'let those things be instantly replaced.""1 Affection is often jealous in its tenacity of what alone offers a holding on the material past. Hence the fondly cherished relics. Mrs. Richard Trench closes an entry in her diary on the death of her child, Frederic, with an account, partly in French, partly in English, of her revisiting for the first time the room he last occupied how often in that room she involuntarily turned towards the glass which reflected his last looks, and expected to find some outline, some trace, some shade, of him. "But he is gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must consecrate his relics. What relics? One poor, solitary lock of shining hair; the little simple clothes that he embellished "-voilà tout. The most popular in its day of all American books shows us a bereaved mother opening a drawer, in which are to be seen a pair of little shoes, a toy horse and wagon, a top, a ball,memorials gathered with many a tear. "And oh! mother that reads this," such a reader is apostrophized, "has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave?" Delta Moir will perhaps be forgotten by name long before that stanza of his can pass out of cherished remembrance: "The nursery shows thy pictured wall, Thy bat-thy bow Thy cloak and bonnet-club and ball: A corner holds thine empty chair, Henry Stephens consecrated to the memory of the wife he lost in her twenty-fifth year some verses in which not a few 1 Mason relates of Gray, who seldom mentioned his mother without a sigh, that after his death her gowns and wearing apparel were found in a trunk in his rooms just as she had left them. It seemed as if he could never take the resolution to distribute them, while he lived, to those female relations to whom, by his will, he bequeathed them. reminiscences and imitations of antiquity are conjoined with touching marks of a vivid personal emotion. "In quamcunque domus converto lumina partem, The garden reference recals a passage from Dr. Chalmers' diary, touching the death of his youngest and favourite brother Alexander, in 1829: "I alternated my employment within doors by walks in the little garden, where all the objects exposed me to gushes of mournful remembrance. The plants, the petrified tree, the little cistern for water plants, etc., all abandoned by the hand which had placed them there and took such delight in tending them." Absent and dead, how great the difference! Yet are they in effect too near of kin for the effect of vacant garments not to be sensibly felt in one case as in the other. King Arthur fears lest in the bowers of Camelot or of Usk his absent queen's shadow glide from room to room, "And I should evermore be vexed with thee, In hanging robe or vacant ornament." Wordsworth's forsaken Margaret keeps her husband's idle loom still in its place : 1 The dean, in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art, is described as haunting with "frantic enthusiasm " every corner of his deanery where the least vestige of what belonged to his brother Henry remained: "He pressed close to his breast, with tender agony, a coat of his, which by accident had been left there; he kissed and wept over a walking stick which Henry had once given him," etc. When Waverley enters the room of Mrs. Flockhart, Fergus MacIvor's The leisure and contemplation attendant upon their home life, Mr. Thackeray remarks, serve to foster the fidelity and tenderness of womankind. "There is the vacant room to go look at, where the boy slept last night, and the impression of his carpet bag is still on the bed. There is his whip hung up in the hall, and his fishing-rod and basket,—mute memorials of the brief bygone pleasures." And be sure no gentle hand is hasty to disturb those hangings. Madame de Sévigné is her motherly self all over when she writes to her absent daughter: "Mademoiselle de Méri est dans votre petite chambre; le bruit de cette porte qui s'ouvre et qui se ferme, et la circonstance de ne vous y point trouver, m'ont fait un mal que je ne puis vous dire." Just as Francis Jeffrey is his fatherly self all over when he writes to his absent daughter: "I happened to go upstairs, and passing into our room, saw the door open of that little one where you used to sleep, and the very bed waiting there for you, so silent and desolate, that all the love, and the miss of you, which fell so sadly on my heart the first night of your desertion, came back upon it so heavily and darkly, that I was obliged to shut myself in and cry over the recollection, as if all the interval had been annihilated, and that loss and sorrow were still fresh and unsubdued before me." Grief filled the room up of his absent child, lay in her bed, walked up and down with him. Of this language, put by Shakspeare into the mouth of the Lady Constance, a friend of Coleridge repeated once to the poet an opinion he had heard, that it was out of nature. A month or two afterwards this friend died; and Coleridge called upon his mother, "an affectionate, but illiterate woman, who had scarcely heard the name of Shakspeare, much less read any of his plays." Like Philip in King John, the visitor endeavoured to console her, and kindly landlady, his heart swells to see Fergus's bonnet, with the white cockade, hanging by the little mirror. "Ay," said Mrs. Flockhart, sighing, as she observed the gaze, "the puir colonel bought a new ane just the day before they marched, and I winna let them tak that ane doun, but just to brush it ilka day mysel; and whiles I look at it till I just think I hear him cry to Callum to bring him his bonnet, as he used to do when he was ganging out." among other things he told her, in the anguish of her sorrow, that she seemed to be as fond of grief as she had been of her son. What was her reply? Almost a prose parody in the very language of Shakspeare-the same thoughts, Coleridge assures us, in almost the same words, but with a different arrangement. He may well pronounce an attestation like this to be worth a thousand criticisms. "A OUT AND OUTSPOKEN. PROVERBS xxix. II. FOOL uttereth all his mind." Out with it, such as it is; what he is pleased to call his mind. We all know, and have winced under, the people who "like to speak their mind." There is no stint in their outpourings. Their utterances are to the uttermost. Their outspokenness is out and out. The wise man is said (by the wise man), as regards his mind, to keep it in, at any rate till afterwards: but the fool uttereth it all at once. His incontinence is incurable. His flux of thoughtless words amounts to an organic disease. Hazlitt's essay on Disagreeable People includes a paragraph on "your blunt, honest creatures," who omit no opportunity of letting you know their minds, and are sure to tell you all the ill and conceal all the good they hear of you. They would not, says he, flatter you for the world; and to caution you against the malice of others they think the province of a friend. "This is not candour, but impudence; and yet they think it odd you are not charmed with their unreserved communicativeness of disposition." You would say, to cite a later essayist, they fancied that the skin of which they have been denuded, for they are apt to be excessively thin-skinned-has been applied to "thicken to rhinoceros callousness the moral hide of other men." The most unpleasant things such folks will utter by the hundred, with that mixture of dulness of perception and small malignity of nature which, as Dr. Boyd says, "go to make what is vulgarly called a person who speaks his mind.'" The right way to meet such folk is, we are advised, by an instant reciprocal action. "Just begin to speak your mind to them, and see how they look." Terence pithily puts it, Qui quæ vult dicit, quod non vult audiet. He who gives tongue to whatever he pleases is likely to hear in return something the reverse of pleasing. Madame Pernelle, in Molière, is one of this type of irritable unreserve: "Je vous parle un peu franc; mais c'est là mon humeur, A due regard, observes Professor Marsh, for the feelings, the prejudices, the ignorance of others, will dictate a certain reserve and caution in the expression of opinions or sentiments which may wound their pride or violently shock their prepossessions. But the dues are not always paid, and the mind is spoken out in all the insolence of reckless freedom, selfish and unfeeling in its facility. "The very truth I undisguised declare; For what so easy as to be sincere?" Chatham whispered to Lord Shelburne one night, during a critical debate, "I must not speak to-night; for when once I am up everything that is in my mind comes out." The self control is exemplary by way of practical application. As Philinte makes bold to tell that par excellence plain speaker, Alceste, "Il est bien des endroits où la pleine franchise To have your say, and to speak your mind, are justly discriminated as two very different things, often confused though they be in common parlance. The one is done in haste and provocation, "as when David spake "; the other deliberately, and with intention, not to say of malice aforethought. Discharging the conscience is too often relieving spite, and is 66 |