
 would be as impossible in a Christian coun- 
 try as a deliberate assassination permitted 
 in its public streets. 2 "Christian" did I 
 
 1 Please observe this statement, and think of it, and 
 consider how it happens that a poor old woman will be 
 ashamed to take a shilling a week from the country — 
 but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand 
 a year. 
 
 2 I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the * Pall 
 
 59 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 say ? Alas, if we were but wholesomely 
 ««-Christian, it would be impossible: it is 
 our imaginary Christianity that helps us to 
 commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuri- 
 ate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it ; 
 dressing it up, like everything else, in fiction. 
 The dramatic Christianity of the organ and 
 aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival — 
 the Christianity which we do not fear to 
 
 Mall Gazette ' established ; for the power of the press 
 in the hands of highly-educated men, in independent 
 position, and of honest purpose, may indeed become all 
 that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its 
 editor will therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, 
 by very reason of my respect for the journal, I do not 
 let pass unnoticed an article in its'third number, page 
 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense 
 wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who 
 has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is 
 following it, regardless of consequences. It contained 
 at the end this notable passage : — 
 
 " The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — 
 aye, and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are the 
 very utmost that the law ought to give to outcasts 
 merely as outcasts." I merely put beside this expres- 
 sion of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part 
 of the message which Isaiah was ordered to ** lift up his 
 voice like a trumpet " in declaring to the gentlemen of 
 his day : " Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist 
 of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, 
 to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring 
 the poor that are cast out (margin, * afflicted') to thy 
 house ? " The falsehood on which the writer had men- 
 tally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was 
 
 60 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our 
 play about the devil, in our Satanellas, — 
 Roberts, — Fausts ; chanting hymns through 
 traceried windows for background effect, and 
 artistically modulating the " Dio " through 
 variation on variation of mimicked prayer: 
 ( while we distribute tracts, next day, for 
 the benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon 
 what we suppose to be the signification 
 of the Third Commandment; — ) this gas- 
 lighted, and gas -inspired, Christianity, we 
 are triumphant in, and draw back the hem of 
 our robes from the touch of the heretics who 
 dispute it. But to do a piece of common 
 Christian righteousness in a plain English 
 word or deed; to make Christian law any 
 
 this : " To confound the functions of the dispensers of 
 the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charita- 
 ble institution is a great and pernicious error." This 
 sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its 
 substance must be thus reversed in our minds before 
 we can deal with any existing problem of national 
 distress. " To understand that the dispensers of the 
 poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and should 
 distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom of 
 hand as much greater and franker than that possible to 
 individual charity, as the collective national wisdom 
 and power may be supposed greater than those of any 
 single person, is the foundation of all law respecting 
 pauperism." (Since this was written the 'Pall Mall 
 Gazette ' has become a mere party paper — like the 
 rest ; but it writes well, and does more good than 
 mischief on the whole.) 
 
 6i 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 rule of life, and found one National act or 
 hope thereon, — we know too well what our 
 faith comes to for that ! You might sooner 
 get lightning out of incense smoke than 
 true action or passion out of your modern 
 English religion. You had better get rid of 
 the smoke, and the organ pipes, both : leave 
 them, and the Gothic windows, and the 
 painted glass, to the property man ; give up 
 your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one 
 healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus 
 at the doorstep. For there is a true Church 
 wherever one hand meets another helpfully, 
 and that is the only holy or Mother Church 
 which ever was, or ever shall be. 
 
 38. All these pleasures then, and all these 
 virtues, I repeat, you nationally despise. 
 You have, indeed, men among you who do 
 not; by whose work, by whose strength, 
 by whose life, by whose death, you live, 
 and never thank them. Your wealth, your 
 amusement, your pride, would all be alike 
 impossible, but for those whom you scorn or 
 forget. The policeman, who is walking up 
 and down the black lane all night to watch 
 the guilt you have created there ; and may 
 have his brains beaten out, and be maimed 
 for life, at any moment, and never be 
 thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's 
 rage ; the quiet student poring over his book 
 
 62 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 or his vial ; the common worker, without 
 praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling 
 his task as your horses drag your carts, 
 hopeless, and spurned of all : these are the 
 men by whom England lives ; but they are 
 not the nation ; they are only the body and 
 nervous force of it, acting still from old 
 habit in a convulsive perseverance, while 
 the mind is gone. Our National wish and 
 purpose are only to be amused ; our National 
 religion is the performance of church cere- 
 monies, and preaching of soporific truths (or 
 untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, 
 while we amuse ourselves ; and the necessity 
 for this amusement is fastening on us, as 
 a feverous disease of parched throat and 
 wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, merci- 
 less. How literally that word Z>/j--Ease, the 
 Negation and possibility of Ease, expresses 
 the entire moral state of our English Industry 
 and its Amusements ! 
 
 39. When men are rightly occupied, their 
 amusement grows out of their work, as the 
 colour-petals out of a fruitful flower; — 
 when they are faithfully helpful and compas- 
 sionate, all their emotions become steady, 
 deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as 
 the natural pulse to the body. But now, 
 having no true business, we pour our whole 
 masculine energy into the false business of 
 
 63 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 money-making ; and having no tnie emotion, 
 we must have false emotions dressed up for 
 us to play with, not innocently, as children 
 with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the 
 idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern 
 walls, which men had to dig to detect. The 
 justice we do not execute, we mimic in the 
 novel and on the stage; for the beauty 
 we destroy in nature, we substitute the 
 metamorphosis of the pantomime, and ( the 
 human nature of us imperatively requiring 
 awe and sorrow of some kind ) for the noble 
 grief we should have borne with our fellows, 
 and the pure tears we should have wept with 
 them, we gloat over the pathos of the police 
 court, and gather the night -dew of the grave. 
 40. It is difficult to estimate the true 
 significance of these things; the facts are 
 frightful enough; — the measure of national 
 fault involved in them is perhaps not as 
 great as it would at first seem. We permit, 
 or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we 
 mean no harm; we set fire to houses, and 
 ravage peasants' fields, yet we should be 
 sorry to find we had injured anybody. We 
 are still kind at heart ; still capable of virtue, 
 but only as children are. Chalmers, at the 
 end of his long life, having had much power 
 with the public, being plagued in some 
 serious matter by a reference to "public 
 
 64 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 opinion, " uttered the impatient exclamation, 
 " The public is just a great baby ! " And the 
 reason that I have allowed all these graver 
 subjects of thought to mix themselves up 
 with an inquiry into methods of reading, is 
 that, the more I see of our national faults or 
 miseries, the more they resolve themselves 
 into conditions of childish illiterateness and 
 want of education in the most ordinary 
 habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, 
 not selfishness, not dulness of brain, which 
 we have to lament ; but an unreachable 
 schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from 
 the true schoolboy's in its incapacity of 
 being helped, because it acknowledges no 
 master. 
 
 41. There is a curious type of us given 
 in one of the lovely, neglected works of the 
 last of our great painters. It is a drawing 
 of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its 
 brook, and valley, and hills, and folded 
 morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike 
 of these, and of the dead who have left " 
 these for other valleys and for other skies, a 
 group of schoolboys have piled their little 
 books upon a grave, to strike them off with 
 stones. So, also, we play with the words of 
 the dead that would teach us, and strike 
 them far from us with our bitter, reckless 
 will; little thinking that those leaves which 
 
 6s 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the wind scatters had been piled, not only 
 upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an 
 enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great 
 city of sleeping kings, who would awake for 
 us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to 
 call them by their names. How often, even 
 if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we 
 but wander among those old kings in their 
 repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and 
 stir the crowns on their foreheads, and still 
 they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty 
 imagery ; because we know not the incanta- 
 tion of the heart that would wake them; — 
 which, if they once heard, they would start 
 up to meet us in their power of long ago, 
 narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; 
 and, as the fallen kings of Hades meet the 
 newly fallen, saying, " Art thou also become 
 weak as we — art thou also become one 
 of us ? " so would these kings, with their 
 undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, 
 saying, "Art thou also become pure and 
 mighty of heart as we ? art thou also become 
 one of us ? " 
 
 42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — 
 " magnanimous '* — to be this, is indeed to 
 be great in life ; to become this increasingly, 
 is, indeed, to "advance in life," — in life 
 itself — not in the trappings of it. My 
 friends, do you remember that old Scythian 
 
 66 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 custom, when the head of a house died ? 
 How he was dressed in his finest dress, and 
 set in his chariot, and carried about to his 
 friends' houses; and each of them placed 
 him at his table's head, and all feasted in 
 his presence ? Suppose it were offered to 
 you in plain words, as it is offered to you in 
 dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian 
 honour, gradually, while you yet thought 
 yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this : 
 You shall die slowly ; your blood shall daily 
 grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat 
 at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. 
 Your life shall fade from you, and sink 
 through the earth into the ice of Caina; 
 but, day by day, your body shall be dressed 
 more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and 
 have more orders on its breast — crowns on 
 its head, if you will. Men shall bow before 
 it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up 
 and down the streets ; build palaces for it, 
 feast with it at their tables' heads all the 
 night long ; your soul shall stay enough 
 within it to know what they do, and feel the 
 weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, 
 and the furrow of the crown -edge on the 
 skull; — no more. Would you take the 
 offer, verbally made by the death-angel } 
 Would the meanest among us take it, think 
 you ."* Yet practically and verily we grasp 
 
 67 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of 
 us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every 
 man accepts it, who desires to advance in 
 life without knowing what life is ; who means 
 only that he is to get more horses, and more 
 footmen, and more fortune, and more public 
 honour, and — not more personal soul. He 
 only is advancing in life, whose heart is 
 getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose 
 brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into 
 Living I peace. And the men who have this 
 life in them are the true lords or kings of 
 the earth — they, and they only. All other 
 kingships, so far as they are true, are only 
 the practical issue and expression of theirs ; 
 if less than this, they are either dramatic 
 royalties, — costly shows, set off, indeed, with 
 real jewels instead of tinsel — but still only 
 the toys of nations; or else, they are no 
 royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere 
 active and practical issue of national folly ; 
 for which reason I have said of them else- 
 where, "Visible governments are the toys 
 of some nations, the diseases of others, the 
 harness of some, the burdens of more." 
 
 43. But I have no words for the wonder 
 with which I hear Kinghood still spoken of, 
 
 I "r6 5^ <f)p6v7jfia toO Trj/eiJ/xaros fw^ Kal 
 elpifivrj." 
 
 68 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 even among thoughtful men, as if governed 
 nations were a personal property, and might 
 be bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, 
 as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to 
 feed, and whose fleece he was to gather ; as 
 if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, 
 " people -eating," were the constant and proper 
 title of all monarchs ; and enlargement of a 
 king's dominion meant the same thing as the 
 increase of a private man's estate! Kings 
 who think so, however powerful, can no 
 more be the true kings of the nation than 
 gadflies are the kings of a horse ; they suck 
 it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. 
 They, and their courts, and their armies are, 
 if one could see clearly, only a large species 
 of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis 
 and melodious, band-mastered trumpeting, 
 in the summer air; the twilight being, per- 
 haps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more 
 wholesome, for its glittering mists of midge 
 companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule 
 quietly, if at all, and hate ruling; too many 
 of them make " il gran rifiuto " ; and if they 
 do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely 
 to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make 
 its " gran rifiuto " of them. 
 
 44. Yet the visible king may also be a 
 true one, some day, if ever day comes when 
 he will estimate his dominion by ih& force 
 
 69 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It 
 matters very little whether Trent cuts you a 
 cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle 
 less there. But it does matter to you, king 
 of men, whether you can verily say to this 
 man "Go," and he goeth; and to another, 
 " Come," and he cometh. Whether you can 
 turn your people, as you can Trent — and 
 where it is that you bid them come, and 
 where go. It matters to you, king of men, 
 whether your people hate you, and die by 
 you, or love you, and live by you. You may 
 measure your dominion by multitudes, better 
 than by miles; and count degrees of love- 
 latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully 
 warm and infinite equator. 
 
 45. Measure ! — nay, you cannot measure. 
 Who shall measure the difference between 
 the power of those who " do and teach," and 
 who are greatest, in the kingdoms of earth, 
 as of heaven — and the power of those who 
 undo, and consume — whose power, at the 
 fullest, is only the power of the moth and 
 the rust ? Strange 1 to think how the Moth- 
 kings lay up treasures for the moth ; and the 
 Rust-kings, who are to their people's strength 
 as rust to armour, lay up treasures for the 
 rust; and the Robber-kings, treasures for 
 the robber; but how few kings have ever 
 laid up treasures that needed no guarding — 
 
 70 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 treasures of which, the more thieves there 
 were, the better ! Broidered robe, only to be 
 rent ; helm and sword, only to be dimmed ; 
 jewel and gold, only to be scattered ; — there 
 have been three kinds of kings who have 
 gathered these. Suppose there ever should 
 arise a Fourth order of kings, who had read, 
 in some obscure writing of long ago, that 
 there was a Fourth kind of treasure, which 
 the jewel and gold could not equal, neither 
 should it be valued with pure gold. A web 
 made fair in the weaving, by Athena's shuttle ; 
 an armour, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian 
 force; a gold to be mined in the very sun's 
 red heart, where he sets over the Delphian 
 cliffs ; — deep -pictured tissue ; — impenetra- 
 ble armour; — potable gold; — the three 
 great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, 
 still calling to us, and waiting at the posts 
 of our doors, to lead us, with their winged 
 power, and guide us, with their unerring 
 eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, 
 and which the vulture's eye has not seen I 
 Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard 
 and believed this word, and at last gathered 
 and brought forth treasures of — Wisdom — 
 for their people ? 
 
 46. Think what an amazing business 
 that would be ! How inconceivable, in the 
 state of our present national wisdom 1 That 
 
 71 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 we should bring up our peasants to a 
 book exercise instead of a bayonet exer- 
 cise! — organise, drill, maintain with pay, 
 and good generalship, armies of thinkers, 
 instead of armies of stabbers ! — find national 
 amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle 
 grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, 
 as well as for a leaden splash on a target. 
 What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in 
 words, that the wealth of the capitalists of 
 civilised nations should ever come to support 
 literature instead of war ! 
 
 47. Have yet patience with me, while I 
 read you a single sentence out of the only 
 book, properly to be called a book, that I 
 have yet written myself, the one that will 
 stand, (if anything stand,) surest and longest 
 of all work of mine : — 
 
 " It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth 
 in Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which 
 supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much 
 money to support them ; for most of the men who wage 
 such, wage them gratis ; but for an unjust war, men's 
 bodies and souls have both to be bought ; and ihe best 
 tools of war for them besides, which makes such war 
 costly to the maximum ; not to speak of the cost of base 
 fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which have 
 not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to 
 buy an hour's peace of mind with ; as, at present, 
 France and England, purchasing of each other ten 
 millions sterling worth of consternation, annually (a 
 remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen 
 
 72 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 leaves, sown, reaped and granaried by the 'science' of 
 the modern political economist, teaching covetousness 
 instead of truth). And, all unjust war being support- 
 able, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans 
 from capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent 
 taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in 
 the matter, the capitalists* will being the primary root 
 of the war ; but its real root is the covetousness of the 
 whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frank- 
 ness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due 
 time, his own separate loss and punishment to each 
 person." 
 
 48. France and England literally, observe, 
 buy panic of each other ; they pay, each of 
 them, for ten thousand-thousand pounds'- 
 worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, 
 instead of buying these ten millions' worth 
 of panic annually, they made up their minds 
 to be at peace with each other, and buy ten 
 millions' worth of knowledge annually; and 
 that each nation spent its ten thousand- 
 thousand pounds a year in founding royal 
 libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, 
 royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it 
 not be better somewhat for both French and 
 English .? 
 
 49. It will be long, yet, before that comes 
 to pass. Nevertheless, I hope it will not be 
 long before royal or national libraries will 
 be founded in every considerable city, with 
 a royal series of books in them ; the same 
 series in every one of them, chosen books, 
 
 73 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the best in every kind, prepared for that 
 national series in the most perfect way 
 possible ; their text printed all on leaves of 
 equal size, broad of margin, and divided 
 into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, 
 beautiful, and strong, and thorough as exam- 
 ples of binders' work ; and that these great 
 libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
 orderly persons at all times of the day and 
 evening; strict law being enforced for this 
 cleanliness and quietness. 
 
 50. I could shape for you other plans, for 
 art galleries, and for natural history galleries, 
 and for many precious — many, it seems to 
 me, needful — things ; but this book plan is 
 the easiest and needfullest, and would prove 
 a considerable tonic to what we call our 
 British Constitution, which has fallen drop- 
 sical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil 
 hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You 
 have got its corn laws repealed for it ; try 
 if you cannot get corn laws established for 
 it, dealing in a better bread; — bread made 
 of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the 
 Sesame, which opens doors; — doors, not of 
 robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries. 
 
 74 
 
NOTE TO § 30 
 
 Respecting the increase of rent by the 
 deaths of the poor, for evidence of which, 
 see the preface to the Medical Officer's 
 report to the Privy Council, just published, 
 there are suggestions in its preface which 
 will make some stir among us, I fancy, 
 respecting which let me note these points 
 following : — 
 
 There are two theories on the subject of 
 land now abroad, and in contention; both 
 false. 
 
 The first is that, by Heavenly law, there 
 have always existed, and must continue to 
 exist, a certain number of hereditarily sacred 
 persons to whom the earth, air, and water 
 of the world belong, as personal property ; of 
 which earth, air, and water, these persons 
 may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the 
 rest of the human race to eat, to breathe, or 
 to drink. This theory is not for many years 
 longer tenable. The adverse theory is that* 
 a division of the land of the world among 
 the mob of the world would immediately 
 elevate the said mob into sacred personages ; 
 that houses would then build themselves, 
 and corn grow of itself ; and that everybody 
 
 75 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 would be able to live, without doing any 
 work for his living. This theory would also 
 be found highly untenable in practice. 
 
 It will, however, require some rough exper- 
 iments and rougher catastrophes, before the 
 generality of persons will be convinced that 
 no law concerning anything — least of all con - 
 cerning land, for either holding or dividing 
 it, or renting it high, or renting it low — 
 would be of the smallest ultimate use to the 
 people, so long as the general contest for 
 life, and for the means of life, remains one 
 of mere brutal competition. That contest, 
 in an unprincipled nation, will take one 
 deadly form or another, whatever laws you 
 make against it. For instance, it would be 
 an entirely wholesome law for England, if 
 it could be carried, that maximum limits 
 should be assigned to incomes according to 
 classes ; and that every nobleman's income 
 should be paid to him as a fixed salary or 
 pension by the nation ; and not squeezed by 
 him in variable sums, at discretion, out of 
 the tenants of his land. But if you could 
 get such a law passed to-morrow, and if, 
 which w^ould be farther necessary, you could 
 fix the value of the assigned incomes by 
 making a given weight of pure bread for a 
 given sum, a twelve-month would not pass 
 before another currency would have been 
 
 76 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 tacitly established, and the power of accumu- 
 lated wealth would have re-asserted itself in 
 some other article, or some other imaginary 
 sign. There is only one cure for public 
 distress — and that is public education, 
 directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, 
 and just. There are, indeed, many laws 
 conceivable which would gradually better 
 and strengthen the national temper ; but, for 
 the most part, they are such as the national 
 temper must be much bettered before it 
 would bear. A nation in its youth may be 
 helped by laws, as a weak child by back- 
 boards, but when it is old it cannot that way 
 strengthen its crooked spine. 
 
 And besides ; the problem of land, at its 
 worst, is a bye one ; distribute the earth 
 as you will, the principal question remains 
 inexorable, — Who is to dig it ? Which of 
 us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty 
 work for the rest — and for what pay ? Who 
 is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for 
 what pay ? Who is to do no work, and 
 for what pay } And there are curious moral 
 and religious questions connected with these. 
 How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the 
 soul out of a great many persons, in order 
 to put the abstracted psychical quantities 
 together and make one very beautiful or 
 ideal soul.^ If we had to deal with mere 
 
 77 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 blood instead of spirit, (and the thing might 
 literally be done — as it has been done with 
 infants before now) — so that it were possible 
 by taking a certain quantity of blood from 
 the arms of a given number of the mob, and 
 putting it all into one person, to make a more 
 azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing 
 would of course be managed; but secretly, 
 I should conceive. But now, because it is 
 brain and soul that we abstract, not visible 
 blood, it can be done quite openly, and we 
 live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after 
 the manner of weasels ; that is to say, we 
 keep a certain number of clowns digging and 
 ditching, and generally stupified, in order 
 that we, being fed gratis, may have all the 
 thinking and feeling to ourselves. Yet 
 there is a great deal to be said for this. A 
 highly-bred and trained English, French, 
 Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more 
 a lady), is a great production, — a better 
 production than most statues ; being beauti- 
 fully coloured as well as shaped, and plus all 
 the brains; a glorious thing to look at, a 
 wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot 
 have it, any more than a pyramid or a 
 church, but by sacrifice of much contributed 
 life. And it is, perhaps, better to build a 
 beautiful human creature than a beautiful 
 dome or steeple — and more delightful to 
 
 78 
 
OF kings' treasuries 
 
 look up reverently to a creature far above 
 us, than to a wall ; only the beautiful human 
 creature will have some duties to do in 
 return — duties of living belfry and rampart 
 — of which presently. 
 
 79 
 
LECTURE II — LILIES 
 OF queens' gardens 
 
 " Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert ; let the desert be 
 made cheerful, and bloom as the lily ; and the barren 
 places of Jordan shall run wild with wood." — Isaiah 
 XXXV. I. (Septuagint.) 
 
 IT will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is 
 the sequel of one previously given, that 
 I should shortly state to you my general 
 intention in both. The questions specially 
 proposed to you in the first, namely, How 
 and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper 
 one, which it was my endeavour to make 
 you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely. 
 Why to Read. I want you to feel, with me, 
 that whatever advantage we possess in the 
 present day in the diffusion of education and 
 of literature, can only be rightly used by any 
 of us when we have apprehended clearly 
 what education is to lead to, and literature 
 to teach. I wish you to see that both 
 well-directed moral training and w^ell-chosen 
 reading lead to the possession of a power 
 over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, 
 according to the measure of it, in the truest 
 sense, kingly ; conferring indeed the purest 
 kingship that can exist among men : too 
 many other kingships ( however distinguished 
 
 80 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 by visible insignia or material power ) being 
 either spectral, or tyrannous ; — spectral — 
 that is to say, aspects and shadows only of 
 royalty, hollow as death, and which only the 
 " likeness of a kingly crown have on ; " or 
 else tyrannous — that is to say, substituting 
 their own will for the law of justice and love 
 by which all true kings rule. 
 
 52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I 
 want to leave this idea with you, I begin 
 with it, and shall end with it — only one pure 
 kind of kingship; an inevitable and eternal 
 kind, crowned or not : the kingship, namely, 
 which consists in a stronger moral state, and 
 a truer thoughtful state, than that of others ; 
 enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise 
 them. Observe that word " State " ; we have 
 got into a loose way of using it. It means 
 literally the standing and stability of a thing ; 
 and you have the full force of it in the 
 derived word "statue" — '* the immovable 
 thing." A king's majesty or "state," then, 
 and the right of his kingdom to be called a 
 state, depends on the movelessness of both : 
 — without tremor, without quiver of balance ; 
 established and enthroned upon a foundation 
 of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor 
 overthrow. 
 
 53. Believing that all literature and all 
 education are only useful so far as they tend 
 
 81 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 to confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore 
 kingly, power, — first, over ourselves, and, 
 through ourselves, over all around us, — I am 
 now going to ask you to consider with me, 
 farther, what special portion or kind of this 
 royal authority, arising out of noble educa- 
 tion, may rightly be possessed by women ; 
 and how far they also are called to a true 
 queenly power, — not in their households 
 merely, but over all within their sphere. 
 And in what sense, if they rightly understood 
 and exercised this royal or gracious influence, 
 the order and beauty induced by such 
 benignant power would justify us in speak- 
 ing of the territories over which each of 
 them reigned, as " Queens' Gardens. " 
 
 54. And here, in the very outset, we are 
 met by a far deeper question, which — 
 strange though this may seem — remains 
 among many of us yet quite undecided, in 
 spite of its infinite importance. 
 
 We cannot determine what the queenly 
 power of women should be, until we are 
 agreed what their ordinary power should 
 be. We cannot consider how education 
 may fit them for any widely extending duty, 
 until we are agreed what is their true con- 
 stant duty. And there never was a time 
 when wilder words were spoken, or more 
 vain imagination permitted, respecting this 
 
 82 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 question — quite vital to all social happiness. 
 The relations of the womanly to the manly 
 nature, their different capacities of intellect 
 or of virtue, seem never to have been yet 
 estimated with entire consent. We hear of 
 the " mission " and of the " rights " of 
 Woman, as if these could ever be separate 
 from the mission and the rights of Man ; — 
 as if she and her lord were creatures of inde- 
 pendent kind, and of irreconcilable claim. 
 This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong 
 
 — perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for I 
 will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) 
 
 — is the idea that woman is only the shadow 
 and attendant image of her lord, owing him 
 a thoughtless and servile obedience, and 
 supported altogether in her weakness, by 
 the pre-eminence of his fortitude. 
 
 This, I say, is the most foolish of all 
 errors respecting her who was made to be 
 the helpmate of man. As if he could be 
 helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily 
 by a slave ! 
 
 55. Let us try, then, whether w^e cannot 
 get at some clear and harmonious idea (it 
 must be harmonious if it is true) of what 
 womanly mind and virtue are in power and 
 office, with respect to man's ; and how their 
 relations, rightly accepted, aid, and increase, 
 the vigour, and honour, and authority of both. 
 
 83 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 And now I must repeat one thing I said 
 in the last lecture : namely, that the first use 
 of education was to enable us to consult 
 with the wisest and the greatest men on all 
 points of earnest difficulty. That to use 
 books rightly, was to go to them for help : 
 to appeal to them when our own knowledge 
 and power of thought failed: to be led by 
 them into wider sight, — purer conception, — 
 than our own, and receive from them the 
 united sentence of the judges and councils 
 of ail time, against our solitary and unstable 
 opinion. 
 
 Let us do this now. Let us see whether 
 the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted 
 of all ages are agreed in any wise on this 
 point : let us hear the testimony they have 
 left respecting what they held to be the true 
 dignity of woman, and her mode of help to 
 man. 
 
 56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 
 
 Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare 
 has no heroes ; — he has only heroines. 
 There is not one entirely heroic figure in all 
 his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry 
 the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of 
 the stage ; and the still slighter Valentine in 
 The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In his 
 laboured and perfect plays you have no 
 hero. Othello would have been one, if his 
 
 84 
 
OF QUEENS* GARDENS 
 
 simplicity had not been so great as to leave 
 him the prey of every base practice round 
 him ; but he is the only example even 
 approximating to the heroic type. Corio- 
 lanus — Caesar — Antony stand in flawed 
 strength, and fall by their vanities ; — Hamlet 
 is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo 
 an impatient boy ; the Merchant of Venice 
 languidly submissive to adverse fortune ; 
 Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at 
 heart, but too rough and unpolished to be 
 of true use at the critical time, and he sinks 
 into the office of a servant only. Orlando, 
 no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of 
 chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosa- 
 lind. Whereas there is hardly a play that 
 has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in 
 grave hope, and errorless purpose ; Cordelia, 
 Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, 
 Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, 
 Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps 
 loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; conceived 
 in the highest heroic type of humanity. 
 
 57. Then observe, secondly, 
 
 The catastrophe of every play is caused 
 always by the folly or fault of a man ; the 
 redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom 
 and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, 
 there is none. The catastrophe of King 
 Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, 
 
 8s 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding 
 of his children ; the virtue of his one true 
 daughter would have saved him from all 
 the injuries of the others, unless he had cast 
 her away from him ; as it is, she all but 
 saves him. 
 
 Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor 
 the one weakness of his so mighty love ; 
 nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect 
 to that even of the second woman character 
 in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild 
 testimony against his error : — 
 
 ** Oh, murderous coxcomb ! what should such a fool 
 Do with so good a wife? " 
 
 In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave 
 stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous 
 issue by the reckless impatience of her 
 husband. In The Winter's Tale, and in 
 Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of 
 two princely households, lost through long 
 years, and imperilled to the death by the 
 folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are 
 redeemed at last by the queenly patience 
 and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for 
 Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, 
 and the foul cowardice of the brother, are 
 opposed to the victorious truth and adaman- 
 tine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the 
 mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would 
 
 86 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 have saved her son from all evil; his 
 momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin ; 
 her prayer, at last, granted, saves him — not, 
 indeed, from death, but from the^curse of 
 living as the destroyer of his country. 
 
 And what shall I say of Julia, constant 
 against the fickleness of a lover who is a 
 mere wicked child ? — of Helena, against the 
 petulance and insult of a careless youth ? — 
 of the patience of Hero, the passion of 
 Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom 
 of the '* unlessoned girl," who appears among 
 the helplessness, the blindness, and the vin- 
 dictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, 
 bringing courage and safety by her presence, 
 and defeating the worst malignities of crime 
 by what women are fancied most to fail in, — 
 precision and accuracy of thought. 
 
 58. Observe, further, among all the prin- 
 cipal figures in Shakespeare's plays, there is 
 only one weak woman — Ophelia; and it 
 is because she fails Hamlet at the critical 
 moment, and is not, and cannot in her 
 nature be, a guide to him when he needs her 
 most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. 
 Finally, though there are three wicked 
 women among the principal figures. Lady 
 Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they are felt 
 at once to be frightful exceptions to the 
 ordinary laws of life ; fatal in their influence 
 
 87 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 also, in proportion to the power for good 
 which they have abandoned. 
 
 Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's 
 testimony to the position and character of 
 women in human life. He represents them 
 as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, 
 — incorruptibly just and pure examples, — 
 strong always to sanctify, even when they 
 cannot save. 
 
 59. Not as in any wise comparable in 
 knowledge of the nature of man, — still less 
 in his understanding of the causes and 
 courses of fate, — but only as the writer who 
 has given us the broadest view of the condi- 
 tions and modes of ordinary thought in 
 modern society, I ask you next to receive 
 the witness of Walter Scott. 
 
 I put aside his merely romantic prose 
 writing as of no value, and though the 
 early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its 
 testimony is of no weight, other than that of 
 a boy's ideal. But his true works, studied 
 from Scottish life, bear a true witness ; and, 
 in the whole range of these, there are but 
 three men who reach the heroic type i — 
 
 I I ought, in order to make this assertion fully under- 
 stood, to have noted the various weaknesses which 
 lower the ideal of other great characters of men in the 
 Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrowness of 
 thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm 
 
 88 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 Dandle Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claver- 
 house; of these, one is a border farmer; 
 another a freebooter; the third a soldier in 
 a bad cause. And these touch the ideal of 
 heroism only in their courage and faith, 
 together with a strong, but uncultivated, or 
 mistakenly applied, intellectual power ; while 
 his younger men are the gentlemanly play- 
 things of fantastic fortune, and only by aid 
 (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not 
 vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain. 
 Of any disciplined, or consistent character, 
 earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or 
 dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely 
 challenged and resolutely subdued, there is 
 no trace in his conceptions of young men. 
 Whereas in his imaginations of women, — 
 in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of 
 Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine 
 Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, 
 Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie 
 Deans, — with endless varieties of grace, 
 tenderness, and intellectual power, we find 
 in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and 
 
 in Edward Glendinning, and the like ; and I ought to 
 have noticed that there are several quite perfect char- 
 acters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds ; three 
 — let us acpept joyously this courtesy to England and 
 her soldiers — are English officers: Colonel Gardiner, 
 Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 
 
 89 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 justice; a fearless, instant, and untiring 
 self-sacrifice, to even the appearance of duty, 
 much more to its real claims ; and, finally, a 
 patient wisdom of deeply restrained affec- 
 tion, which does infinitely more than pro- 
 tect its objects from a momentary error; it 
 gradually forms, animates, and exalts the 
 characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at 
 the close of the tale, we are just able, and 
 no more, to take patience in hearing of their 
 unmerited success. 
 
 So that, in all cases, with Scott as with 
 Shakespeare, it is the woman who watches 
 over, teaches, and guides the youth ; it is 
 never, by any chance, the youth who watches 
 over, or educates, his mistress. 
 
 60. Next, take, though more briefly, 
 graver testimony — that of the great Ital- 
 ians and Greeks. You know well the plan 
 of Dante's great poem — that it is a love- 
 poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for 
 her watch over his soul. Stooping only to 
 pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 
 destruction — saves him from hell. He is 
 going eternally astray in despair ; she comes 
 down from heaven to his help, and through- 
 out the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, 
 interpreting for him the most difficult truths, 
 divine and human; and leading him, with 
 rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 
 
 90 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; 
 if I began, I could not cease : besides, you 
 might think this a wild imagination of one 
 poet's heart. So I will rather read to you 
 a few verses of the deliberate writing of a 
 knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly 
 characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest 
 men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, 
 century, preserved among many other such 
 records of knightly honour and love, which 
 Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from 
 among the early Italian poets. 
 
 " For lo ! thy law is passed 
 That this my love should manifestly be 
 
 To serve and honour thee : 
 And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
 Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 
 
 " Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
 
 Since thus my will was set : 
 To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence : 
 Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
 
 A pain or a regret. 
 But on thee dwells my every thought and sense ; 
 Considering that from thee all virtues spread 
 
 As from a fountain head, — 
 That in thy gift is wisdom's best avail, 
 
 A nd honour without fail ; 
 With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
 Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 
 
 " Lady, since I conceived 
 Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 
 
 My life has been apart 
 In shining brightness and the place of truth; 
 
 91 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Which till that time, good sooth, 
 Groped among shadows in a darken 'd place, 
 
 Where many hours and days 
 It hardly ever had remember'd good. 
 
 But now my servitude 
 Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 
 
 A man from a wild beast 
 Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 
 
 6i. You may think, perhaps, a Greek 
 knight would have had a lower estimate of 
 women than this Christian lover. His spir- 
 itual subjection to them was indeed not so 
 absolute ; but as regards their own personal 
 character, it was only because you could not 
 have followed me so easily, that I did not 
 take the Greek women instead of Shake- 
 speare's ; and instance, for chief ideal types 
 of human beauty and faith, the simple 
 mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; 
 the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra ; 
 the playful kindness and simple princess-life 
 of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of 
 that of^Penelope, with its watch upon the 
 sea; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly 
 devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in 
 Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, 
 lamb-like and silent; and, finally, the expec- 
 tation of the resurrection, made clear to 
 the soul of the Greeks in the return from 
 her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her 
 
 92 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 husband, had passed calmly through the 
 bitterness of death. 
 
 62. Now I could multiply witness upon 
 witness of this kind upon you if I had time. 
 I would take Chaucer, and show you why 
 he wrote a Legend of Good Women ; but 
 no Legend of Good Men. I would take 
 Spenser, and show you how all his fairy 
 knights are sometimes deceived and some - 
 times vanquished; but the soul of Una is 
 never darkened, and the spear of Britomart 
 is never broken. Nay, I could go back into 
 the mythical teaching of the most ancient 
 times, and show you how the great people, — 
 by one of whose princesses it was appointed 
 that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be 
 educated, rather than by his own kindred : — 
 how that great Egyptian people, wisest then 
 of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom 
 the form of a woman; and into her hand, 
 for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle ; and 
 how the name and the form of that spirit, 
 adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, 
 became that Athena of the olive -helm, and 
 cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, 
 down to this date, whatever you hold most 
 precious in art, in literature, or in types of 
 national virtue. 
 
 63. But I will not wander into this dis- 
 tant and mythical element; I will only ask 
 
 93 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 you to give its legitimate value to the testi- 
 mony of these great poets and men of the 
 world, — consistent, as you see it is, on this 
 head. I will ask you whether it can be 
 supposed that these men, in the main work 
 of their lives, are amusing themselves with a 
 fictitious and idle view of the relations 
 betw^een man and woman ; nay, worse than 
 fictitious or idle; for a thing may be imagi- 
 nary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but 
 this, their ideal of woman, is, according to 
 our common idea of the marriage relation, 
 wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is 
 not to guide, nor even to think for herself. 
 The man is always to be the wiser ; he is to 
 be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in 
 knowledge and discretion, as in power. 
 
 64. Is it not somewhat important to 
 make up our minds on this matter? Are 
 all these great men mistaken, or are we ? 
 Are Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and 
 Homer, merely dressing dolls for us ; or, 
 worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the real- 
 isation of which, w^ere it possible, would 
 bring anarchy into all households and ruin 
 into all affections .•* Nay, if you can suppose 
 this, take lastly the evidence of facts given 
 by the human heart itself. In all Christian 
 ages which have been remarkable for their 
 purity of progress, there has been absolute 
 
 94 
 
OF QUEENS' GAEDENS 
 
 yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, 
 to his mistress. I say obedient; — not merely 
 enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, 
 but entirely subject, receiving from the 
 beloved woman, however young, not only 
 the encouragement, the praise, and the 
 reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice is 
 open, or any question difficult of decision, 
 the direction of all toil. That chivalry, to 
 the abuse and dishonour of which are attrib- 
 utable primarily whatever is cruel in war, 
 unjust in peace, or corrupt and ignoble in 
 domestic relations; and to the original 
 purity and power of which we owe the 
 defence alike of faith, of law, and of love; 
 — that chivalry, I say, in its very first 
 conception of honourable life, assumes the 
 subjection of the young knight to the com- 
 mand — should it even be the command in 
 caprice — of his lady. It assumes this, 
 because its masters knew that the first and 
 necessary impulse of every truly taught and 
 knightly heart is this of blind service to its 
 lady : that where that true faith and captivity 
 are not, all wayward and wicked passion 
 must be ; and that in this rapturous obedi- 
 ence to the single love of his youth, is the 
 sanctification of all man's strength, and the 
 continuance of all his purposes. And this, 
 not because such obedience would be safe, 
 
 95 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 or honourable, were it ever rendered to the 
 unworthy ; but because it ought to be impos- 
 sible for every noble youth — it is impossible 
 for every one rightly trained — to love any 
 one whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or 
 whose prayerful command he can hesitate to 
 obey. 
 
 65. I do not insist by any farther argu- 
 ment on this, for I think it should commend 
 itself at once to your knowledge of what has 
 been, and to your feeling of what should be. 
 You cannot think that the buckling on of 
 the knight's armour by his lady's hand was a 
 mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the 
 type of an eternal truth — that the soul's 
 armour is never well set to the heart unless 
 a woman's hand has braced it ; and it is only 
 when she braces it loosely that the honour 
 of manhood fails. Know you not those 
 lovely lines — I would they were learned by 
 all youthful ladies of England — 
 
 " Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 
 On her sweet self set her own price, 
 Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
 How has she cheapen 'd Paradise ! 
 How given for nought her priceless gift, 
 How spoil'd the bread and spill'd the wine, 
 Which, spent with due respective thrift, 
 Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " i 
 
 I Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too 
 often or too carefully ; as far as I know, he is the only 
 
 96 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 66. Thus much, then, respecting the 
 relations of lovers I believe you will accept. 
 But what we too often doubt is the fitness 
 of the continuance of such a relation through- 
 out the whole of human life. We ihink it 
 right in the lover and mistress, not in the 
 husband and wife. That is to say, we think 
 that a reverent and tender duty is due to 
 one whose affection we still doubt, and 
 whose character we as yet do but partially 
 and distantly discern ; and that this rever- 
 ence and duty are to be withdrawn, when 
 the affection has become wholly and limit- 
 lessly our own, and the character has been 
 so sifted and tried that we fear not to 
 entrust it with the happiness of our lives. 
 Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well 
 as how unreasonable ? Do you not feel that 
 marriage, — when it is marriage at all, — is 
 only the seal which marks the vowed transi- 
 tion of temporary into untiring service, and 
 of fitful into eternal love ? 
 
 67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of 
 this guiding function of the woman reconcil- 
 able with a true wifely subjection ? Simply 
 in that it is a guiding^ not a determining, 
 function. Let me try to show you briefly 
 
 living poet who always strengthens and purifies ; the 
 others sometimes darken and nearly always depress, 
 and discourage, the imagination they deeply seize. 
 
 97 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 how these powers seem to be rightly distin- 
 guishable. 
 
 We are foolish, and without excuse fool- 
 ish, in speaking of the " superiority " of one 
 sex to the other, as if they could be com- 
 pared in similar things. Each has what the 
 other has not : each completes the other, 
 and is completed by the other: they are in 
 nothing alike, and the happiness and per- 
 fection of both depends on each asking and 
 receiving from the other what the other only 
 can give. 
 
 68. Now their separate characters are 
 briefly these. The man's power is active, 
 progressive, defensive. He is eminently 
 the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the 
 defender. His intellect is for speculation 
 and invention; his energy for adventure, 
 for war, and for conquest wherever war is 
 just, wherever conquest necessary. But the 
 woman's power is for rule, not for battle, — 
 and her intellect is not for invention or 
 creation, but for sweet ordering, arrange- 
 ment, and decision. She sees the qualities 
 of things, their claims, and their places. 
 Her great function is Praise: she enters 
 into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the 
 crown of contest. By her office, and place, 
 she is protected from all danger and tempta- 
 tion. The man, in his rough work in the 
 
 98 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 open world, must encounter all peril and 
 trial: — to him, therefore, must be the fail- 
 ure, the offence, the inevitable error : often 
 he must be wounded, or subdued ; often 
 misled; and always hardened. But he 
 guards the woman from all this; within 
 his house, as ruled by her, unless she her- 
 self has sought it, need enter no danger, 
 no temptation, no cause of error or offence. 
 This is the true nature of home — it is the 
 place of Peace ; the shelter, not only from 
 all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and 
 division. In so far as it is not this, it is not 
 home ; so far as the anxieties of the outer 
 life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently - 
 minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society 
 of the outer world is allowed by either hus- 
 band or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases 
 to be home ; it is then only a part of that 
 outer world which you have roofed over, 
 and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a 
 sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the 
 hearth watched over by Household Gods, 
 before whose faces none may come but those 
 whom they can receive with love, — so far as 
 it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a 
 nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock 
 in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos 
 in the stormy sea; — so far it vindicates the 
 name, and fulfils the praise, of Home. 
 
 99 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 And wherever a true wife comes, this 
 home is always round her. The stars only 
 may be over her head ; the glowworm in the 
 night-cold grass may be the only fire at her 
 foot : but home is yet wherever she is ; and 
 for a noble woman it stretches far round 
 her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted 
 with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, 
 for those who else were homeless. 
 
 69. This, then, I believe to be, — will 
 you not admit it to be.-* — the woman's true 
 place and power. But do not you see that, 
 to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can 
 use such terms of a human creature — be 
 incapable of error ? So far as she rules, all 
 must be right, or nothing is. She must be 
 enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, 
 infallibly wise — wise, not for self -develop- 
 ment, but for self-renunciation: wise, not 
 that she may set herself above her husband, 
 but that she may never fail from his side : 
 wise, not with the narrowness of insolent 
 and loveless pride, but with the passionate 
 gentleness of an infinitely variable, because 
 infinitely applicable, modesty of service — 
 the true changefulness of woman. In that 
 great sense — '* La donna e mobile," not 
 " Qual pium' al vento " ; no, nor yet " Varia- 
 ble as the shade, by the light quivering aspen 
 made " ; but variable as the lights manifold in 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 fair and serene division, that it may take the 
 colour of all that it falls upon, and exalt it. 
 
 70. II. I have been trying, thus far, to 
 show you what should be the place, and 
 what the power, of woman. Now, secondly, 
 we ask. What kind of education is to fit her 
 for these ? 
 
 And if you indeed think this a true con- 
 ception of her office and dignity, it will not 
 be difficult to trace the course of education 
 which would fit her for the one, and raise 
 her to the other. 
 
 The first of our duties to her — no 
 thoughtful persons now doubt this, — is to 
 secure for her such physical training and 
 exercise as may confirm her health, and 
 perfect her beauty; the highest refinement 
 of that beauty being unattainable without 
 splendour of activity and of delicate strength. 
 To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its 
 power; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed 
 its sacred light too far : only remember that 
 all physical freedom is vain to produce 
 beauty without a corresponding freedom of 
 heart. There are two passages of that poet 
 who is distinguished, it seems to me, from 
 all others — not by power, but by exquisite 
 rightness — which point you to the source, 
 and describe to you, in a few syllables, the 
 completion of womanly beauty. I will read 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the introductory stanzas, but the last is the 
 one I wish you specially to notice : — 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
 Then Nature said, * A lovelier flower 
 
 * On earth was never sown ; 
 
 * This child I to myself will take ; 
 
 ' She shall be mine, and I will make 
 
 * A lady of my own. 
 
 " * Myself will to my darling be 
 ' Both law and impulse ; and with me 
 
 ' The girl, in rock and plain, 
 ' In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 
 * Shall feel an overseeing power 
 . , ' To kindle, or restrain. 
 
 "* * The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 
 * To her, for her the willow bend ; 
 
 * Nor shall she fail to see 
 
 ' Even in the motions of the storm, 
 
 * Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 * By silent sympathy. 
 
 ** * And vital feelings of delight 
 ' Shall rear her form to stately height, — 
 
 * Her virgin bosom swell. 
 
 * Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
 
 * While she and I together live, , 
 
 * Here in this happy dell.' " i > 
 
 " Vital feehng of delight," observe. There 
 are deadly feelings of delight ; but the nat- 
 ural ones are vital, necessary to very life. 
 
 I Observe, it is " Nature " who is speaking through- 
 out, and who says, " while she and 1 together live." 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 And they must be feelings of delight, if 
 they are to be vital. Do not think you can 
 make a girl lovely, if you do not make her 
 happy. There is not one restraint you put 
 on a good girl's nature — there is not one 
 clieck you give to her instincts of affection 
 or of effort — which will not be indelibly 
 written on her features, with a hardness 
 which is all the more painful because it 
 takes away the brightness from the eyes of 
 innocence, and the charm from the brow of 
 virtue. 
 
 71. This for the means: now note the 
 end. Take from the same poet, in two lines, 
 a perfect description of womanly beauty — 
 
 " A countenance in which did meet 
 Sweet records, promises as sweet." 
 
 The perfect loveliness of a woman's coun- 
 tenance can only consist in that majestic 
 peace which is founded in memory of happy 
 and useful years, — full of sweet records; 
 and from the joining of this with that yet 
 more majestic childishness, which is still full 
 of change and promise ; — opening always — 
 modest at once, and bright, with hope of 
 better things to be won, and to be bestowed- 
 There is no old age where there is still that 
 promise. 
 
 72. Thus, then, you have first to mould 
 her physical frame, and then, as the strength 
 
 103 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 she gains will permit you, to fill and temper 
 her mind with all knowledge and thoughts 
 which tend to confirm its natural instincts 
 of justice, and refine its natural tact of love. 
 All such knowledge should be given her 
 as may enable her to understand, and even 
 to aid, the work of men : and yet it should 
 be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it 
 were, or could be, for her an object to know ; 
 but only to feel, and to judge. It is of no 
 moment, as a matter of pride or perfectness 
 in herself, whether she knows many lan- 
 guages or one ; but it is of the utmost, that 
 she should be able to show kindness to a 
 stranger, and to understand the sweetness of 
 a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to 
 her own worth or dignity that she should be 
 acquainted with this science or that ; but it 
 is of the highest that she should be trained 
 in habits of accurate thought ; that she 
 should understand the meaning, the inevita- 
 bleness, and the loveliness of natural laws ; 
 and follow at least some one path of scientific 
 attainment, as far as to the threshold of that 
 bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only 
 the wisest and bravest of men can descend, 
 owning themselves for ever children, gath- 
 ering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is 
 of little consequence how many positions of 
 cities she knows, or how many dates of 
 
 104 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 events, or names of celebrated persons — it 
 is not the object of education to turn the 
 woman into a dictionary ; but it is deeply 
 necessary that she should be taught to enter 
 with her whole personality into the history 
 she reads ; to picture the passages of it vitally 
 in her own bright imagination ; to apprehend, 
 with her fine instincts, the pathetic circum- 
 stances and dramatic relations, which the 
 historian too often only eclipses by his 
 reasoning, and disconnects by his arrange- 
 ment : it is for her to trace the hidden 
 equities of divine reward, and catch sight, 
 through the darkness, of the fateful threads 
 of woven fire that connect error with retribu- 
 tion. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught 
 to extend the limits of her sympathy with 
 respect to that history which is being for 
 ever determined as the moments pass in 
 which she draws her peaceful breath ; and to 
 the contemporary calamity, which, were it 
 but rightly mourned by her, would recur no 
 more hereafter. She is to exercise herself 
 in imagining what would be the effects upon 
 her mind and conduct, if she were daily 
 brought into the presence of the suffering 
 which is not the less real because shut from 
 her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to 
 understand the nothingness of the proportion 
 which that little world in which she lives and 
 
 105 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 loves, bears to the world in which God lives 
 and loves; — and solemnly she is to be 
 taught to strive that her thoughts of piety 
 may not be feeble in proportion to the 
 number they embrace, nor her prayer more 
 languid than it is for the momentary relief 
 from pain of her husband or her child, when 
 it is uttered for the multitudes of those who 
 have none to love them, — and is, " for all 
 who are desolate and oppressed." 
 
 73. Thus far, I think, I have had your 
 concurrence; perhaps you will not be with 
 me in what I believe is most needful for me 
 to say. There is one dangerous science for 
 women — one which they must indeed beware 
 how they profanely touch — that of theology. 
 Strange, and miserably strange, that while 
 they are modest enough to doubt their powers, 
 and pause at the threshold of sciences where 
 every step is demonstrable and sure, they will 
 plunge headlong, and without one thought of 
 incompetency, into that science in which the 
 greatest men have trembled, and the wisest 
 erred. Strange, that they will complacently 
 and pridef ully bind up whatever vice or folly 
 there is in them, whatever arrogance, petu- 
 lance, or blind incomprehensiveness, into one 
 bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. Strange 
 in creatures born to be Love visible, that 
 where they can know least, they will condemn 
 
 106 
 
OF QUEENS* GARDENS 
 
 first, and think to recommend themselves to 
 their Master, by crawling up the steps of 
 His judgment -throne, to divide it with Him. 
 Strangest of all, that they should think they 
 were led by the Spirit of the Comforter into 
 habits of mind which have become in them 
 the unmixed elements of home discomfort ; 
 and that they dare to turn the Household 
 Gods of Christianity into ugly idols of their 
 own; — spiritual dolls, for them to dress 
 according to their caprice ; and from which 
 their husbands must turn away in grieved 
 contempt, lest they should be shrieked at for 
 breaking them. 
 
 74. I believe, then, with this exception, 
 that a girl's education should be nearly, in 
 its course and material of study, the same as 
 a boy's ; but quite differently directed. A 
 woman, in any rank of life, ought to know 
 whatever her husband is likely to know, but 
 to know it in a different way. His command 
 of it should be foundational and progressive ; 
 hers, general and accomplished for daily and 
 helpful use. Not but that it would often be 
 wiser in men to learn things in a womanly 
 sort of way, for present use, and to seek for 
 the discipline and training of their mental 
 powers in such branches of study as will 
 be afterwards fitted for social service; but, 
 speaking broadly, a man ought to know any 
 
 107 
 
♦ SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 language or science he learns, thoroughly — 
 while a woman ought to know the same 
 language, or science, only so far as may 
 enable her to sympathise in her husband's 
 pleasures, and in those of his best friends. 
 
 75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy 
 as far as she reaches. There is a wide 
 difference between elementary knowledge 
 and superficial knowledge — between a firm 
 beginning, and an infirm attempt at compass- 
 ing. A woman may always help her husband 
 by what she knows, however little ; by what 
 she half-knows, or mis-knows, she will only 
 tease him. 
 
 And indeed, if there were to be any differ- 
 ence between a girl's education and a boy's, 
 I should say that of the two the girl should 
 be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, 
 into deep and serious subjects : and that her 
 range of literature should be, not more, but 
 less frivolous ; calculated to add the qualities 
 of patience and seriousness to her natural 
 poignancy of thought and quickness of wit ; 
 and also to keep her in a lofty and pure 
 element of thought. I enter not now into 
 any question of choice of books ; only let 
 us be sure that her books are not heaped up 
 in her lap as they fall out of the package of 
 the circulating library, wet with the last and 
 lightest spray of the fountain of folly. 
 
 108 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 76. Or even of the fountain of wit; for 
 with respect to the sore temptation of novel 
 reading, it is not the badness of a novel that 
 we should dread, so much as its overwrought 
 interest. The weakest romance is not so 
 stupefying as the lower forms of religious 
 exciting literature, and the worst romance 
 is not so corrupting as false history, false 
 philosophy, or false political essays. But 
 the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by 
 its excitement, it renders the ordinary course 
 of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid 
 thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in 
 which we shall never be called upon to act. 
 
 77. I speak therefore of good novels only ; 
 and our modern literature is particularly rich 
 in types of such. V/ell read, indeed, these 
 books have serious use, being nothing less 
 than treatises on moral anatomy and chemis- 
 try; studies of human nature in the elements 
 of it. But I attach little w^eight to this 
 function; they are hardly ever read with 
 earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil 
 it. The utmost they usually do is to enlarge 
 somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or 
 the bitterness of a malicious one; for each 
 will gather, from the novel, food for her own 
 disposition. Those who are naturally proud 
 and envious will learn from Thackeray to 
 despise humanity ; those who are naturally 
 
 109 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 gentle, to pity it; those who are naturally 
 shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might 
 be a serviceable power in novels to bring 
 before us, in vividness, a human truth which 
 we had before dimly conceived ; but the 
 temptation to picturesqueness of statement 
 is so great, that often the best writers of 
 fiction cannot resist it; and our views are 
 rendered so violent and one-sided, that their 
 vitality is rather a harm than good. 
 
 78. Without, however, venturing here on 
 any attempt at decision how much novel 
 reading should be allowed, let me at least 
 clearly assert this, that whether novels, or 
 poetry, or history be read, they should be 
 chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but 
 for their possession of good. The chance 
 and scattered evil that may here and there 
 haunt, or hide itself in, a powerful book, 
 never does any harm to a noble girl ; but the 
 emptiness of an author oppresses her, and 
 his amiable folly degrades her. And if she 
 can have access to a good library of old and 
 classical books, there need be no choosing 
 at all. Keep the modern magazine and 
 novel out of your girl's way; turn her loose 
 into the old library every wet day, and let 
 her alone. She will find what is good for 
 her; you cannot ; for there is just this dif- 
 ference between the making of a girl's 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 character and a boy's — you may chisel a 
 boy into shape, as you would a rock, or 
 hammer him into it, if he be of a better 
 kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But 
 you cannot hammer a girl into anything. 
 She grows as a flower does, — she will wither 
 without sun ; she will decay in her sheath, 
 as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air 
 enough ; she may fall, and defile her head in 
 dust, if you leave her without help at some 
 moments of her life ; but you cannot fetter 
 her ; she must take her own fair form and 
 way, if she take any, and in mind as in body, 
 must have always 
 
 " Her household motions light and free, 
 And steps of virgin liberty." 
 
 Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do 
 a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds 
 twenty times better than you ; and the good 
 ones too, and will eat some bitter and prickly 
 ones, good for it, which you had not the 
 slightest thought would have been so. 
 
 79. Then, in art, keep the finest models 
 before her, and let her practice in all accom- 
 plishments be accurate and thorough, so as 
 to enable her to understand more than she 
 accomplishes. I say the finest models — 
 that is to say, the truest, simplest, usef ullest. 
 Note those epithets ; they will range through 
 all the arts. Try them in music, where you 
 
 III 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 might think them the least applicable. I 
 say the truest, that in which the notes most 
 closely and faithfully express the meaning 
 of the words, or the character of intended 
 emotion; again, the simplest, that in which 
 the meaning and melody are attained with 
 the fewest and most significant notes possi- 
 ble ; and, finally, the usef ullest, that music 
 which makes the best words most beautiful, 
 which enchants them in our memories each 
 with its own glory of sound, and which 
 applies them closest to the heart at the 
 moment we need them. 
 
 80. And not only in the material and in 
 the course, but yet more earnestly in the 
 spirit of it, let a girl's education be as serious 
 as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if 
 they were meant for sideboard ornaments, 
 and then complain of their frivolity. Give 
 them the same advantages that you give 
 their brothers — appeal to the same grand 
 instincts of virtue in them; teach them^ also, 
 that courage and truth are the pillars of their 
 being : — do you think that they would not 
 answer that appeal, brave and true as they 
 are even now, when you know that there 
 is hardly a girls' school in this Christian 
 kingdom where the children's courage or 
 sincerity would be thought of half so much 
 importance as their way of coming in at a 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 door ; and when the whole system of society, 
 as respects the mode of establishmg them in 
 life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and 
 imposture — cowardice, in not daring to let 
 them live, or love, except as their neighbours 
 choose ; an imposture, in bringing, for the 
 purposes of our own pride, the full glow of 
 the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, 
 at the very period when the whole happiness 
 of her future existence depends upon her 
 remaining undazzled ? 
 
 81. And give them, lastly, not only noble 
 teachings, but noble teachers. You consider 
 somewhat, before you send your boy to 
 school, what kind of a man the master is; — 
 whatsoever kind of man he is, you at least 
 give him full authority over your son, and 
 show some respect to him yourself: — if he 
 comes to dine w4th you, you do not put him 
 at a side table: you know also that, at 
 college, your child's immediate tutor will be 
 under the direction of some still higher tutor, 
 for whom you have absolute reverence. You 
 do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or 
 the Master of Trinity as your inferiors. 
 
 But what teachers do you give your girls, 
 and what reverence do you show to the 
 teachers you have chosen ? Is a girl likely 
 to think her own conduct, or her own intel- 
 lect, of much importance, when you trust the 
 
 "3 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 entire formation of her character, moral and 
 intellectual, to a person whom you let your 
 servants treat with less respect than they do 
 your housekeeper (as if the soul of your 
 child were a less charge than jams and 
 groceries), and whom you yourself think you 
 confer an honour upon by letting her some- 
 times sit in the drawing-room in the evening? 
 82. Thus, then, of literature as her help 
 and thus of art. There is one more help 
 which she cannot do without — one which, 
 alone, has sometimes done more than all 
 other influences besides, — the help of wild 
 and fair nature. Hear this of the education 
 of Joan of Arc: — 
 
 " The education of this poor girl was mean, accord- 
 ing to the present standard ; was ineffably grand, 
 according to a purer philosophical standard ; and only 
 not good for our age, because for us it would be 
 unattainable. . . . 
 
 " Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most 
 to the advantages of her situation. The fountain of 
 Domremy was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and 
 it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish 
 priest {cure) was obliged to read mass there once a 
 year, in order to keep them in decent bounds. . . . 
 
 "But the forests of Domremy — those were the 
 glories of the land ; for in them abode mysterious 
 powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic 
 strength. Abbeys there were, and abbey windows, — 
 * like Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' — that exercised 
 even princely power both in Touraine and in the Ger- 
 man Diets. These had their sweet bells that pierced 
 
 114 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, and 
 each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scat- 
 tered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to 
 disturb the deep solitude of the region ; yet many 
 enough to spread a network or awning of Christian 
 sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen 
 wilderness." i 
 
 Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in 
 England, woods eighteen miles deep to the 
 centre; but you can, perhaps, keep a fairy or 
 two for your children yet, if you wish to 
 keep them. But do you wish it ? Suppose 
 you had each, at the back of your houses, a 
 garden, large enough for your children to 
 play in, with just as much lawn as would 
 give them room to run, — no more — and 
 that you could not change your abode ; but 
 that, if you chose, you could double your 
 income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal 
 shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning 
 the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would 
 you do it ? I hope not. I can tell you, you 
 would be wrong if you did, though it gave 
 you income sixty -fold instead of four-fold. 
 
 83. Yet this is what you are doing with 
 all England. The whole country is but a 
 little garden, not more than enough for your 
 children to run on the lawns of, if you would 
 
 I "Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's ' His- 
 tory of France.' " — De Quincey'sWorks,vol. iii, p. 217, 
 
 "5 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 let them all run there. And this little gar- 
 den you will turn into furnace ground, and 
 fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and 
 those children of yours, not you, will suffer 
 for it. For the fairies will not be all ban- 
 ished; there are fairies of the furnace as of 
 the wood, and their first gift seems to be 
 " sharp arrows of the mighty ; " but their last 
 gifts are " coals of juniper." 
 
 84. And yet I cannot — though there is 
 no part of my subject that I feel more — 
 press this upon you; for we made so little 
 use of the power of nature while we had it 
 that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. 
 Just on the other side of the Mersey you 
 have your Snowdon, and your Menai Straits, 
 and that mighty granite rock beyond the 
 moors of Anglesea, splendid in its heathery 
 crest, and foot planted in the deep sea, once 
 thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, 
 looking westward; the Holy Head or Head- 
 land, still not without awe when its red light 
 glares first through storm. These are the 
 hills, and these the bays and blue inlets, 
 which, among the Greeks, would have been 
 always loved, always fateful in influence on 
 the national mind. That Snowdon is your 
 Parnassus ; but where are its Muses .'' That 
 Holyhead mountain is your Island of ^Egina ; 
 but where is its Temple to Minerva t 
 
 116 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 85. Shall I read you what the Christian 
 Minerva had achieved under the shadow of 
 our Parnassus up to the year 1848? — Here 
 is a little account of a Welsh school, from 
 page 261 of the Report on Wales, published 
 by the Committee of Council on Education. 
 This is a school close to a tow^n containing 
 5,000 persons : — 
 
 " I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 
 recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly 
 declared they had never heard of Christ, and two that 
 they had never heard of God. Two out of six thought 
 Christ was on earth now " (they might have had a 
 worse thought perhaps), "three knew nothing about 
 the Crucifixion. Four out of seven did not know the 
 names of the months nor the number of days in a 
 year. They had no notion of addition ; beyond two 
 and two, or three and three, their minds were perfect 
 blanks." 
 
 Oh, ye women of England! from the Prin- 
 cess of that Wales to the simplest of you, 
 do not think your own children can be 
 brought into their true fold of rest, while 
 these are scattered on the hills, as sheep 
 having no shepherd. And do not think your 
 daughters can be trained to the truth of their 
 own human beauty, while the pleasant places, 
 which God made at once for their school- 
 room and their play-ground, lie desolate and 
 defiled. You cannot baptise them rightly in 
 those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you 
 
 117 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 baptise them also in the sweet waters which 
 the great Lawgiver strikes forth for ever 
 from the rocks of your native land — waters 
 which a Pagan would have worshipped in 
 their purity, and you worship only with 
 pollution. You cannot lead your children 
 faithfully to those narrow axe -hewn church 
 altars of yours, while the dark azure altars 
 in heaven — the mountains that sustain your 
 island throne, — mountains on which a Pagan 
 would have seen the powers of heaven rest 
 in every wreathed cloud — remain for you 
 without inscription ; altars built, not to, but 
 by an Unknown God. 
 
 86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, 
 thus far of the teaching, of woman, and thus 
 of her household office, and queenliness. 
 We come now to our last, our widest ques- 
 tion, — What is her queenly office with 
 respect to the state ? 
 
 Generally, we are under an impression 
 that a man's duties are public, and a woman's 
 private. But this is not altogether so. A 
 man has a personal work or duty, relating to 
 his own home, and a public work or duty, 
 which is the expansion of the other, relating 
 to the state. So a woman has a personal 
 work or duty, relating to her own home, 
 and a public work or duty, which is also the 
 expansion of that. 
 
 ii8 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 Now, the man's work for his own home is, 
 as has been said, to secure its maintenance, 
 progress, and defence ; the woman's to secure 
 its order, comfort, and loveliness. 
 
 Expand both these functions. The man's 
 duty, as a member of a commonwealth, is to 
 assist in the maintenance, in the advance, 
 in the defence of the state. The woman's 
 duty, as a member of the commonwealth is 
 to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, 
 and in the beautiful adornment of the state. 
 
 What the man is at his own gate, defend- 
 ing it, if need be, against insult and spoil, 
 that also, not in a less, but in a more devoted 
 measure, he is to be at the gate of his coun- 
 try, leaving his home, if need be, even to the 
 spoiler, to do his more incumbent work 
 there. 
 
 And, in like manner, what the woman is 
 to be within her gates, as the centre of 
 order, the balm of distress, and the mirror 
 of beauty : that she is also to be without her 
 gates, where order is more difficult, distress 
 more imminent, loveliness more rare. 
 
 And 'as within the human heart there is 
 always set an instinct for all its real duties, 
 — an instinct which you cannot quench, but 
 only warp and corrupt if you withdraw it 
 from its true purpose: — as there is the 
 intense instinct of love, which, rightly disci - 
 
 119 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 plined, maintains all the sanctities of life, 
 and, misdirected, undermines them ; and 
 must do either the one or the other; — so 
 there is in the human heart an inextinguish- 
 able instinct, the love of power, which, 
 rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of 
 law and life, and misdirected, wrecks them. 
 87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of 
 the heart of man, and of the heart of woman, 
 God set it there, and God keeps it there. 
 Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the 
 desire of power 1 — For Heaven's sake, and 
 for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But 
 what power? That is all the question. 
 Power to destroy ? the lion's limb, and the 
 dragon's breath ? Not so. Power to heal, 
 to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power 
 of the sceptre and shield ; the power of the 
 royal hand that heals in touching, — that 
 binds the fiend, and looses the captive ; the 
 throne that is founded on the rock of Justice, 
 and descended from only by steps of Mercy. 
 Will you not covet such power as this, and 
 seek such throne as this, and be no more 
 housewives, but queens ? 
 
 88. It is now long since the women of 
 England arrogated, universally, a title which 
 once belonged to nobility only ; and, having 
 once been in the habit of accepting the 
 simple title of gentlewoman, as correspond- 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 ent to that of gentleman, insisted on the 
 privilege of assuming the title of " Lady," i 
 which properly corresponds only to the title 
 of " Lord." 
 
 I do not blame them for this ; but only 
 for their narrow motive in this. I would 
 have them desire and claim the title of Lady, 
 provided they claim, not merely the title, but 
 the office and duty signified by it. Lady 
 means *' bread-giver*' or " loaf -giver," and 
 Lord means " maintainer of laws," and both 
 titles have reference, not to the law which 
 is maintained in the house, nor to the 
 bread which is given to the household ; but 
 to law maintained for the multitude, and to 
 bread broken among the multitude. So 
 that a Lord has legal claim only to his title 
 in so far as he is the maintainer of the 
 justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady 
 has legal claim to her title, only so far as 
 she communicates that help to the poor 
 
 I I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted 
 for our English youth of certain ranks,in which both boy 
 and girl should receive, at a given age, their knighthood 
 and ladyhood by true title ; attainable only by certain 
 probation and trial both of character and accomplish- 
 ment ; and to be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, 
 of any dishonourable act. Such an institution would 
 be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a 
 nation which loved honour. That it would not be 
 possible among us,is not to the discredit of the scheme. 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 representatives of her Master, which women 
 once, ministering to Him of their substance, 
 were permitted to extend to that Master 
 Himself; and when she is known, as He 
 Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 
 
 89. And this beneficent and legal domin- 
 ion, this power of the Dominus, or House- 
 Lord, and of the Domina, or House- Lady, 
 is great and venerable, not in the number 
 of those through whom it has lineally 
 descended, but in the number of those 
 whom it grasps within its sway ; it is always 
 regarded with reverent worship wherever 
 its dynasty is founded on its duty, and -its 
 ambition correlative with its beneficence. 
 Your fancy is pleased with the thought of 
 being noble ladies, with a train of vassals ? 
 Be it so ; you cannot be too noble, and your 
 train cannot be too great; but see to it that 
 your train is of vassals whom you serve 
 and feed, not merely of slaves who serve and 
 feed you; and that the multitude which 
 obeys you is of those whom you have com- 
 forted, not oppressed, — whom you have 
 redeemed, not led into captivity. 
 
 90. And this, which is true of the lower 
 or household dominion, is equally true of 
 the queenly dominion ; — that highest dignity 
 is open to you, if you will also accept that 
 highest duty. Rex et Regina — Roi et 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 Reine — *^ Right-doQxs ; " they differ but from 
 the Lady and Lord, in that their power is 
 supreme over the mind as over the person — 
 that they not only feed and clothe, but 
 direct and teach. And whether consciously 
 or not, you must be, in many a heart, 
 enthroned: there is no putting by that 
 crown ; queens you must always be ; queens 
 to your lovers ; queens to your husbands 
 and your sons ; queens of higher mystery to 
 the world beyond, which bows itself, and 
 will for ever bow, before the myrtle crown, 
 and the stainless sceptre of womanhood. 
 But, alas ! you are too often idle and care- 
 less queens, grasping at majesty in the least 
 things, while you abdicate it in the greatest ; 
 and leaving misrule and violence to work 
 their will among men, in defiance of the 
 power which, holding straight in gift from 
 the Prince of all Peace, the wicked among 
 you betray, and the good forget. 
 
 91. " Prince of Peace." Note that name. 
 When kings rule in that name, and nobles, 
 and the judges of the earth, they also, in 
 their narrow place, and mortal measure, 
 receive the power of it. There are no 
 other rulers than they : other rule than 
 theirs is but misxnlQ ; they who govern verily 
 " Dei gratia " are all princes, yes, or prin- 
 cesses, of Peace. There is not a war in 
 
 123 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the world, no, nor an injustice, but you 
 women are answerable for it; not in that 
 you have provoked, but in that you have 
 not hindered. Men, by their nature, are 
 prone to fight ; they will fight for any cause, 
 or for none. It is for you to choose their 
 cause for them, and to forbid them when 
 there is no cause. There is no suffering, 
 no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the 
 guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear 
 the sight of it, but you should not be able 
 to bear it. Men may tread it down without 
 sympathy in their own struggle ; but men are 
 feeble in sympathy, and contracted in hope ; 
 it is you only who can feel the depths of 
 pain, and conceive the way of its healing. 
 Instead of trying to do this, you turn away 
 from it; you shut yourselves within your 
 park walls and garden gates ; and you are 
 content to know that there is beyond them 
 a whole world in wilderness — a world of 
 secrets which you dare not penetrate, and 
 of suffering which you dare not conceive. 
 
 92. I tell you that this is to me quite 
 the most amazing among the phenomena of 
 humanity. I am surprised at no depths to 
 which, when once warped from its honour, 
 that humanity can be degraded. I do not 
 wonder at the miser's death, with his hands, 
 as they relax, dropping gold. I do not won- 
 
 124 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 der at the sensualist's life, with the shroud 
 wrapped about his feet. I do not wonder at 
 the single-handed murder of a single victim, 
 done by the assassin in the darkness of the 
 railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I 
 do not even wonder at the myriad-handed 
 murder of multitudes, done boastfully in 
 the daylight, by the frenzy of nations, 
 and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt, 
 heaped up from hell to heaven, of their 
 priests, and kings. But this is wonderful 
 to me — oh, how wonderful ! — to see the 
 tender and delicate woman among you, with 
 her child at her breast, and a power, if she 
 would wield it, over it, and over its father, 
 purer than the air of heaven, and stronger 
 than the seas of earth — nay, a magnitude 
 of blessing which her husband would not part 
 with for all that earth itself, though it were 
 made of one entire and perfect chrysolite: 
 — to see her abdicate this majesty to play 
 at precedence with her next-door neighbour! 
 This is wonderful — oh, wonderful ! — to 
 see her, with every innocent feeling fresh 
 within her, go out in the morning into her 
 garden to play with the fringes of its guarded 
 flowers, and lift their heads when they are 
 drooping, with her happy smile upon her 
 face, and no cloud upon her brow, because 
 there is a little wall around her place of 
 
 125 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 peace ; and yet she knows, in her heart, if 
 she would only look for its knowledge, that, 
 outside of that little rose-covered wall, the 
 wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up by the 
 agony of men, and beat level by the drift of 
 their life-blood. 
 
 93. Have you ever considered what a 
 deep under meaning there lies, or at least 
 may be read, if we choose, in our custom of 
 strewing flowers before those whom we think 
 most happy ? Do you suppose it is merely 
 to deceive them into the hope that happiness 
 is always to fall thus in showers at their 
 feet? — that wherever they pass they will 
 tread on herbs of sweet scent, and that the 
 rough ground will be made smooth for them 
 by depth of roses ? So surely as they believe 
 that, they will have, instead, to walk on 
 bitter herbs and thorns ; and the only soft- 
 ness to their feet will be of snow. But it is 
 not thus intended they should believe; there 
 is a better meaning in that old custom. The 
 path of a good woman is indeed strewn 
 with flowers ; but they rise behind her steps, 
 not before them. " Her feet have touched 
 the meadows, and left the daisies rosy." 
 
 94. You think that only a lover's fancy ; 
 — false and vain ! How if it could be true ? 
 You think this also, perhaps, only a poet's 
 fancy — 
 
 126 
 
OF queens' gardens 
 
 " Even the light harebell raised its head 
 Elastic from her airy tread." 
 
 But it is little to say of a woman, that she 
 only does not destroy where she passes. 
 She should revive; the harebells should 
 bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think 
 I am rushing into wild hyperbole ? Pardon 
 me, not a whit — I mean what I say in calm 
 English, spoken in resolute truth. You have 
 heard it said — (and I believe there is more 
 than fancy even in that saying, but let it 
 pass for a fanciful one) — that flowers only 
 flourish rightly in the garden of some one 
 who loves them. I know you would like that 
 to be true; you would think it a pleasant 
 magic if you could flush your flowers into 
 brighter bloom by a kind look upon them : 
 nay, more, if your look had the power, not 
 only to cheer, but to guard ; — if you could 
 bid the black blight turn away, and the 
 knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid 
 the dew fall upon them in the drought, and 
 say to the south wind, in frost — '*Come, 
 thou south, and breathe upon my garden, 
 that the spices of it may flow out." This 
 you would think a great thing ? And do you 
 think it not a greater thing, that all this, 
 (and how much more than this ! ) you can 
 do, for fairer flowers than these — flowers 
 that could bless you for having blessed 
 
 127 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 them, and will love you for having loved 
 them ; — flowers that have thoughts like 
 yours, and lives like yours; and which, once 
 saved, you save for ever ? Is this only a 
 little power ? Far among the moorlands 
 and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the 
 terrible streets, — these feeble florets are 
 lying, with all their fresh leaves torn, and 
 their stems broken — will you never go down 
 to them, nor set them in order in their little 
 fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trem- 
 bling, from the fierce wind ? Shall morning 
 follow morning, for you, but not for them ; 
 and the dawn rise to w^atch, far away, those 
 frantic Dances of Death ; i but no dawn 
 rise to breathe upon these living banks of 
 wild violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor call 
 to you, through your casement, — call (not 
 giving you the name of the English poet's 
 lady, but the name of Dante's great Matilda, 
 who on the edge of happy Lethe, stood, 
 wreathing flowers with flowers), saying, — 
 
 '* Come into the garden, Maud, 
 
 For the black bat, night, has flown, 
 
 And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
 
 And the musk of the roses blown "? 
 
 Will you not go down among them ? — 
 among those sweet living things, whose new 
 
 I See note p. 57. 
 
 128 
 
OF QUEENS' GARDENS 
 
 courage, sprung from the earth with the 
 deep colour of heaven upon it, is starting 
 up in strength of goodly spire ; and whose 
 purity, washed from the dust, is opening, 
 bud by bud, into the flower of promise ; — 
 and still they turn to you and for you, " The 
 Larkspur listens — I hear, I hear 1 And the 
 Lily whispers — I wait." 
 
 95. Did you notice that I missed two 
 lines when I read you that first stanza ; and 
 think that I had forgotten them ? Hear 
 them now : — 
 
 " Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, night, has flown. 
 Come into the garden, Maud, 
 I am here at the gate, alone." 
 
 Who is it, think you, who stands at the 
 gate of this sweeter garden, alone, waiting 
 for you ? Did you ever hear, not of a Maud, 
 but a Madeleine, who went down to her 
 garden in the dawn, and found One waiting 
 at the gate, whom she supposed to be the 
 gardener ? Have you not sought Him often ; 
 sought Him in vain, all through the night; 
 sought Him in vain at the gate of that old 
 garden where the fiery sword is set ? He is 
 never there ; but at the gate of M/j garden 
 He is waiting always — waiting to take your 
 hand — ready to go down to see the fruits 
 of the valley, to see whether the vine has 
 
 129 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 flourished, and the pomegranate budded. 
 There you shall see with Him the little 
 tendrils of the vines that His hand is guid- 
 ing — there you shall see the pomegranate 
 springing where His hand cast the sanguine 
 seed; — more: you shall see the troops of 
 the angel keepers that, with their wings, 
 wave away the hungry birds from the path- 
 sides where He has sown, and call to each 
 other between the vineyard rows, " Take us 
 the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the 
 vines, for our vines have tender grapes." 
 Oh — you queens — you queens; among the 
 hills and happy greenwood of this land of 
 yours, shall the foxes have holes and the 
 birds of the air have nests; and in your 
 cities shall the stones cry out against you, 
 that they are the only pillows where the Son 
 of Man can lay His head ? 
 
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