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ECLECTIC MAGAZINE OF FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

New Series.       }      FEBRUARY, 1885.      {Old Series complete
Vol. XLI., No. 2. }                           {in 63 vols.

A FAITHLESS WORLD.

BY FRANCES POWER COBBE.

A little somnolence seems to have overtaken religious controversy
of late. We are either weary of it or have grown so tolerant of our
differences that we find it scarcely worth while to discuss them. By
dint of rubbing against each other in the pages of the Reviews, in the
clubs, and at dinner parties, the sharp angles of our opinions have
been smoothed down. Ideas remain in a fluid state in this temperate
season of sentiment, and do not, as in old days, crystallize into
sects. We have become almost as conciliatory respecting our views as
the Chinese whom Huc describes as carrying courtesy so far as to praise
the religion of their neighbors and depreciate their own. “You, honored
sir,” they were wont to say, “are of the noble and lofty religion of
Confucius. I am of the poor and insignificant religion of Lao-tze.”
Only now and then some fierce controversialist, hailing usually from
India or the colonies where London amenities seem not yet to have
penetrated, startles us by the desperate earnestness wherewith he
disproves what we had almost forgotten that anybody seriously believes.

As a result of the general “laissez _croire_” of our day, it has come
to pass that a question has been mooted which, to our fathers, would
have seemed preposterous: “Is it of any consequence what we believe,
or whether we believe anything? Suppose that by-and-by we all arrive
at the conclusion that Religion has been altogether a mistake, and
renounce with one accord the ideas of God and Heaven, having (as M.
Comte assures us) outgrown the theological stage of human progress;
what then? Will it make any serious difference to anybody?”

Hitherto, thinkers of Mr. Bradlaugh’s type have sung pæans of welcome
for the expected golden years of Atheism, when “faiths and empires” will

                            “Gleam
    Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”

Christians and Theists of all schools, on the other hand, have
naturally deprecated with horror and dread such a cataclysm of faith
as sure to prove a veritable Ragnarok of universal ruin. In either
case it has been taken for granted that the change from a world of
little faith, like that in which we live, to a world wholly destitute
of faith, would be immensely great and far-reaching; and that at the
downfall of religion not only would the thrones and temples of the
earth, but every homestead in every land, be shaken to its foundation.
It is certainly a step beyond any yet taken in the direction of
scepticism to question this conclusion, and maintain that such a
revolution would be of trivial import, since things would go on with
mankind almost as well without a God as with one.

The man who, with characteristic downrightness, has blurted out most
openly this last doubt of all—the doubt whether doubt be an evil—is,
as my readers will have recognized, Mr. Justice Stephen. In the
concluding pages of one of his sledge-hammerings on the heads of his
adversaries, in the _Nineteenth Century_ for last June, he rung the
changes upon the idea (with some reservations, to be presently noted)
as follows:—

        “If human life is in the course of being fully
      described by science, I do not see what materials
      there are for any religion, or, indeed, what would be
      the use of one, or why it is wanted. We can get on
      very well without one, for though the view of life
      which science is opening to us gives us nothing to
      worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to
      enjoy.... The world seems to me a very good world,
      if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people
      and curious things, and I think that most men find
      no great difficulty in turning their minds away
      from its transient character. Love, friendship,
      ambition, science, literature, art, politics,
      commerce, professions, trades, and a thousand other
      matters, will go equally well, as far as I can see,
      whether there is, or is not, a God or a future
      state.”—_Nineteenth Century_, No. 88, p. 917.

Had these noteworthy words been written by an obscure individual, small
weight would have attached to them. We might have observed on reading
them that the—not wise—person who three thousand years ago “said in
his heart, there is no God,” had in the interval plucked up courage
to say in the magazines that it does not signify whether there be one
or not. But the dictum comes to us from a gentleman who happens to
be the very antithesis of the object of Solomon’s detestation, a man
of distinguished ability and unsullied character, of great knowledge
of the world (as revealed to successful lawyers), of almost abnormal
clear-headedness; and lastly, strangest anomaly of all! who is the
representative of a family in which the tenderest and purest type of
Protestant piety has long been hereditary. It is the last utterance
of the devout “Clapham School,” of Venn, Stephen, Hannah More and
Wilberforce, which we hear saying: “I think we could do very well
without religion.”

As it is a widely received idea just now that the Evolution theory is
destined to coil about religion till it strangle it, and as it has
become the practice with the scientific party to talk of religion as
politicians twenty years ago talked of Turkey, as a Sick Man destined
to a speedy dissolution, it seems every way desirable that we should
pay the opinion of Sir James Stephen on this head that careful
attention to which, indeed, everything from his pen has a claim. Those
amongst us who have held that Religion is of priceless value should
bring their prepossessions in its favor to the bar of sober judgment,
and fairly face this novel view of it as neither precious Truth nor
yet disastrous Error, but as an unimportant matter of opinion which
Science may be left to settle without anxiety as to the issue. We ought
to bring our Treasure to assay, and satisfy ourselves once for all
whether it be really pure gold or only a fairy substitute for gold, to
be transformed some day into a handful of autumn leaves and scattered
to the winds.

To estimate the part played by Religion in the past history of the
human race would be a gigantic undertaking immeasurably above my
ambition.[1] A very much simpler inquiry is that which I propose
to pursue: namely, one into the chief consequences which might be
anticipated to follow the downfall of such Religion, as at present
prevails in civilized Europe and America. When these consequences have
been, however imperfectly, set in array we shall be in a position to
form some opinion whether we “can do very well without religion.” Let
me premise:—

1. That by the word Religion I mean definite faith in a Living and
Righteous God; and, as a corollary therefrom, in the survival of the
human soul after death. In other words, I mean by “religion” that
nucleus of simple Theism which is common to every form of natural
religion, of Christianity and Judaism; and, of course, in a measure
also to remoter creeds, which will not be included in the present
purview. Further, I do _not_ mean Positivism, or Agnosticism, or
Buddhism, exoteric or esoteric; or the recognition of the “Unknown
and Unknowable,” or of a “Power not ourselves which makes for
righteousness.” These may, or may not, be fitly termed “religions;” but
it is not the results of their triumph or extinction which we are here
concerned to estimate. I shall even permit myself generally to refer to
all such phases of non-belief as involve denial of the dogmas of Theism
above-stated as “Atheism;” not from discourtesy, but because it would
be impossible at every point to distinguish them, and because, for the
purposes of the present argument, they are tantamount to Atheism.

2. That I absolve myself from weighing against the advantages of
Religion the evils which have followed its manifold corruptions. Those
evils, in the case even of the Christian religion, I recognize to have
been so great, so hideous, that during their prevalence it might have
been plausibly—though even then, I think, not truly—contended that
they out-balanced its benefits. But the days of the worst distortions
of Christianity have long gone by. The Christianity of our day tends,
as it appears to me, more and more to resume the character of the
_Religion of Christ_, _i.e._, the religion which Christ believed and
lived; and to reject that other and very different religion which
men have taught in Christ’s name. As this deep and silent but vast
change comes over the spirit of the Christianity of modern Europe, it
becomes better and better qualified to meet fearlessly the challenge,
“Should we do well without religion in its Christian shape?” But it is
not my task here to analyze the results of any one type of religion,
Christian, Jewish, or simply Theistic; but only to register those of
_Religion itself_, as I have defined it above, namely, faith in God and
in immortality.

I confess, at starting on this inquiry, that the problem “Is religion
of use, or can we do as well without it?” seems to me almost as
grotesque as the old story of the woman who said that we owe vast
obligation to the Moon, which affords us light on dark nights,
whereas we are under no such debt to the Sun, who only shines by day,
_when there is always light_. Religion has been to us so diffused a
light that it is quite possible to forget how we came by the general
illumination, save when now and then it has blazed out with special
brightness. On the other hand, all the moon-like things which are
proposed to us as substitutes for Religion,—friendship, science,
art, commerce, and politics,—have a very limited area wherein they
shine at all, and leave the darkness around much as they found it.
It is the special and unique character of Religion to deal with the
whole of human nature _all_ our pleasures and pains and duties and
affections and hopes and fears, here and hereafter. It offers to the
Intellect an explanation of the universe (true or false we need not
now consider); and, pointing to Heaven, it responds to the most eager
of its questions. It offers to the Conscience a law claiming authority
to regulate every act and every word. And it offers to the Heart an
absolutely love-worthy Being as the object of its adoration. Whether
these immense offers of Religion are all genuine, or all accepted by us
individually, they are quite unmatched by anything which science, or
art, or politics, or commerce, or even friendship, has to bestow. The
relation of religion to us is not one-sided like theirs, but universal,
ubiquitous; not moon-like, appearing at intervals, but sun-like,
forming the source, seen or unseen, of all our light and heat, even
of the warmth of our household fires. Strong or weak as may be its
influence on us as individuals, it is the greatest thing with which
we have to do, from the cradle to the grave. And this holds good
whether we give ourselves up to it or reject it. It is the one great
acceptance, or “_il gran rifiuto_.” Nothing equally great can come in
our way again.

In an estimate of the consequences which would follow a general
rejection of religion, we are bound to take into view the two classes
of men—those who are devout and those who are not so—who would, of
course, be diversely affected by such a revolution of opinion. As
regards the first, every one will concede that the loss of so important
a factor in their lives would alter those lives radically. As regards
the second, after noting the orderly and estimable conduct of many
of them, the observer might, _per contra_, not unfairly surmise that
they would continue to act just as they do at present were religion
universally exploded. But ere such a conclusion could be legitimately
drawn from the meritorious lives of non-religious men in the present
order of society, we should be allowed (it is a familiar remark) to
see the behavior of a whole nation of Atheists. Our contemporaries are
no more fair samples of the outcome of Atheism than a little party
of English youths who had lived for a few years in Central Africa
would be samples of Negroes. It would take several thousand years to
make a full-blooded Atheist out of the scion of forty generations of
Christians. Our whole mental constitutions have been built up on food
of religious ideas. A man on a mountain top, might as well resolve
not to breathe the ozone in the air, as to live in the intellectual
atmosphere of England and inhale no Christianity.

As, then, it is impossible to forecast what would be the consequences
of universal Atheism hereafter by observing the conduct of individual
Atheists to-day, all that can be done is to study bit by bit the
changes which must take place should this planet ever become, as is
threatened, a _Faithless World_. In pursuing this line of inquiry it
will be well to remember that every ill result of loss of faith and
hope which we may now observe will be _cumulative_ as a larger and
yet larger number of persons, and at last the whole community, reject
religion together. Atheists have been hitherto like children playing
at the mouth of a cavern of unknown depth. They have run in and out,
and explored it a little way, but always within sight of the daylight
outside, where have stood their parents and friends calling on them to
return. Not till the way back to the sunshine has been lost will the
darkness of that cave be fully revealed.

I shall now register very briefly the more obvious and tangible changes
which would follow the downfall of religion in Europe and America, and
then devote my available space to a rather closer examination of those
which are less manifest; the drying up of those hidden rills which now
irrigate the whole subsoil of our civilization.

The first visible change in the Faithless World, of course, would be
the suppression of Public and Private Worship and of Preaching; the
secularization or destruction everywhere of Cathedrals, Churches, and
Chapels; and the extinction of the Clerical Profession. A considerable
_hiatus_ would undoubtedly be thus made in the present order of things.
Public Worship and Preaching, however much weariness of the flesh
has proverbially attended them, have, to say the least, done much to
calm, to purify, and to elevate the minds of millions; nor does it
seem that any multiplication of scientific Lectures or Penny Readings
would form a substitute for them. The effacement from each landscape
of the towers and spires of the churches would be a somewhat painful
symbol of the simultaneous disappearance from human life of heavenly
hope and aspiration. The extinction of the Ministry of Religion, though
it would be hailed even now by many as a great reformation, would be
found practically, I apprehend, to reduce by many perceptible degrees
the common moral level; and to suppress many highly-aimed activities
with which we could ill dispense. The severity of the strictures always
passed on the faults of clergymen testifies to the general expectation,
not wholly disappointed, that they should exhibit a loftier standard
of life than other men; and the hortative and philanthropic work
accomplished by the forty or fifty thousand ministers of the various
sects and churches in England alone, must form, after all deductions,
a sum of beneficence which it would sorely tax any conceivable secular
organization to replace in the interests of public morality.

Probably the Seventh Day Rest would survive every other religious
institution in virtue of its popularity among the working classes, soon
to be everywhere masters of legislation. The failure of the Tenth Day
holiday in the first French Revolution would also forestall any further
experiments in varying the hebdomadal interval so marvellously adapted
to our mental and physical constitution. As, however, all religious
meaning of the day would be lost, and all church-going stopped,
nothing would hinder the employment of its hours from morning to night
as Easter Monday and Whit Monday are now employed by the millions in
our great cities. The nation would, therefore, enjoy the somewhat
doubtful privilege of keeping fifty-six Bank Holidays instead of four
in the year. Judicial and official oaths of all sorts, and Marriage
and Burial rites, would, of course, be entirely abolished. A gentleman
pronouncing the _Oraison Funèbre_ outside the crematorium would replace
the old white-robed parson telling the mourners;—

            “Beneath the churchyard tree,
    In solemn tones, and yet not sad,
    Of what man is, what man shall be.”

Another change more important than any of these, in Protestant
countries, would be the reduction of the Bible to the rank of an
historical and literary curiosity. Nothing (as we all recognize) but
the supreme religious importance attached to the Hebrew Scriptures
could have forced any book into the unique position which the Bible
has now held for three centuries in English and Scottish education.
Even that held by the Koran throughout Islam is far less remarkable,
inasmuch as the latter (immeasurably inferior though it be) is the
supreme work of the national literature, whereas we have adopted the
literature of an alien race. All the golden fruit which the English
intellect has borne from Shakespeare downwards may be said to have
grown on this priceless Semitic graft upon the Aryan stem.

But as nothing but its religious interest, over and above its
historical and poetical value, could have given the Bible its present
place amongst us, so the rejection of religion must quickly lower its
popularity by a hundred degrees. Notwithstanding anything which the
Matthew Arnolds of the future may plead on behalf of its glorious
poetry and mines of wisdom, the youth of the future “Faithless World”
will spare very little time from their scientific studies to read a
book brimming over with religious sentiments which to them will be
nauseous. Could everything else remain unchanged after the extinction
of religion in England, it seems to me that the unravelling of this
Syrian thread from the very tissue of our minds will altogether alter
their texture.

Whether the above obvious and tangible results of a general
relinquishment of religion would all be _disadvantageous_ may,
possibly, be an open question. That they would be _trifling_, and that
things would go on much as they have done after they had taken place,
seems to me, I confess, altogether incredible.

I now turn to those less obvious consequences of the expected downfall
of religion which would take place silently.

The first of these would be the _belittling_ of life. Religion has been
to us hitherto (to rank it at its lowest), like a great mountain in
a beautiful land. When the clouds descend and hide the mountain, the
grandeur of the scene is gone. A stranger entering that land at such
a time will commend the sweetness of the vales and woods; but those
who know it best will say, “Ichabod!—The glory has departed.” To do
justice to the eminent man whose opinion concerning the practical
unimportance of religion I am endeavoring to combat, he has seen
clearly and frankly avowed this ennobling influence of religion, and,
as a corollary, would, I presume, admit the _minifying_ consequences of
its general abandonment.[2] If the window which Religion opens out
on the infinite expanse of God and Heaven, immeasurably enlarges and
lightens our abode of clay, the walling of it up cannot fail to narrow
and darken it beyond all telling. Human nature, ever pulled two ways
by downward and by aspiring tendencies, cannot afford to lose all the
aid which religious ideas offer to its upward flight. Only when they
disappear will men perceive how the two thoughts—of this world as
_God’s world_, and of ourselves as Immortal beings,—have, between
them, lighted up in rainbow hues the dull plains of earth. When they
fade away, all things, Nature, Art, Duty, Love, and Death, will seem to
grow grey and cold. Everything which casts a glamour over life will be
gone.

Even from the point of view of Art (of which in these days perhaps too
much is made), life will lose _poetry_ if it lose religion. Nothing
ever stirs our sympathies like it, or like a glimpse into the inner
self of our brother man, as affected by repentance, hope, and prayer.
The great genius, of George Eliot revealed this to her; and, Agnostic
as she was, she rarely failed to strike this resonant string of human
nature, as in “Adam Bede,” “Silas Marner,” and “Janet’s Repentance.”
French novelists who have no knowledge of it, and who describe the
death of a man as they might do that of an ox, while they galvanize our
imaginations, rarely touch the outer hem of our sympathies. Religion
in its old anthropomorphic forms was the great inspirer of sculpture,
painting, poetry, science, and almost the creator of architecture.
Phidias, Dante, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Milton, Handel, and the
builders of the Egyptian temples and mediæval cathedrals, were all
filled with the religious spirit, nor can we imagine what they would
have been without it. In the purer modern types of religion, while
music and architecture would still remain in its direct service, we
should expect painting and sculpture to be less immediately concerned
with it than in old days, because unable to touch such purely spiritual
ideas. But the elevation, aspiration, and reverence which have their
root in religion must continue to inspire those arts likewise, or
they will fall into triviality on one side (as there seems danger in
England), or into obscene materialism on the other, as is already
annually exemplified on the walls of the Paris _Salon_.

Again, it will not merely belittle life, it will _carnalize_ it to
take Religion out of it. The lump without the leaven will be grosser
and heavier than we have dreamed. Civilization, as we all know, bore
under Imperial Rome, and may assume again any day, the hateful type in
which luxury and cruelty, art and sensuality, go hand in hand. That it
ever changed its character and has come to mean with us refinement,
self-restraint, chivalry, and freedom from the coarser vices, is surely
due to the fact that it has grown up _pari passu_ with Christianity.
In truth it needs no argument to prove that, as the bestial tendencies
in us have scarcely been kept down while we believed ourselves to be
immortal souls, they will have it still more their own way when we feel
assured we are only mortal bodies.

And the life thus belittled and carnalized will be a more cowardly
life than men have been wont to lead while they had a Providence over
them and a heaven waiting for them. Already, I fear, we may see some
signs of this new poltroonery of reflective prudence, which holds that
death is the greatest of all evils, and disease the next greatest;
and teaches men to prefer a “whole skin” to honor and patriotism, and
health to duty. Writing of this Hygeiolatry elsewhere, I have remarked
that it has almost come to be accepted as a canon of morals that any
practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily health,
or tends to the cure of disease, becomes _ipso facto_ lawful; and
that there are signs apparent that this principle is bearing fruit,
and that men and women are beginning to be systematically selfish and
self-indulgent where their health is concerned, in modes not hitherto
witnessed. In public life it is notorious that whenever a Bill comes
before Parliament concerning itself with sanitary matters there is
exhibited by many of the speakers, and by the journalists who discuss
it, a readiness to trample on personal and parental rights in a way
forming a new feature in English legislation, and well deserving of
the rebuke it has received from Mr. Herbert Spencer. As to military
courage, I fear it will also wane amongst us, as it seemed to have
waned amongst the French atheistic soldiery at Metz and Sedan. Great as
are the evils of war, those of a peace only maintained by the nations
because it had become no longer possible to raise troops who would
stand fire, would be immeasurably worse.

From the general results on the community, I now pass to consider those
on the life of the individual which may be expected to follow the
collapse of Religion.

Mr. Mallock in his “New Republic,” made the original and droll remark
that even Vice would lose much of its savor were there no longer any
morality against which it might sin. As Morality will probably not
expire—though its vigor must be considerably reduced—by the demise
of its Siamese twin, Religion, it would seem that Vice need not fear,
even in such a contingency, the entire loss of the pleasures of
disobedience. Nevertheless (to speak seriously), it is pretty certain
that the temperature of all moral sentiments will fall so considerably
when the sun of religion ceases to warm them that not a few will perish
of cold. The “Faithless World” will pass through a moral Glacial
Period, wherein much of our present fauna and flora will disappear.
What, for example, can become, in that frigid epoch of godlessness,
of _Aspiration_, the sacred passion, the _ambition sainte_ to become
perfect and holy, which has stirred at one time or other in the breast
of every son of God; the longing to attain the crowning heights of
truth, goodness, and purity? This is surely not a sentiment which can
live without faith in a Divine Perfection, existing somewhere in the
universe, and an Immortal Life wherein the infinite progress may be
carried on. Even the man whose opinions on the general unimportance of
religion I am venturing to question in these pages, admits frankly
enough that it is not the heroic or saintly character which will be
cultivated after the extinction of faith. Among the changes which he
anticipates, one will be that “the respectable man of the world, the
_lukewarm, nominal Christian_, who believed as much of his creed as
happened to suit him, and _led an easy life_, will turn out to have
been right after all,” Precisely so. The _easy life_ will be the ideal
life in the “Faithless World;” and the life of Aspiration, the life
which is a prayer, will be lived no more. And the “lukewarm” men of the
world, in their “easy lives,” will be all the easier and more lukewarm
for leading them thenceforth unrebuked by any higher example.

Again, Repentance as well as aspiration will disappear under the
snows of atheism. I have written before on this subject in this
REVIEW,[3] and will now briefly say that Mr. Darwin’s almost
ludicrously false definition of Repentance is an illustration of
the inability of the modern scientific mind to comprehend spiritual
phenomena; much less to be the subject of them. In his _Descent of
Man_, this great thinker and most amiable man describes Repentance
as a natural return, after the satisfaction of selfish passions, to
“the instinct of sympathy and good will to his fellows which is still
present and ever in some degree active” in a man’s mind.... “And then,
a sense of dissatisfaction will inevitably be felt” (_Descent of Man_,
p. 90). Thus even on the showing of the great philosopher of evolution
himself, Repentance (or rather the “dissatisfaction” he confounds with
that awful convulsion of the soul) is only to be looked for under
the very exceptional circumstances of men in whom the “instinct of
sympathy and good will to their fellows” is ever present, and moreover
_reasserts itself after they have injured them_—in flat opposition to
ordinary human experience as noted by Tacitus, _Humani generis proprium
est odisse quem læseris_.

The results of the real spiritual phenomenon of Repentance (not Mr.
Darwin’s child’s-play) are so profound and far-reaching that it cannot
but happen that striking them out of human experience will leave
life more shallow. No soul will survive with the deeper and riper
character which comes out of that ordeal. As Hawthorne illustrated it
in his exquisite parable of _Transformation_, men, till they become
conscious of sin, are morally little more than animals. Out of hearts
ploughed by contrition spring flowers fairer than ever grow on the
hard ground of unbroken self-content. There bloom in them Sympathy
and Charity for other erring mortals; and Patience under suffering
which is acknowledged to be merited; and lastly, sweetest blossom of
all! tender Gratitude for earthly and heavenly blessings felt to be
free gifts of Divine love. Not a little, perhaps, of the prevalent
disease of pessimism is owing to the fact that these flowers of
charity, patience, and thankfulness are becoming more and more rare as
cultivated men cease to feel what old theologians used to call “the
exceeding sinfulness of sin;” or to pass through any vivid experiences
of penitence and restoration. As a necessary consequence they never
see the true proportions of good and evil, joy and grief, sin and
retribution. They weigh jealously human Pain; they never place human
Guilt in the opposite scale. There is little chance that any man will
ever feel how sinful is sin, who has not seen it in the white light of
the holiness of God.

The abrogation of Public Worship was mentioned above as one of the
visible consequences of the general rejection of religion. To it must
here be added a still direr and deeper loss, that of the use of Private
Prayer—whether for spiritual or other good, either on behalf of
ourselves or of others; all Confession, all Thanksgiving, in one word
all effort at communion of the finite spirit with the Infinite. This is
not the place in which this subject can be treated as it would require
to be were the full consequences of such a cessation of the highest
function of our nature to be defined. It may be enough now to say that
the Positivists in their fantastic device of addresses to the _grand
être_ of Humanity as a substitute for real prayer to the Living God,
have themselves testified to the smaller—the subjective—part of the
value of the practice. Alas for our poor human race if ever the day
should arrive when to Him who now “heareth prayer,” flesh shall no
longer come!

With Aspiration, Repentance, and Prayer renounced and forgotten, and
the inner life made as “easy” as the outward, we may next inquire
whether in the “Faithless World” the relations between man and man
will either remain what they have been, improve or deteriorate? I have
heard a secularist lecturer argue that the love of God has been a
great hindrance to the love of man; and I believe it is the universal
opinion of Agnostics and Comtists that the “enthusiasm of Humanity”
will flourish and form the crowning glory of the future after religion
is dead. It is obvious, indeed, that the social virtues are rapidly
eclipsing in public opinion those which are personal and religious; and
if Philanthropy is not to be enthroned in the “Faithless World,” there
is no chance for Veracity, Piety, or Purity.

But, not to go over ground which I have traversed already in this
REVIEW, it will be enough now to remark that Mr. Justice
Stephen, with his usual perspicacity, has found out that there is here
a “rift within the lute,” and frankly tells us that we must not expect
to see Christian Charity after the departure of Christianity. He thinks
that temperance, fortitude, benevolence, and justice will always be
honored and rewarded, but—

        “If a purely human morality takes the place of
      Christian morals, self-command and self-denial, force
      of character shown in postponing the present to the
      future (_qy._, selfish prudence?) will take the place
      of self-sacrifice as an object of admiration. Love,
      friendship, good-nature, kindness, carried to the
      height of sincere and devoted affection will always
      be the chief pleasures of life, whether Christianity
      is true or false; but Christian charity is not the
      same as any of these or of all of them put together,
      and I think, if Christian theology were exploded,
      Christian charity would not survive it.”

Even if the same sentiment of charity were kept alive in a “Faithless
World,” I do not think its ministrations would be continued on the same
lines as hitherto. The more kind-hearted an atheist may be (and many
have the kindest of hearts) the less, I fancy, he could endure to go
about as a comforter among the wretched and dying, bringing with him
only such cold consolation as may be afforded by the doctrine of the
“Survival of the Fittest.” Every one who has tried to lighten the
sorrows of this sad world, or to reclaim the criminal and the vicious,
knows how immense is the advantage of being able to speak of God’s love
and pity, and of a life where the bereaved shall be reunited to their
beloved ones. It would break, I should think, a compassionate atheist’s
heart to go from one to another death-bed in cottage or workhouse or
hospital, meet the yearning looks of the dying, and watch the anguish
of wife or husband or mother, and be unable honestly to say: “This is
not the end. There is Heaven in store.” But Mr. Justice Stephen speaks,
I apprehend, of another reason than this why Christian charity must
not be expected to survive Christianity. The truth is (though he does
not say it) that the charity of Science is not merely _different_ from
the charity of Religion; it is an _opposite_ thing altogether. Its
softest word is _Væ Victis_. Christianity (and like it I should hope
every possible form of future religion) says, “The strong ought to bear
the burdens of the weak. Blessed are the merciful, the unselfish, the
tender-hearted, the humble-minded.” Science says, “The supreme law of
Nature is the Survival of the Fittest; and that law, applied to human
morals, means the remorseless crushing down of the unfit. The strong
and the gifted shall inherit the earth, and the weak and simple go
to the wall. Blessed are the merciless, for they shall obtain useful
knowledge. Blessed are the self-asserting, for theirs is the kingdom of
this world, and there is no world after it.”

These Morals of Evolution are beginning gradually to make their way,
and to be stated (of course in veiled and modest language) frequently
by those priests of science, the physiologists. Should they ever obtain
general acceptance, and Darwinian morality take the place of the Sermon
on the Mount, the old _droit du plus fort_ of barbarous ages will be
revived with more deliberate oppression, and the last state of our
civilization will be worse than the first.

Behind all these changes of public and general concern, lies the
deepest change of all for each man’s own heart. We are told that in
a “Faithless World” we may interest ourselves in friendship, and
politics, and commerce, and literature, science, and art, and that “a
man who cannot occupy every waking moment of a long life with some or
other of these things must be either very unfortunate in regard to his
health, or circumstances, or else must be a poor creature.”

But it is not necessary to be either unfortunate oneself or a very
“poor creature” to feel that the wrongs and agonies of this world of
pain are absolutely intolerable unless we can be assured that they will
be righted hereafter; that “there is a God who judgeth the earth,” and
that all the oppressed and miserable of our race, aye, and even the
tortured brutes, are beheld by Him. It is, I think, on the contrary,
to be a “poor creature” to be able to satisfy the hunger of the soul
after justice, the yearning of the heart for mercy, with such pursuits
as money-getting, and scientific research, and the writing of clever
books, and painting of pretty pictures. Not that which is “poorest” in
us, but that which is richest and noblest, refuses to “occupy every
moment of a long life” with our own ambitions and amusements, or to
shut out deliberately from our minds the “Riddle of the painful Earth.”
A curse would be on us in our “lordly pleasure-house” were we to do it.

Even if it be possible to enjoy our own good fortune regardless of
the woes of others, is it not rather a pitiful wreck and remnant of
merely selfish happiness which it is proposed to leave to us? “The
world,” we are told, “is full of pleasant people and curious things,”
and “most men find no difficulty in _turning their minds away_ from
its transient character.” Even our enjoyment of “pleasant people and
curious things” must be held, then, on the condition of reducing
ourselves—philosophers that we are, or shall be—to the humble level
of the hares and rabbits!—

      “Regardless of their doom the little victims play.”

Surely the happiness of any creature, deserving to be called Rational,
depends on the circumstance whether he can look on Good as “the final
goal of ill,” or believe Ill to be the final goal of any good he has
obtained or hopes for;—whether he walk on a firm, even if it be a
thorny road, or tread on thin, albeit glittering ice, destined ere long
to break beneath his feet? The faith that there is an ORDER
tending everywhere to good, and that JUSTICE sooner or later
will be done to all,—this, almost universal, faith to which the
whole literature of the world bears testimony, seems to me no less
indispensable for our selfish happiness than it is for any unselfish
satisfaction in the aspect of human life at large. If it be finally
baulked, and we are compelled to relinquish it for ever at the bidding
of science, existence alike on our own account and that of others will
become unendurable.

In all I have said hitherto, I have confined myself to discussing the
probable results of the downfall of religion on men in general, and
have not attempted to define what they would be to those who have been
fervently religious; and who we must suppose (on the hypothesis of
such a revolution) to be forcibly driven by scientific arguments out
of their faith in God and the life to come. To such persons (and there
are, alas! many already who think they have been so driven, and to whom
the sad result is therefore the same) the loss must needs be like that
of the darkening of the sun. Of all human sorrows the bitterest is to
discover that we have misplaced our love; labored and suffered in vain;
thrown away our heart’s devotion. All this, and much more, must it be
to _lose God_. Among those who have endured it there are, of course, as
we all know, many who have reconciled themselves to the loss, and some
tell us they are the happier. Yet, I think to the very last hour of
life there must remain in every heart which has once _loved_ God (not
merely believed in or feared Him) an infinite regret if it can love Him
no more; and the universe, were it crowded with a million friends, must
seem empty when that Friend is gone.

As to human Love and Friendship, to which we are often bidden to turn
as the best substitutes for religion, I feel persuaded that, above all
other things they must deteriorate in a “Faithless World.” To apples
of Sodom must all their sweetness turn, from the hour in which men
recognize their transitory nature. The warmer and more tender and
reverential the affection, the more intolerable must become the idea of
eternal separation; and the more beautiful and admirable the character
of our friend, the more maddening the belief that in a few years, or
days, he will vanish into nothingness. Sooner than endure the agony
of these thoughts, I feel sure that men will check themselves from
entering into the purer and holier relations of the heart. Affection,
predestined to be cast adrift, will throw out no more anchors, but
will float on every wave of passion or caprice. The day in which it
becomes impossible for men to vow that they will love _for ever_ will
almost be the last in which they will love nobly and purely at all.

But if these things hold good as regard the prosperous and healthy, and
those still in the noon of life, what is to be said of the prospects
in the “Faithless World,” of the diseased, the poverty-stricken, the
bereaved, the aged? There is no need to strain our eyes to look into
the dark corners of the earth. We all know (though while we ourselves
stand in the sunshine we do not often _feel_) what hundreds of
thousands of our fellow-mortals are enduring at all times, in the way
of bodily and mental anguish. When these overtake us, or when Old Age
creeps on, and

    “First our pleasures die, and then
    Our hopes, and then our fears,”

is it possible to suppose it will make “little difference” what we
believe as to the existence of some loving Power in whose arms our
feebleness may find support; or of another life wherein our winter may
be turned once more to spring? If we live long enough, the day must
come to each of us when we shall find our chief interest in our daily
newspaper most often in the obituary columns, till, one after another
nearly all the friends of our youth and prime have “gone over to the
majority,” and we begin to live in a world peopled with spectres. Our
talk with those who travel still beside us is continually referring to
the dead, and our very jests end in a sigh for the sweet old laughter
which we shall never hear again. If in these solemn years we yet have
faith in God and Immortality, and as we recall one dear one after
another,—father, mother, brother, friend,—we can say to ourselves,
“They are all gone into the world of light; they are all safe and
rejoicing in the smile of God;” then our grief is only mourning; it
is not despair. Our sad hearts are cheered and softened, not turned
to stone by the memories of the dead. Let us, however, on the other
hand, be driven by our new guide, Science, to abandon this faith and
the hope of eternal reunion, then, indeed, must our old age be utterly,
utterly desolate. O! the mockery of saying that it would make “no great
difference!”

We have been told that in the event of the fall of religion, “life
would remain in most particulars and to most people much what it
is at present.” It appears to me, on the contrary, that there is
actually _nothing_ in life which would be left unchanged after such a
catastrophe.

But I have only conjured up the nightmare of a “Faithless World.”
GOD LIVES; and in His light we shall see light.—_Contemporary
Review._

FOOD AND FEEDING.

When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest,
it makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at
least, whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We
haven’t the slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the
two, in each particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten.
Here, we say, is the grizzly that ate the man; or, here is the man
that smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion
upon such familiar and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for
granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, between
the active and the passive voice of the verb _edo_, there exists
necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow an
oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing
from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realise at first
the underlying fundamental identity of eating with mere coalescence.
And yet, at the very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent
animal first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice,
one may fairly say that no practical difference as yet existed between
the creature that ate and the creature that was eaten. After the man
and the bear had finished their little meal, if one may be frankly
metaphorical, it was impossible to decide whether the remaining being
was the man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the other.
The dinner having been purely mutual, the resulting animal represented
both the litigants equally; just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief
who ate up his brother chief was held naturally to inherit the goods
and chattels of the vanquished and absorbed rival, whom he had thus
literally and physically incorporated.

A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water
under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another
jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction
across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two,
there is now one: and the united body proceeds to float away quite
unconcernedly, without waiting to trouble itself for a second with
the profound metaphysical question, which half of it is the original
personality, and which half the devoured and digested. In these minute
and very simple animals there is absolutely no division of labor
between part and part; every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head
and foot and mouth and stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs,
but it keeps putting forth vague arms and legs every now and then from
one side or the other; and with these temporary and ever-dissolving
members it crawls along merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant
water. If two of the legs or arms happen to knock up casually against
one another, they coalesce at once, just like two drops of water on
a window-pane, or two strings of treacle slowly spreading along the
surface of a plate. When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing—a
bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic egg—it
proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around it, making, as
it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose of swallowing it, and a
temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly digesting and assimilating
it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a foot may at the next moment
become a mouth, and at the moment after that again a rudimentary
stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no outside and no inside,
no distinction of parts or members, no individuality, no identity.
Roll it up into one with another of its kind, and it couldn’t tell you
itself a minute afterwards which of the two it had really been a minute
before. The question of personal identity is here considerably mixed.

But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type,
the antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume
a more definite character. The big jelly-bag approaches a good
many smaller jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate
foodstuffs, and, surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms,
envelops them in its own substance, which closes behind them and
gradually digests them. Everybody knows, by name at least, that
revolutionary and evolutionary hero, the amœba—the terror of
theologians, the pet of professors, and the insufferable bore of
the general reader. Well, this parlous and subversive little animal
consists of a comparatively large mass of soft jelly, pushing forth
slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its own substance, and
gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over water-plants and
other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally turn itself
inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings of a
mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water
through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its
body is thinnest. Thus the amœba may be said really to eat and drink,
though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.

The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however,
is this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do
discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn’t. The
amœba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,
no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it
meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any
way to swallow them; but the moment it comes across a bit of material
fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around
the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amœba’s body
apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of
those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.
And it is because of the light which the amœba thus incidentally
casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that
I have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native
pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.

With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale
of being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the
mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of
advanced perfection. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the
one hand, and French cooks and _pâté de foie gras_ on the other. But
while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which
things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever
recognize that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of
gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in
informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it
may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things
that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise
injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case
(alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial
surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in which we
flavor up unwholesome food, so as to deceive and cajole the natural
palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant gospel that what we like is
really good for us, and, when we have made some small allowances for
artificial conditions, it is in the main a true one also.

The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused equally
over the whole frame, is in ourselves and other higher creatures
concentrated in a special part of the body, namely the mouth, where the
food about to be swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand
for the work of digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear that
some sort of supervision must be exercised by the body over the kind
of food that is going to be put into it. Common experience teaches
us that prussic acid and pure opium are undesirable food stuffs in
large quantities; that raw spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be
sparingly partaken of by the judicious feeder; and that even green
fruit, the bitter end of cucumber, and the berries of deadly nightshade
are unsatisfactory articles of diet when continuously persisted in.
If, at the very outset of our digestive apparatus, we hadn’t a sort of
automatic premonitory adviser upon the kinds of food we ought or ought
not to indulge in, we should naturally commit considerable imprudences
in the way of eating and drinking—even more than we do at present.
Natural selection has therefore provided us with a fairly efficient
guide in this respect in the sense of taste, which is placed at the
very threshold, as it were, of our digestive mechanism. It is the duty
of taste to warn us against uneatable things, and to recommend to our
favorable attention eatable and wholesome ones; and, on the whole,
in spite of small occasional remissness, it performs its duty with
creditable success.

Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the whole surface of
the tongue alike. There are three distinct regions or tracts, each
of which has to perform its own special office and function. The tip
of the tongue is concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the
middle portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters; while the
back or lower portion confines itself almost entirely to the flavors of
roast meats, butter, oils, and other rich or fatty substances. There
are very good reasons for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue,
the object being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three
separate examinations (like “smalls,” “mods,” and “greats” at Oxford),
which must be successively passed before it is admitted into full
participation in the human economy. The first examination, as we shall
shortly see, gets rid at once of substances which would be actively
and immediately destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and body;
the second discriminates between poisonous and chemically harmless
foodstuffs; and the third merely decides the minor question whether
the particular food is likely to prove then and there wholesome or
indigestible to the particular person. The sense of taste proceeds,
in fact, upon the principle of gradual selection and elimination;
it refuses first what is positively destructive, next what is more
remotely deleterious, and finally what is only undesirable or
over-luscious.

When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste, about an unknown
object—say a lump of some white stuff, which may be crystal, or glass,
or alum, or borax, or quartz, or rocksalt—we put the tip of the tongue
against it gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more or
less rapidly, with an accompaniment in language strictly dependent
upon our personal habits and manners. The test we thus occasionally
apply, even in the civilised adult state, to unknown bodies is one that
is being applied every day and all day long by children and savages.
Unsophisticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees up to
its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as to its gustatory
properties. In civilised life, we find everything ready labelled and
assorted for us; we comparatively seldom require to roll the contents
of a suspicious bottle (in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the
tongue in order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,
Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage state, from which,
geologically and biologically speaking, we have only just emerged,
bottles and labels do not exist. Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet
simplicity, has only two modes open before him for deciding whether the
things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first thing he does
is to sniff at them, and smell being, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has well
put it, an anticipatory taste, generally gives him some idea of what
the thing is likely to prove. The second thing he does is to pop
it into his mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further
characteristics.

Strictly speaking with the tip of the tongue one can’t really taste at
all. If you put a small drop of honey or of oil of bitter almonds on
that part of the mouth, you will find (no doubt to your great surprise)
that it produces no effect of any sort; you only taste it when it
begins slowly to diffuse itself, and reaches the true tasting region
in the middle distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard
on the same part, you will find that it bites you immediately—the
experiment should be tried sparingly—while, if you put it lower down
in the mouth you will swallow it almost without noticing the pungency
of the stimulant. The reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied
only with nerves which are really nerves of touch, not nerves of taste
proper; they belong to a totally different main branch, and they go
to a different centre in the brain, together with the very similar
threads which supply the nerves of smell for mustard and pepper. That
is why the smell and taste of these pungent substances are so much
alike, as everybody must have noticed; a good sniff at a mustard-pot
producing almost the same irritating effects as an incautious mouthful.
As a rule, we don’t accurately distinguish, it is true, between these
different regions of taste in the mouth in ordinary life; but that is
because we usually roll our food about instinctively, without paying
much attention to the particular part affected by it. Indeed, when one
is trying deliberate experiments in the subject, in order to test the
varying sensitiveness of the different parts to different substances,
it is necessary to keep the tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the
thing you are experimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all
parts of the mouth together. In actual practice this result is obtained
in a rather ludicrous manner—by blowing upon the tongue, between each
experiment, with a pair of bellows. To such undignified expedients does
the pursuit of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. These
domestic rivals of Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the
enthusiastic investigator alternately drying his tongue in this
ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith’s fire, and then
squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea
from a glass syringe upon the dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at
the conclusion that master has gone stark mad, and that, in their
private opinion, it’s the microscope and the skeleton as has done it.

Above all things, we don’t want to be flayed alive. So the kinds of
tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the pungent, like
pepper, cayenne, and mustard; the astringent, like borax and alum;
the alkaline, like soda and potash; the acid, like vinegar and green
fruit; and the saline, like salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies
likely to give rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations
of touch in the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive
in their character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody
wishes to drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this
part of the tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against
caustic substances and corrosive acids—against vitriol and kerosene,
spirits of wine and ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots,
such as those of the common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this
sort are immediately destructive to the very tissues of the tongue
and palate; if taken incautiously in too large doses, they burn the
skin off the roof of the mouth; and when swallowed they play havoc,
of course, with our internal arrangements. It is highly advisable,
therefore, to have an immediate warning of these extremely dangerous
substances, at the very outset of our feeding apparatus.

This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or burning. The
sensibility of the tip of the tongue is only a very slight modification
of the sensibility possessed by the skin generally, and especially by
the inner folds over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that
common caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it burns the tongue,
only in a somewhat more marked manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks
the fingers each after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle
almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the tongue hardly
differs, except in being more instantaneous and more discriminative.
Cantharides work in just the same way. If you cut a red pepper in
two and rub it on your neck it will sting you just as it does when
put into soup (this experiment, however, is best tried upon one’s
younger brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble and
annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed into the skin, are
followed by a slight tingling; while the effect of brandy, applied,
say, to the arms, is gently stimulating and pleasurable, somewhat
in the same way as when normally swallowed in conjunction with the
habitual seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct
tastes when applied to the tip of the tongue, give rise to fainter
sensations when applied to the skin generally. And one hardly needs
to be reminded that pepper or vinegar placed (accidentally as a rule)
on the inner surface of the eyelids produces a very distinct and
unpleasant smart.

The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by pungent or
acid bodies is common to every part of the skin; but it is least felt
where the tough outer skin is thickest, and most felt where that skin
is thinnest, and the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the
surface. A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on one’s
heel or the palm of one’s hand; while it is decidedly painful on one’s
neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard inside the eyelid gives one
positive torture for hours together. Now the tip of the tongue is just
a part of one’s body specially set aside for this very object, provided
with an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense number of
nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by all such pungent,
alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would probably
conclude that it was deliberately designed by Providence to warn us
against a wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.

At first sight it might seem as though there were hardly enough of such
pungent and fiery things in existence to make it worth while for us to
be provided with a special mechanism for guarding against them. That is
true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilized life; though,
even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children should have an
internal monitor (other than conscience) to dissuade them immediately
from indiscriminate indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents
of stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India chilies. But
in an earlier period of progress, and especially in tropical countries
(where the Darwinians have now decided the human race made its first
_début_ upon this or any other stage), things were very different
indeed. Pungent and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every
side. We have all of us in our youth been taken in by some too cruelly
waggish companion, who insisted upon making us eat the bright, glossy
leaves of the common English arum, which without look pretty and juicy
enough, but within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency
and profanity. Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold
climates, to tempt the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle
or childish humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows
carefully avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow
is not usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison
with which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is
baneberry, whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature.
There are horseradish, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper,
and still smarter water-pepper, and wormwood, and nightshade, and
spurge, and hemlock, and half a dozen equally unpleasant weeds. All of
these have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as
nettles have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order
to prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And
the animals in turn have acquired a very delicate sense of pungency
on purpose to warn them beforehand of the existence of such dangerous
and undesirable qualities in the plants which they might otherwise be
tempted incautiously to swallow.

In tropical woods, where our “hairy quadrumanous ancestor” (Darwinian
for the primæval monkey, from whom we are presumably descended) used
playfully to disport himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious
destiny as the remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late
Mr. Peace—in tropical woods, such acid or pungent fruits and plants
are particularly common, and correspondingly annoying. The fact is, our
primitive forefather and all the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed
fruit-eaters. But to guard against their depredations a vast number
of tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery rinds
and shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor. It may not be
nice to get your tongue burnt with a root or fruit, but it is at least
a great deal better than getting poisoned; and, roughly speaking,
pungency in external nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels
which some chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It means to
say, “This fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities, will kill
you.” That is the true explanation of capsicums, pimento, colocynth,
croton oil, the upas tree, and the vast majority of bitter, acrid,
or fiery fruits and leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood,
as our naked ancestors had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries,
we should far more readily appreciate this simple truth. We should
know that a great many more plants than we now suspect are bitter or
pungent, and therefore poisonous. Even in England we are familiar
enough with such defences as those possessed by the outer rind of the
walnut; but the tropical cashewnut has a rind so intensely acrid that
it blisters the lips and fingers instantaneously, in the same way
as cantharides would do. I believe that on the whole, taking nature
throughout, more fruits and nuts are poisonous, or intensely bitter, or
very fiery, than are sweet, luscious, and edible.

“But,” says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector (whom one
always sets up for the express purpose of promptly knocking him down
again), “if it be the business of the forepart of the tongue to warn us
against pungent and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely
use such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and vinegar?” Well,
in themselves all these things are, strictly speaking, bad for us;
but in small quantities they act as agreeable stimulants; and we take
care in preparing most of them to get rid of the most objectionable
properties. Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as
condiments. One drop of oil of capsicum is enough to kill a man, if
taken undiluted; but in actual practice we buy it in such a very
diluted form that comparatively little harm arises from using it.
Still, very young children dislike all these violent stimulants, even
in small quantities; they won’t touch mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and
they recoil at once from wine or spirits. It is only by slow degrees
that we learn these unnatural tastes, as our nerves get blunted and
our palates jaded; and we all know that the old Indian who can eat
nothing but dry curries, devilled biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot,
mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles,
fiery sherry, and neat cognac, is also a person with no digestion, a
fragmentary liver, and very little chance of getting himself accepted
by any safe and solvent insurance office. Throughout, the warning
in itself is a useful one; it is we who foolishly and persistently
disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us at once that it is bad
for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with flavoring matters and
dilute it with water that we overlook the fiery character of the spirit
itself. But that alcohol is in itself a bad thing (when freely indulged
in) has been so abundantly demonstrated in the history of mankind that
it hardly needs any further proof.

The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experience
sensations of taste proper—that is to say, of sweetness and
bitterness. In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant
to us, and all bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The
reason for this is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at
once into those primæval tropical forests where our “hairy ancestor”
used to diet himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season.
Now, almost all edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and
therefore the presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a
rough test of whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find.
In fact, the argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because
they are intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other
animals have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary
things in nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early
progenitors formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and
grapes; upon sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild-honey. There
is scarcely anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and
our earliest ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians), which does
not contain sugar in considerable quantities. In temperate climates
(where man is but a recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to
regarding wheaten bread as the staff of life; but in our native tropics
enormous populations still live almost exclusively upon plantains,
bananas, breadfruit, yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons,
cassava, pineapples, and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the
circumstances of our early life as a race in tropical forests; and we
still retain a marked liking for sweets of every sort. Not content with
our strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears,
cherries, plums, and other northern fruits, we ransack the world for
dates, figs, raisins, and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired
meat-eating propensities, it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds
(including wheat, rice, peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still
form by far the most important element in the foodstuffs of human
populations generally.

But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing
artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition
of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?
It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that
we now look upon as all but necessaries—cakes, puddings, made dishes,
confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits,
tarts, and so forth—were then practically quite impossible. Fancy
attempting nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no
coffee, no jam, no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one
goes to bed; the bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was
really the abject condition of all the civilised world up to the middle
ages. Horace’s punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavor of peppermint
bull’s eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled
one quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try
for a moment to realise drinking honey with one’s whiskey-and-water,
or doing the year’s preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you
get at once a common measure of the difference between the two as
practical sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beetroot in
abundance, while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford
a considerable supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the
little Greeks and Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a
single ray of joy from chocolate creams or Everton toffee.

The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness
of various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether
it had sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and
flavoring we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most
indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the
name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres.
But in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as
fruits are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour;
as soon as they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire
some bright color as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In
the main, bar the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good
to eat—nay more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse
folly that makes us sometimes think all nice things bad for us, and all
wholesome things nasty. In a state of nature, the exact opposite is
really the case. One may observe, too, that children, who are literally
young savages in more senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive
feeling in this respect than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like
sweets; adults, who have grown more accustomed to the artificial meat
diet, don’t as a rule, care much for puddings, cakes, and made dishes.
(May I venture parenthetically to add, any appearance to the contrary
notwithstanding, that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far from
desiring to bring down upon my devoted head the imprecation pronounced
against the rash person who would rob a poor man of his beer. It is
quite possible to believe that vegetarianism was the starting-point of
the race, without wishing to consider it also as the goal; just as it
is quite possible to regard clothes as purely artificial products of
civilization, without desiring personally to return to the charming
simplicity of the Garden of Eden.)

Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are almost
invariably poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is intensely bitter,
and it is well known that life cannot be supported on strychnia alone
for more than a few hours. Again, colocynth and aloes are far from
being wholesome food stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of
cucumber does not conduce to the highest standard of good living. The
bitter matter in decaying apples is highly injurious when swallowed,
which it isn’t likely to be by anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and
walnut-shells contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe,
which is made from one of them, is a favorite slow poison with the
fashionable young men of Paris, who wish to escape prematurely from “Le
monde où l’on s’ennuie.” But prussic acid is the commonest component in
all natural bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple pippins, the
kernels of mango-stones, and many other seeds and fruits. Indeed, one
may say roughly that the object of nature generally is to prevent the
actual seeds of edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for
this purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she encloses
the seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes it nasty with bitter
essences. Eat an orange pip, and you will promptly observe how
effectual is this arrangement. As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is
bitter, and the inner kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us
immediately against bitter things, as being poisonous, and prevents us,
automatically, from swallowing them.

“But how is it,” asks our objector again, “that so many poisons are
tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant to the palate?”
The answer is (you see, we knock him down again, as usual) because
these poisons are themselves for the most part artificial products;
they do not occur in a state of nature, at least in man’s ordinary
surroundings. Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to
meet with in the wild state we are warned against at once by the sense
of taste; but of course it would be absurd to suppose that natural
selection could have produced a mode of warning us against poisons
which have never before occurred in human experience. One might just
as well expect that it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or have
given us a skin like the hide of a rhinoceros to protect us against the
future contingency of the invention of rifles.

Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes proper, almost
the only ones discriminated by this central and truly gustatory
region of the tongue and palate. Most so-called flavorings will be
found on strict examination to be nothing more than mixtures with
these of certain smells or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline
matters, distinguished as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,
paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no taste at
all, but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe this on first hearing,
but nothing on earth is easier than to put it to the test. Take a small
piece of cinnamon, hold your nose tightly, rather high up, between
the thumb and finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is
absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly insipid bit
of bark. Then let go your nose, and you will find immediately that it
“tastes” strongly, though in reality it is only the perfume from it
that you now permit to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So,
again, cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and the
same is the case more or less with almost all distinctive flavorings.
When you come to find of what they are made up, they consist generally
of sweets or bitters, intermixed with certain ethereal perfumes, or
with pungent or acid tastes, or with both or several such together.
In this way, a comparatively small number of original elements,
variously combined, suffice to make up the whole enormous mass of
recognisably different tastes and flavors.

The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is the seat of
those peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, the great authority
upon this important philosophical subject, has given the names of
relishes and disgusts. It is here, chiefly, that we taste animal food,
fats, butters, oils, and the richer class of vegetables and made
dishes. If we like them, we experience a sensation which may be called
a relish, and which induces one to keep rolling the morsel farther
down the throat, till it passes at last beyond the region of our
voluntary control. If we don’t like them, we get the sensation which
may be called a disgust, and which is very different from the mere
unpleasantness of excessively pungent or bitter things. It is far less
of an intellectual and far more of a physical and emotional feeling. We
say, and say rightly, of such things that we find it hard to swallow
them; a something within us (of a very tangible nature) seems to rise
up bodily and protest against them. As a very good example of this
experience, take one’s first attempt to swallow cod-liver oil. Other
things may be unpleasant or unpalatable, but things of this class are
in the strictest sense nasty and disgusting.

The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied with nerves in
close sympathy with the digestion. If the food which has been passed by
the two previous examiners is found here to be simple and digestible,
it is permitted to go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich,
too bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered against
it, and if we are wise we will immediately desist from eating any more
of it. It is here that the impartial tribunal of nature pronounces
definitely against roast goose, mince pies, _pâté de foie gras_, sally
lunn, muffins and crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that
the slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;
that rancid pastry from the pastrycook’s is ruthlessly exposed, and
that the wiles of the fishmonger are set at naught by the judicious
palate. It is the special duty, in fact, of this last examiner to
discover, not whether food is positively destructive, not whether it is
poisonous or deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and
there digestible or undesirable.

As our state of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so
do the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker.
Sweet things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar
is always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our
state of health or feeling; but our taste for roast loin of mutton,
high game, salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely
from time to time, with the passing condition of our health and
digestion. In illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the
taste carried to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in
the chops of the Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the
steward who offers you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with
promises of ham sandwiches in half a minute. Under those too painful
conditions it is the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that
one can most easily swallow—champagne, soda-water, strawberries,
peaches, not lobster salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot
brandy-and-water. On the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry
with exercise, you can eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside,
or dine off fresh salmon three days running without inconvenience. Even
a Spanish stew, with plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive
oil, tastes positively delicious after a day’s mountaineering in the
Pyrenees.

The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to
make children eat fat when they don’t want it. A healthy child likes
fat, and eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of
disgust at fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it
ought never to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us
are bilious in after life just because we were compelled to eat rich
food in childhood, which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us.
We might still be indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back
ducks, devilled white-bait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we
hadn’t been so persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things
that we didn’t want and knew were indigestible.

Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and
uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up
together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one
discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue
and palate. Salt is mixed with almost everything we eat—_sal sapit
omnia_—and pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter is put
into the peas, which have been previously adulterated by being boiled
with mint; and cucumber is unknown except in conjunction with oil
and vinegar. This makes it comparatively difficult for us to realise
the distinctness of the elements which go to make up most tastes as
we actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable objects
have hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking, but only a
feeling of softness or hardness, or glutinousness in the mouth, mainly
observed in the act of chewing them. For example, plain boiled rice is
almost wholly insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually
been boiled with it, and in practice we generally eat it with sugar,
preserves, curry, or some other strongly flavored condiment. Again,
plain boiled tapioca and sago (in water) are as nearly tasteless as
anything can be; they merely yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in
which they are oftenest cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense here
restricted), and sugar, eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are usually added
by way of flavoring. Even turbot has hardly any taste proper, except
in the glutinous skin, which has a faint relish; the epicure values
it rather because of its softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh.
Gelatine by itself is merely very swallowable, we must mix sugar, wine,
lemon-juice, and other flavorings in order to make it into good jelly.
Salt, spices, essences, vanilla, vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups,
sauces, chutneys, lime-juice, curry, and all the rest are just our
civilised expedients for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity
to naturally insipid foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the
tongue, just as sugar is our tribute to the pure gustatory sense, and
oil, butter, bacon, lard, and the various fats used in frying to the
sense of relish which forms the last element in our compound taste.
A boiled sole is all very well when one is just convalescent, but in
robust health we demand the delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are,
after all only the vehicle for the appetising grease. Plain boiled
macaroni may pass muster in the unsophisticated nursery, but in the
pampered dining-room it requires the aid of toasted parmesan. Good
modern cookery is the practical result of centuries of experience in
this direction; the final flower of ages of evolution, devoted to the
equalisation of flavors in all human food. Think of the generations of
fruitless experiment that must have passed before mankind discovered
that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of vinegar and sugar) ought
to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose required a corrective in
the shape of apple, and that while a pre-established harmony existed
between salmon and lobster, oysters were ordained beforehand by nature
as the proper, accompaniment of boiled cod. Whenever I reflect upon
such things, I become at once a good Positivist, and offer up praise
in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity which has slowly
perfected these profound rules of good living.—_Cornhill Magazine._

BYGONE CELEBRITIES AND LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS.

BY CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D.

III.

NAPOLEON III.—LORD WILLIAM PITT LENNOX.—ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

It was during the unsettled times that preceded the great French
Revolution of 1848—I think it was in January of that year—that one
of Mr. Rogers’s breakfasts was attended by Prince Louis Napoleon
Buonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III.; Dr. Whately, the Protestant
Archbishop of Dublin; Lord William Pitt Lennox, the son of the Duke
of Richmond (who distinguished himself at the battle of Waterloo, and
died many years afterwards as Governor-General of Canada); and myself.
I was previously acquainted with all these gentlemen, and had met
the Prince a few days previously at the house of Mr. John MacGregor,
formerly Secretary of the Board of Trade, and member of Parliament for
Glasgow. The Prince, who was then forty years of age, had long been a
resident in London as an exile, spoke English exceedingly well, had
thoroughly studied the working of the British constitution, and had
learned to respect and apparently to love the English people. He was
very taciturn and undemonstrative; his dull grey eyes seemed to have
little speculation in them, and to have been given to him, if such
an expression may be used, to look inwards upon himself rather than
outwards upon the world. They brightened up at rare intervals when
anything was said that particularly interested him. On this occasion
the talk of the breakfast table turned a good deal upon French politics
and the probability, more or less imminent, of a revolutionary outbreak
in Paris, consequent upon the unwise opposition of Louis Philippe
and his too obsequious minister, M. Guizot, to the question of the
extension of the franchise and the reform of the French Parliament.
As I had within a fortnight or three weeks returned from Paris, where
I had associated with some leading liberal politicians, among others
with Béranger the poet and the Abbé de Lamennais, my opinion upon the
situation was asked, I think, by Mr. Rogers, and whether I thought
the agitation would subside. “Not,” I said, “unless the King yields.”
“He won’t yield, I think,” said the Prince; “he does not understand
the seriousness of the case.” I told the Prince that Béranger, who
knew the temper and sympathised with the opinions of the people, had
predicted the establishment of a Republic, consequent upon the downfall
of the monarchy, within less than a twelvemonth. Lamennais did not
give the King so long a lease of power, but foresaw revolution within
six months. The Prince remarked that “if there were barricades in the
streets of Paris, such as those by which his way to the throne was won
in 1830, the King would not give orders to disperse the mob by force
of arms.” “Why do you think so?” asked Mr. Rogers. “The King is a weak
man, a merciful man. He does not like bloodshed. I often think he was
a fool not to have had me shot after the affair of Strasburg. Had our
cases been reversed I know that I would have had him shot without
mercy,” I thought little of this remark at the time, but in after
years, when the exiled Prince became the powerful emperor, my mind
often reverted to this conversation, and I thought that if King Louis
Philippe had done what the Prince considered he ought to have done—and
as he would have been fully justified by law, civil and military, as
well as by state policy, in doing—the whole course of European history
would have been changed. Personally, the Prince was highly esteemed by
all who knew him. Stern as a politician, and in pursuit of the great
object of his ambition, as in the famous _coup d’état_ of 1851 by
which he raised himself at a bound from the comparatively humble and
uncertain chair of a President to the most conspicuous imperial throne
in the world—he was, in private life, of a singularly amiable temper.
He never forgot in his prosperity the friends or even the acquaintances
of his adversity; never ceased to remember any benefit that had been
conferred upon him, and not only to be grateful for it, but to show
his gratitude by acts of kindness and generosity, if the kindness or
generosity could be of benefit to the fortunes of the persons on whom
it was bestowed. When he sought the hand in marriage of a Princess of
the House of Austria, and the honor was declined for the occult and
unwhispered reason that he was a parvenu and an upstart, and that his
throne was at the mercy of a revolution (and what throne is not?), he
married for pure love and affection a noble lady of inferior rank, and
raised her to a throne which she filled for many years with more grace
and splendor than any contemporary sovereign born in the purple of
royalty had ever exhibited, Queen Victoria alone excepted.

The Prince thoroughly understood the character of the French people.
Napoleon I. had called the English a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon
III. knew that the French were entitled in a far greater degree than
the English to that depreciatory epithet. He knew that in their hearts
they did not care so much for liberty and fraternity as they did for
“equality,”—that what they wanted in the first place was peace, so
that trade and industry might have a chance to prosper; and secondly,
that France as a nation might be the predominant power in Europe. For
the first reason, they required a master who would maintain order; for
the second reason, they idolised the name of the first Napoleon. These
two things were patent to the mind of Napoleon III., and formed the
keystone of his domestic and foreign policy.

When London, about three months after the breakfast at Mr. Rogers’, was
threatened, on April 10, 1848, by an insurrectionary mob of Chartists,
under the guidance of a half-crazy Irishman, named Feargus O’Connor,
who afterwards died in a lunatic asylum, the Prince volunteered to act
as a special constable, for the preservation of the peace, in common
with many thousands of respectable professional men, merchants, and
tradesmen. I met him in Trafalgar Square, armed with the truncheon
of a policeman. On this occasion, the Duke of Wellington, then
commander-in-chief of the British army, had taken the precaution to
station the military in sufficient numbers at all the chief strategical
points of the metropolis ready, though concealed from the notice of
the multitude, to act on an emergency. Happily their services were not
required. The sovereign was popular; the upper and middle classes were
unanimous; a large section of the laboring classes had no sympathy with
Chartism, and the display of the civic force, with bludgeons and staves
only, without firearms of any kind, was quite sufficient to overawe the
rioters. I stopped for a minute to exchange greetings with the Prince,
and said I did not think from all that I had heard that the Chartists
would resort to violence, and that their march through the streets
would be orderly. The Prince was of the same opinion, and passed upon
his beat among other police special constables in front of the National
Gallery.

As Lord William Lennox was of the breakfast party, I took the
opportunity to ask him a question with regard to a disputed point.
I had lately visited Brussels, the city in which I had passed my
school-boy days, and which was consequently endeared to my mind by
many youthful associations. The mother of Lord William, the beautiful
Duchess of Richmond, had given a great ball on the night preceding the
battle of Waterloo, in June, 1815, at which Lord William, then in his
sixteenth year, was present. Every lover of poetry will remember the
splendid description of this ball and of the subsequent battle which
occurs in the third canto of Byron’s “Childe Harold.” The passage is
unsurpassed in any language for the vigor, the picturesqueness, and the
magnificence of its thought and diction, and in its relation to one of
the most stupendous events in modern history.

    There was a sound of revelry by night,
      And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then
    Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
      The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
      A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
    Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
      Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,
    And all went merry as a marriage bell;
    But hush! hark: a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.

It has been generally asserted and believed that the ball was given
by the duchess in the grand hall of the stately Hôtel de Ville in the
Grande Place, and when in Brussels I heard the assertion repeated by
many people, though denied by others. One old citizen, who remembered
the battle well, affirmed it to have been at the Hôtel de Ville, which
he saw brilliantly lighted up for the occasion, and passed among the
crowd of equipages that filled the Grande Place, when setting down
and taking up the ladies who graced the assembly with their presence.
Another equally old and trustworthy inhabitant declared that to his
personal knowledge the ball was given in the “Palais d’Aes,” a large
building that adjoins the palace of the King of the Belgians, and is
now used as a barrack; while a third affirmed it to have been held
in the handsome hotel, adjoining the Chamber of Deputies, which was
formerly occupied by Sir Charles Bagot, the British Ambassador to
Brussels and the Hague in 1830. Thinking there could be no better
authority than one who was present on the occasion, one, moreover,
who was so nearly allied to the giver of the entertainment, I asked
Lord William to decide the point. He replied at once that all these
assertions were unfounded. His father, the Duke, took a large house
in a back street, called the “Rue de la Blanchisserie” (street of the
laundry), abutting on the boulevard, opposite the present Botanic
Garden, and that the ball took place in the not extraordinarily
spacious drawing-room of that mansion. He said, moreover, that the
lines—

    Within the window’d niche of that high hall
    Sat Brunswick’s fated chieftain,

conveyed an idea of magnitude which the so-called “high hall” did not
in reality possess.

Archbishop Whately here said: “If we may be permitted without breach of
good manners to speak of Waterloo in the presence of Prince Napoleon,
I may remark that the correction of the very minor error just made
by Lord William, though exceedingly interesting is not of great
importance. Though contradicted again and again, the report still
circulates, and is still believed, that the Duke of Wellington was
surprised on the eve of the battle of Waterloo by the rapid march of
the emperor, and was thus taken at a disadvantage.”

“I never believed the report,” said the Prince, “though I have my own
views about the battle. I visited Waterloo in the winter of 1832, with
what feelings you may imagine.”

“The truth as regards the alleged surprise,” said the Archbishop,
“appears to be, as Lord Byron explained in a note to the passage in
‘Childe Harold,’ that the Duke had received intelligence of Napoleon’s
march, and at first had the idea of requesting the Duchess of Richmond
to countermand the ball; but, on reflection, considered it desirable
that the people of Brussels should be kept in ignorance of the course
of events. He, therefore, desired the duchess to let the ball proceed,
and gave commands to all the general officers who had been invited
to appear at it, each taking care to quit the room at ten o’clock
quietly, and without giving any notification, except to each of the
under officers, to join their respective divisions _en route_. There is
no doubt that many of the subalterns who were not in the secret were
surprised at the suddenness of the order.”

“I heard, when I visited the field of Waterloo less than a month ago,”
I said, “that many of the officers joined the march in their dancing
shoes, so little time was left for them to obey orders.”

“It has been proved to the satisfaction of every real inquirer into
the facts,” said Mr. Rogers, “that as far as the duke himself and
his superior officers were concerned, there was no surprise in the
matter. You know the daring young lady, who presumed on her beauty to
be forgiven for her impertinence, who asked the Duke point-blank at an
evening party whether he had not been surprised at Waterloo. ‘Certainly
not!’ he replied ‘but I am now.’”

“A proper rebuke,” said Lord William, “I hope the lady felt it.”

Byron, in the beautiful stanzas to which allusion has been made,
describes the wood of Soignes, erroneously called Soignies, in the
environs of Brussels, a portion of the great Forest of Ardennes:

    And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
      Dewy with Nature’s tear-drops as they pass.
    Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er grieves,
      Over the unreturning brave.

In a note to this passage he speaks of Ardennes as famous in
Boiardo’s “Orlando,” as immortal in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
Whatever may have been the case with Boiardo, it is all but certain
that Shakespeare’s “Arden” was not the Ardennes near Brussels,
but the forest of Arden, in Warwickshire, near his native town of
Stratford-on-Avon. He frequented this “Arden” in his youth, perhaps in
chasing the wild deer of Sir Thomas Lucy, perhaps in love-rambles with
Anne Hathaway. Portions of this English forest still remain, containing
in a now enclosed park—the property of a private gentleman—some
venerable oak trees, one of which as I roughly measured it with my
walking-stick is upwards of thirty feet in circumference within a yard
of the ground. This tree, with several others still standing, must
have been old in the days of Shakespeare; and in the shadow of which
he himself may have reclined in the happy days ere he went to London
in search of fame and fortune. “Arden,” spelled Ardennes in French,
is a purely Celtic word, meaning the high forest, from _Ard_, high,
and _Airdean_, heights. The English district is still called “Arden,”
and the small town of Henley, within its boundaries, is described as
Henley-in-Arden to distinguish it from the many other Henleys that
exist in England.

Lord William Lennox married the once celebrated cantatrice, Miss Wood,
from whom he was divorced. He was a somewhat voluminous author of
third-rate novels, and a frequent contributor to the periodical press.
He died in 1880, in his eighty-first year.

Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was the author of a very able
treatise on Logic and Rhetoric, long the text-book of the schools;
and also of a once famous _jeu d’esprit_ entitled “Historic Doubts
concerning Napoleon Buonaparte,” in which he proved irrefragably by
false logic likely to convince idle and unthinking readers, that
no such person as Napoleon Buonaparte ever did exist or could have
existed. In this clever little work he ridiculed, under the guise of
seeming impartiality and critical acumen, the many attempts that had
been made, especially by French writers of the school of Voltaire, to
prove that Jesus Christ was a purely imaginary character, as much a
myth as the gods of Grecian and Roman mythology. Mr. Greville, in his
“Memoirs of the Courts of George III., George IV., and William IV.,”
records that he met Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, at a dinner-party,
and describes him “as a very ordinary man in appearance and
conversation, with something pretentious in his talk, and as telling
stories without point.” Nevertheless he admitted him to be “a very able
man.” My opinion of the Archbishop was far more favorable. The first
thing that struck me with regard to him was the clear precision of
his reasoning, as befitted a man who had written with such undoubted
authority on Logic and Rhetoric, and the second his rare tolerance for
all conscientious differences of opinion on religious matters. Two
years previously I had sat next to him on the platform of the inaugural
meeting held by the members of The Athenæum at Manchester in support of
that institution. Several bishops had been invited, and had signified
their intention to be present, but all of them except Dr. Whately had
withdrawn as soon as it was publicly announced that Mr. George Dawson,
a popular lecturer and Unitarian preacher of advanced opinions, was
to address the audience. Mr. Dawson, who was at the time a very young
man, spoke with considerable eloquence and power, and impressed the
audience favorably, the Archbishop included. “I think,” said Dr.
Whately, turning to me at the conclusion of the speech, “that my
reverend brethren would have taken no harm from being present to-night,
and more than one of them, whom I could name, would be all the better
if they could preach with as much power and spirit, as this boy has
displayed in his speech.” On another occasion, when I was in Dublin in
1849. I heard that several ultra-orthodox Protestant clergymen in the
city had been heard to express regret that Dr. Whately was so lax in
his religious belief, and set so bad an example to his clergy. I asked
in what manner, and was told in reply that he had publicly spoken of
Dr. Daniel Murray, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, then in his
81st year, as “a good man, a very good man,” adding the hope that he
himself should be found worthy to meet Murray in Heaven.

This large-minded prelate died in 1863, in his seventy-seventh year.

IV.

THE REV. HENRY HART MILMAN—THE REV. ALEXANDER DYCE—THOMAS MILLER.

It was in the summer of 1844, a few days after the interment in
Westminster Abbey of Thomas Campbell, the poet, author of the
“Pleasures of Hope” and many other celebrated poems, that I received
an invitation to breakfast with Samuel Rogers, to meet the Rev. Dr.
Milman, the officiating clergyman on that solemn occasion. There were
two other guests besides myself; the Rev. Alexander Dyce, well known
as a commentator on Shakespeare, and Mr. Thomas Miller—originally a
basket-maker—who had acquired considerable reputation as a poet and
novelist and a hard-working man of letters.

Dr. Milman was at the time rector of St. Margaret’s—the little church
that stands close to Westminster Abbey and interferes greatly with the
view of that noble cathedral. He was afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s, and
was known to fame as the author of the successful tragedy of “Fazio,”
of many poetical volumes of no great merit, and of a “History of the
Jews” and a “History of Christianity,” both of which still retain their
reputation.

The conversation turned principally on the funeral of the poet, at
which both Mr. Dyce and myself had been present. The pall-bearers were
among the most distinguished men of the time, for their rank, their
talent, and their high literary and political positions. They included
Sir Robert Peel, Lord Brougham, Lord Campbell, the Duke of Argyll,
the Earl of Strangford, and the Duke of Buccleuch, the last named the
generous nobleman—noble in nature as well as in rank—who had offered,
when a lad in his teens, to pay the debts of his illustrious namesake,
Sir Walter Scott, when the great novelist had fallen upon evil days
in the full flush of his fame and popularity. A long procession of
authors, sculptors, artists, and other distinguished men followed the
coffin to the grave. Many Polish exiles were conspicuous among them. As
Dr. Milman pronounced the affecting words of the burial service, “ashes
to ashes, dust to dust,” a Polish gentleman made his way through the
ranks of mourners, and drawing a handful of earth from a little basket
which he carried, exclaimed in a clear voice, “This is Polish earth for
the tomb of the friend of Poland,” and sprinkled it upon the coffin.
This dramatic incident recalled to my mind, as it no doubt did to that
of other spectators, Campbell’s unwearied exertions in the cause of
Poland, and of the indignant lines in the “Pleasures of Hope,”

    Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
    And Freedom shriek’d when Kosciusko fell.

Mr. Rogers, reminded, perhaps, of a grievance by the presence at the
breakfast table of Dr. Milman, seemed to brood over an injustice that
he thought had been done him with reference to the late poet. When
Campbell, under the pressure of some pecuniary difficulty, complained
of the scanty rewards of literature, and especially of poetry, Mr.
Rogers was reported to have recommended him to endeavor to procure
employment as a clerk. This was thought to be very unfeeling; but
on this occasion Mr. Rogers explained to the whole company that he
had been misunderstood, and that he had not meant any unkindness. “I
myself,” he said, “was a clerk in my early days, and never had to
depend upon poetry for my bread; and I only suggested that in Mr.
Campbell’s ‘case,’ and in that of every other literary man, it would be
much better if the writing of poetry were an amusement only and not a
business.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Dyce, “but men of genius are not always the
masters of their own youth, and cannot invariably choose their careers
or make choice of a profession which requires means and time to qualify
for it. You, for instance, Mr. Rogers, when a clerk, were clerk to your
father, and qualified yourself under his auspices for partnership in,
or succession to the management of, his prosperous bank. Mr. Campbell
had no such chances.”

“It is a large question,” said Dr. Milman. “The love of literature in
a man of genius, rich or poor—especially if poor, is an all-absorbing
passion; and shapes his life, regret it as we may. Literature has
rewards more pleasant than those of money, pleasant though money
undoubtedly is. If money were to be the ‘be-all’ and ‘end-all’ of life,
it would be better to be a rich cheesemonger or butcher than a poor
author. But no high-spirited, intelligent, and ambitious youth could be
of this opinion and shape his life by it. Sensitive youths drift into
poetry, as prosaic and adventurous youths drift into the army or the
navy.”

“The more’s the pity,” replied Mr. Rogers, “as by drifting into poetry
they too often drift into poverty and misery. I trust, however, you
will all understand that the idle and the malevolent gossips did, and
do me, gross unjustice when they say that I recommended Campbell to
accept a clerkship rather than continue to rely upon poetry. I never
thought of doing so. I merely expressed a general wish that every man
of genius, not born to wealth, should have a profession to rely upon
for his daily bread.”

“A wish that all men would agree in,” said Mr. Dyce, “and that after
all had no particular or exclusive reference to Mr. Campbell. He did
not find the literature which he adorned utterly unprofitable. He
made money by his poetry and by his literary labor generally, besides
gaining a pension of three hundred pounds per annum on the Civil List,
and the society of all the most eminent men of his time, which he could
not have done as a cheesemonger or a butcher, however successful he
might have become in these pursuits.”

“These are all truisms,” said Mr. Rogers, somewhat sharply, as if
annoyed. “What I complain of is that the world, the very ill-natured
world, should have spread abroad the ridiculous story that I
recommended Mr. Campbell, in his declining years, to apply for a
clerkship.”

“I think no one believes that you did so,” said Dr. Milman, “or that
you could have done so. Your sympathy with men of letters is well known
and has been proved too often, not by mere words only, but by generous
deeds, for such a story to obtain credence.”

“Falsehoods,” replied Mr. Rogers, still with a tone of bitterness,
“are not cripples. They run fast, and have more legs than a centipede.
I saw it stated in print the other day that I depreciate Shakespeare
and think him to have been over-rated. I know of no other foundation
for the libel than that I once quoted the opinion expressed of him by
Ben Jonson, his dearest friend and greatest admirer. Though Ben Jonson
called Shakespeare ‘the Swan of Avon,’

                          Soul of the age,
    The applause, delight, and wonder of the stage,

and affirmed that:

    He was not for an age, but for all Time,

he did not hesitate to express the wish, in answer to one who boasted
that Shakespeare had never blotted a line, ‘would to Heaven he had
blotted a thousand.’ Ben Jonson saw the spots on the glorious face of
the sun of Shakespeare’s genius, and was not accused of desecrating his
memory because he did so; but because _I_ quoted that very saying and
approved of it, I have been accused of an act of treason against the
majesty of the great poet. Surely my offence was no greater than that
of Ben Jonson! If there were treason in the thought, it was treason
that I shared with him who had said he loved Shakespeare with as much
love as was possible to feel on this side of idolatry.”

“I think,” remarked Dr. Milman, “that such apparently malevolent
repetitions of a person’s remarks are the results of careless ignorance
or easy-going stupidity, rather than of positive ill-nature or a wilful
perversion of the truth.”

“It is very curious,” said Mr. Dyce, “how very few people can repeat
correctly what they hear, and that nine people out of ten cannot repeat
a joke without missing the point or the spirit of it.”

“And what a widely prevalent tendency there is to exaggerate,
especially in numbers. If some people see a hundred of anything, they
commonly represent the hundred as a thousand and the thousand as ten
thousand.”

“Not alone in numbers,” interposed Mr. Rogers, “but in anything. If I
quoted Ben Jonson’s remark in relation to Shakespeare once only, the
rumor spreads that I quoted it frequently; and so the gossip passes
from mouth to mouth with continual accretion. Perhaps I shall go down
to posterity as an habitual reviler and depreciator of Shakespeare.”

“Perhaps you won’t go down to posterity at all,” said Mr. Dyce,
good-naturedly.

“Perhaps not,” replied Mr. Rogers, “but if my name should happen to
reach that uncertain destination I trust I may be remembered, as Ben
Jonson is, as a true lover of Shakespeare. But great as Shakespeare is,
I don’t think that our admiration should ever be allowed to degenerate
into slavish adoration. We ought neither to make a god of him nor a
fetish. And I ask you, Mr. Dyce, as a diligent student of his works and
an industrious commentator upon them, whether you do not think that
very many passages in them are unworthy of his genius. If Homer nods,
why not Shakespeare?”

“I grant all that,” replied Mr. Dyce, “nay more! I assert that many of
the plays attributed to him were not written by him at all. And more
even than that. Several of his plays were published surreptitiously,
and without his consent, and never received his final corrections or
any revision whatever. The faults and obscurities that are discoverable
even in the masterpieces of his genius, were not due to him at all,
but to ignorant and piratical booksellers, who gave them to the world
without his authority, and traded upon his name. Some also must be
attributed to the shorthand writers who took down the dialogue as
repeated by the actors on the stage. It is curious to reflect how
indifferent Shakespeare was to his dramatic fame. He never seems to
have cared for his plays at all, and to have looked at them, to use the
slang of the artists of our days, as mere ‘_pot-boilers_,’ compositions
that brought him in money, and enabled him to pay his way, but in which
he took no personal pride whatever.”

“His heart was in his two early poems—‘Venus and Adonis,’ and the
‘Rape of Lucrece,’” said Dr. Milman, “the only compositions, it should
be observed, that were ever published by his authority, and to which he
appended his name. His sonnets, which some people admire so much—an
admiration in which I do not share—were published surreptitiously,
without his consent, and probably more than one-half of them were not
written by him. Some of them are undoubtedly by Marlowe, and some by
authors of far inferior ability. Shakespeare’s name was popular at the
time; there was no law of copyright, and booksellers did almost what
they pleased with the names and works of celebrated men; and what seems
extraordinary in our day, the celebrated men made no complaint—most
probably because there was no redress to be obtained for them if they
had done so. The real law of copyright only dates from the eighth
year of the reign of Queen Anne, 1710, or nearly a century after
Shakespeare’s death.”

“But authors in those early days, even in the absence of a well-defined
law of copyright,” said Mr. Miller, “received payment for their works;
witness the receipt of John Milton for five pounds on account of
‘Paradise Lost’—now in the possession of our host—and which we have
all seen.”

“But that was long after the death of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Dyce, “and
it does not appear that Shakespeare ever received a shilling for the
copyright of any of his works. Perhaps he received gratuities from the
Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, and the other rich young men about
town, for whom it is supposed that he wrote many of his sonnets. That
he also must have received considerable sums for his representation of
his plays at the Globe Theatre is evident from the well-ascertained
fact that he retired from theatrical business with a competent fortune
and lived the life for some years of a prosperous country gentleman.”

As it has been asserted in my presence by an eminent literary
man, within a month of the present writing, that Samuel Rogers
systematically depreciated Shakespeare, and that he was above all
things a cynic, I think it right, in justice to his memory, to repeat
the conversation above recorded. Though it took place nearly forty
years ago, I wrote down the heads of it in my notebook on the very
day when it occurred; and by reperusal of it I have refreshed my memory
so as to be certain of its accuracy. Mr. Rogers doubtless said very
pungent and apparently ill-natured things in his time; no professed
wit, such as he was, can always, or indeed very often, refrain from
shooting a barbed dart either to raise a laugh and to strengthen an
argument, or to dispense with one; but there was no malevolence in the
heart, though there might appear to be some on the tongue, of Samuel
Rogers. To love literature, and to excel in poetical composition, were
unfailing passports to his regard, his esteem, and if necessary, his
purse. One of the guests of the morning on which these conversations
took place, and who bore his part in them, was a grateful recipient
and witness of his beneficence. Thomas Miller, who began life as a
journeyman basket-maker, working for small daily wages in the fens
of Lincolnshire, excited the notice of his neighbors by his poetical
genius, or it may have been only talent, and by their praises of his
compositions, filled his mind with the desire to try his literary
fortune in the larger sphere of London. He listened to the promptings
of his ambition, came to the metropolis, launched his little skiff on
the wide ocean of literary life, and by dint of hard work, indomitable
perseverance, unfailing hope, and incessant struggles, managed to earn
a modest subsistence. He speedily found that poetry failed to put money
in his purse, and prudently resorted to prose. When prose in the shape
of original work—principally fiction—just enabled him to live from
day to day, he took refuge in the daily drudgery of reviewing in the
_Literary Gazette_, then edited by Mr. Jerdan, a very bad paymaster.
He had not been long in London before he made the acquaintance or Mr.
Rogers, and after a period of more or less intimacy, received from that
gentleman the good, though old, and as it often happens, the unwelcome
advice that he should cease to rely wholly upon literature for his
daily bread. As poor Miller could not return to basket-making—except
as an employer of other basket-makers, for which he had not sufficient,
or indeed any, capital—and as, moreover, he had no love for any
pursuits but those of literature, he resolved, if he could manage it,
to establish himself as a bookseller and publisher. Mr. Rogers, to
whom he confided his wish, approved of it, and generously aided him to
accomplish it, by the advance without security of the money required
for the purpose. The basket-maker carried on the business for a few
years with but slight success, and once informed me that he had made
more money by the sale of note paper, of sealing-wax, of ink, and of
red-tape, than he had made by the sale of his own works, or those of
anybody else.

Mr. Rogers established another poet in the bookselling and publishing
business, but with far greater success than attended his efforts in the
case of the basket-maker. Mr. Edward Moxon, a clerk or shopman in the
employ of Messrs. Longman, who wrote in his early manhood a little book
of sonnets that attracted the notice of Mr. Rogers, to whom they had
been sent by the author with a modest letter, became by the pecuniary
aid and constant patronage of the “Bard of Memory,” one of the most
eminent publishers of the time. He was known to fame as “the Poet’s
publisher,” and issued the works not only of Mr. Rogers himself, but
of Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Savage, Landor, Coleridge, and many
other poetical celebrities. He also published the works of Ben Jonson,
Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Peele, and other noted dramatists of
the Elizabethan era.

The friendly assistance, delicately and liberally administered in the
hour of need, by Samuel Rogers to the illustrious Richard Brinsley
Sheridan is fully recorded in the life of the latter by Thomas Moore;
that which was administered, though under less pressing circumstances,
to Thomas Campbell, has found a sympathetic historian in Dr. William
Beattie. Rogers, in spite of the baseless libel concerning Shakespeare,
had not a particle of literary envy in his composition. His dislike
to Lord Byron was not literary but personal, and is adequately
explained—and almost justified—by the gross and unprovoked attacks
which Byron directed against him.—_Gentleman’s Magazine._

AN ACTOR IN THE REBELLION OF 1798.

BY LETITIA McCLINTOCK.

In a tiny hovel on the mountain-side just above the romantic glens
of Banagher, in the wildest part of the country Londonderry, lives
Paddy O’Heany, aged a hundred and three years. Paddy is an intelligent
old man who must have enjoyed his existence thoroughly, and taken a
vivid interest in the stirring scenes of his early life. No clod of
the valley is he even now, not like many old people who cannot be
aroused to any enthusiasm about either past or present events. Being
in quest of an actor in the terrible scenes of ’98, and having tried
several very old people without result, we hoped to find in Paddy a
story-teller.

“Paddy,” said our friend Mrs. S----, “is the oldest inhabitant in the
parish; he was a youth of nineteen at the time of the Rebellion, and
can relate graphic tales of adventures in which he took part. One of
them, the history of Jack McSparron, will make your blood run cold;
but there, I’ll say no more; you shall judge for yourself. Paddy was
one of the United Irishmen; has been, it is said, a Ribbonman and a
Fenian since then, and is now, in all probability, a Land Leaguer. At
any rate, his sympathies are with the Land League, so that you must be
careful what you say if you want him to talk; but I need not give you
any hints, you will know how to draw him out.”

Looking down from Paddy’s cottage door upon the richly wooded glens of
Banagher, the traveller is struck by the extent and beauty of the view.
Below lies a ruined church, a little to its right the glens—four dark
lines of wood branching off from a common meetingpoint, and running
up the mountain in different directions, and to the left the quaint
country town of Dungiven. Above the town rises the majestic mountain
range of Benbraddagh; while yet farther to the left, and like pale,
smoke-tinted phantoms, are the hills of Magilligan, and the shadowy
coast-line. This was the view we saw from Paddy’s low doorway, and with
a little reluctance we turned away from contemplating it, to enter the
smoky cabin.

Paddy was a fine old man with thick, grizzled hair, a better-formed
profile than many of his class, and a hale, hearty voice. He was
totally blind, but his keen face was so full of intelligence that it
was easy to forget that he could not see. His daughter, herself a very
old woman, moved his arm-chair near the door, and we sat beside him
facing the scene above described. The turf smoke, of which the kitchen
was full, blew past us to find its outlet at the door. A turf stack was
built against the end of the dresser just behind Paddy’s chair. A calf
was walled off by a little rampart of boards from the rest of the room,
and the cock and hens had already flown to their roost directly above
our heads. The atmosphere and neighborhood might have been objected to
by squeamish people, but in the pursuit of knowledge what will not one
dare?

The old woman stood behind her fathers chair ready to jog his memory if
necessary. A present of tobacco, tea, and sugar touched the patriarch’s
heart; he was quite willing to take the desired journey into the
regions of the past.

“Do I mind the time o’ the Uniting? Is that what the lady wants to
know? Ay, bravely I mind it. I mind it far better nor things that
happened yesterday. I was ane o’ the United Men mysel’, an’ I was sent
wi’ a big wheen o’ the boys to keep the pass on the White Mountain when
the army was expected from Derry to destroy us. I had my pike, an’ the
maist part o’ the boys had guns.”

“Were you not afraid to meet the soldiers?”

“Feared? Was I feared? Troth an’ faix I was, sorely feared; but it wad
ha’ been as much as your life was worth to let on that you were feared.
I mind us leaning against the heather, an’ the big rocks an’ mountains
rising up all roun’ us, an’ the cold night an’ the darkness comin’ on,
an’ feen a word was spoke amang us, for we be to keep the pass.”

“Well?”

“Weel, at long an’ at last, Jack McSparron came running back (he was
put to watch); ‘an’,’ says he, ‘the army’s comin’ now; there’s the
tramp o’ the horses,’ says he. Wi’ that we to the listening, an’ we all
heered the tramp o’ the cavalry; an’ the company o’ the United Men just
melted away like snow off a ditch. Jack an’ one or two others tried to
keep us thegether, but it couldna be done; the boys was too feared. I
ran wi’ the rest, an’ I never stopped till I was in my father’s house
sittin’ into the chimney-corner aback o’ my mother. After that there
was soldiers passing we’er door nearly every day, an’ they said they
were marching to burn Maghera to the ground.”

“Why was Maghera to be burned to the ground?”

“I dinna rightly know, but I think the United Men was strong in it. But
counter-orders came that it was na to be destroyed, an’ then the army
came back to Dungiven.”

“Were you acquainted with Jack McSparron?”

“Is it Jack McSparron that was flogged in Dungiven Street? Ay, I mind
that weel.”

His withered hands clutched the arms of his chair as he bent forward,
with his sightless eyes fixed, and the fire of eagerness in his keen
face. He was gone upon a journey into the distant past, and a scene of
horror passed before his mental vision.

“Those times were worse nor these,” he said; “there were murders, too,
in parts o’ the country, but there was another way o’ working then. I
told you that the army came over frae England, an’ they took up the men
that was for the Uniting, an’ there was short work wi’ _them_. Ay, ay,
I mind the day Jack was flogged in Dungiven Street because he wouldna
tell the names o’ the men that was banded wi’ him. One o’ them was a
meeting minister, it was said; an’ there was farmers an’ laboring men,
too. For the whole country about Dungiven was strong for the United
Irishmen as they called them. I was wi’ them mysel’, but I was never
took.”

“There were some Presbyterians among them?”

“Eh?” and his hand went up to his ear.

“The lady’s axin’ if there wasn’t Presbyterians wi’ the United Men,
father,” said his daughter.

“Troth, was there, ma’am! it was allowed that there was ministers an’
farmers an’ shopkeepers o’ them. Jack was a Presbyterian himsel’.”

“How was he taken prisoner?”

“I dinna just mind, but I think it was at a meeting they had at a house
in Feeny. The alarm was given that the soldiers was coming, and all
fled an’ got away but Jack. He was a fine boy of nineteen years of age,
the support o’ his mother. He was stiff in his turn, too, far stiffer
nor I could ha’ been, for he swore he’d die afore he’d tell upon his
comrades. Ay, he was stiffer nor me.”

“True for you, father,” laughed the old woman, leaning over Paddy’s
chair; “you’d ha’ told sooner nor be scourged.”

We recalled Paddy’s naïve history of his flight from the pass on the
White Mountain and mentally agreed with her. Paddy, however, was an
Irishman pure, while Jack McSparron was descended from the Scottish
Covenanters, and had inherited from them the fortitude of an Ephraim
MacBriar.

“Go on, Paddy; your story is most interesting.”

The old man smiled, but he was hardly thinking of his visitors, the
picture brought back by memory so engrossed him.

“Jack wouldna’ gie the names o’ his comrades, an’ he was sentenced to
be flogged till he would tell. I mind Niel Sweenie, that was a comrade
boy o’ mine, an’ me went to Dungiven to see the flogging. We seen
Jack in a cart an’ his mother wi’ him, an’ all the way along the road
she was laying her commands upon him to die before he’d betray his
comrades. The army was marching all round the cart, an’ people frae
all the farmhouses an’ cottierhouses was following. Then we got into
Dungiven. I mind the crowds that was looking on, an’ me an’ Niel among
them.

“Jack got so many lashes, an’ then they’d stop an’ the officer would ax
him if he would tell now, an’ the old woman would call out, ‘Dinna give
in, Jack. Die like a man, my son. Think o’ the curses o’ the widows an’
orphans that wad follow you;’ an’ the poor boy would make answer, ‘Ay,
mother, I’ll die before I tell.’”

“Dear, dear, but that mother was the hard-hearted woman!” interrupted
Paddy’s daughter, glancing at her grandson, who happened to pass the
door at that moment with a creel of turf on his back.

Paddy did not heed her interruption; he was embarked on the full tide
of recollection—the horrible scene lived again before him. “They gave
him a great many lashes,” he continued; “I dinna mind how many hundred
it was, an’ each time they stopped he was asked if he would tell, an’
his mother still bid him die like a man, an’ his answer was still the
same. At long an’ at last the officer called out ‘Stop! would you kill
a game bird?’ an’ he was took down an’ put in the guard-room for the
night.

“Niel an’ me was invited in to tak’ a look at him, an’ we seen him
lying on his face on a table wi’ an ointment shirt on that the soldiers
had thrown over him. The officers gave orders that the whole country