last governess, and was retired on full-pay, which, she flattered herself, she earned in the capacity of travelling chaperone and censor; but, inasmuch as when she really held some tutelar authority, her pupil had never taken the slightest notice of her prohibitions, she could hardly be expected now to exercise any very salutary influence or control.

Dick Tresilyan was absurdly proud and fond of his sister, and performed all her behests with a blind obedience; but when he heard that he was to attend her during a whole winter's residence abroad, he did think that it was stretching her prerogative to the verge of tyranny. No wonder. A dragoon who has lost his horse, a goose on a turnpike-road, or any other popular type of helplessness, does not present so lamentable a picture as a Briton in a foreign land, without resources in himself, and with a rooted aversion to the use of any language except his own. In this case, the victim actually attempted some feeble remonstrance and argument on the subject. Cecil was almost as much astonished as the Prophet was under similar circumstances; but she considered, that habits of discussion in beasts of burden and the lower order of animals generally, were inconvenient and rather to be discouraged; so she cut it short, now, somewhat imperiously. Thereupon, Dick Tresilyan slid into a slough of despond, in which he had been wallowing ever since. A faint gleam of sunshine broke in when one of his intimates, hearing he was going to France, suggested that's where the brandy comes from ;' but it was instantly overclouded by the remark which followed. I suppose, though,

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you won't be able to drink much more of it than you do here;' on realizing which crushing fact, his melancholy became, if possible, more profound than ever. Indeed, since he crossed the Channel, he had spent most of his leisure moments in a sort of chronic blasphemy, which, it is to be hoped, afforded him some slight relief and consolation, as it was wholly unintelligible to his audience; for, to do Dick justice, in his sister's presence the door of his lips was always strictly guarded.

However, to Dorade they came -hours after their time, of course, but perfectly safe: no accident ever does happen in France to anything properly booked, except to luggage sent by Roulage, to which there attaches the romantic uncertainty of Vanderdecken's correspondence. Cecil rather liked travelling; it never tired her; so, by midnight she had seen Mrs. Danvers, weary and querulous, to bed-gone through a variety of gymnastics in the way of accolades, with Fanny Molyneux-taken some trouble in inquiring about shooting and other amusements likely to divert her brother from his sorrows-and yet did not feel very sleepy.

They ignore shutters in these climes; and her reflection was still flitting backward and forward across the white window-blinds as Royston Keene came home from the Cercle. He knew the room, or guessed who the shadow belonged to; and as he moved away, after pausing a minute or two, he waved his hand towards it, with a gesture so unwarrantably like a salute that, were silhouettes sensitive or prudish, it might have proved an offence not easily forgiven.

VOL. LIX. NO. CCCLII.

球球

D D

1859.]

Boy, and I sitting upon it; the mortal and the immortal; close together; your nose on my knee, my paper on your head; yet with something between us broader than the broad Atlantic. As for you, if you suffer here, there is no other life to make up for it. Yet it would be well if many of those who are your betters in the scale of creation, fulfilled their Creator's purposes as well as you. He gave you strength and swiftness, and you use these to many a valuable end: not many of the superior race will venture to say that they turn the powers God gave them to account as worthy of their nature. If it come to the question of deserving, you deserve better than me. Forgive me, my fellowcreature, if I have sometimes given you an angry flick, when you shied a little at a pig or a donkey. But I know you bear me no malice; you forget the flicks (they are not many), and you think rather of the bread and the carrots, of the times I have pulled your ears, and smoothed your neck, and patted your nose. And forasmuch as this is all your life, I shall do my very best to make it a comfortable one. Happiness, of course, is something which you can never know. Yet, my friend and companion through many weary miles, you shall have a deep-littered stall, and store of corn and hay so long as I can give them; and may this hand never write another line if it ever does you wilful injury.

Into this paragraph has my pencil of its own accord rambled, though it was taken up to write about something else. And such is the happiness of the writer of essays: he may wander about the world of thought at his will. The style of the essayist has attained what may be esteemed the perfection of freedom, when it permits him, in writing upon any subject whatsoever, to say whatever may occur to him upon any other subject. And truly it is a pleasing thing for one long trammelled by the requirements of a rigorous logic, and fettered by thoughts of symmetry, connexion, and neatness in the discussion of his topic, to enter upon a fresh field where all these things go for nothing, and to write for readers many of whom would never notice such

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characteristics if they were present, nor ever miss them if they were absent. There is all the difference between plodding wearily along the dusty highway, and rambling through green fields, and country stiles, leisurely, saunteringly, going nowhere in particular. You would not wish to be always desultory and rambling, but it is pleasant to be so now and then. And there is a delightful freedom about the feeling that you are producing an entirely unsymmetrical composition. It is fearful work, if you have a thousand thoughts and shades of thought about any subject, to get them all arranged in what a logician would call their proper places. It is like having a dissected puzzle of a thousand pieces given you in confusion, and being required to fit all the little pieces of ivory into their box again. By most men this work of orderly and symmetrical composition can be done well only by its being done comparatively slowly. In the case of ordinary folk the mind is a machine, which may indeed, by putting on extra pressure, be worked faster; but the result is the deterioration of the material which it turns off. It is an extraordinary gift of nature and training, when a man is like Follett, who, after getting the facts of an involved and intricate case into his mind only at one or two o'clock in the morning, could appear in Court at nine A.M., and there proceed to state the case and all his reasonings upon it, with the very perfection of logical method, every thought in its proper place, and all this at the rate of rapid extempore speaking. The difference between the rate of writing and that of speaking, with most men, makes the difference between producing good material and bad.* A great many minds can turn off a fair manufacture at the rate of writing, which, when overdriven to keep pace with speaking, will bring forth very poor stuff indeed. And besides this, most people cannot grasp a large subject in all its extent and its bearings, and get their thoughts upon it marshalled and sorted, unless they have at least two or three days to do so. At first all is confusion and indefiniteness, but gra

dually things settle into order. Hardly any mind, by any effort, can get them into order quickly. If at all, it is by a tremendous exertion; whereas the mind has a curious power, without any perceptible effort, of arranging in order thoughts upon any subject, if you give it time. Who that has ever written his ideas on some involved point but knows this? You begin by getting up information on the subject about which you are to write. You throw into the mind, as it were, a great heap of crude, unordered material. From this book and that book, from this review and that newspaper, you collect the observations of men who have regarded your subject from quite different points of view, and for quite different purposes; you throw into the mind cartload after cartload of facts and opinions, with a despairing wonder how you will ever be able to get that huge, contradictory, vague mass into anything like shape and order. And if, the minute you had all your matter accumulated, you were called on to state what you knew or thought upon the subject, you could not do so for your life in any satisfactory manner. You would not know where to begin, or how to go on; it would be all confusion and bewilderment. Well, do not make the slightest effort. What is impossible now will be quite easy by and bye. The peas, which cost a sovereign a pint at Christmas, are quite cheap in their proper season. Go about other things for three or four days: and at the end of that time you will be aware that the machinery of your mind, voluntarily and almost unconsciously playing, has sorted and arranged that mass of matter which you threw into it. Where all was confusion and uncertainty, all is now order and clearness; and you see exactly where to begin, and what to say next, and where and how to leave off.

The probability is, that all this has not been done without an effort, and a considerable amount of labour. But then, instead of the labour having been all at once, it has been very much subdivided. The subject was simmering in your mind all the while, though you were hardly

aware of it. Time after time, you took a little run at it, and saw your way a little farther through it. But this multitude of little separate and momentary efforts does not count for much; though in reality, if they were all put together, they would probably be found to have amounted to as much as the prolonged exertion which would at a single heat have attained the end. A large result, attained by innumerable little, detached efforts, seems as if it had been attained without any effort at all.

I love a parallel case; and I must take such cases from my ordinary experience. Yesterday, passing a little cottage by the wayside (hundreds of miles from London, my inquiring friend), I perceived at the door the carcase of a very large pig extended on a table. Approaching, as is my wont, the tenant of the cottage and owner of the pig, I began to converse with him on the size and fatness of the poor creature which had that morning quitted its sty for ever. It had been shot, he told me; for such, in these parts, is at present the most approved way of securing for swine an end as little painful as may be. I admired the humanity of the intention, and hoped that it might be crowned with success. Then my friend, the proprietor of the bacon, began to discourse on the philosophy of the rearing of pigs by labouring men. No doubt, he said, the four pounds, or thereabout, which he would get for his pig, would be a great help to a hard-working man with five or six little children. But after all, he remarked, it was likely enough that during the months of the pig's life, it had bit by bit consumed and cost him as much as he would get for it now. But then, he went on, it cost us that in little sums we hardly felt; while the four pounds it will sell for come all in a lump, and seem to give a very perceptible profit. Successive unfelt sixpences had mounted up to that considerable sum; even as five hundred little unfelt mental efforts had mounted up to the large result of sorting and methodizing the mass of crude fact and opinion of which we were thinking a little while ago.

Having worked through this pre

liminary matter (which will probably be quite enough for some readers, even as the Solan goose which does but whet the appetite of the Highlander, annihilates that of the Sassenach), I now come to the subject which was in my mind when I began to write on the horse's head. I am not in the stable now; for the business which detained me there is long since despatched and after all, it is more convenient to write at one's studytable. I wish to say something concerning certain evils which press upon humanity; and which are to the mind very much what a mustardblister is to the body. To the healthy man or woman they probably do not do much serious harm; but they maintain a very constant irritation. They worry and annoy. It is extremely interesting, in reading the published diaries of several great and good men, to find them recording on how many days they were put out of sorts, vexed and irritated, and rendered unfit for their work of writing, by some piece of petty malignity or petty trickery. How well one can sympathize with that good and great, and honest and amiable and sterling man, Dr. Chalmers, when we find him recording in his diary, when he was a country parish minister, how he was unable to make satisfactory progress with his sermon one whole forenoon, because some tricky and over-reaching farmer in the neighbourhood drove two calves into a field of his glebe, where the great man found them in the morning devouring his fine young clover! There was something very irritating and annoying in the paltry dishonesty. And the sensitive machinery of the good man's mind could not work sweetly when the gritty grains of the small vexation were fretting its polished surface. Let it be remarked in passing, that the peculiar petty dishonesty of driving cattle into a neighbouring proprietor's field, is far from being an uncommon one.

And let

me inform such as have suffered from it of a remedy against it which has never been known to fail. If the trespassing animals be cows, wait till the afternoon: then have them well milked, and send them

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home. If horses, let them instantly be put in carts, and sent off ten miles to fetch lime. A sudden strength will thenceforward invest your fences; and from having been so open that no efforts on the part of your neighbours could keep their cattle from straying into your fields, you will find them all at once become wholly impervious.

But, to return, I maintain that these continual blisters, of petty trickery and petty malignity, produce a very vexatious effect. You are quite put about at finding out one of your servants in some petty piece of dishonesty or deception. You are decidedly worried if you happen to be sitting in a cottage where your coachman does not know that you are; and if you discern from the window that functionary, who never exercises your horses in your presence save at a walk, galloping them furiously over the hard stones; shaking their legs and endangering their wind. It is annoying to find your haymakers working desperately hard and fast when you appear in the field, not aware that from amid a little clump of wood you had discerned them a minute before reposing quietly upon the fragrant heaps, and possibly that you had overheard them saying that they need not work very hard, as they were working for a gentleman. You would not have been displeased had you found them honestly resting on the sultry day but you are annoyed by the small attempt to deceive you. Such pieces of petty trickery put you more out of sorts than you would like to acknowledge: and you are likewise ashamed to discover that you mind so much as you do, when some goodnatured friend comes and informs you how Mr. Snarling has been misrepresenting something you have said or done; and Miss Limejuice has been telling lies to your prejudice. You are a clergyman, perhaps; and you said in your sermon last Sunday that, strong Protestant as you are, you believed that many good people may be found in the Church of Rome. Well, ever since then, Miss Limejuice has not ceased to rush about the parish, exclaiming in every house she entered, Is not this awful? Here,

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