Juliott that the little affair of the morning shillings, stimulated him to put his mind had been quite satisfactorily arranged; that Miss Wenna and he were very good friends again; and that it was quite a mistake to imagine that she was already married to Mr. Roscorla.

"Harry," said his cousin, "I strictly forbid you to mention that gentleman's name."

Why, Jue?" he said.

"Because I will not listen to the bad language you invariably use whenever you speak of him; and you ought to remember that you are in a clergyman's house. I wonder Miss Rosewarne is not ashamed to have your acquaintance; but I dare say you amend your ways when you are in her presence. She'll have plenty to reform if ever she takes you for a husband."

"That's true enough, Jue," the young man said, penitently. "I believe I'm a bad lot; but then, look at the brilliant contrast which the future will present. You know that my old grandmother is always saying to me, 'Harry, you were born with as many manners as most folks; and you've used none; so you'll have a rare stock to come and go on when you begin.'"

From The Saturday Review.
OLD LETTERS.

or memory into it; the recipient scrupled to reduce to its elements what had given pleasure and had cost both pence and pains. Thus letters grew into chronicles, and were preserved as such by loving hands. Keeping letters or destroying them are matters of habit which have their influence on the correspondence. Without consciously desiring that a let ter may be preserved, we doubt whether any one could bestow the same amount of thought or picturesque description upon paper which he knows will be torn up after perusal as would be natural to him when letters are not viewed as ephemeral. Most family letters are, we suspect, summarily destroyed in these days, and the fact influences the universal style. The correspondences we have in mind were started at least under another state of things, and consequently have a value as records which altered circumstances deny to the hurried communications, whether brief or diffuse, which have nowadays taken their place.

In almost every case where a letter is worth preserving on its own merits, its merely literary and historical value increases with age. Its main subject may have lost much of its interest, but the whole will incidentally throw light on the times and manners, or the persons or the questions, concerned in it. And in every collection containing many such letters, besides the local events and family in THERE is one important class of rec-terests which follow in a course and ords which is, we must suppose, becom- change from day to day and year to year, ing scarcer every day, because the con- some central figures will be found to hold ditions out of which it grew are radically their ground throughout. It is curious changed. We mean that sort of sus- and pleasant to note by this means the tained family correspondence in which growth of a great name, to see a leader the different members report to one an-in embryo, to catch the first boyish enother or to a common centre all that hap-thusiasm of contact with genius, and to pens of interest to each, and their obser- note how it tells upon the home circle, vations on matters public and private-widening their sphere of interest, and a correspondance begun when life was opening upon the writers, and persevered in under the joint influences of affection and habit as the readiest channel for first thoughts and unrestrained impulsive judgments. Letters were letters in the days when a large sheet had to be filled. It was necessary to turn over in the mind what there was to say before beginning, and, once begun, there was space to do justice to an event or a topic. When a letter cost the receiver a shilling there was a double motive at work tending to its preservation. The writer's conscience, if he was writing to a home where thought was more briskly current than pounds and

even constituting them members of a party before they knew it, or indeed before the thought of a party was in any one's mind.

It must, however, be admitted that it requires an enormous effort to address oneself seriously to a voluminous correspondence of this sort, whether we are personally concerned in it, or enter upon it on merely literary grounds. In the last case, however, it is work pure and simple, to be undertaken, like many another irksome task, as work sure of the reward of all honest industry steadily persevered in. But, if it is our own past that we are going to encounter, the effort

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is great indeed. Nor does the labour in tive's death) of your own letters written
this case, when the first repugnance is at some interesting period; the approach
Overcome, ensure the reward which duty of age, and the like, furnish these occa-
done generally brings. Unless we have sions; and then comes the test of memo-
been through life especially severe and ry. Let no indistinct or weak memory
impartial judges of ourselves, some dis- trust itself, even as far as it seems to go,
agreeable rubs and surprises are pretty where feeling was once concerned.
sure to be in store for us; it is likely Nothing but a strong original grip of the
enough that we come out of certain crit-facts and images first recorded can be
ical periods less satisfied with our part in depended on. There are people who
them than we had in the general subsid- have this grip, whose memory cannot be
ence of the affair let ourselves expect. caught halting, who seem to review their
We find that a prejudiced memory and past by a continual survey, and thus never
self-complacency had between them given to leave hold of it. To some people old
us the best of it where we now see that letters must be an almost superfluous
the other party had more to say, and said study; they know nothing of the excite-
it better, than we had any idea of.ment of the reader, who pursues his in-
Again, experience shows us how sadly vestigations with the hopes and fears of
disappointment, failing health, loss of spir- an explorer not knowing what he may
it and of hope, injure many a fair promise. light on next. But few memories, how-
We find now too late, how much these ever retentive, are impartial enough not
harsh visitations affected character in the to colour the image in the process of
case of intimates; not fundamentally, as storing it; and for the rest, when once
we once resentfully supposed, but on the an impression loses its distinctness,
surface. If we had only been more pa-temper and disposition play strange tricks
tient, more discerning, more tender- with exact formal truth. We believe
more fair and just, as it seems now
some regrets need not have fixed their
sting in memory. Why did we not hu-
mour irritation and laugh away suspicion?
Why did we take so literally what we now
see admitted a happier interpretation? If
ever the secret of living this life over
again is discovered, we should enjoin the
preservation of letters as an essential
precaution against slipping into new
forms of our old errors, and being always
merely ourselves, whatever happened.

Keeping letters is a responsibility so great a responsibility, indeed, that some people destroy them on principle. Letters which would be literary treasures, as well as invaluable aids to the biographer in elucidating character and throwing light on events, letters having their place in years of an active correspondence, have often been sought for and inquired after in vain. It turns out that their receiver, as a rule, kept no letters. There are sure to be in every intimate correspondence many confidences, many judgments, many records of situations, persons, and scenes which men have no right to leave to the scrutiny of strangers. Consequently, keeping them commits the keeper to a subsequent re-perusal, or to a standing order for their indiscriminate destruction if this intention is frustrated. This duty, or self-imposed task, of re-perusal comes at different periods of life. A change of house or occupation; failing health; the return (on a friend's or relaVOL. IX. 468

LIVING AGE.

there are few persons to whom an exciting correspondence in which they have been principals, suddenly opened, does not materially change the aspect of a great many points and occasions about which they had entertained no doubt; and he is a lucky man who finds this change to his own advantage. For example, his own youth may stand before him invested with a confidence, arrogance, and hardness for which he was not at all prepared. He is astonished at his boyish joy in vituperation, at his small pity for infirmities, at his intolerant contempt for those who were perhaps his betters. Some of the rougher lessons of life since learnt he feels, with a new and keener sense, to have been not unmerited. On the other hand, diffidence and self-consciousness at the same age prepare for after years many a needless pang, a heritage of painful and often grotesque impressions which an actual review is pretty sure to modify. The reader finds the occasion to have been distorted by a memory gradually relaxing its hold; he acted, after all, according to his natural bent, not by some hideous perversity against it, which is the nervous, uneasy suspicion that had been left on the mind. In both cases the gain of such a review is worth the trouble. In either one can profitably speculate at leisure on the glosses slid into memory by the mere action of prevailing influences on thought and conduct. But, independently of the

tendency consequent on human weakness | table standard, and henceforth memory to falsify the records of memory- reverts to early dates for its specimen whether in the act of imprinting them- traits and images. Such at least should selves, or as they fade very few memo-be the result of this clearing, and as it ries are safe from the mere oblivion were tidying up, of our past as a moral which buries whole sections of the past. act. Busy men, engrossed in the occupations of active life, have no time for ruminating and storing impressions; and the temporary concentration of thought which characterizes much literary labour, forced to turn abruptly from subject to subject, each absorbing the attention while it lasts, each necessarily cast aside for the next as soon as accomplished, is a habit and condition of mind still more unfriendly to a strong hold over what may be fairly called past, and therefore done with.

But these are the solemnities of our subject. In such a correspondence as we have indicated much amusing matter lies buried, much brightness, and some wit; and touches of character too slight to be preserved in any other form, yet full of interest. There we may note the dawn of style. Nothing teaches the art of good writing better than a real endeavour to convey to sympathizing readers new impressions and experiences as they arise. What better exercise can be set to any one than to hit off a pen-and-ink portrait, to select the traits which mark individuality, to record with verbal accu

Time and success remove men who make a figure in the world from these little liberties of portraiture; it is no small recompense for wading through difficult manuscript and pale ink to come upon some vivid and unexpected touch showing us a distinguished man in the light in which he was seen by equals long ago. And more trivial matters, if only treated in the right spirit, are very welcome interludes. Touches of flirtation, antipathies coyly turning to love, quaint gossip, jokes, the absurdities and eccentricities of acquaintances - dress, economies, visiting-all, where the hand is light and the spirit gay, are pleasant things to read of with an interval of years between.

For all these reasons, a correspondence from youth to an age more or less mature is a possession to all whom it may con-racy any racy or characteristic utterance? cern, if people have the leisure, and we may certainly add the courage, to use it; for old letters have something akin to sleeping dogs and torpid snakes. To rip up old sorrows and grievances and mistakes, to live again the excitements of boyhood, to fight again the battles once of such enthralling importance, to suffer once again the private snubs, the family trials and disappointments, to revive the old loves and hates and successes, to come into close intercourse once more with those who have passed away, to meet friends of another generation who helped to make them what they are, for good or evil, to subject former objects of their admiration or reverence to the test of maturer judgment, to raise the ghost of their old selves and draw comparisons It is a sort of murder to destroy a good -how eager once where now indifferent, letter - a letter instinct with life, feeling, how positive where opinion has turned and observation; and some very good round, how dictatorial where now hesitat-ones there must be to constitute a collecing, how loving where now estranged. all this is a judicial process to those who have the courage to face it. The decline of a friendship is among the sadnesses of this retrospect, bringing back as it does the attractive qualities, the intellect, the tenderness, the personal regard, which have got themselves obscured un-averting the doom for a time. A family der subsequent misunderstandings and resentments. There is nothing in which men differ more than in the amount of themselves which they put into a letter; and where a lost friend had this power it is next to impossible for recent rancours to make head against the sudden recognition awakened by some happy touch. Old intercourse may never be renewed, but feeling adjusts itself to a more chari

tion worth the trouble first of keeping and then of re-perusing. The taste for hoarding and the taste for destruction, both holding a place in every human bosom, find equal indulgence in the task before us. Destruction must come at last to all, but there is a satisfaction in

must be ill off for heirs if there is no one to succeed to the selection which the contention between these two impulses leaves as a residuum; and it is wonderful what the anticipation of one interested, grateful reader, yet unborn, will do to recompense the labour involved in the task on which we have been commenting.

31

M

བ་

NATIONAL "STEADINESS."

From The Spectator. of all, when they have once gained a certain height of civilization. The ENGLISHMEN always say that they are French, whom we think so volatile, indifferent to foreign opinion, and when have adhered to a definite foreign pol foreign opinion is hostile their indiffer-icy, a definite theory of administraence is probably real. If they are edu- tion not of government - and a defcated men they see that foreigners do inite social ideal for ages; and they not comprehend all the facts of the case, carry their persistency into the ordinary and ignorance of facts, however small, business of life. A Frenchman with an seems to them to disqualify judges; and idea in his head cannot get rid of it; he if they are uneducated, they only wrap is often the most obstinate, not to say themselves in their insularity and ask, as impracticable, of business men, and he a labourer recently asked about a barom-can carry out a plan as witness the eter in which his employer believed, completion of the Suez Canal-with a "How can things like them know?" dogged determination Englishmen might We are not quite sure, however, that they envy. M. de Lesseps puffs and fanfaronare equally indifferent to praise. If a nades and promises and threatens in a way foreigner is known to like England, he is Englishmen do not like, but Stephenson usually set down without much more con- never stuck to Chat Moss as Lesseps sideration, as an exceptionally intelligent stuck to the Suez Canal. The difference man. The high eulogy passed by the is that the typical Englishman laughed, late Duke de Broglie on English infantry and supposed there must be bottom is still quoted with pleasure, and one of somewhere, and went on "copping" his the claims of the Emperor William to cartloads of earth into the morass, as if English worship is that he caused a nar- that operation were an end instead of a rative of the loss of the "Birkenhead," means; while the Frenchman, though and of the heroic discipline of the troops just as persevering, would have gesticuon board, to be read at the head of every lated and sworn and ground his teeth, Prussian regiment. Garibaldi's recent and generally shown himself "troubled" praise of the English for steadiness has by the obstinacy of the soil. The Italian, been quoted everywhere with a pleasure as Metternich, in a famous paper of inunaffected either by the usual English dis-structions to a viceroy of Lombardy and trust of the general's judgment, or by a Venice, once explained, never gives up certain doubt as to the exact quality which anything upon which his heart is set, and he intended to praise. He is generally is most determined when he seems most understood to have referred to the Eng- pliant; but the Italian, when too much lish persistence, and he did so; but it opposed, is apt to mistake his pazienza was, as is evident from the rest of his for an active force, and to wait, with speech, persistence of a somewhat special good-humour sometimes, for the gods kind. His remark, that the English, and circumstance to do his work. The when pursuing an enterprise, were never Englishman does not do that. He must "troubled "about anything, and his illus- keep on pegging away," or he would trative story of the Romans who, with forget his object altogether, or lose his Hannibal at their gates, sent out an army steadiness in rage, and he therefore in another direction, alike show that he keeps on, even if pretty sure of loss. was thinking of a quality which, what"One must do business," he says, if he ever its value, seems to belong in a is a merchant, and does not think the special degree to men of English blood, speculation promising; and "One must a quality for which he found the nearest hurt the enemy," he says, if he is a premEnglish word, but of which no word is ier sanctioning a Walcheren expedition. perfectly descriptive. There exists in "The German," says Heine, who was a Englishmen and Americans, and as far hybrid, with Jew blood, French intellect as we know, in no other people, unless it and Teutonic patience, "is the most perbe the Chinese, a power of persisting in sistent of mankind," and certainly his tranquillity, of overlooking rather than steadiness in battle, in business, and in overcoming obstacles, and going on with-literary investigation is of the most perout setting the teeth, which strikes an fect kind; but there is a weakness in the observer accustomed to Frenchmen of German somewhere, a trace of lymph in the South, Italians, Spaniards, and Span- his mental composition, which tolerates ish Americans, as the most separate of an inordinate expenditure of time. He -capacities. Persistence by itself is an can halt to consider too contentedly. attribute of many nations, and possibly Englishmen think he is the slave of

66

habit, but that is not the case. No man or foresight, or intellectual grasp that an in the world adapts himself so readily to Englishman does not shrink from obstaan entirely new life, or as emigrant or cles, but because he does not see them settler submits so docilely or with such as other races do before they are visible, good-humour to the ways of a new world. and then, sees only one at once, and We rather fancy his unsteadiness or habit grapples with that with the good-huof delay, of which Heine complained so moured audacity of a man who is more much, is due to his strong mental realiza- than a match for that one difficulty at all tion of his ideal, be it the unity of Ger- events. He has not the power to exagmany, or a substitute for Christianity, or gerate the obstacle, or to suppose it will only a fortune. It is there; he possesses be endless, or to frame a plan which it when he is smoking; it is real, it is would simply overburden his brain, but perfect, and the time to be lost in mak- he sees the thing as it is, and goes at it ing it concrete does not seriously matter. just as a Chinaman does at the next bit The Englishman will not give too much of carving, without caring or, as it were, time. If a great deal must be given, he knowing that he must repeat his next bit forgets his purpose, and as to advancing twenty thousand times. There is the towards it through generations, that day, and the day's wage, and the work to amount of steadiness is quite beyond do, and he does it, and failure or success him. We scarcely know a case in which weighs on him comparatively little. Linour persistent countrymen have con- coln was a typical Englishman in his way, sciously gone on with a purpose through as Western men often are, and not seethe ages, the very few apparent excep-ing his way to a grand scheme, as tions being due rather to conservative a Frenchman would have tried to do; feeling than to any determination to make a persistent advance. Very long jobs are very difficult to us, and our "steadiness" neither helps us to kill the National Debt, which, in our position, Frenchmen would have extinguished long since, nor to arrive in America or India at a self-acting and rigid system of forest laws. What we do possess is the power of steadiness in tranquillity which Garibaldi recommended to the Romans, - of going on doing bit by bit, without faltering, and without particularly caring whether there are obstacles or not. "It is all in the day's work" is a specially English sentence, and one the full force of which it is extremely difficult to render in any other tongue.

and not being sure of the ultimate end, as a German could possibly have felt; and not being able, like an Italian, to perceive energy in mere waiting, he kept on pegging away with his armies, just as Stephenson did with his cart-loads of earth at Chat Moss, till at last the work so long invisible revealed itself to the world as done. Engineers said Stephenson was pig-headed, and so he was, for he had no more theoretical right to believe that the Moss would be filled within the compass of his means than the first man who sowed grain had to believe that it would die and come up again twentyfold, but he went on trying, as a more thoughtful man of science might never have done. Politicians said Lincoln was The quality is most valuable, as every so unintellectual, and it was true. No quality is which conduces to efficiency, "intellectual man in that sense could but we doubt whether if Englishmen have gone on as he did without more imever analyzed themselves they would be mediate and, so to speak, more dramatic quite as pleased with its source, which is, result. The difficulties, and the losses, we fear, no virtue, and no capacity, and and the horrors, and the chances against no faculty, but just a form of stupidity, his method of operation would have been and nothing better. It is to want of im- too patent to him, and he would have agination that we owe our special steadi- despaired, or have risked too much upon ness; and so, we suspect did Garibaldi's a single exhaustive effort. In the limitaRomans, who did not realize to them- tion of his intellect resided the strength selves what Hannibal's victory would of his character, and so it is with Engmean, and sent out an army by the other lishmen as a nation. If they had to drain gate because it came in the regular day's the territory round Rome and too little work to send another army. The sen- money to do it with, they would form no tries at the Horse Guards would be re-grand plan, but many plans for many lieved regularly if London were on fire, bits, and go on doing them with steadiand would stand there, probably, if the ness, with no more "trouble "" on them flames were round them, till their horses than the workmen felt who at last sucbegan to shriek. It is not from firmness, ceeded in draining the Bedford Level.