Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348

“The brave man!” cried Charles; “the good man! Were there many such brave, good men in the old world, father?”

“Ay, that there were,” said Paulett; “many a glorious one; some known and some unknown, who did things which made one know one’s-self a glorious, an immortal creature. See there that ruined abbey—there lie the ashes of brave and good; these are their crumbled monuments—‘that fane where fame is A spectral resident!’ Alas, there is no fame, no name left!”

Paulett and Charles went down among the ruins of the abbey, and there, amidst the fallen stones and broken aisles, saw monumental marbles, old known names, and funeral inscriptions, contrasting strongly by their quiet character with the confusion around.

“Never forget them, Charles,” said Paulett. “These are names which the world has trembled at, and which are now like to be such as those before the Flood, barbarous to those who are building up a new order of things, and known merely as a barren catalogue of names. Yet, if you live, remember Edward the king here; remember the Black Prince; remember the days and heroes of Elizabeth; remember the poetry and the romance of the old world.”

“Ay, father, and I’ll remember the great name of him who taught you to print, and of Wicliffe the reformer, and of the man who gave you the steam-engine.”

Paulett smiled and sighed; he felt that his own ideas of things heroic were as much contrasted with those of Charles, as their notions of the beautiful. But he thought not to stem the stream.

“See here,” he said, pointing to some new monuments, which, like the old,   were cracked by fire; “there were many brave and good actions done, and one of those who did best was laid here. He was a clergyman, his name Host, and during the pestilence which came on in the fourth year, he was more like an inspired messenger of good than any mortal creature. You must know, Charles, that the teachers of religion at this time were greatly divided among themselves, and they had led a great portion of the lay world into their disputes. One party, in an age of reasoning, and when nothing in science was taken upon trust, gave up their reason altogether, and followed authority as blindly as they could—still, however, feeling the influence of the age; for they would argue upon the existence or non-existence of authority, and would fit it unconsciously each man to his own conceit. Indeed, superstition was the disease of the age, and while the healthy part of the community employed and enjoyed the freest use of their reason, this same infirmity appeared among other people in other forms; so that some men took up the notion that the human mind might act independently of sense, and see without eyes, and know intuitively what existed at a distance. Other parties, among professors of religion, allowed nothing in religion that they allowed daily in the evidence of other matters. They gave no weight to research, and thought, about religious facts; and dreamed that each one among themselves gained a kind of spiritual knowledge by inspiration. It was a time of conceits and quackery; but there was a better spirit abroad, of which this good man Host was the representative. He began in the pestilence, and went to all houses indifferently, whether they were princes or peasants; and there was a common-sense in what he did and said, a universal character in his religion, which struck men in these evil days. They drew nearer to each other under his influence; and I recollect this great building thronged in one of the last months that men continued here, with a congregation of all orders and all divisions of opinion, who met to pray together, and listen to Host. He stood yonder, Charles, as nearly there, I think, as I can tell from the ruins; he was rapt by his own discourse, and his face was as the face of an angel. And truly three days after, he was dead; and here they buried him—the last sound of the organ, the last service of this church, being for him. Here is his name still on the tombstone—

‘Host.
Pio. dilecto. beato.
Populus miserrimus.’”

Charles’s memory was deeply impressed with this history, and he followed his father, much engrossed and animated by what he had heard. Not so Paulett; for the ruins of London occupied his mind, and filled him with deep pity and regret for the fair world destroyed: and so they returned to their temporary habitation, the father sorrowful, the son exulting; one full of the old world, one dreaming great actions for the new.

After another day’s rest, the sole surviving family of mankind set forth again on their pilgrimage. Paulett again carried his Alice, and Ellen and Charles walked hand in hand with such a basket of necessaries as they could support. Paulett secured about his person a large packet of diamonds, collected in palaces and noble dwellings near London, and the apparatus he required for transmuting them into water; and searching for and finding the remains of the railroad to the coast, at Dover, they kept on in that track, which, from its evenness, offered facility to their journey. But in several places it had been purposely broken up, during the commotions which preceded the final triumph of the drought, and the tunnel near Folkestone had fallen in the middle from want of the necessary attention to the masonry. These difficulties seemed harder to bear than those which they had met with in the beginning of their pilgrimage, when their hopes of reaching a certain bourne were more secure. The destruction of London had thrown a deep gloom over all their expectations; and besides that help was removed to a much greater distance, they could not but feel it very probable that a similar fate might have befallen the other places they looked to. Nevertheless, none of them murmured. They went steadfastly though sadly on; and the two children, with   less knowledge of what was to be feared, were encouraged by their parents whenever they broke into a merrier strain. Alice was the happiest of the party, for she knew least. She was the one who suffered least also; for every one spared her suffering, and contrived that what remained on earth of luxury should be hers. She had the first draught of water; she was carried on her father’s shoulder; she ran to find pebbles, and whatever shone and glittered on their path; and when the others were silent, they heard with joy her infant voice singing, without words like a bird, in a covered tone, as they got wearily over mile by mile of their way. Ellen suffered most, though Paulett tried, by all means that remained, to lighten her fatigue and cheer her spirit. She bore up steadfastly; but her frame was slight, and her feelings were oppressed by the fearful aspect of things around her. They made a deep and deeper impression, and she was fain to look steadfastly on the faces of the few living, to recover from the effects of such universal death.

Paulett himself was shaken more than he knew, though he was as energetic as ever; but Charles was vigorous and advanced beyond his years, and took more than his share in aiding and in comforting. They came at last to what had been sea-coast, and to that part of the road which ran along the face of the cliff overlooking the sea; and here they paused, and gazed upon the wild and strange view before them. Where the sea had stretched all glorious in motion, expanse, and colour, there was now a deep valley, the bottom of which was rough with rocks, black for the most part, but in places glittering with the white salt from which the water had evaporated, and which the winds had rolled together. Further out from the coast, where the sea had been deepest, there seemed tracks of sand; and far away over this newly exposed desert, rose other hills, clearly seen through the unclouded atmosphere, and which they knew to be the rocks of France. And if they should arrive there, what was the hope they offered? Scarce any. Nothing but more pilgrimage, further wandering. Paulett and Ellen sat apart, while the children lay sleeping side by side, for an hour or two, at this point of their journey, and talked over the desolation before them.

“Yet,” said Paulett, “the more terrible is the appearance which material things put on, the greater I feel the triumph of the spirit to be. The worse it looks, the more immortal I feel; and when a perishing world shows itself most perishable, I exult most that you and I, Ellen, have borne it so far.”

“Yes, I am glad too,” said Ellen; “your strength strengthens me. In the midst of this desolation the mind rises, for an hour at least, higher perhaps than it would have ever done if we had been prosperous.”

“Yet we might have used our prosperity to the same good end,” said Paulett. “It is not necessary to be miserable in order to be noble. Millions have died before us, some in agony, some before the struggle began; some hardly, some at ease: they had all their chances; all had their occasions of virtue, if they used them; and some used them, some failed: ours is not over yet; we have to struggle on still; and let us do it, dear Ellen, and be ready for the good day when we too may be allowed to die.” And thus talking for a while, they rested themselves in sight of the desert they had to traverse; then with renewed strength and steadfast resolution, when the children woke, descended the cliffs, and prepared to trace out a path through what had been the bottom of the sea. The first part of the journey was infinitely difficult: the rocks over which foot of man had never passed; the abrupt precipices over which had flowed the even surface of the ocean, and then the height to climb again, again to find themselves on ledges and shelves of rocks—all these seemed at times hardly passable impediments. And when they got to a distance from what had been the shore, the unnatural place where they found themselves pressed upon the imagination. There was a plain of sand, about which at irregular distances rose rocks, which, north and south, stretched out beyond the reach of the eye; and this sand, which had been at such a depth that it never   felt the influence of the waves, was covered in places with shells, the inhabitants of which had perished when the waters gradually dried away. There lay mixed with these some skeletons of fishes; here a huge heap, and there small bones which looked less terrible; and masses of sea-weed, dried and colourless, under which, as it seemed, the creeping things of the ocean had sheltered for a while, and some had crawled to the surface when about to perish. But it was not only the brute creation which had died here: there was in the middle a pile of rocks, on one side of which they came suddenly to a pit, so deep and dark that they perceived no bottom; and here probably there had been seawater longer than elsewhere, for there were human bones about it, and skulls of men, and human garbs, which the sun had faded, but which were not disturbed by waves. There was a cord and a metal jar attached to it, for lowering into the pit; but Paulett, as he looked at the attitudes of the remaining skeletons, and observed how they seemed distorted in death, fancied that they must have brought up either poisoned water, or waters so intensely salt as to drive them mad with the additional thirst; and that some had died on the instant, some had lingered, some had sought to succour others, and yielded sooner or later to the same influence. Ellen and he would not dwell on the sight after the first contemplation of it; they passed on, shuddering, and made toward the great wall of rock which they saw rising to the south, and which must be their way to the land of France. But before they reached it the sun began to decline, and without light it was in vain to attempt to seek a path. There was a wind keener than they had felt of late, which came from the west, and the little Alice pressed on her father’s bosom to shield her from it. He wrapped her closer in a cloak, and they resolved to put themselves under the shelter of the first rock they reached, and pass the night in the channel of the sea. They pressed on, and found at last the place they sought; a cliff which must once have raised its head above the waves, and which now stood like some vast palace wall, bare and huge, upon the ocean sand. Screened from the wind, they collected an abundance of the dried vegetation of the sea, partly for warmth and to roast their corn, partly for Paulett to dissolve some of the diamonds into water; and here they rested, here they slept, many fathoms below that level over which navies used to sail. At times during the night Paulett fancied, when the wind abated, that he heard a sound like thunder, or like what used to be the rushing of a distant torrent; and occasionally he thought he felt a vibration in the earth as if it were shaken by some moving body. The region he was in was so strange that he knew not what might be here, or what about to happen; the sounds so imperfect that he tormented himself to be sure of them, or to be sure they were not; and when the time for action came he was beginning to disbelieve them altogether; but Alice brought all back again by saying, “My rock” (for her cradle was a rock) “shook my head, father.” The child could explain herself no further; but the vibration he had fancied seemed to be what she had felt. And now they climbed again, and again descended weary rock after rock; it was a strange chaos, which the tides had swept and moulded, and which had in places risen to the surface, and caused the wreck of many a vessel. Fragments of these lay under the rocks they had split upon, but the wandering family had no thoughts for them; wonder and pity had been exhausted among exciting and terrific scenes. They thought only of forcing their way over the rocks, and feared to think how much of this they had to traverse before they should come to what had been the shore, and to towns.

Suddenly, as they toiled forward, Paulett said in a low voice to Ellen, “Don’t you hear it?”

“I have heard it a long time,” said Ellen in the same tone; and Charles stopping as well as they, said, “Father, what is that?”

“I can’t tell, my boy,” said Paulett, listening.

“Water?” asked Ellen.

Paulett shook his head, yet they all pressed forward, and there grew a thundering sullen sound. There was   a valley and a ridge of rock before them, and they had to clamber first down the rugged precipice they were upon, then to cross the valley, and then to struggle up the opposite side, a trembling motion growing perceptible as they advanced, before they stood on a sort of broad ledge, which they perceived at the angles that jutted out, went down straight into a depth, and opposite which was another broad table-land of rock, between which and that they were upon was a rent, wider and narrower in various parts, and running along as far as they could see to right and left. Paulett rushed on to the brink, and stood looking. He put his hand out to keep Ellen back when he heard her close behind; but she also sprang to the edge, and when she had seen turned to catch Charles in her arms. Rushing past was a torrent, but not water. It was dark, thick, pitchy; it sent up hot steams to the edge: it was one of the secrets of nature, laid bare when the ocean was taken away. Fire seemed to be at work below, for occasionally it would boil with more violence, and rush on with an increased, increasing noise, then sullenly fall back to the first gloomy sound. It bewildered the sense; and though it could threaten no more than death, yet it was death with so many horrors around it, that the body and mind both shrank from it. How was it possible, too, to cross it? Yet their way lay over it; for behind was certain destruction, and before it was not yet proved impossible that they might find the element of water. Paulett felt that it would not do to linger on the brink; he drew his family away from the sight, and he himself went up and down to find some narrower place, and some means by which to make a bridge over the abyss; and it was not till their assistance could avail him that he returned for them, and brought them to the place where he hoped to get over. It was a fearful point, for in order to reach a space narrow enough to have a chance of throwing a plank over, it was necessary to go down the broken side of the precipice some twenty feet, and there, high above the seething lava, to cross on such a piece of wood as could be got to span the abyss, and then clamber up the rugged opposite side. Paulett had been down to the point he selected, and had got timber, which a wrecked vessel had supplied, to the edge, so that Ellen and Charles might push a plank down to him, and he might try, at least, to cast it to the opposite bank. His head was steady, his hand strong; no one of them spoke a word while he stood below, steadying himself to receive the plank. Ellen’s weak arm grew powerful; her wit was ready with expedients, to aid him in this necessity. Her frame and spirit were strung to the very uttermost, and she was brave and silent, doing all that could be done. No word was spoken till Paulett said, “I have done it;” and Ellen and Charles had seen him place the plank, and secure it on his own side of the abyss with stones. Then they held their breath, beholding him cross it; but his firm foot carried him safely, and he heaped stones on the other side also. He came over again, sprang up the side, and now smiled and spoke.

“After all it is but a mountain torrent, Ellen,” he said, “and the water would have destroyed us like yonder seething flood; yet we have crossed many a one and feared nothing. Now Charles shall go over; then Alice, and he shall take care of her; and then my Ellen. The ground beyond is better; we shall get on well after this.”

Ellen took the girl in her arms, and stood, not trembling, not weeping; seeing and feeling every motion; all was safe that time again, Charles was on the opposite bank, and his father waved his hand to Ellen. He came back for Alice, whom her mother tied on his shoulders, for hands as well as feet were wanted to scramble down and up the banks. And now Ellen followed to the brink, and forgot, in watching her husband and child pass over, that the black torrent was seething beneath her eyes. When they were quite safe, she felt again that it was there, and that her eyes were growing dizzy, and her hands involuntarily grasping about for support. She did not take time to feel more, but sprang upon the plank, and   over it, and found Paulett’s hand seizing hers, and drawing her up the opposite bank.

And once there, with all the three round her, she burst into tears—tears which had not overcome her through many miseries—and embracing them alternately, blessed them that they were all so far safe. Paulett suffered this emotion to spend itself before he said that he must cross the plank again. To be more at liberty to assist them, he had left the diamonds on the other side, till they should be over. Ellen offered no remonstrance. The times had so schooled them all, that selfish or unreasonable thoughts either did not come at all, or were suppressed at once; and she did not oppose, even with a word, this necessary step. But the renewal of fear, after the excited energy had subsided, did her more harm than all that had gone before; and she stood on the brink exhausted, yet palpitating again, while Paulett made the passage. He himself was wearied; but he had reached the plank, and was upon it on his way back to safety, when one of those ebullitions which stirred the dark fluid began roaring down the cleft rock, and with stunning noise sent up dark and clouding vapour. Paulett seemed suffocating—he could not be heard—he could but just be seen—he reeled! Has he fallen? Oh, he has fallen! No—no! he has got his footing again; he forces himself up the bank; he is safe—but the diamonds are in the bottom of the pit.

Chapter VI

The exhausted family toiled with difficulty over the remaining passage to what had been the mainland, and reached a village on the former coast, under a roof of which they entered, and lay down on the floor of the first room they came to. Their supply of water was almost out; the materials for producing more were gone; and there seemed little chance of finding any in the neighbourhood. “Death was here;” and yet the exhaustion of their frames led them to sleep before they died, and to seek and enjoy a taste of that oblivion which was soon to fall upon them with an impenetrable shroud. All but Ellen were soon asleep; but she, the most wearied of all, could not close her eyes and admit rest to her overwrought frame. There was a burning thirst in her throat, which the small portion of water she and the rest had shared—being all that remained for them—had failed to slake. She had not complained of it; but she rejoiced when she heard them asleep, that she could rise and move restlessly about. The night was hot, and yet the west wind continued to blow strongly; the moon shone, but scarcely with so bright a light as usual—there was a film upon it, or perhaps, Ellen thought, it was the dimness of her own weary eyes. She came softly up to Paulett, and watched his frame, half naked in the unconsciousness of sleep, and upon which none of the ravages of want and exertion were now concealed. The flesh was wasted; the strong chest showed the bones of the skeleton; the arms which had so strained their powers were thin, and lay in an attitude of extreme exhaustion. His sleep was deep; his lips open; his eyelids blue; he would wake in want; and soon he would be able to sleep no more, till the last sleep of all came in torment and anguish. Poor Charles lay by him, his head on his father’s body for a pillow, his limbs drawn somewhat together, his clusters of brown hair parted off his pale thin cheek; and Alice, the darling Alice, with more colour in her face than any of them, slept in deep repose, destined, perhaps, to live last, and to call in vain on those whose cares had hitherto kept her healthier and happier than themselves. The mother groaned with anguish; she measured what these were about to suffer, by all she began to suffer herself; and the sight of them seemed to sear the burning eyes which could no longer weep. She sat down on the floor by Alice; her head fell against the wall; she caught at a little rosary which hung near her, and pressed it in her mouth,   the comparative coolness of the beads giving her a little ease; her face fell on her bosom.

When Paulett woke out of his deep sleep, and as soon as he stirred, the little Alice came on tiptoe across the floor to him, and said, “Hush, father! my mother is asleep at last.”

“At last, my Alice! What! Could not she sleep?”

“I think she could not sleep. I woke up, and there was my mother; and Charles woke presently, and she said Charles should go out and try to bring back some cold stones in a cup, and then presently she sat down again, and went to sleep.”

He rose softly, and taking the little girl by the hand, came up to Ellen’s side, and looked upon her. She was lying at full length on the floor; her head was toward him, but her face was turned upon the ground, and her hair further hid it; her right arm was fallen forward, and the back of that hand lay in the palm of the other. He did not hear nor see her breathe. “Is it so, my Ellen?” he said. “Art thou at rest? Is there no farewell for me?” He kneeled and stooped lower and lower. His lip did not venture to feel hers; he longed that she might be free, yet shrank from knowing that she was gone. But no; she had not ceased to suffer; a low sigh came at last, and her parched mouth opened.

“Water!” she said; then lifted her eyes and saw Paulett, and remembered all by degrees. “Is not there a little? Oh, no—none! Nay, I shall not want it soon!” She turned her face on Paulett’s breast, and soon after tried to rise and push herself from him. “Leave me, dear husband; kiss me once, and leave me; try to save them!”

But Paulett folded his arms round her. “Not so, my Ellen; the chances of life are so little, that it is lawful for me to give them up, unless we can all seek them together. Alas! all I can do is but to see thee die! Oh, if I could give thee one minute’s ease!”

“Alas! you must all die like this,” said Ellen, who was perishing like one of the flowers that had died in the drought for want of rain. Water would have saved that life, spared those sufferings. That burning hand, those gasping lips, those anxious eyes, revealed what the spirit passing away in that torment would fain have concealed. “Alice, come near me; hold my hand, Alice. Are you thirsty, poor child? Oh, do not grieve your father! It will be but a short time, my little girl—be patient.” Ellen tried to kiss her; her husband kneeled and raised her head on his shoulder, bending his face on her forehead, and murmuring the last farewell—the last thanks—the agony of his pity for her suffering. The poor child threw herself on her mother, gazing upward in want, and grief, and bewilderment, in her face. “My Charles,” said the mother, feeling about with the other hand, but she did not find his head to bless it. “My Charles,” she repeated in a fainter tone, and her eyelids drooped over the hot eyes.

Paulett saw nothing but his suffering wife, heard nothing except her painful breath. At that moment the door opened, and Charles stood there, paler than ever, with glittering eyes. He held the cup towards his father. “Father,” he said, “there is water coming down from heaven!”

Paulett looked up and cried, “O God, it rains!”

A TENDER CONSCIENCE

I have a story to tell you, my dear Eusebius, of a tender conscience. It will please you; for you delight to extract good out of evil, and find something ever to say in favour of the “poor wretches of this world’s coinage,” as you call them; thus gently throwing half their errors, and scattering them among a pretty large society to be responsible for them; provided only they be wretches by confession, that dare not hide themselves in hypocrisy. In all such cases you show that you were born with the genius of a beadle, and (strange conjunction) the tenderest of hearts. I believe that you would stand an hour at a pillory, and see full justice done to a delinquent of that caste; and would as willingly, in your own person, receive the missiles that you would attempt to ward off from the contrite wretch, whose sins might not have been woefully against human kindness. Could you choose your seat in the eternal mansions, it would be among the angels that rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. You can distinguish in another the feeblest light of conscience that ever dimly burned, and see in it the germ of a beautiful light, that may one day, by a little fanning and fostering, shine as a star, and shed a vital heat that may set the machinery of the heart in motion to throw off glorious actions. But let not the man that shams a conscience come in your way. I have seen you play off such an one till he has burst forth—up, up, up, aiming at the skies, nothing less, in his self-glorification; and how have you despised him, and exhibited him to all bystanders as nothing but a poor stick in his descent! These human rockets are at their best but falling stars—cinders incapable of being rekindled. Commend me to the modest glow-worms, that shine only when they think the gazing world is asleep, and dwell in green hedges, and fancy themselves invisible to all eyes but those of love.

There are persons, and of grave judgments too, who verily believe that the quantity of conscience amongst mankind is not worth speaking of, and treat of human actions as entirely independent of it. And this fault honest Montaigne finds with Guicciardini:—“I have also,” says he, “observed this in him, that of so many persons and so many effects, so many motives and so many counsels as he judges of, he never attributes any one of them to virtue, religion, or conscience, as if all those were utterly extinct in the world; and of all the actions, however brave an outward show they make, he always throws the cause and motive upon some vicious occasion, or some prospect of profit. It is impossible to imagine but that, amongst such an infinite number of actions as he makes mention of, there must be some one produced by the way of reason. No corruption could so universally have affected men, that some of them would not have escaped the contagion, which makes me suspect that his own taste was vicious; from whence it might happen that he judged other men by himself.” You, Eusebius, will be perfectly of Montaigne’s opinion. We would rather trust that there are few in whom this moral principle has no vitality whatever. The wayside beggar, when he divides his meal—which, perhaps, he has stolen—with his dog, acts from its kind impulse; and see how uncharitable I am at my first impulse, to suppose, to suggest that the meal is stolen—so ready are we to steal away virtues, one after the other, and in our judgments to be thieves upon a large scale. And so a better feeling pricks me to charity. I doubt if we ought even to say that the parliamentary reprobate, who openly confessed “that he could not afford to keep a conscience,” had none—he was but dead to some of its motions. If it were not that it must be something annexed to an immortal condition, would you not, Eusebius, say that the beggar’s dog conscientiously makes his return of service and gratitude for the scraps thrown to him? See him by the gipsies’ tent: how safely can the infant children be left to his sole care by the roadside! It is a beautiful sight to see the sagacious, the faithful creature, watching   while they sleep, and lying upon the outer fold of the blanket that enwraps them. Has he not a sense of duty—a sort of bastard conscience? And what is truly wonderful, is, that animals have often a sense of duty against their instincts. If it be said that they act through fear of punishment, it is a punishment their instincts would teach them to avoid; and, after all, this fear of punishment may be a mighty ingredient in most men’s consciences. We learn that immense numbers of ducks are reared by that part of the Chinese population who spend their lives in boats upon the rivers; and these birds, salted and dried, form one of the chief articles of diet in the celestial land. They are kept in large cages or crates, from which, in the morning, they are sent forth to seek their food upon the river banks. A whistle from their keeper brings them back in the evening; and as, according to Tradescent Lay, the last to return receives a flogging for his tardiness, their hurry to get back to the boats, when they hear the accustomed call, is in no small degree amusing. I cannot but think that there must be something like a sense of duty in these poor creatures, that they thus of themselves, and of good-will return to the certainty of being salted and dried. This may sound very ridiculous, Eusebius, but there is matter in it to muse upon; and if we want to know man, we must speculate a little beyond him, and learn him by similities and differences. He has best knowledge of his own home and country who has wandered into a terra incognita, and studied the differences of soil and climate. And besides that every man is a world to himself, and may find a terra incognita in his own breast, it is not amiss to look abroad into other wildernesses, where he will find instincts that are not so much any creature’s but that they have something divine in them, and so, in their origin at least, akin to his own. He will find conscience of some sort growing in the soil of every heart. It is not amiss to discover where it grows most healthily, and by what deadly nightshade its virtue may be suffocated, and its nicer sense not thrive.

Surprising is the diversity;—were not nature corrupted, there would be no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep thinker, “Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim of the horizon and elsewhere. Truly this same sense of the infinite nature of duty, is the central part of all within us; a ray as of eternity and immortality immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your coloured glass varies so much from century to century—and in certain money-making, game-preserving centuries, it gets terribly opaque. Not a heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant, leaden, cold hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this coloured glass; now, may it not become at once translucent and uncoloured? Painting no pictures more for us, but only the everlasting azure itself. That will be a right glorious consummation.” If it were only the painting pictures! but we act the painted scenes. And strange they are, and of diversity enough. It was the confession of an apostle, that he “thought with himself that he ought to do many things contrary” to his master. There are national consciences how unlike each other; there are consciences of tribes and guilds, which, strange to say, though they be composed of individuals, bear not the stamp of any one individual conscience among them. They apologise to themselves for iniquity by a division and subdivision of the responsibility; and thus, by each owning to but a little share collectively, they commit a great enormity. It is the whole and sole responsibility of the individual, responsibility to that inner arbiter sitting foro conscientiæ, and the sight of those frowning attendants of the court, Nemesis and Adraste, ready with the scourge to follow crime,   that keep the man honest. Put not confidence, Eusebius, in bodies, in guilds, and committees. Trust not to them property or person; they may be all individually good Samaritans, but collectively they will rather change places with the thieves than bind up your wounds. In this matter, “Experto crede Roberto.”

But of this diversity.—The Turk will split his sides with laughter, against the very nature, too, of his Turkish gravity, should he witness the remorse of the subdued polygamist. We read of nations who, from a sense of duty, eat their parents, and would shudder at the crime of burying them in the earth, or burning them. So is there a cannibalism of love as well as of hatred. Sinbad’s terror at the duty of being buried alive with his deceased wife, the king’s daughter, was no invention beyond the probability of custom. The Scythians, as Herodotus tells us, thought it an honourable act and no murders committed, when they slaughtered the king’s councillors and officers of state, and guards and their horses, on which they stuck them upright by skewers, to be in death the king’s attendants. The suttee is still thought no wrong. There is habit of thought that justifies habit of deed. Southey, in his History of the Brazils, tells a sad tale of a dying converted Indian. In her dying moments, cannibalism prevailed over Christian conscience; and was the Pagan conscience silent? She was asked by those standing about her, if they could do any thing for her. She replied, that she thought she could pick the bones of a little child’s hand, but that she had no one now who would go and kill her one. I dare to say, Eusebius, she died in peace. The greater part of the world die in peace. Their conscience may be the first part of then that departs—it is dead before the man—most say, I have done no harm. I have known a man die in the very effort of triumphant chuckling over his unfortunate neighbours, by his successful fraud and over-reaching; yet, perhaps, this man’s conscience was only dead as to any sense of right and wrong in this particular line; very possibly he had “compunctious visitings” about “mint and cumine”—and oh! human inconsistency, some such have been known to found hospitals—some spark of conscience working its way into the very rottenness of their hearts, that, like tinder, have let out all their kindred and latent fire, till that moment invisible, all but in posse non-existent. But for any thing like a public conscience so kindling since the repentance of the Ninevites, it is not to be thought of. The pretence of such a thing is a sign of the last state of national hypocrisy. It was not that sense which emancipated the Negroes and forbade the slave trade. Take, for example, the Portuguese, and their “board of conscience” at Lisbon, which they set up to quiet the remorse, if any should exist, of those who had bought the miserable natives of Reoxcave, when they sold themselves and their children for food. This very convenient scruple was started in “the court, to sanction the purchase, that if these so purchased slaves were set free, they might apostatize!” Now, who were the judges in such a court? Oh! the villany of the whole conclave!—yet was each individual, perhaps, of demure and sanctimonious manners, to whom the moral eye of a people looked—villains all in the guise of goodness:—

“Vir bonus, omne forum quem spectat et omne tribunal,
Quandocuncque Deos vel porco vel bove placat,
Jane Pater, clare, clare, cum dixit, Apollo,
Labra movet metuens audiri—Pulchra Laverna,
Da mihi fallere, da justum sanctumque videri,
Noctem peccatis et fraudibus objice nubem.”

We are told that there is such a disease as a cannibal madness, and that it was common among the North American savages; that those seized with it have a raving desire for human flesh, and rush like wolves upon all they meet. Now, in what was this court of conscience better than these cannibals? Better! a thousand times worse—for wolves are honest. Now   I well know, Eusebius, how I have put a coal under the very fountain of your blood—and it is boiling at a fine rate. Let me allay it, and follow the stage directions of “soft music;” only on this occasion we omit the music, and take the rhyme. So here do I exhibit conscience in its playful vein. Our friend S., the other day, repeated me off the following lines; he cannot remember where he had them—he says it was when a boy that he met with them somewhere. Call it the Conscientious Toper; yet that is too common—it is the characteristic of all topers—never was one that could not find an excuse. Drink wonderfully elicits moral words, to compound for immoral deeds. Call it then—

The Controversy

No plate had John and Joan to hoard—
Plain folks in humble plight—
One only tankard graced their board,
But that was fill’d each night;

Upon whose inner bottom, sketch’d
In pride of chubby grace,
Some rude engraver’s hand had etch’d
A baby angel’s face.

John took at first a moderate sup—