such as it is, of Alexander Pope with that of a much later and smaller Alexander, he calls attention to the Essay on Man as a thing to be read and pondered by "young men of the Job's wife school," who fancy it a fine thing to tell their readers to curse God and die, or at least to show the world in print how they could curse God by divine right of genius, if they chose. What, he asks, would the author of the Essay on Man say to "any one who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is not to be quoted) of the Life Drama as the thoughts of his hero, without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys towards Him whom he dares in the same breath to call 'Father,' simply because he wants to be something very fine and famous and self glorifying, and Providence keeps him waiting awhile?"1 Less to Job's wife with her counsel of cursing is such as Blackmere to be compared, than to Job himself, venting the wistful utterance, "Oh that I knew where I might find Him! that I might come even to His seat!" Of that, and of parallel passages in the book of Job, the rude seaman's quasi blasphemy is but, so to speak, a marginal reading,—an idiomatic reading truly, and with a wide margin. CAT A BROTHER IN BLOOD. GENESIS iv. I seq. AIN, tiller of the ground, own brother to Abel, keeper of sheep. In more than one sense, a brother in blood. The manslayer and the gentle shepherd2 are both Eve's 1 'Has not Pope said it already? 'Persist, by all Divine in man unawed; But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God.' And yet no; the gentle goddess [Dulness, of the Dunciad] would now lay no such restriction on her children, for in Pope's day no man had discovered the new poetic plan for making the Divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and finding in the dignity of heaven-born genius' free licence to upbraid, on the very slightest grounds, the Being from whom the said genius pretends to derive his dignity."-Miscellanies, by Charles Kingsley, vol. i., pp. 281, 283. 2 One likes to think of Abel as of David in early days at Bethlehem, as children. The fratricide and his meek victim both called Adam father. Look here upon this picture, and on this, in a shepherd lad, of the type idealised by Bunyan in the Valley of Humiliation, where the pilgrims in their progress espy "a boy feeding his father's sheep. The boy was in very mean clothes, but [like the son of Jesse] of a fresh and well favoured countenance; and as he sat by himself he sung." And Mr. Greatheart bids the pilgrims hearken to the song, which is of lowliness and contentment; and dares to say this boy lives a merrier life, and wears more of that herb called heart's ease in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet. 66 It is not often that Samuel Pepys in his Diary verges on the poetical, or touches on sentiment; but for once he does so in describing a visit to his cozen Pepys's" house in Surrey, and how he and his companions ranged the woodland, and lost themselves in the thickets, and "walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd, and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did, with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty, and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him. He did content 66 himself mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after." The loneliness of the shepherd boy's daily life is a material part of the interest associated with him; as even with the young Mongol shepherd whom le père Huc describes on a mount, 'silently smoking his pipe," (a jar on the harmony of the picture; he ought to have been playing on it,) while his flock grazed amid the ruined ramparts around, half buried in grass as in a funeral shroud,- -no other human being to be seen. Byron's picture of a view in Greece, polluted by no city towers, and where men are few, scanty the hamlet, rare the lonely cot, comprises this glimpse of pastoral existence : "But, peering down each precipice, the goat Browseth; and, pensive o'er his scattered flock, Doth lean his boyish form along the rock, Or in his cave awaits the tempest's short lived shock." Cowper's poem on Retirement omits not, accordingly, so obvious an illustration as that of 66 the boy, who, when the breeze of morn * To carve his rustic name upon a tree, To snare the mole, or with ill fashioned hook the earliest annals of human existence," the counterfeit presentment of two brothers," but the elder, "like a mildewed ear, blasting his wholesome brother." Sin was already in the world, and death by sin; else, to apply what Kent says of Cordelia and her unnatural sisters, "Else one self, mate and mate, could not beget Such different issue:" differing as Edmund from Edgar, as Regan from Cordelia, as Cain from Abel. Or, to apply again what Fidele replies to Cadwal's query, "Are we not brothers?" "... So man and man should be; But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike." William Browne, the Tavistock poet of the seventeenth century, has some charming lines on pastoral pursuits-these included: "Here (from the rest), a lovely shepherd boy Sits piping on a hill, as if his joy Would still endure, or else that age's frost Should never make him think what he had lost." Nor is James Grahame unmindful of the same study in pastoral picturesque. He too has his shepherd boy, from a Sunday morning standpoint, and seen partially through a Scotch mist, "In some lone glen, where every sound is lulled Or sheds a tear o'er him to Egypt sold, And wonders why he weeps; the volume closed, With meikle care beneath the lowly roof Where humble lore is learnt. Thus reading, hymning, all alone unseen, The shepherd boy the sabbath holy keeps." The opening pages of Ch. de Bernard's Gerfaut are concerned, incidentally, with a shepherd boy of some nine or ten years old, who is overheard singing the words of the psalm In exitu Israel de Ægypto, in a valley among the Vosges mountains: "Son timbre vibrant, quoique grêle, retentissait avec une telle sonorité dans le silence de la vallée, qu'une bonne partie des versets était achevée avant qu'on put apercevoir le pieux musicien." When the travellers have learnt their way of him, and given him a piece of money in return, they leave him "chantant sur un ton encore plus triomphant, Montes exultaverunt ut arietes, en bondissant, lui-même plus haut que toutes les collines et tous les béliers de la Bible." Or Prospero's "mark his condition, and the event; then tell me, if this might be a brother." Or Isabella's indignant disavowal of her's-refusing to believe that ever "such a warped slip of wilderness" as Claudio could be her father's son. Or, once more, old Adam's repudiation of real brotherhood between such a pair as Oliver and Orlando "Your brother-(no, no brother; yet the son Yet not the son, I will not call him son Of him I was about to call his father.)" For Oliver is in intent and purpose a very Cain, albeit there is no brand upon his brow. It is so natural to suppose, says a popular writer, that murderers are and look a race apart, "bearing the brand of Cain upon their brow before as well as after the commission of their dreadful sin. But Cain was like other men before he lifted the club to slay his innocent brother." Branded, he is indeed marked out from other men. In Macaulay's words, "All shrink before the mark of his despair, The seal of that great curse which he alone can bear." 1 Diversities of disposition in offspring of the same parents are a standing wonder in the wide world's history,—or rather, too common, and too universally recognised, to admit of real 1 Macaulay's Miscellaneous Poems; Tirzah and Ahirad. The mark of Cain may be said to be on De Montfort in Joanna Baillie's tragedy: "No, it is hate-black, lasting, deadly hate, Which thus hath driven me forth from kindred peace, From social pleasure, from my native home, The Wandering Jew of romance is stigmatised with a like brand upon his brow: "I have no friend in the world. The hungry tiger shudders at my approach. God has set His seal upon me, and all His creatures respect this fatal mark.' He put his hand to the velvet which was bound round his forehead. There was in his eyes an expression of fury, despair, and malevolence, that struck horror to my very soul. An involuntary convulsion made me shudder. The stranger perceived 'Such is the curse imposed on me,' he continued; 'I am doomed to inspire all who look on me with terror and detestation.' it. wonder at all. The duke, the cardinal, and the duchess their sister, in the best known of John Webster's plays, are typical in this respect: the cardinal is a melancholy church man: "The duke there,-a most perverse and turbulent nature: But for their sister, the right noble duchess, You never fixed your eye on three fair medals, Cast in one figure, of so different temper." One is willing to believe that the younger Robespierre may have been right, when so indignantly denouncing his sister as an alien in blood from her brothers. Charity to her inclines to hope she was as unlike them as he says. "Our sister," writes the younger Robespierre to his brother, "has not one drop of blood which resembles ours. I consider her our greatest enemy. . . She must be forced to go to Arras, else she will cause us deep despair. She would confer on us the reputation of bad brothers." Brothers in blood,— the Reign of Terror produced grim and ghastly versions of that relationship, in most perverse and perverted meaning. Striking contrasts every biographic historian has constant occasion to point out, in family characteristics. Archdeacon Coxe, dealing with the two brothers on whom, at the opening of the fourteenth century, the fortunes of the house of Austria depended, describes Frederic and Leopold as "strikingly contrasted" both in their persons and dispositions, the elder handsome, most amiable and accomplished, and though brave even to rashness, of a mild, benevolent, and conciliating temper; the younger diminutive and deformed in person, fiery, restless, and impatient. So again with the brothers Albert and Leopold, towards the close of the same century, whose discordant characters boded ill for family union: Albert, placid, inactive, devout; Leopold, impetuous and aspiring, equally prodigal and rapacious. Again, Frederick and Albert, midway in the fifteenth century: the former cold, cautious, phlegmatic, and parsimonious; the latter frank, lively, turbulent, and ambitious, opening his career by an attack against his brother, despising the ties of blood." The commencement of the N |
