But, unless inconsiderate as well as impatient, he scorns not blank annals that tell their own tale. He appreciates the meaning of Goldsmith's philosophic mandarin, in his review of European annals: "The seasons of serenity are passed over in silence, their history seems to speak only of the storms." The (ex-officio) venerable historian of the House of Austria, adverting to the almost silence in which history passes over the Emperor Maximilian's doings in his own hereditary dominions, (as contrasted with his share in the transactions of the Empire and of Europe,) pens this comment: "But this very silence proves the vigour and wisdom of his administration; for it evinces that his states were relieved from those troubles which mark the reigns of all his predecessors, and all his provinces exempted from the calamities of war" (those exposed to Venetian attack excepted). It was, of course, ere yet the great civil war in America had broken out, that Nathaniel Hawthorne justified his choice of Italy, instead of his own country, as the site of a romance, by pleading that no author, without a trial, could conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, "as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes in the annals of our stalwart republic." It was not very long first. But Mr. Hawthorne's apologetic plea is to the same effect as that of Wordsworth's Recluse, who similarly excuses the dull level of narrative of what had been happy in his life, just— "As times of quiet and unbroken peace, Though, for a nation, times of blessedness, And from another poem of Wordsworth's may be cited another illustration of the main theme; it is where Leonard tells the vicar, in his little churchyard among the mountains,— "You live, sir, in these dales, a quiet life : Your years make up one peaceful family; I And who would grieve and fret, if welcome come The rays of happiness, says Longfellow, like those of light, are colourless when unbroken. To an impatient listener's objection, "Your tale is of the longest," an old man's reply, in a well read fiction, is: "It is a true tale of grief and trial, and such tales usually are so; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief." On souffre bruyamment, on jouit en silence—is the pensée of a great French writer, adverting to one's habit of ignoring the happy hours, and even whole days together, dont on fait son profit et dont on ne parle pas. Gibbon begins one of his letters from Lausanne with the remark, designed to excuse remissness in writing, that the unfortunate are loud and loquacious in their complaints, but real happiness is content with its own silent enjoyment; "and if that happiness is of a quiet uniform kind we suffer days and weeks to elapse without communicating our sensations to a distant friend." Having occasion to record of a happy couple in one of his stories, that for many years they did not furnish any exciting or even interesting matter to the story teller, “And all the better for them," exclaims Mr. Charles Reade: "without these happy periods of dulness our lives would be hell, and our hearts eternally bubbling and boiling in a huge pot made hot with thorns." He begins a chapter in another work by observing that no life was ever yet a play; meaning by that an unbroken sequence of dramatic incidents. "Calms will come; unfortunately for the readers, happily for the read." says Mrs. Brunton, is more important in its issue, nothing more dull in the relation, than a life of quiet and regular employment, lapsing amid an atmosphere of benign repose. The perfect women, it has been said, are those who leave no histories behind them, but who go through life upon such a tranquil course of quiet well-doing as leaves no footprints on the sands of time; only mute records hidden here and there, deep in the grateful hearts of those who have been blessed by them, Nothing, BRAYED IN A MORTAR. PROVERBS Xxvii. 22. HERE are kinds of fools and degrees of folly; and one. TH kind of fool there is, whose degree of foolishness-in the Scripture sense of fool and foolishness-is inseparable from him; an inalienable attribute, an ineffaceable characteristic, a constant quality. Qualis ab incepto, as he was in the beginning, is now, and will be to the end of the chapter. Subject him to the discipline of experience, and he comes out what he went in. Schooled with briers, the schooling is lost upon him. "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” You may as well, says Camillo of his master in the Winter's Tale, "Forbid the sea for to obey the moon, As, or by oath, remove, or counsel, shake That "beef-witted lord," Ajax, in the Troilus and Cressida, is for braying Thersites in a mortar, if haply his ill looks, and his ill manners, for they about match, may depart from him; but the cynical railer tells him the case is hopeless: "I shall sooner rail thee into wit." "I think thy horse will sooner con an oration than thou learn a prayer without book." "Thou art proclaimed a fool, I think." That Ajax should ever master the other's meaning,-the probability may be estimated in the gravedigger's words in Hamlet: "Cudgel thy brains no more about it for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating." To beat that braying quadruped, and to bray his representative biped, c'est égal; the outcome in either case is nil. The Ettrick Shepherd of the Noctes is stringent upon sumphs-"obstinater," he calls them, "than either pigs or cuddies, and waur to drive along the high road of life. The maist contumacious cuddie [ass] you can transplant at last by pourin' upon his hurdies the oil o' hazel; but neither by priggin' nor prayin', by reason nor by rung, when the fit's on him, frae his position may mortal man howp to move a sumph." So Mr. Thackeray affirms of one of the species, that he will go on "braying to the end of time": you cannot alter the nature of men and sumphs by any force of satire, any more than " by laying ever so many stripes on a donkey's back" you can turn him into a zebra. Pope was refining upon Dr. Donne when he penned the lines "But as coarse iron, sharpened, mangles more, But Pope was following the lead of no other satirist when, in the Epilogue to his own Satires, he said— "Laugh then at any, but at fools or foes; These you but anger, and you mend not those." Just as in the Prologue to his Satires he had said "You think this cruel? take it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Thou stand'st unshook amid a bursting world." In the course of his argument that age and experience do not mellow and enlighten the born fool, the keen witted author of Si Jeunesse savait observes, that "Quand la nature vous a donné un sot, l'infortune le travaillerait cent ans, qu'elle n'y changerait rien; un sot portera toujours des sottises, comme un prunier des prunes." A favourite maxim of Horace Walpole's, as his correspondents well knew, was, that it is idle to endeavour to cure the world of any folly, unless we could cure it of being foolish.1 The truth, that experience teaches, has its 1 See a letter of his to George Montagu, Dec. 16, 1764. In another, to the most receptive, if not perceptive, of all his correspondents, he has occasion to remark how much more difficult it is to expel nonsense than sense, and continues: "I think that folly is matter, and cannot be annihilated. Destroy its form, it takes another." (To Sir Horace Mann, limits, as Mr. Herbert Spencer reminds us; perpetually repeated and ever accumulating experiences will fail to teach, until there exist the mental conditions required for the assimilation of them. "The folly of nations," writes Mr. Nassau Senior, himself italicising the word, "principally arises from their comparative inability to profit by experience. To learn from the experience of others is the privilege of a rare degree of intelligence." But this, he shows, is what a nation must do, if it is to learn from any long experience; for its own is only that of a few years. The English proverb says, Experience is the mistress of fools. Hesiod had put that into classical Greek, ages before, παθών δε τε νήπιος ἔγνω : even the fool knows from experience, or suffering. But this set of adages (they go in sets), like every other, duly has its exception-takers and objection-makers. A sceptical commentator on the old proverb, that a burnt child dreads the fire, objects that if so the child must be uncommonly astute, and with a power of reasoning by analogy in excess of impulsive desire rarely found either in children or adults. As a matter of fact, he maintains, experience alone goes a very little way towards directing folks wisely. No impulsive or wildly hopeful person, for instance, he contends, ever learns by experience, so long as his physical condition remains the same; no very credulous person becomes suspicious or critical by mere experience: how much soever people of this kind have been taken in, they are just as ready to become the prey of the spoiler in times to come. "The speculating man, without Feb. 7, 1772.) Expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret, like the unwelcome guest in one of Mr. Tennyson's idylls, whom the mistress of the house bids be thrust out of doors; And thrust him out they do, nevertheless return he does; for, |
