HALF-AN-HOUR IN GOOD COMPANY. BY JOVEN. Wagh! This chief is smitten and sad: on the hunting-grounds of his brothers he looks with a languid and a jaundiced eye. Time was when he was fleet of foot, when his tomahawk was bright, when his arrows were keen. His mocassins trod in pleasant places; he camped out upon the rolling prairies in a happy mood: he tracked the mighty buffalo-he laid that mighty buffer low! The tobacco in his calumet was pleasant to the palate and odorous to the nostril now it is dusty, and tasteless, and dry! A shadow from the Dark Spirit has passed before the chief: he folds his robes around him with a gloomy and a sullen air. As he enters his wigwam, at eve, the warriors and the squaws recoil, whispering, "Our brother is sick!" A cloud is upon him, and it will not awayWagh! Our spirits and our tempers have their ups and downs. At present, I am "All in the Downs." "All in the Downs," drifting towards the Goodwin Sands: this gallant barque (I have changed the figure) lies at the mercy of the winds and tides! A cold fog has coiled around her; her crew are shamefully asleep, lulled by the weary wash of the waters. Thou sea monotonous, moan not on us! Again to change the figure, the present writer is aweary, aweary! Vainly does he try to argue himself into cheerfulness and joy; vainly does he scoff at his depression, attributing it to dyspepsia and over-much tobacco; vainly does he fling his head into cold water; vainly does he rub himself with coarse towels; vainly does he practise the "extension movements!" All these things, which were wont to rouse, leave him moping still. All of us are governed, more or less, by the barometer. I, in particular (here the pronoun is changed) am acutely affected by "Set fair," and "Much rain." But now I cannot lay the blame of my bad spirits on the weather. The weather is noble. Frosty, and clear, with a tingling wind-it would almost stimulate into life and energy a torpid dormouse! Nevertheless I, although worth (I trust) several dormice, sit here in a weary, lackadaisical, sentimental manner. It may be permitted to me to mention that my appetite is good, and that five minutes ago I consumed a chop. I know that my state of mind is not English. By no English word, then, shall it be described. It is not ennui; it is malaise ! although ludicrous to me for its affected name "Plume Philopapyrienne!" here are sundry long, thin slips of paper, akin to those whereupon Count Fosco did indite his confession. Finally, here is ink. I have a clear conviction that, if I set myself doggedly to work, I shall manage to write myself into a Tapleyan state of mind. True it is, I have no subject: but I do not see why that should stop me. On the whole, I rather prefer not having a subject: it leaves one so much freedom! It is obviously impossible to wander from the path when there is no path to wander from. The gipsy essayist enjoys a beautiful liberty! What cares he for milestones or finger-posts? If he chooses to squat under a hedge and chatter of green fields, who shall rebuke him? Tell him that he is digressive, illogical, incoherent, he answers that he never pretended to be anything else, and then cuts a caper expressive of triumph. If he set forth with the intention of proving that three and three make six, and then digressed into a rhapsody about clover, you would have a perfect right to complain: but when he proclaims his little wanton ways, when he says that it is in his very nature to be circuitous and zig-zaggy, that for the very life of him he cannot keep straight any more than yonder little brook can run up hill, surely, when all this is premised, writer and reader understand each other! The latter is not bound to read, and can easily spare himself that trouble. There is no bribery and no intimidation. Both parties start fair. What has become of the good old essay? Where do we now find lucubrations, headed, "On Speculation," or, "Of a Prospect in Kent"? A friend of mine informs me that essays do not pay; that the public cannot be got to care for them; that tales are the only things to which young writers should devote themselves. The present young writer went home, and tried a tale; but, on the very threshold of his task, he felt the want of a story. He had a pleasing description by him, full of nice adjectives and the sweetest interjections: he also saw his way clearly to a moral, of an elevating though not ascetic character: recent residence in the west of England had provided him with some very nice names for his characters. One thing alone was wanted-the story. He thought of a little tale of De Balzac's, which might be easily adapted. But, by the feeble glimmer of his wavering conscience, he saw that this would Now, I am not going to be beaten. My pre- scarcely be writing a tale himself, and he resent desire is to lie down on my back, and take a frained. Seriously, the ingenuity and fertility grumbling view of the ceiling. The thing of all of professional story-tellers are enough to fill things which I would rather not do is-write! one with wonder. Take some of the most proThis thing, therefore, I will do. Here is my desk,lific of our minor writers: there is no originality here is my bone-pen, dear to me for its rapidity, in them, no real depth of feeling, though in finite sinulation thereof, no great power even of mere writing. But what ingenuity! How these trifles, all framed upon some two or three wellknown models, are cunningly varied, and yet have all some kind of cohesion-do hang together, somehow or other! platitudes in full-bottomed wigs. If I must have platitudes, let me have my own, in pegtop trousers and turn-down collars: let them have reference to Garibaldi; Mr. Toole, as Bluebeard, Gaeta, and Balfe's Bianca. Let them have the image of the time, "its form and pressure." Dr. Hawkesworth died in 1773, and has a monument at Bromley in Kent. I am very fond of Bromley, and I have no disrespect for the year 1773; but why should I be compelled to read Dr. Hawkesworth? Because he is bound up as a British essayist? I protest that the full-bottomed-wig essayists of my native land have given a respectability to dulness, which alone has made Alison possible as a historian, and Tupper possible as a moralist. I sometimes shudder when I think how many good young people are taught to believe in the stultifying stilted stuff of some of our "politest writers," while they never have the chance of looking into " Hackluyt's Voyages," or reading Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess." For all this, and all this, shall the personal and egotistical essay be forgotten? Forbid it, shade of Montaigne! Forbid it, shade of Charles Lamb! 66 The Saturday Review," a year or two ago, made a violent onslaught on “A. K. H. B.” (the genial essayist, whose pleasant pages have adorned so many numbers of "Fraser's Magazine") touching "Smith's Drag"; how he, the said A. K. H. B., having to review a philosophical work of right abstruse and mystic character, did diverge into a brisk and readable description of his friend Smith's "trap." Manfully did the four initials reply unto this attack; manfully did their owner plead for full liberty of writing, for the privilege of making his articles amusing, and of introducing his own personality thereinto. Ars celare "Ware Doctor Johnson! we "hot youth," artem is a good motto: also it may be true that who sometimes speak evil of dignitaries, are the noblest artist is he who is hidden behind his ready, nevertheless, to doff our turbans to picture. Certain it is, that, in looking at the Fleet street sage. I never could read "RasRaphael's Madonna, you do not think of selas" more than once: I never read "Irene" Raphael himself: certain it is, that, in reading at all. Am I the only one who has to make the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth," you this confession? But when I think of the huge, never think of Master William Shakespeare, of bulky, unwieldy, scrofulous man, with his Stratford-upon-Avon. After all, however, there heart as pure as a little child's, and as tender are faggots and faggots. Granted that the ob- oftentimes as that of a mother; when I think of ject of the artist is to produce a beautiful pic-the poor outcast, whom he carried on his back ture, surely you don't object to be admitted to through London streets; when I think of his his studio and hear him talk as he works? If my friend Crayon, the Pre-Raphaelite (often mentioned in these pages) kindly tells me where he did see these particular specimens of freckled rusticity at which I am gazing, I am beartily . obliged to Crayon for his information. Unless the work is of a sublime and sacred character, I rather enjoy a morning in the workshop. This, the egotistical essayist readily allows you. He opens the door of his library, points to one shelf of books after another-even descants upon the view from his windows-gives you the history of yonder village-church; tells you the legend of yonder Elizabethan mansion. To me, the literature of personal gossip has an endless charm. I can't always keep my nerves screwed up to the pitch of "Paradise Lost." There are times when it is ridiculously impossible for me to read Johann Gottlieb Fichte; times when Wordsworth's "Excursion" sends me off into a deep and prolonged slumber. But I can always take down a volume of Montaigne with the certainty of passing an agreeable half-hour. The essayist becomes your friend as well as your teacher. The style of essay beginning with "It hath ever been observed that the credulity of mankind not only," and ending with-" So true it is that our sanguine expectations ever overshoot the mark," is a style of essay for which I have no particular love. The "British essayists," who figure in our libraries, inspire me with feelings of the gloomiest repugnance. I don't like sallying forth to buy a pennyworth of meat for his cat, because his negro was too proud to fetch it; when I think of that awful letter in which, once and for ever, and with one terrific, Nasmyth's-hammer kind of blow, he demolished Lord Chesterfield and Lord Tom Noddy, and made the profession of literature respectable for all future time-I make the lowest possible salaam to him, and wish I could have had the opportunity to black his boots! Yet, he is ponderous, ce cher Johnson; is he not? Out of Boswell, he has always his Sunday coat on; and I defy you to be intimate with a man who always wears his Sunday coat. He was grand, he was massive: so was the Mastodon, and he couldn't have been a pleasing companion for every day! Always, for ten men who admire Johnson, there will be a hundred who love Goldsmith. Goldsmith's Essays, it rejoiceth me to say, can now be obtained, in legible modern print, for a handful of the new bronze coinage. And can we spread them too widely? Where else shall we find so cheerful and genial a moralist? Given all his follies, given all his frailties, was there ever in this world a man who could read him and not love him? So tender, so childlike, so full of airy grace and delicacy, so true-hearted, so exquisitely and bewitchingly wayward and wanton, he is the spoilt child of the English race. You can't laugh with a manly scorn at his absurdities: man never lived who could do it. When Goldsmith was most pre-eminently a tom-fool, he was most irresistibly a loveable angel. Why, the very vanity of the man-which had Johnson possessed, he would have been a kind of comic elephant-his little freaks of sheer ridiculous nonsense, you cannot help pardoning, almost loving. And here a word about his Poetry. I hardly know what the esprits forts, the " exalted" young men of the present day, think of it. I am not an "exalted" young man myself. I don't belong to any clique or set. I don't believe that the present age is the only one that has produced true poets or poetry. I believe something exceedingly different. Now, Goldsmith wrote in the heroic couplet, and the heroic couplet is sadly out of fashion. To believe in poetry between the death of Milton and the first publications of Cowper may seem like heresy. Then, I am a heretic. I confess to thinking Goldsmith one of the very sweetest of our poets. Nobody says he had a very fiery or fervid imagination-nor was he addicted to daffodils overmuch; but for gentle truth, and serene simplicity, and a loving affectionate spirit, match me Goldsmith if you can amongst the spasmodic gentlemen of the present day, who never deal in anything less exciting than spuming stars or shrieking cataracts. Surely that "Deserted Village" of his will retain its charm for ages! It may be too rose-coloured. The village may be one the like of which for innocence and happiness, existed never upon this naughty old earth; but at any rate it is a lovely dream-an adorable picture, fresh and beautiful to a boy's eyes as a girl's eyes, nor losing its charms when viewed with a gaze more critical in after-life. I have wandered into such pleasant company that I have quite forgotten how I am All in the Downs. Behold the ambrosial-wigged Addison, whom I have endeavoured to become fond of, without success. Behold the wineflushed face, the dirty ruffles, of dear Sir Richard Steele. Hail, thou immortal Bohemian of the "Augustan Age!" Bohemian, without cynicism, without scepticism, without jealousy! Immortal, if only for that one most glorious expression, applied to a noble lady: that "To love her was a liberal education !" Such a phrase seems to purify a man-at any rate to build up a little sacred chapel in his nature, cool and sweet, and freshened by pious thoughts and the tenderest memories. One needs such little chapels very sorely. When you enter them, it is like turning away from a crowded market-place, hot with chaffering and brawling, into the dim aisles of the neighbouring cathedral, whose very stones seem like words in one grand organic enduring prayer. Assuredly, Steele did let ginger be hot in his mouth to a quite ruinous extent. But Addison? I fancy Addison becoming preternaturally dignified and moral when the wine mounted in his head. Somehow, the weaknesses of Addison cannot get themselves pardoned so readily as poor Steele's. Dick knew that he was a sad dog, and he was very sorry, and "he really would turn over a new leaf next Monday week;" whereas, it is my solemn conviction that whenever Addison woke in the morning with a racking headache-and that sensation will occur even to a distinguished essayistAddison would get calmly out of bed, survey himself in his mirror with a balmy and beatified smile, and proceed to remark: "It must be so-Plato, thou reasonest well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, or else: "As I was surveying the moon walking in her brightness, and taking her progress amongst the constellations, a thought rose in me which I believe very often perplexes and disturbs men of serious and contemplative natures.' After this, Addison, as a man of a serious and contemplative nature, would put on his biggest wig, and feel himself considerably better. There were strong men before Agamemnon, and there have been stronger since. Turn we now to two essayists of our own century, and challenge our fathers to name their equals. And first, let us gossip about Charles Lamb. When a man is "All in the Downs," I don't know that he can do better than read dear Charles; not merely to chuckle at his sweet slyness, not merely to have his feelings stirred and purified at once by pathos as sincere and tender as ever flowed from human pen, but also to see how Charles bore himself through a life in which "All in the Downs" kept constantly singing itself as a disagreeable chorus, a remorseless refrain. Why, the man's life is to me almost the most pathetic ever lived! Let us think of the awful haunting dread that hung around him, ever and ever. Let us remember that the brain, which teemed with fancies so rare that Shakespeare's self would have listened with delight to them, had Lamb lived in the great Mermaid days-that this brain had, by God's mysterious providence, been vexed and wearied once into madness, and that madness, ever after, was present to his fearful thoughts!that the dread of utter insanity, which has startled every thinking man once or twice in his life, was amongst Lamb's constant fancies and fears! The most awful words in Shakespeare are these five of King Lear: "Let me not go mad!" No reader, I think, can have forgotten how Lamb and his sister were seen, walking slowly through the fields towards the asylum to which he was taking her, "both weeping bitterly." I have thought of that terrible walk, sometimes, until those tears have seemed to scorch me. A bright clear day-the lark singing in the skythe grasshopper chirping beneath the hedgequiet sunlight flooding the broad fields: and these two, brother and sister, walking slowly on, "both weeping bitterly;" she knowing that she would be mad to-morrow, and he, perchance mercifully spared by the very acuteness and spasm of his sorrow for her, from remembering that, in a day or two, his own turn might come. Pour yet this one little black drop into Charles Lamb's chalice: to take his sister to the mad house he had to ask for a holiday. It was his "day out."...... And he wrote the Essay on Roast Pig! He painted Sarah Battle, in her clean-swept room, insisting on the "rigour of the game." He wrote to Manning, when Manning thought of going to Tartary: "Some say they are cannibals: and imagine a Tartar fellow eating my friend, and adding the cool malignity of mustard and vinegar!"-which is, to me, the funniest conceit in our tongue. O what an Ariel-spirit was this, chained to, or in, the "desk's dry wood!" What a brain, to keep books in Leadenhall-street! And how nobly he did it! If a man wants strengthening or refreshing, if his way of life seems mean and mechanical, if his brain gets impatient of "invoices" and indignant at "deeds," let him think of Lamb's long servitude, and take heart of grace, seeing how this dear and precious spirit bore it. I vow that he seems to sanctify the East India House, and that the odour of his memory sweeps like a refreshing breeze through every court in the City, till a ledger becomes as sweet as a lyre. I very lately re-read his "Letters," and I do not remember a book which has more moved me. Let us not forget his frailties. There is nothing in the man which we have a right to forget! Let every excuse which love and charity have ever made for Robert Burns, be multiplied tenfold when it is brought forward to plead for Charles Lamb. I do not find that he was wont to talk of the "infirmities of genius," or seek to justify error by sophistry. When he even, with that rich humouristic nature of his, makes fun of his failings, he does not try to excuse them. I fancy that he could scarcely see to write those letters through his tears. Was that a laugh you heard? It was surely a very strange, broken one! It surely made the good clerk who sat opposite to him feel rather uncomfortable as he dipped his quill into the inkstand! One more personal essayist, and we have done. Charles Lamb was of the City, if ever man was-walked through London streets (as wise people must) as if he were walking through a miracle! A weak, frail, nervous nature was this poet's; giving out music as sweet as that of an Æolian harp, even when touched by a very common wind, a mere wandering breeze that had straggled round the corner! He is not the less dear to us for his feebleness, surely! But it is like opening a window on a bright spring morning to name the last of our friends. Place for the kingliest of them all! Place for a man who needs a good deal of it! Hats off, when a stronger and better than ourselves comes into the room! Hats off for John Wilsonfor "Christopher North," monarch of proserhapsodists, most Homeric of modern men! He has no wig on, ladies and gentlemen, this one! What a head! Jove-like; but with more passion and soul than ever a sculptured deity of them all! I know it is vulgar to admire mere size and bulk, and I trust I am free from the vulgarity; but it is not vulgar to admire physical perfection. All England was right, when, last spring, all England, reading its Times, admired that grand description of John Heenan, lifting up his long strong arms, inflating his broad chest, sniffing the keen morning air into his nostrils-just an animal, it is true; but an animal which months of preparation and training had rendered, as an animal, magnificent! Think now of Wilson in his early primebeautiful with a man's beauty, not a gladiator's; and with genius and daring looking out through those grand eyes of his! Then turn to the "Recreations;" turn to the "Essays;" and tell me where else you will find such rosy, exultant, exuberant health ?-such "athletic inspiration?" Every mood of a noble nature is mirrored there. The rich overflowing humour which made him the darling of every circle, whether it was a circle of Scotch professors or a circle of English gipsies; the hushed and sacred awe which fell upon him when alone with the solemn seclusions of Nature; the aspiration after a nobier, higher life, which breathed itself out, like a prayer, when he was alone upon the hills-alone beside the lochs-alone, and with the candle burning down to its socket, in his own study, after a night of fierce tempestuous writing, in which his words had been like arrows! He was Weary, and weak, and All in the Downs, I seem to tantalise myself with thoughts of this man's wondrous health, and cheerfulness, and strength; but there is one thing which we may as well remember-the deep seriousness that was hidden under his jollity. He was more often seen at funerals than any other noted man of his day. Let there be sunshine or snow, the grand head was bared, solemnly and reverently, beside the grave-the grand voice was hushed into whispered responses to prayer. And once, his wife then recently dead, he came into his class-room at Edinburgh. wont to stalk about on his platform like an angry lion, his old worn robe fluttering about him; his voice was wont to ring out like a clarion, in supreme chivalric enthusiasm, and his eyes would kindle into a sudden flame that was beautiful to behold; but he never so moved his students, as when, after the sore shipwreck of his household happiness, he apologised for not having attended to their various essays. "I could not see to read them," he said, "in the valley of the shadow of Death!" Like those old Douglases, whom he loved with a true knight's loyalty, he was "tender and true, tender and true." It is good to carry the memory of such men as these about with us; not bowing to them, blindly, as to idols, but loving them as friends; censuring when that which is higher even than they-Truth-seems to compel us to censure, with very humble words and hearts; not as men assuming to sit in judgment, but rather as brothers lamenting. In this spirit we may spend a very profitable half-hour in good company. * * The dark cloud is rolling away. A gleam of sunshine irradiates the wigwam of this chief. Summon ye the maidens, and summon ye the warriors, of his tribe. The heart of this chief is light. Paint him, and he will dance. AN EDUCATIONAL CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF MRS. CATHERINE GOODENOUGH. It was Friday morning. Any of the Kirkbridge people could have told you that before they got to the Parsonage gate, for a group of children was going along the footpath from the village, hunting amid the road-side dock-leaves for violets, shouting and screaming with the shrillest of voices and the glad bursts of merriment that only echo from young hearts. Here, a girl with a baby that was twice too heavy for her slight frame-there, a boy with a shock, red head and coarse features, who asserted his prerogative of manhood in perspective by pushing the little ones out of his way and tormenting the girls. Ah, he would be a man someday: you might have been sure of the fact when you saw him selfishly appropriating the few early violets, peeping with all the power of his grey eyes into the hawthorn hedge to look for birdsnests, and aiming a stone at the old donkey amid the nettles. the room, to note the old piano that serves as a table, seeing that the key is lost, that Mrs. Catherine does not know the difference between a flat and a sharp; and it was last tuned for Mr. Goodenough's young wife. Look at him as he sits in his easy chair over the fire, dozing behind his newspaper, with his wrinkled old hand resting on the leathern arm, and one ray of sunshine playing amid his scanty white locks; look from him to his grey haired daughter and you will think that it must be a long, long time since the piano was locked up, and the young wife left her one child for another home-Mrs. Catherine has left off talking of "poor mamma" or my poor mother;" and rarely mentions her at all now save in relation to other things, or as "long ago, when my mother was alive." 66 The room is small and dark-looking with a dingy old Turkey carpet, and some rough-looking book-shelves against the walls. Even the Any of the old women at the cottage doors books are old-rows of dowdy classics and could have told you that it was Friday and soup-paper-backed sermons; here and there a later day, and that "yon was them childer going to 't' Paarson's;" and many a mother had sent her little ones to school that morning with the promise of a good dinner when they came back. It was Friday. Mrs. Catherine's soup was deservedly appreciated; she went to the kitchen herself to look after its manufacture-and along the village road the children carolled gladly while their tin cans glittered in the sunshine. In the front parlour of Kirkbridge Parsonage sat Mrs. Catherine herself. She had a little table covered with a red cloth in the window, a low chair drawn to it, and a great wicker-work basket at the side full of flannels and coarse garments. A black label was on the lid of the basket and one read in huge letters-Kirkbridge Clothing Club, 1860. Just then Mrs. Catherine was putting a runner into a very ugly shaped baby's gown-a pink print baby's gown, with a square plain front and a pair of queer cut sleeves that stuck off gauntly like branches from a huge bole. It was Mrs. Catherine's particular shape, and she had a great deal to say in its praise; it would not be prudent to discuss its merits, so we will take them for granted and look at something else. No very long time is needed to glance round publication, the Bridgewater Treatises, and a new red backed edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress." There is a chiffonier in the corner that presents a more inviting appearance. The wax flowers in the centre look well at a distance; but when you come near you see they are falling to bits-quite done for-they were made by Mrs. Goodenough before she married. And the same thing with the few moroccobound books, you are disappointed to find them the landscape annuals from 1828, to 1833. There, we have looked at the titles, watched the old decrepit Parson as he dozes in his arm chair, discovered that that piece of drugget has been put down because the carpet is literally worn through-and again we are back at the window by Mrs. Catherine, watching as she passes her brisk needle in and out, and draws her thread over the end of wax candle in the corner of her workbox. She has a green weighted pincushion on the table with a long array of threaded needles, and as fast as one needleful is finished she puts the needle aside in a little wooden box and takes another. it were Saturday night we should see why. If One of the tin cans passing the Parsonage gate sends a reflected light dancing from Mrs. |