moment dreams of literally obeying the texts in the New Testa-
ment that have hit him hard; for he has a shrewd notion that
they imply a very different state of society from the busy
nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting
the sick, and that if he had, the sick would think him a great
nuisance; and he knows that when he got to the bedside, he
would probably be at his wits' ends for anything to say, and
would end by twisting his watch-chain, and remarking that it
was a cold day." The practical inference is, that if he is to do
any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by com-
mission ;—and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws
itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers.
He, at least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious
beneficence may avail, from any possible charge of branded
fellowship with such as the poet of the Seasons depicts, in
"The cruel wretch

Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled,
Himself a useless load, has squandered vile

Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered

A drooping family of modest worth."

Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies: "If people of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent, I fear, do not consider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot out of millions not so fortunate; yet less do they reflect that chance, not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel." Crabbe portrays this nonreflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales:

"Month after month was passed, and all were spent

In quiet comfort and in rich content:
Miseries there were, and woes, the world around,
But these had not her pleasant dwelling found;
She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept,
And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept.
Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah's board
Gave what the seasons to the rich afford ;
For she indulged," etc.

Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, "But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying," etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe's Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered:

"To have this money in my purse-to know

What grief was his, and what to grief we owe;

To see him often, always to conceive

How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve ;*
And every day in ease and peace to dine,

And rest in comfort !-what a heart is mine!"

Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as (mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. "Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,' sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be--whether thou dost not pray prayers of long omission-whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!" As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,

Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath:

666

"Know you his conduct?' 'Yes, indeed, I know,

And how he wanders in the wind and snow;

Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear,
But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.""

"Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield
When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows;
You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood,
And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind."

Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day—which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. "That day,"

he often told a friend, in after life, "I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful." As the sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe's tragedies: "We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling." And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. "Luxury is indeed possible in the future-innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold."

Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff's temporal government of Rome, that he-Gregory the Greatrelieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy-his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit. "Nor would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion." A non possumus this, in its beneficent nisi prius scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran's interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellowsubjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her

early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms,

"Too generous-happy to endure
The thought of all the woful poor
Who that same night lay down their heads
In mockeries of starving beds,

In cold, in wet, disease, despair,

In madness that will say no prayer;
With wailing infants some; and some
By whom the little clay lies dumb;
And some, whom feeble love's excess,
Through terror, tempts to murderousness.
And at that thought the big drops rose
In pity for her people's woes;

And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen,

And vowing in her princely will

That they should thrive and bless her still."

Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the "vulgar herd," that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance-by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff's bread bill to his running account for sack—one of Anne of Austria's sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of taste of suffering in propria persona, the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortressbut his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: "that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the

enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment's thought

[O, I have ta'en too little thought of this !]

on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty. The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture as was inflicted by that man upon so many others."—It is in a glowing description of one of the great fêtes at Versailles under the auspices of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Arsène Houssaye delivers himself of this pensive aside: "Et la musique de Lulli achève d'enivrer tout ce beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que près de là, à la grille même du château des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout affamée, pour ses enfants. Qu'importe ! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus tard. Comment t'appelles-tu, bonne femme ?-Je m'appelle la France je reviendrai.”

Part of the education of the royal heir-apparent of the Incas consisted in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of skill-during which, for a period of thirty days, "the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire, -a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute." It is to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, "Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people's sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then. But when the hour of trouble comes and seldom may it visit your leddyship-and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low-lang and late may it be yours-O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled wail penetrates through the "official cotton