University of Virginia Library

A LOVE STORY.[1]
By ROBERT SOUTHEY.

1. CHAPTER I.

Herbert.

MRS. DOVE was the only child of a clergyman who
held a small vicarage in the West Riding. Leonard
Bacon, her father, had been left an orphan in early youth.
He had some wealthy relations by whose contributions he
was placed at an endowed grammar-school in the country,
and having through their influence gained a scholarship, to
which his own deserts might have entitled him, they continued
to assist him — sparingly enough indeed — at the
University, till he succeeded to a fellowship. Leonard was
made of Nature's finest clay, and Nature had tempered it
with the choicest dews of heaven.

He had a female cousin about three years younger than
himself, and in like manner an orphan, equally destitute, but

far more forlorn. Man hath a fleece about him which enables
him to bear the buffetings of the storm; —but woman
when young, and lovely, and poor, is as a shorn lamb for
which the wind has not been tempered.

Leonard's father and Margaret's had been bosom friends.
They were subalterns in the same regiment, and, being for a
long time stationed at Salisbury, had become intimate at the
house of Mr. Trewbody, a gentleman of one of the oldest
families in Wiltshire. Mr. Trewbody had three daughters.
Melicent, the eldest, was a celebrated beauty, and the knowledge
of this had not tended to improve a detestable temper.
The two youngest, Deborah and Margaret, were lively, good-natured,
thoughtless, and attractive. They danced with the
two lieutenants, played to them on the spinnet, sung with
them and laughed with them, — till this mirthful intercourse
became serious, and, knowing that it would be impossible to
obtain their father's consent, they married the men of their
hearts without it. Palmer and Bacon were both without
fortune, and without any other means of subsistence than
their commissions. For four years they were as happy as
love could make them; at the end of that time Palmer was
seized with an infectious fever. Deborah was then far advanced
in pregnancy, and no solicitations could induce Bacon
to keep from his friend's bedside. The disease proved fatal;
it communicated to Bacon and his wife; the former only
survived his friend ten days, and he and Deborah were then
laid in the same grave. They left an only boy of three
years old, and in less than a month the widow Palmer was
delivered of a daughter.

In the first impulse of anger at the flight of his daughters,
and the degradation of his family, (for Bacon was the son
of a tradesman, and Palmer was nobody knew who,) Mr.
Trewbody had made his will, and left the whole sum, which
he had designed for his three daughters, to the eldest.
Whether the situation of Margaret and the two orphans

might have touched him, is perhaps doubtful, — for the family
were either light-hearted or hard-hearted, and his heart
was of the hard sort; but he died suddenly a few months
before his sons-in-law. The only son, Trewman Trewbody,
Esq., a Wiltshire fox-hunter, like his father, succeeded to
the estate; and as he and his eldest sister hated each other
cordially, Miss Melicent left the manor-house, and established
herself in the Close at Salisbury, where she lived in
that style which a portion of £ 6,000 enabled her in those
days to support.

The circumstance which might appear so greatly to have
aggravated Mrs. Palmer's distress, if such distress be capable
of aggravation, prevented her perhaps from eventually sinking
under it. If the birth of her child was no alleviation
of her sorrow, it brought with it new feelings, new duties,
new cause for exertion, and new strength for it. She wrote
to Melicent and to her brother, simply stating her own
destitute situation, and that of the orphan Leonard; she believed
that their pride would not suffer them either to let
her starve or go to the parish for support, and in this she
was not disappointed. An answer was returned by Miss
Trewbody, informing her that she had nobody to thank but
herself for her misfortunes; but that, notwithstanding the
disgrace which she had brought upon the family, she might
expect an annual allowance of ten pounds from the writer,
and a like sum from her brother; upon this she must retire
into some obscure part of the country, and pray God to forgive
her for the offence she had committed, in marrying
beneath her birth, and against her father's consent.

Mrs. Palmer had also written to the friends of Lieutenant
Bacon, — her own husband had none who could assist her.
She expressed her willingness and her anxiety to have the
care of her sister's orphan, but represented her forlorn state.
They behaved more liberally than her own kin had done,
and promised five pounds a year as long as the boy should

require it. With this and her pension she took a cottage in
a retired village. Grief had acted upon her heart like the
rod of Moses upon the rock in the desert; it had opened
it, and the well-spring of piety had gushed forth. Affliction
made her religious, and religion brought with it consolation,
and comfort, and joy. Leonard became as dear to her as
Margaret. The sense of duty educed a pleasure from every
privation to which she subjected herself for the sake of
economy; and, in endeavoring to fulfil her duties in that
state of life to which it had pleased God to call her, she
was happier than she had ever been in her father's house,
and not less so than in her marriage state. Her happiness
indeed was different in kind, but it was higher in degree.
For the sake of these dear children she was contented to
live, and even prayed for life; while, if it had respected
herself only, death had become to her rather an object of
desire than of dread. In this manner she lived seven years
after the loss of her husband, and was then carried off by an
acute disease, to the irreparable loss of the orphans, who
were thus orphaned indeed.

2. CHAPTER II.

Goff.

Miss Trewbody behaved with perfect propriety upon
the news of her sister's death. She closed her front windows

for two days; received no visitors for a week; was
much indisposed, but resigned to the will of Providence, in
reply to messages of condolence; put her servants in mourning,
and sent for Margaret, that she might do her duty to
her sister's child by breeding her up under her own eye.
Poor Margaret was transferred from the stone floor of her
mother's cottage to the Turkey carpet of her aunt's parlor.
She was too young to comprehend at once the whole evil of
the exchange; but she learned to feel and understand it
during years of bitter dependence, unalleviated by any hope,
except that of one day seeing Leonard, the only creature on
earth whom she remembered with affection.

Seven years elapsed, and during all those years Leonard
was left to pass his holidays, summer and winter, at the
grammar-school where he had been placed at Mrs. Palmer's
death: for although the master regularly transmitted with
his half-yearly bill the most favorable accounts of his disposition
and general conduct, as well as of his progress in
learning, no wish to see the boy had ever arisen in the
hearts of his nearest relations; and no feeling of kindness,
or sense of decent humanity, had ever induced either the
fox-hunter Trewman, or Melicent his sister, to invite him
for Midsummer or Christmas. At length in the seventh
year a letter announced that his school-education had been
completed, and that he was elected to a scholarship at —
College, Oxford, which scholarship would entitle him to a
fellowship in due course of time: in the intervening years
some little assistance from his liberal benefactors would be
required; and the liberality of those kind friends would be
well bestowed upon a youth who bade so fair to do honor
to himself, and to reflect no disgrace upon his honorable connections.
The head of the family promised his part, with
an ungracious expression of satisfaction at thinking that,
“thank God, there would soon be an end of these demands
upon him.” Miss Trewbody signified her assent in the

same amiable and religious spirit. However much her
sister had disgraced her family, she replied, “Please God,
it should never be said that she refused to do her duty.”

The whole sum which these wealthy relations contributed
was not very heavy, — an annual ten pounds each; but
they contrived to make their nephew feel the weight of
every separate portion. The Squire's half came always
with a brief note, desiring that the receipt of the enclosed
sum might be acknowledged without delay, — not a word of
kindness or courtesy accompanied it: and Miss Trewbody
never failed to administer with her remittance a few edifying
remarks upon the folly of his mother in marrying
beneath herself; and the improper conduct of his father in
connecting himself with a woman of family, against the
consent of her relations; the consequence of which was,
that he had left a child dependent upon those relations for
support. Leonard received these pleasant preparations of
charity only at distant intervals, when he regularly expected
them, with his half-yearly allowance. But Margaret meantime
was dieted upon the food of bitterness, without one
circumstance to relieve the misery of her situation.

At the time of which I am now speaking, Miss Trewbody
was a maiden lady of forty-seven, in the highest state of
preservation. The whole business of her life had been to
take care of a fine person, and in this she had succeeded
admirably. Her library consisted of two books: “Nelson's
Festivals and Fasts” was one, the other was “The Queen's
Cabinet Unlocked”; and there was not a cosmetic in the
latter which she had not faithfully prepared. Thus by
means, as she believed, of distilled waters of various kinds,
May-dew and buttermilk, her skin retained its beautiful
texture still, and much of its smoothness; and she knew at
times how to give it the appearance of that brilliancy which
it had lost. But that was a profound secret. Miss Trewbody,
remembering the example of Jezebel, always felt

conscious that she was committing a sin when she took the
rouge-box in her hand, and generally ejaculated in a low
voice, the Lord forgive me! when she laid it down: but,
looking in the glass at the same time, she indulged a hope
that the nature of the temptation might be considered as
an excuse for the transgression. Her other great business
was to observe with the utmost precision all the punctilios
of her situation in life; and the time which was not devoted
to one or other of these worthy occupations, was employed
in scolding her servants, and tormenting her niece. This
employment, for it was so habitual that it deserved that
name, agreed excellently with her constitution. She was
troubled with no acrid humors, no fits of bile, no diseases
of the spleen, no vapors or hysterics. The morbid matter
was all collected in her temper, and found a regular vent at
her tongue. This kept the lungs in vigorous health; nay,
it even seemed to supply the place of wholesome exercise,
and to stimulate the system like a perpetual blister, with
this peculiar advantage, that instead of an inconvenience it
was a pleasure to herself, and all the annoyance was to her
dependants.

Miss Trewbody lies buried in the Cathedral at Salisbury,
where a monument was erected to her memory worthy of
remembrance itself for its appropriate inscription and accompaniments.
The epitaph recorded her as a woman
eminently pious, virtuous, and charitable, who lived universally
respected, and died sincerely lamented, by all who had
the happiness of knowing her. This inscription was upon
a marble shield supported by two Cupids, who bent their
heads over the edge, with marble tears larger than gray
pease, and something of the same color, upon their cheeks.
These were the only tears which her death occasioned, and
the only Cupids with whom she had ever any concern.

3. CHAPTER III.

Robert Wilmot.

When Leonard had resided three years at Oxford, one
of his college-friends invited him to pass the long vacation
at his father's house, which happened to be within an easy
ride of Salisbury. One morning, therefore, he rode to that
city, rung at Miss Trewbody's door, and having sent in his
name, was admitted into the parlor, where there was no one
to receive him, while Miss Trewbody adjusted her head-dress
at the toilette, before she made her appearance. Her
feelings while she was thus employed were not of the
pleasantest kind toward this unexpected guest; and she was
prepared to accost him with a reproof for his extravagance
in undertaking so long a journey, and with some mortifying
questions concerning the business which brought him there.
But this amiable intention was put to flight, when Leonard,
as soon as she entered the room, informed her, that having
accepted an invitation into that neighborhood, from his friend
and fellow-collegian, the son of Sir Lambert Bowles, he had
taken the earliest opportunity of coming to pay his respects
to her, and acknowledging his obligations, as bound alike
by duty and inclination. The name of Sir Lambert Bowles
acted upon Miss Trewbody like a charm; and its mollifying
effect was not a little aided by the tone of her nephew's
address, and the sight of a fine youth in the first bloom of
manhood, whose appearance and manners were such, that

she could not be surprised at the introduction he had obtained
into one of the first families in the county. The
scowl, therefore, which she brought into the room upon her
brow, passed instantly away, and was succeeded by so
gracious an aspect, that Leonard, if he had not divined the
cause, might have mistaken this gleam of sunshine for fair
weather.

A cause which Miss Trewbody could not possibly suspect
had rendered her nephew's address thus conciliatory. Had
he expected to see no other person in that house, the visit
would have been performed as an irksome obligation, and
his manner would have appeared as cold and formal as the
reception which he anticipated. But Leonard had not forgotten
the playmate and companion with whom the happy
years of his childhood had been passed. Young as he was
at their separation, his character had taken its stamp during
those peaceful years, and the impression which it then
received was indelible. Hitherto hope had never been to
him so delightful as memory. His thoughts wandered back
into the past more frequently than they took flight into the
future; and the favorite form which his imagination called
up was that of the sweet child, who in winter partook his
bench in the chimney-corner, and in summer sat with him
in the porch, and strung the fallen blossoms of jessamine
upon stalks of grass. The snowdrop and the crocus reminded
him of their little garden, the primrose of their
sunny orchard-bank, and the bluebells and the cowslip of
the fields, wherein they were allowed to run wild, and
gather them in the merry month of May. Such as she
then was he saw her frequently in sleep, with her blue
eyes, and rosy cheeks, and flaxen curls: and in his day-dreams
he sometimes pictured her to himself such as he
supposed she now might be, and dressed up the image with
all the magic of ideal beauty. His heart, therefore, was at
his lips when he inquired for his cousin. It was not without

something like fear, and an apprehension of disappointment,
that he awaited her appearance; and he was secretly
condemning himself for the romantic folly which he had
encouraged, when the door opened, and a creature came in,
— less radiant, indeed, but more winning than his fancy
had created, for the loveliness of earth and reality was
about her.

“Margaret,” said Miss Trewbody, “do you remember
your cousin Leonard?”

Before she could answer, Leonard had taken her hand.
“'T is a long while, Margaret, since we parted! — ten
years! — But I have not forgotten the parting — nor the
blessed days of our childhood.”

She stood trembling like an aspen leaf, and looked wistfully
in his face for a moment, then hung down her head,
without power to utter a word in reply. But he felt her
tears fall fast upon his hand, and felt also that she returned
its pressure.

Leonard had some difficulty to command himself, so as to
bear a part in conversation with his aunt, and keep his eyes
and his thoughts from wandering. He accepted, however,
her invitation to stay and dine with her with undissembled
satisfaction, and the pleasure was not a little heightened
when she left the room to give some necessary orders in
consequence. Margaret still sate trembling and in silence.
He took her hand, pressed it to his lips, and said in a low
earnest voice, “Dear, dear Margaret!” She raised her
eyes, and fixing them upon him with one of those looks,
the perfect remembrance of which can never be effaced from
the heart to which they have been addressed, replied in a
lower but not less earnest tone, “Dear Leonard!” and from
that moment their lot was sealed for time and for eternity.

4. CHAPTER IV.

Beaumont and Fletcher.

I will not describe the subsequent interviews between
Leonard and his cousin, short and broken, but precious as
they were; nor that parting one, in which hands were
plighted with the sure and certain knowledge that hearts
had been interchanged. Remembrance will enable some of
my readers to portray the scene, and then perhaps a sigh
may be heaved for the days that are gone: Hope will picture
it to others — and with them the sigh will be for the
days that are to come.

There was not that indefinite deferment of hope in this
case at which the heart sickens. Leonard had been bred
up in poverty from his childhood; a parsimonious allowance,
grudgingly bestowed, had contributed to keep him frugal at
college, by calling forth a pardonable if not a commendable
sense of pride in aid of a worthier principle. He knew
that he could rely upon himself for frugality, industry, and
a cheerful as well as a contented mind. He had seen the
miserable state of bondage in which Margaret existed with
her aunt, and his resolution was made to deliver her from
that bondage as soon as he could obtain the smallest benefice
on which it was possible for them to subsist. They
agreed to live rigorously within their means, however poor,
and put their trust in Providence. They could not be deceived
in each other, for they had grown up together; and
they knew that they were not deceived in themselves.
Their love had the freshness of youth, but prudence and

forethought were not wanting; the resolution which they
had taken brought with it peace of mind, and no misgiving
was felt in either heart when they prayed for a blessing
upon their purpose. In reality it had already brought a
blessing with it; and this they felt; for love, when it deserves
that name, produces in us what may be called a
regeneration of its own — a second birth — dimly, but yet
in some degree, resembling that which is effected by Divine
Love when its redeeming work is accomplished in the soul.

Leonard returned to Oxford happier than all this world's
wealth or this world's honors could have made him. He
had now a definite and attainable hope — an object in life
which gave to life itself a value. For Margaret, the world
no longer seemed to her like the same earth which she had
till then inhabited. Hitherto she had felt herself a forlorn
and solitary creature, without a friend; and the sweet
sounds and pleasant objects of nature, had imparted as little
cheerfulness to her as to the debtor who sees green fields in
sunshine from his prison, and hears the lark singing at liberty.
Her heart was open now to all the exhilarating and
all the softening influences of birds, fields, flowers, vernal
suns, and melodious streams. She was subject to the same
daily and hourly exercise of meekness, patience, and humility;
but the trial was no longer painful; with love in
her heart, and hope and sunshine in her prospect, she found
even a pleasure in contrasting her present condition with
that which was in store for her.

In these our days every young lady holds the pen of a
ready writer, and words flow from it as fast as it can indent
its zigzag lines, according to the reformed system of writing,
— which said system improves handwritings by making
them all alike and all illegible. At that time women wrote
better and spelt worse; but letter-writing was not one of
their accomplishments. It had not yet become one of the
general pleasures and luxuries of life, — perhaps the greatest

gratification which the progress of civilization has given
us. There was then no mail-coach to waft a sigh across the
country at the rate of eight miles an hour. Letters came
slowly and with long intervals between; but when they
came, the happiness which they imparted to Leonard and
Margaret lasted during the interval, however long. To
Leonard it was as an exhilarant and a cordial which rejoiced
and strengthened him. He trod the earth with a lighter and
more elated movement on the day when he received a letter
from Margaret, as if he felt himself invested with an importance
which he had never possessed till the happiness of another
human being was inseparably associated with his own.

Happy, indeed, if there be happiness on earth, as that
same sweet poet says, is he

This was Leonard's case; and when he kissed the paper
which her hand had pressed, it was with a consciousness of
the strength and sincerity of his affection, which at once rejoiced
and fortified his heart. To Margaret his letters were
like summer dew upon the herb that thirsts for such refreshment.
Whenever they arrived, a headache became the
cause or pretext for retiring earlier than usual to her chamber,
that she might weep and dream over the precious lines.

5. CHAPTER V.

Cowper.

Leonard was not more than eight-and-twenty when he
obtained a living, a few miles from Doncaster. He took
his bride with him to the vicarage. The house was as humble
as the benefice, which was worth less than £ 50 a year;
but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the country
round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone.
A few acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden
was large enough to afford healthful and pleasurable
employment to its owners. The course of true love never
ran more smoothly; but its course was short.

Little more than five years from the time of their marriage
had elapsed, before a head-stone in the adjacent
churchyard told where the remains of Margaret Bacon had
been deposited, in the thirtieth year of her age.

When the stupor and the agony of that bereavement had
passed away, the very intensity of Leonard's affection became
a source of consolation. Margaret had been to him a
purely ideal object during the years of his youth; death
had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified
and idolized her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now.
She had been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all
that he had hoped, all that he had desired. She would
again be so in heaven. And this second union nothing
could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing could dissolve.
He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing
her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed
a parent's duty to their child; and so doing to await
his own summons, which must one day come, which every
day was brought nearer, and which any day might bring.

The same feeling which from his chidhood had refined
Leonard's heart, keeping it pure and undefiled, had also
corroborated the natural strength of his character, and made
him firm of purpose. It was a saying of Bishop Andrewes,
that “good husbandry is good divinity”; “the truth whereof,”
says Fuller, “no wise man will deny.” Frugality he
had always practised as a needful virtue, and found that, in
an especial manner, it brings with it its own reward. He
now resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his
small income to make a provision for his child, in case of
her surviving him, as in the natural course of things might
be expected. If she should be removed before him — for
this was an event the possibility of which he always bore in
mind — he had resolved, that whatever should have been
accumulated with this intent, should be disposed of to some

other pious purpose, — for such, within the limits to which
his poor means extended, he properly considered this.
And having entered on this prudential course with a calm
reliance upon Providence, in case his hour should come before
that purpose could be accomplished, he was without
any earthly hope or fear, — those alone excepted from
which no parent can be free.

The child had been christened Deborah, after her maternal
grandmother, for whom Leonard ever gratefully retained a
most affectionate and reverential remembrance. She was
a healthy, happy creature in body and in mind; at first

afterwards, as she grew up, a favorite with the village
schoolmistress, and with the whole parish; docile, good-natured,
lively and yet considerate, always gay as a lark and
busy as a bee. One of the pensive pleasures in which
Leonard indulged was to gaze on her unperceived, and
trace the likeness to her mother.

That resemblance which was strong in childhood lessened
as the child grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired
a cast of meek melancholy during those years in
which the bread of bitterness had been her portion; and,
when hope came to her, it was that “hope deferred,” which
takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart, instead
of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy
circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her
daughter's spirits. Deborah brought into the world the

happiest of all nature's endowments, an easy temper and a
light heart. Resemblant therefore as the features were,
the dissimiltude of expression was more apparent; and
when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity
that lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight
loveliness which had given a serene and saint-like character
to her mother's, he wished to persuade himself, that as the
early translation of the one seemed to have been thus prefigured,
the other might be destined to live for the happiness
of others till a good old age, while length of years in
their course should ripen her for heaven.

6. CHAPTER VI.

— Southey.

The name of Leonard must now be dropped as we proceed.
Some of the South American tribes, among whom
the Jesuits labored with such exemplary zeal, and who take
their personal appellations (as most names were originally
derived) from beasts, birds, plants, and other visible objects,
abolish upon the death of every individual the name by
which he was called, and invent another for the thing from
which it was taken, so that their language, owing to this
curiously inconvenient custom, is in a state of continual
change. An abolition almost as complete with regard to
the person had taken place in the present instance. The
name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by all his dearest
and fondest recollections. He had been known by it on

his mother's knees, and in the humble cottage of that aunt
who had been to him a second mother; and by the wife of
his bosom, his first, last, and only love. Margaret had
never spoken to him, never thought of him, by any other
name. From the hour of her death, no human voice ever
addressed him by it again. He never heard himself so
called, except in dreams. It existed only in the dead letter;
he signed it mechanically in the course of business,
but it had ceased to be a living name.

Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack
on to them any two or more honorary letters of the alphabet
as a tail; they drop their surnames for a dignity, and
change them for an estate or a title. They are pleased
to be Doctor'd and Professor'd; to be Captain'd, Major'd,
Colonel'd, General'd, or Admiral'd; to be Sir John'd, my-Lorded,
or your-Grace'd. “You and I,” says Cranmer in
his Answer to Gardiner's book upon Transubstantiation —
“you and I were delivered from our surnames when we
were consecrated Bishops; sithence which time we have so
commonly been used of all men to be called Bishops, you of
Winchester, and I of Canterbury, that the most part of the
people know not that your name is Gardiner, and mine
Cranmer. And I pray God, that we being called to the
name of Lords, have not forgotten our own baser estates,
that once we were simple squires!” — But the emotion with
which the most successful suitor of Fortune hears himself
first addressed by a new and honorable title, conferred upon
him for his public deserts, touches his heart less (if that
heart be sound at the core), than when after long absence,
some one who is privileged so to use it, accosts him by his
christian name, — that household name which he has never
heard but from his nearest relations, and his old familiar
friends. By this it is that we are known to all around us
in childhood; it is used only by our parents and our nearest
kin when that stage is passed; and, as they drop off, it dies
as to its oral uses with them.

It is because we are remembered more naturally in our
family and paternal circles by our baptismal than our hereditary
names, and remember ourselves more naturally by
them, that the Roman Catholic, renouncing, upon a principle
of perverted piety, all natural ties when he enters a
convent, and voluntarily dies to the world, assumes a new
one. This is one manifestation of that intense selfishness
which the law of monastic life inculcates, and affects to
sanctify. Alas, there need no motives of erroneous religion
to wean us from the ties of blood and of affection! They
are weakened and dissolved by fatal circumstances, and the
ways of the world, too frequently and too soon.

“Our men of rank,” said my friend one day when he was
speaking upon this subject, “are not the only persons who
go by different appellations in different parts of their lives.
We all moult our names in the natural course of life. I
was Dan in my father's house, and should still be so with
my uncle William and Mr. Guy, if they were still living.
Upon my removal to Doncaster, my master and mistress
called me Daniel, and my acquaintance Dove. In Holland
I was Mynheer Duif. Now I am the Doctor, and not
among my patients only; friends, acquaintance, and strangers,
address me by this appellation; even my wife calls
me by no other name; and I shall never be anything but
the Doctor again, — till I am registered at my burial by the
same name as at my christening.”

7. CHAPTER VII.

Sydney Godolphin.

When Deborah was about nineteen, the small-pox broke
out in Doncaster, and soon spread over the surrounding

country, occasioning everywhere a great mortality. At
that time inoculation had very rarely been practised in
the provinces; and the prejudice against it was so strong,
that Mr. Bacon, though convinced in his own mind that the
practice was not only lawful, but advisable, refrained from
having his daughter inoculated till the disease appeared in
his own parish. He had been induced to defer it during
her childhood, partly because he was unwilling to offend the
prejudices of his parishioners, which he hoped to overcome
by persuasion and reasoning when time and opportunity
might favor; still more, because he thought it unjustifiable
to introduce such a disease into his own house, with imminent
risk of communicating it to others, which were otherwise
in no danger, in which the same preparations would
not be made, and where, consequently, the danger would be
greater. But when the malady had shown itself in the parish,
then he felt that his duty as a parent required him to
take the best apparent means for the preservation of his
child; and that as a pastor also it became him now in his
own family to set an example to his parishioners.

Deborah, who had the most perfect reliance upon her
father's judgment, and lived in entire accordance with his
will in all things, readily consented; and seemed to regard
the beneficial consequences of the experiment to others with
hope, rather than to look with apprehension to it for herself.
Mr. Bacon therefore went to Doncaster and called upon
Mr. Dove. “I do not,” said he, “ask whether you would
advise me to have my daughter inoculated; where so great
a risk is to be incurred, in the case of an only child, you
might hesitate to advise it. But if you see nothing in her
present state of health, or in her constitutional tendencies,
which would render it more than ordinarily dangerous, it is
her own wish and mine, after due consideration on my part,
that she should be committed to your care, — putting our
trust in Providence.”

Hitherto there had been no acquaintance between Mr.
Bacon and the Doctor, farther than that they knew each
other by sight and by good report. This circumstance led
to a growing intimacy. During the course of his attendance,
the Doctor fell in friendship with the father, and the
father with him.

“Did he fall in love with his patient?”

“No, ladies.”

You have already heard that he once fell in love, and
how it happened. And you have also been informed that
he caught love once, though I have not told you how,
because it would have led me into too melancholy a tale.
In this case he neither fell in love, nor caught it, nor ran
into it, nor walked into it; nor was he overtaken in it, as a
boon companion in liquor, or a runaway in his flight. Yet
there was love between the parties at last, and it was love for
love, to the heart's content of both. How this came to pass
will be related at the proper time and in the proper place.

For here let me set before the judicious reader certain
pertinent remarks by the pious and well-known author of a
popular treatise upon the Right Use of Reason, — a treatise
which has been much read to little purpose. That author
observes, that “those writers and speakers whose chief
business is to amuse or delight, to allure, terrify, or persuade
mankind, do not confine themselves to any natural order, but
in a cryptical or hidden method, adapt everything to their
designed ends. Sometimes they omit those things which
might injure their design, or grow tedious to their hearers,
though they seem to have a necessary relation to the point in
hand; sometimes they add those things which have no great
reference to the subject, but are suited to allure or refresh
the mind and the ear. They dilate sometimes, and flourish
long upon little incidents, and they skip over, and but
lightly touch the dryer part of the theme. They omit things
essential which are not beautiful; they insert little needless

circumstances, and beautiful digressions: they invert times
and actions, in order to place everything in the most affecting
light; — they place the first things last, and the last
things first with wondrous art; and yet so manage it as to
conceal their artifice, and lead the senses and passions of
their hearers into a pleasing and powerful captivity.”

8. CHAPTER VIII.

Shakespeare.

In a Scotch village the Manse is sometimes the only good
house, and generally it is the best; almost, indeed, what in
old times the Mansion used to be in an English one. In Mr.
Bacon's parish, the vicarage, though humble as the benefice
itself, was the neatest. The cottage in which he and Margaret
passed their childhood, had been remarkable for that comfort
which is the result and the reward of order and neatness:
and when the reunion which blessed them both rendered the
remembrance of those years delightful, they returned in
this respect to the way in which they had been trained up,
practised the economy which they had learned there, and
loved to think how entirely their course of life, in all its circumstances,
would be after the heart of that person, if she
could behold it, whose memory they both with equal affection
cherished. After his bereavement, it was one of the
widower's pensive pleasures to keep everything in the same

state as when Margaret was living. Nothing was neglected
that she used to do, or that she would have done. The
flowers were tended as carefully as if she were still to enjoy
their fragrance and their beauty; and the birds who came
in winter for their crumbs, were fed as duly for her sake, as
they had formerly been by her hands.

There was no superstition in this, nor weakness. Immoderate
grief, if it does not exhaust itself by indulgence,
easily assumes the one character or the other, or takes a
type of insanity. But he had looked for consolation, where,
when sincerely sought, it is always to be found; and he had
experienced that religion effects in a true believer all that
philosophy professes, and more than all that mere philosophy
can perform. The wounds which stoicism would cauterize,
religion heals.

There is a resignation with which, it may be feared,
most of us deceive ourselves. To bear what must be
borne, and submit to what cannot be resisted, is no more
than what the unregenerate heart is taught by the instinct
of animal nature. But to acquiesce in the afflictive dispensations
of Providence, — to make one's own will conform in
all things to that of our Heavenly Father, — to say to him
in the sincerity of faith, when we drink of the bitter cup,
“Thy will be done!” — to bless the name of the Lord as
much from the heart when he takes away as when he gives,
and with a depth of feeling, of which, perhaps, none but the
afflicted heart is capable, — this is the resignation which religion
teaches, this the sacrifice which it requires.[8] This
sacrifice Leonard had made, and he felt that it was accepted.

Severe, therefore, as his loss had been, and lasting as its
effects were, it produced in him nothing like a settled sorrow,
nor even that melancholy which sorrow leaves behind.
Gibbon has said to himself, that as a mere philosopher he
could not agree with the Greeks, in thinking that those who
die in their youth are favored by the Gods:

It was because he was “a mere philosopher,” that he
failed to perceive a truth which the religious heathen acknowledged,
and which is so trivial, and of such practical
value, that it may now be seen inscribed upon village tombstones.
The Christian knows that “Blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit.” And the
heart of the Christian mourner, in its deepest distress, hath
the witness of the Spirit to that consolatory assurance.

In this faith Leonard regarded his bereavement. His
loss, he knew, had been Margaret's gain. What, if she had
been summoned in the flower of her years, and from a state
of connubial happiness which there had been nothing to disturb
or to alloy? How soon might that flower have been
blighted, — how surely must it have faded, — how easily
might that happiness have been interrupted, by some of
those evils which flesh is heir to! And as the separation
was to take place, how mercifully had it been appointed
that he, who was the stronger vessel, should be the survivor!
Even for their child this was the best, greatly as she needed,
and would need, a mother's care. His paternal solicitude
would supply that care, as far as it was possible to supply
it; but had he been removed, mother and child must have
been left to the mercy of Providence, without any earthly
protector, or any means of support.

For her to die was gain; in him, therefore, it were sinful
as well as selfish to repine, and of such selfishness and sin
his heart acouitted him. If a wish could have recalled her

to life, no such wish would ever have by him been uttered,
nor ever have by him been felt; certain he was, that he
loved her too well to bring her again into this world of instability
and trial. Upon earth there can be no safe happiness.

All things here are subject to Time and Mutability:

We must be in eternity before we can be secure against
cnange. “The world,” says Cowper, “upon which we close
our eyes at night, is never the same with that on which we
open them in the morning.”

It was to the perfect Order he should find in that state
upon which he was about to enter, that the judicious Hooker
looked forward at his death with placid and profound contentment.
Because he had been employed in contending
against a spirit of insubordination and schism which soon
proved fatal to his country; and because his life had been
passed under the perpetual discomfort of domestic discord,
the happiness of Heaven seemed, in his estimation, to consist
primarily in Order, as, indeed, in all human societies this is
the first thing needful. The discipline which Mr. Bacon had
undergone was very different in kind: what he delighted to
think was, that the souls of those whom death and redemption
have made perfect, are in a world where there is no
change, nor parting, — where nothing fades, nothing passes
away and is no more seen, but the good and the beautiful
are permanent.

When Wilkie was in the Escurial looking at Titian's
famous picture of the Last Supper, in the refectory there,
an old Jeronimite said to him, “I have sat daily in sight of
that picture for now nearly threescore years; during that
time my companions have dropped off, one after another, —
all who were my seniors, all who were my contemporaries,
and many, or most of those who were younger than myself;
more than one generation has passed away, and there the
figures in the picture have remained unchanged! I look at
them till I sometimes think that they are the realities, and
we but shadows!”[12]

I wish I could record the name of the monk by whom
that natural feeling was so feelingly and strikingly expressed.

says the author of the Tragedy of Nero, whose name also
I could wish had been forthcoming; and the classical reader
will remember the lines of Sophocles: —

These are reflections which should make us think

9. CHAPTER IX.

Leone Medico (Hebreo.)

Mr. Bacon s parsonage was as humble a dwelling in all
respects as the cottage in which his friend Daniel was born.
A best kitchen was its best room, and in its furniture an
Observantine Friar would have seen nothing that he could
have condemned as superfluous. His college and later
school books, with a few volumes which had been presented
to him by the more grateful of his pupils, composed his
scanty library: they were either books of needful reference,
or such as upon every fresh perusal might afford new
delight. But he had obtained the use of the Church Library
at Doncaster by a payment of twenty shillings, according
to the terms of the foundation. Folios from that
collection might be kept three months, smaller volumes,
one or two, according to their size; and as there were
many works in it of solid contents as well as sterling value,
he was in no such want of intellectual food, as too many of
his brethren are, even at this time. How much good might
have been done, and how much evil might probably have
been prevented, if Dr. Bray's design for the foundation
of parochial libraries had been everywhere carried into
effect!

The parish contained between five and six hundred souls.
There was no one of higher rank among them than entitled
him, according to the custom of those days, to be styled

gentleman upon his tombstone. They were plain people,
who had neither manufactories to corrupt, alehouses to
brutalize, nor newspapers to mislead them. At first coming
among them he had won their good-will by his affability
and benign conduct, and he had afterwards gained their
respect and affection in an equal degree.

There were two services at his church, but only one sermon,
which never fell short of fifteen minutes in length, and
seldom extended to half an hour. It was generally abridged
from some good old divine. His own compositions were
few, and only upon points on which he wished carefully
to examine and digest his own thoughts, or which were
peculiarly suited to some or other of his hearers. His whole
stock might be deemed scanty in these days; but there was
not one in it which would not well bear repetition, and the
more observant of his congregation liked that they should be
repeated.

Young ministers are earnestly advised long to refrain
from preaching their own productions, in an excellent little
book addressed by a Father to his Son, preparatory to his
receiving holy orders. Its title is a “Monitor for Young
Ministers,” and every parent who has a son so circumstanced
would do well to put it into his hands. “It is not
possible,” says this judicious writer, “that a young minister
can at first be competent to preach his sermons with effect,
even if his abilities should qualify him to write well. His
very youth and youthful manner, both in his style of writing
and in his delivery, will preclude him from being effective.
Unquestionably it is very rare indeed for a man of his age
to have his mental abilities sufficiently chastened, or his
method sufficiently settled, to be equal to the composition
of a sermon fit for public use, even if it should receive the
advantage of chaste and good delivery. On every account,
therefore, it is wise and prudent to be slow and backward in
venturing to produce his own efforts, or in thinking that

they are fit for the public ear. There is an abundant field
of the works of others open to him from the wisest and the
best of men, the weight of whose little fingers, in argument
or instruction, will be greater than his own loins even at his
highest maturity. There is clearly no want of new compositions,
excepting on some new or occasional emergencies:
for there is not an open subject in the Christian religion,
which has not been discussed by men of the greatest learning
and piety, who have left behind them numerous works
for our assistance and edification. Many of these are so
neglected that they are become almost new ground for our
generation. To these he may freely resort, — till experience
and a rational and chastened confidence shall warrant
him in believing himself qualified to work upon his own
resources.”

“He that learns of young men,” says Rabbi Jose Bar
Jehudah, “is like a man that eats unripe grapes, or that
drinks wine out of the wine-press; but he that learneth of
the ancient, is like a man that eateth ripe grapes, and drinketh
wine that is old.”[15]

It was not in pursuance of any judicious advice like this
that Mr. Bacon followed the course here pointed out, but
from his own good sense and natural humility. His only
ambition was to be useful; if a desire may be called ambitious
which orginated in the sincere sense of duty. To
think of distinguishing himself in any other way, would for
him, he well knew, have been worse than an idle dream.
The time expended in composing a sermon as a perfunctory
official business, would have been worse than wasted for
himself, and the time employed in delivering it, no better
than wasted upon his congregation. He was especially
careful never to weary them, and, therefore, never to preach
anything which was not likely to engage their attention,
and make at least some present impression. His own sermons

effected this, because they were always composed with
some immediate view, or under the influence of some deep
and strong feeling: and in his adopted ones, the different
manner of the different authors produced an awakening
effect. Good sense is as often to be found among the illiterate,
as among those who have enjoyed the opportunities
of education. Many of his hearers who knew but one
meaning of the word style, and had never heard it used in
any other, perceived a difference in the manner of Bishops
Hall and Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor, of Barrow and
South and Scott, without troubling themselves about the
cause, or being in the slightest degree aware of it.

Mr. Bacon neither undervalued his parishioners, nor over-valued
the good which could be wrought among them by
direct instruction of this kind. While he used perspicuous
language, he knew that they who listened to it would be
able to follow the argument; and as he drew always from
the wells of English undefiled, he was safe on that point.
But that all even of the adults would listen, and that all
even of those who did, would do anything more than hear,
he was too well acquainted with human nature to expect.

A woman in humble life was asked one day on the way
back from church, whether she had understood the sermon;
a stranger had preached, and his discourse resembled one of
Mr. Bacon's neither in length nor depth. “Wud I hae the
persumption?” was her simple and contented answer. The
quality of the discourse signified nothing to her; she had
done her duty, as well as she could, in hearing it; and she
went to her house justified rather than some of those who
had attended to it critically; or who had turned to the text
in their Bibles when it was given out.

“Well, Master Jackson,” said his minister, walking homeward
after service with an industrious laborer, who was a
constant attendant; “well, Master Jackson, Sunday must be
a blessed day of rest for you, who work so hard all the

week! And you make a good use of the day, for you are
always to be seen at church!”—“Ay, sir,” replied Jackson,
“it is indeed a blessed day; I works hard enough all
the week, and then I comes to church o' Sundays, and sets
me down, and lays my legs up, and thinks o' nothing.”

“Let my candle go out in a stink, when I refuse to confess
from whom I have lighted it.”[16] The author to whose
little book[17] I am beholden for this true anecdote, after saying,
“Such was the religion of this worthy man,” justly
adds, “and such must be the religion of most men of his station.
Doubtless, it is a wise dispensation that it is so.
For so it has been from the beginning of the world, and
there is no visible reason to suppose that it can ever be
otherwise.”

“In spite,” says this judicious writer, “of all the zealous
wishes and efforts of the most pious and laborious teachers,
the religion of the bulk of the people must and will ever be
little more than mere habit, and confidence in others. This
must of necessity be the case with all men, who, from defect
of nature or education, or from other worldy causes, have
not the power or the disposition to think; and it cannot be
disputed that the far greater number of mankind are of this
class. These facts give peculiar force to those lessons
which teach the importance and efficacy of good example
from those who are blessed with higher qualifications; and
they strongly demonstrate the necessity, that the zeal of
those who wish to impress the people with the deep and
awful mysteries of religion should be tempered by wisdom
and discretion, no less than by patience, forbearance, and
a great latitude of indulgence for uncontrollable circumstances.
They also call upon us most powerfully to do all
we can to provide such teachers, and imbue them with such
principles as shall not endanger the good cause by over

earnest efforts to effect more than, in the nature of things,
can be done; or disturb the existing good by attempting
more than will be borne, or by producing hypocritical pretences
of more than can be really felt.”

10. CHAPTER X.

Sir Walter Raleigh.

The first thing which Mr. Bacon had done after taking
possession of his vicarage, and obtaining such information
about his parishioners as the more considerate of them
could impart, was to inquire into the state of the children
in every household. He knew that to win the mother's
good-will was the surest way to win that of the family, and
to win the children was a good step toward gaining that
of the mother. In those days reading and writing were
thought as little necessary for the lower class, as the art
of spelling for the class above them, or indeed for any
except the learned. Their ignorance in this respect was
sometimes found to be inconvenient, but by none, perhaps,
except here and there by a conscientious and thoughtful
clergyman, was it felt to be an evil, — an impediment in
the way of that moral and religious instruction, without
which men are in danger of becoming as the beasts that

perish. Yet the common wish of advancing their children
in the world, made most parents in this station desire to
obtain the advantage of what they called book-learning for
any son, who was supposed to manifest a disposition likely
to profit by it. To make him a scholar was to raise him a
step above themselves.
Partly for this reason, and still more that industrious mothers
might be relieved from the care of looking after their
children, there were few villages in which, as in Mr.
Bacon's parish, some poor woman in the decline of life and
of fortune did not obtain day-scholars enough to eke out her
scanty means of subsistence.

The village schoolmistress, such as Shenstone describes
in his admirable poem, and such as Kirke White drew from
the life, is no longer a living character. The new system
of education has taken from this class of women the staff
of their declining age, as the spinning-jennies have silenced
the domestic music of the spinning-wheel. Both changes
have come on unavoidably in the progress of human affairs.
It is well when any change brings with it nothing worse
than some temporary and incidental evil; but if the moral
machinery can counteract the great and growing evils of
the manufacturing system, it will be the greatest moral
miracle that has ever been wrought.

Sunday schools, which make Sunday a day of toil to the
teachers, and the most irksome day of the week to the children,
had not at that time been devised as a palliative for
the profligacy of large towns, and the worsened and worsening
condition of the poor. Mr. Bacon endeavored to make
the parents perform their religious duty toward their children,
either by teaching them what they could themselves
teach, or by sending them where their own want of knowledge

might be supplied. Whether the children went to
school or not, it was his wish that they should be taught
their prayers, the Creed, and the Commandments, at home.
These he thought were better learned at the mother's knees
than from any other teacher; and he knew also how wholesome
for the mother it was, that the child should receive
from her its first spiritual food, the milk of sound doctrine.
In a purely agricultural parish, there were at that time no
parents in a state of such brutal ignorance as to be unable
to teach these, though they might never have been taught
to read. When the father or mother could read, he expected
that they should also teach their children the
Catechism; in other cases this was left to his humble
coadjutrix, the schoolmistress.

During the summer and part of the autumn, he followed
the good old usage of catechising the children, after the
second lesson in the evening service. His method was to
ask a few questions in succession, and only from those who
he knew were able to answer them; and after each answer
he entered into a brief exposition suited to their capacity.
His manner was so benevolent, and he had made himself
so familiar in his visits, which were at once pastoral and
friendly, that no child felt alarmed at being singled out;
they regarded it as a mark of distinction, and the parents
were proud of seeing them thus distinguished. This practice
was discontinued in winter; because he knew that to
keep a congregation in the cold is not the way either to
quicken or cherish devotional feeling. Once a week during
Lent he examined all the children, on a week-day; the last
examination was in Easter week, after which each was sent
home happy with a homely cake, the gift of a wealthy
parishioner, who by this means contributed not a little to
the good effect of the pastor's diligence.

The foundation was thus laid by teaching the rising generation
their duty towards God and towards their neighbor,

and so far training them in the way that they should go.
In the course of a few years every household, from the
highest to the lowest, (the degrees were neither great
nor many,) had learned to look upon him as their friend.
There was only one in the parish whose members were
upon a parity with him in manners, none in literary culture;
but in good-will, and in human sympathy, he was
upon a level with them all. Never interfering in the concerns
of any family, unless his interference was solicited, he
was consulted upon all occasions of trouble or importance.
Incipient disputes, which would otherwise have afforded
grist for the lawyer's mill, were adjusted by his mediation;
and anxious parents, when they had cause to apprehend
that their children were going wrong, knew no better
course than to communicate their fears to him, and request
that he would administer some timely admonition.
Whenever he was thus called on, or had of himself perceived
that reproof or warning was required, it was given
in private, or only in presence of the parents, and always
with a gentleness which none but an obdurate disposition
could resist. His influence over the younger part of his
flock was the greater because he was no enemy to any innocent
sports, but, on the contrary, was pleased to see them
dance round the May-pole, encouraged them to dress their
doors with oaken boughs on the day of King Charles's
happy restoration, and to wear an oaken garland in the
hat, or an oak-apple on its sprig in the button-hole; went
to see their bonfire on the 5th of November, and entertained
the morris-dancers when they called upon him in
their Christmas rounds.

Mr. Bacon was in his parish what a moralizing old poet
wished himself to be, in these pleasing stanzas: —

11. CHAPTER XI.

Horace.

In all Mr. Bacon's views he was fortunate enough to
have the hearty concurrence of the wealthiest person in the
parish. This was a good man, Allison by name, who, having
realized a respectable fortune in the metropolis as a
tobacconist, and put out his sons in life according to their
respective inclinations, had retired from business at the age
of threescore, and established himself with an unmarried
daughter, and a maiden sister some ten years younger than
himself, in his native village, that he might there, when his
hour should come, be gathered to his fathers.

“The providence of God,” says South, “has so ordered
the course of things, that there is no action, the usefulness
of which has made it the matter of duty and of a profession,
but a man may bear the continual pursuit of it, without
loathing or satiety. The same shop and trade that employs
a man in his youth, employs him also in his age. Every
morning he rises fresh to his hammer and his anvil: custom
has naturalized his labor to him; his shop is his element,
and he cannot, with any enjoyment of himself, live out of
it.” The great preacher contrasts this with the wearisomeness
of an idle life, and the misery of a continual round of
what the world calls pleasure. “But now,” says he, “if
God has interwoven such a contentment with the works
of our ordinary calling, how much superior and more refined
must that be that arises from the survey of a pious
and well-governed life?”

This passage bears upon Mr. Allison's case, partly in the
consolatory fact which it states, and wholly in the application

which South has made of it. At the age of fourteen
he had been apprenticed to an uncle in Bishopsgate Street
Within; and twenty years after, on that uncle's death, had
succeeded to his old and well-established business. But
though he had lived there prosperously and happily six and
twenty years longer, he had contracted no such love for it
as to overcome the recollections of his childhood. Grateful
as the smell of snuff and tobacco had become to him, he
still remembered that cowslips and violets were sweeter;
and that the breath of a May morning was more exhilarating
than the air of his own shop, impregnated as it was
with the odor of the best Virginia. So having buried his
wife, who was a Londoner, and made over the business to
his eldest son, he returned to his native place, with the
intention of dying there; but he was in sound health of
body and mind, and his green old age seemed to promise,
— as far as anything can promise, — length of days.

Of his two other sons, one had chosen to be a clergyman,
and approved his choice both by his parts and diligence;
for he had gone off from Merchant-Tailors' School to St.
John's, Oxford, and was then a fellow of that college. The
other was a mate in the Merchants' service, and would soon
have the command of a ship in it. The desire of seeing
the world led him to this way of life; and that desire had
been unintentionally implanted by his father, who, in making
himself acquainted with everything relating to the herb out
of which his own fortune was raised, had become fond of
reading voyages and travels. His conversation induced the
lad to read these books, and the books confirmed the inclination
which had already been excited; and, as the boy was
of an adventurous temper, he thought it best to let him
follow the pursuit on which his mind was bent.

The change to a Yorkshire village was not too great for
Mr. Allison, even after residing nearly half a century in
Bishopsgate Street Within. The change in his own household,
indeed, rendered it expedient for him to begin, in this

sense, a new life. He had lost his mate; the young birds
were full-fledged and had taken flight; and it was time that
he should look out a retreat for himself and the single nestling
that remained under his wing, now that his son and
successor had brought home a wife. The marriage had
been altogether with his approbation; but it altered his
position in the house; and in a still greater degree his
sister's; moreover, the nest would soon be wanted for another
brood. Circumstances thus compelled him to put in
effect what had been the dream of his youth, and the still
remote intention of his middle age.

Miss Allison, like her brother, regarded this removal as a
great and serious change, preparatory to the only greater
one in this world that now remained for both; but, like
him, she regarded it rather seriously than sadly, or sadly
only in the old sober meaning of the word; and there was
a soft, sweet, evening sunshine in their prospect, which both
partook, because both had retained a deep affection for the
scenes of their childhood. To Betsey, her niece, nothing
could be more delightful than the expectation of such a removal.
She, who was then only entering her teens, had
nothing to regret in leaving London; and the place to
which she was going was the very spot which, of all others
in this wide world, from the time in which she was conscious
of forming a wish, she had wished most to see. Her
brother, the sailor, was not more taken with the story of
Pocahontas and Captain Smith, or Dampier's Voyages, than
she was with her aunt's details of the farm and the dairy at
Thaxted Grange, the May-games and the Christmas gambols,
the days that were gone, and the elders who were
departed. To one born and bred in the heart of London,
who had scarcely ever seen a flock of sheep, except when
they were driven through the streets to or from Smithfield,
no fairy tale could present more for the imagination than a
description of green fields and rural life. The charm of
truth heightened it, and the stronger charm of natural

piety; for the personages of the tale were her near kin,
whose names she had learned to love, and whose living
memory she revered, but whose countenances she never
could behold till she should be welcomed by them in the
everlasting mansions of the righteous.

None of the party were disappointed when they had established
themselves at the Grange. Mr. Allison found full
occupation at first in improving the house, and afterwards
in his fields and garden. Mr. Bacon was just such a clergyman
as he would have chosen for his parish priest, if it had
been in his power to choose, only he would have had him
provided with a better benefice. The single thing on which
there was a want of agreement between them was, that
the Vicar neither smoked nor took snuff; he was not the
worst company on this account, for he had no dislike to
the fragrance of a pipe; but his neighbor lost the pleasure
which he would have had in supplying him with the best
Pig-tail, and with Strasburg or Rappee. Miss Allison fell
into the habits of her new station the more easily, because
they were those which she had witnessed in her early
youth; she distilled waters, dried herbs, and prepared conserves,
— which were at the service of all who needed them
in sickness. Betsey attached herself at first sight to Deborah,
who was about five years elder, and soon became to her as
a sister. The aunt rejoiced in finding so suitable a friend
and companion for her niece; and as this connection was a
pleasure and an advantage to the Allisons, so was it of the
greatest benefit to Deborah.

12. CHAPTER XII.

Archbishop Cranmer.

Mr. Allison was as quiet a subject as Peter Hopkins,
but he was not like him a political quietist from indifference,
for he had a warm sense of loyalty, and a well-rooted
attachment to the constitution of his country in church and
state. His ancestors had suffered in the Great Rebellion,
and much the greater part of their never large estates had
been alienated to raise the fines imposed upon them as delinquents.
The uncle, whom he succeeded in Bishopsgate
Street, had, in his early apprenticeship, assisted at burning
the Rump, and in maturer years had joined as heartily in
the rejoicings when the Seven Bishops were released from
the Tower: he subscribed to Walker's “Account of the
Sufferings of the Clergy,” and had heard sermons preached
by the famous Dr. Scott (which were afterwards incorporated
in his great work upon the Christian Life) in the
church of St. Peter-le-Poor (oddly so called, seeing that
there are few districts within the City of London so rich,
insomuch that the last historian of the metropolis believed
the parish to have scarcely a poor family in it), — and in
All-hallows, Lombard Street, where, during the reign of
the Godly, the puritanical vestry passed a resolution, that
if any persons should come to the church “on the day
called Christ's birthday,” they should be compelled to
leave it.

In these principles Mr. Allison had grown up; and without
any profession of extra religion, or ever wearing a

sanctified face, he had in the evening of his life attained
“the end of the commandment, which is charity, proceeding
from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a faith unfeigned.”
London in his days was a better school for young
men in trade than it ever was before, or has been since.
The civic power had quietly and imperceptibly put an end
to that club-law which once made the apprentices a turbulent
and formidable body, at any moment armed as well
as ready for a riot; and masters exercised a sort of parental
control over the youth intrusted to them, which in later
times it may be feared has not been so conscientiously exerted,
because it is not likely to be so patiently endured.
Trade itself had not then been corrupted by that ruinous
spirit of competition, which, more than any other of the
evils now pressing upon us, deserves to be called the curse
of England in the present age. At all times men have
been to be found, who engaged in hazardous speculations,
gamester like, according to their opportunities, or who, mistaking
the means for the end, devoted themselves with
miserable fidelity to the service of Mammon. But “Live
and let live,” had not yet become a maxim of obsolete morality.
We had our monarchy, or hierarchy, and our aristocracy,
— God be praised for the benefits which have been
derived from all three, and God in his mercy continue them
to us! but we had no plutarchy, no millionnaires, no great
capitalists to break down the honest and industrious trader
with the weight of their overbearing and overwhelming
wealth. They who had enriched themselves in the course
of regular and honorable commerce withdrew from business,
and left the field to others. Feudal tyranny had passed
away, and moneyed tyranny had not yet arisen in its stead,
— a tyranny baser in its origin, not more merciful in its
operations, and with less in its appendages to redeem it.

Trade, in Mr. Allison's days, was a school of thrift and
probity, as much as of profit and loss; such his shop had

been when he succeeded to it upon his uncle's decease, and
such it continued to be when he transmitted it to his son.
Old Mr. Strahan the printer (the founder of his typarchical
dynasty) said to Dr. Johnson, that “there are few ways in
which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting
money”; and he added, that “the more one thinks of
this the juster it will appear.” Johnson agreed with him;
and though it was a money-maker's observation, and though
the more it is considered now, the more fallacious it will be
found, the general system of trade might have justified it
at that time. The entrance of an exciseman never occasioned
any alarm or apprehension at No. 113 Bishopsgate
Street Within, nor any uncomfortable feeling, unless the
officer happened to be one who, by giving unnecessary
trouble, and by gratuitous incivility in the exercise of
authority, made an equitable law odious in its execution.
They never there mixed weeds with their tobacco, nor
adulterated it in any worse way; and their snuff was never
rendered more pungent by stirring into it a certain proportion
of pounded glass. The duties were honestly paid, with
a clear perception that the impost fell lightly upon all whom
it affected, and affected those only who chose to indulge
themselves in a pleasure which was still cheap, and which,
without any injurious privation, they might forego. Nay,
when our good man expatiated upon the uses of tobacco,
which Mr. Bacon demurred at, and the Doctor sometimes
playfully disputed, he ventured an opinion, that among the
final causes for which so excellent an herb had been created,
the facilities afforded by it towards raising the revenue
in a well-governed country like our own, might be one.

There was a strong family likeness between him and his
sister, both in countenance and disposition. Elizabeth Allison
was a person for whom the best and wisest man might
have thanked Providence if she had been allotted to him for
helpmate. But though she had, in Shakespeare's language,

“withered on the virgin thorn,” hers had not been a life of
single blessedness: she had been a blessing first to her parents;
then to her brother and her brother's family, where she
relieved an amiable but sickly sister-in-law from those domestic
offices which require activity and forethought; lastly,
after the dispersion of his sons, the transfer of the business
to the eldest, and the breaking-up of his old establishment,
to the widower and his daughter, the only child who cleaved
to him, — not like Ruth to Naomi, by a meritorious act of
duty, for in her case it was in the ordinary course of things,
without either sacrifice or choice; but the effect in endearing
her to him was the same.

In advanced stages of society, and nowhere more than in
England at this time, the tendency of all things is to weaken
the relations between parent and child, and frequently to destroy
them, reducing human nature in this respect nearer to
the level of animal life. Perhaps the greater number of
male children who are “born into the world,” in our part
of it, are put out at as early an age, proportionately, as the
young bird is driven from its nest, or the young beast turned
off by its dam as being capable of feeding and protecting
itself; and in many instances they are as totally lost to the
parent, though not in like manner forgotten. Mr. Allison
never saw all his children together after his removal from
London. The only time when his three sons met at the
Grange was when they came there to attend their father's
funeral; nor would they then have been assembled, if the
Captain's ship had not happened to have recently arrived in
port.

This is a state of things more favorable to the wealth
than to the happiness of nations. It was a natural and pious
custom in patriarchal times that the dead should be gathered
unto their people. “Bury me,” said Jacob, when he
gave his dying charge to his sons, — “bury me with my
fathers in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which

is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham
bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession
of a burying-place. There they buried Abraham and
Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebecca his
wife; and there I buried Leah.” Had such a passage
occurred in Homer, or in Dante, all critics would have concurred
in admiring the truth and beauty of the sentiment.
He had buried his beloved Rachel by the way where she
died; but, although he remembered this at his death, the
orders which he gave were, that his own remains should be
laid in the sepulchre of his fathers. The same feeling prevails
among many, or most of those savage tribes who are
not utterly degraded. With them the tree is not left to lie
where it falls. The body of one who dies on an expedition
is interred on the spot, if distance or other circumstances
render it inconvenient to transport the corpse; but, however
long the journey, it is considered as a sacred duty that
the bones should at some time or other be brought home.
In Scotland, where the common rites of sepulture are
performed with less decency than in any other Christian
country, the care with which family burial-grounds in the
remoter parts are preserved, may be referred as much to
natural feeling as to hereditary pride.

But as indigenous flowers are eradicated by the spade and
plough, so this feeling is destroyed in the stirring and bustling
intercourse of commercial life. No room is left for it;
as little of it at this time remains in wide America as in
thickly-peopled England. That to which soldiers and sailors
are reconciled by the spirit of their profession, and the
chances of war and of the seas, the love of adventure and
the desire of advancement cause others to regard with the
same indifference; and these motives are so prevalent, that
the dispersion of families and the consequent disruption of
natural ties, if not occasioned by necessity, would now
in most instances be the effect of choice. Even those

to whom it is an inevitable evil, and who feel it deeply as
such, look upon it as something in the appointed course of
things, as much as infirmity and age and death.

It is well for us that in early life we never think of the
vicissitudes which lie before us; or look to them only with
pleasurable anticipations as they approach.

The thought of them, when it comes across us in middle
life, brings with it only a transient sadness, like the shadow
of a passing cloud. We turn our eyes from them while
they are in prospect; but when they are in retrospect
many a longing, lingering look is cast behind. So long as
Mr. Allison was in business, he looked to Thaxted Grange
as the place where he hoped one day to enjoy the blessings
of retirement, — that otium cum dignitate, which in a certain
sense the prudent citizen is more likely to attain than the
successful statesman. It was the pleasure of recollection
that gave this hope its zest and its strength. But after the
object which during so many years he had held in view had
been obtained, his day-dreams, if he had allowed them to
take their course, would have recurred more frequently to
Bishopsgate Street than they had ever wandered from
thence to the scenes of his boyhood. They recurred
thither oftener than he wished, although few men have
been more masters of themselves; and then the remembrance
of his wife, whom he had lost by a lingering disease
in middle age; and of the children, those who had died
during their childhood, and those who in reality were almost
as much lost to him in the ways of the world, made him
always turn for comfort to the prospect of that better state
of existence in which they should once more all be gathered
together, and where there would be neither change nor parting.
His thoughts often fell into this train, when on summer
evenings he was taking a solitary pipe in his arbor,
with the church in sight, and the churchyard wherein, at no
distant time, he was to be laid in his last abode. Such
musings induced a sense of sober piety, — of thankfulness
for former blessings, contentment with the present, and
humble yet sure and certain hope for futurity, which might
vainly have been sought at prayer-meetings or evening lectures,
where indeed little good can ever be obtained without
some deleterious admixture, or alloy of baser feelings.

The happiness which he had found in retirement was of
a different kind from what he had contemplated; for the
shades of evening were gathering when he reached the
place of his long wished for rest, and the picture of it which
had imprinted itself on his imagination was a morning
view. But he had been prepared for this by that slow
change, of which we are not aware during its progress till
we see it reflected in others, and are thus made conscious
of it in ourselves; and he found a satisfaction in the station
which he occupied there, too worthy in its nature to be
called pride, and which had not entered into his anticipations.
It is said to have been a saying of George the
Third, that the happiest condition in which an Englishman
could be placed, was just below that wherein it would
have been necessary for him to act as a Justice of the Peace,
and above that which would have rendered him liable to
parochial duties. This was just Mr. Allison's position;
there was nothing which brought him into rivalry or competition
with the surrounding Squirarchy, and the yeomen
and peasantry respected him for his own character, as well
as for his name's sake. He gave employment to more persons
than when he was engaged in trade, and his indirect
influence over them was greater; that of his sister was still
more. The elders of the village remembered her in her

youth, and loved her for what she then had been, as well as
for what she now was; the young looked up to her as the
Lady Bountiful, to whom no one that needed advice or
assistance ever applied in vain. She it was who provided
those much approved plum-cakes, not the less savory for
being both homely and wholesome, the thought of which
induced the children to look on to their Lent examination
with hope, and prepare for it with alacrity. Those offices in
a parish which are the province of the Clergyman's wife,
when he has made choice of one who knows her duty, and
has both will and ability to discharge it, Miss Allison performed;
and she rendered Mr. Bacon the farther, and to him
individually the greater, service of imparting to his daughter
those instructions which she had no mother to impart.
Deborah could not have had a better teacher; but as the
present chapter has extended to a sufficient length,

13. CHAPTER XIII.

Katharine Philips.

The house wherein Mr. Allison realized by fair dealing
and frugality the modest fortune which enabled him to repurchase
the homestead of his fathers, is still a Tobacconist's,
and has continued to be so from “the palmy days”

of that trade, when King James vainly endeavored, by the
expression of his royal dislike, to discountenance the newly-imported
practice of smoking; and Joshua Sylvester thundered
from Mount Helicon a Volley of Holy Shot, thinking
that thereby “Tobacco” should be “battered, and the Pipes
shattered, about their ears that idly idolize so base and barbarous
a weed, or at least-wise overlove so loathsome vanity.”
[23] For he said, —
Yet it was not long before the dead and unsavory odor of
that weed, to which a Parisian was made to say that “sea-coal
smoke seemed a very Portugal perfume,” prevailed as
much in the raiment of the more coarsely clad part of the
community, as the scent of lavender among those who were
clothed in fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: and
it had grown so much in fashion, that it was said children
“began to play with broken pipes, instead of corals, to make
way for their teeth.”

Louis XIV. endeavored just as ineffectually to discourage
the use of snuff-taking. His valets de chambre were obliged
to renounce it when they were appointed to their office;
and the Duke of Harcourt was supposed to have died of
apoplexy in consequence of having, to please his Majesty,
left off at once a habit which he had carried to excess.

I know not through what intermediate hands the business
at No. 113 has passed, since the name of Allison was withdrawn
from the firm; nor whether Mr. Evans, by whom it
is now carried on there, is in any way related by descent
with that family. Matters of no greater importance to most

men have been made the subject of much antiquarian investigation;
and they who busy themselves in such investigations
must not be said to be ill-employed, for they find
harmless amusement in the pursuit, and sometimes put up a
chance truth of which others, soon or late, discover the application.
The house has at this time a more antiquated
appearance than any other in that part of the street, though
it was modernized some forty or fifty years after Mr. Bacon's
friend left it. The first floor then projected several
feet farther over the street than at present, and the second
several feet farther over the first; and the windows, which
still extend the whole breadth of the front, were then composed
of small casement panes. But in the progress of
those improvements which are now carrying on in the city
with as much spirit as at the western end of the metropolis,
and which have almost reached Mr. Evans's door, it cannot
be long before the house will be either wholly removed, or
so altered as no longer to be recognized.

The present race of Londoners little know what the
appearance of the city was a century ago; — their own city,
I was about to have said; but it was the city of their great-grandfathers,
not theirs, from which the elder Allisons retired
in the year 1746. At that time the kennels (as in
Paris) were in the middle of the street, and there were
no footpaths; spouts projected the rain-water in streams,
against which umbrellas, if umbrellas had been then in use,
could have afforded no defence; and large signs, such as are
now only to be seen at country inns, were suspended before
every shop,[24] from posts which impeded the way, or from
iron supports strongly fixed into the front of the house.
The swinging of one of these broad signs in a high wind,
and the weight of the iron on which it acted, sometimes

brought the wall down; and it is recorded that one front-fall
of this kind in Fleet Street maimed several persons,
and killed “two young ladies, a cobbler, and the King's
jeweller.”

The sign at No. 113 was an Indian Chief smoking the
calumet. Mr. Allison had found it there; and when it
became necessary that a new one should be substituted, he
retained the same figure, — though, if he had been to
choose, he would have greatly preferred the head of Sir
Walter Raleigh, by whom, according to the common belief,
he supposed tobacco had been introduced into this country.
The Water-Poet imputed it to the Devil himself, and published

Mr. Allison used to shake his head at such libellous aspersions.
Raleigh was a great favorite with him, and held,
indeed, in especial respect, though not as the Patron of his
old trade, as St. Crispin is of the Gentle Craft, yet as the
founder of his fortune. He thought it proper, therefore,
that he should possess Sir Walter's History of the World,
though he had never found inclination, or summoned up
resolution, to undertake its perusal.

Common sense has been defined by Sir Egerton Brydges,
“to mean nothing more than an uneducated judgment, arising
from a plain and coarse understanding exercised upon
common concerns, and rendered effective rather by experience,
than by any regular process of the intellectual powers.
If this,” he adds, “be the proper meaning of that quality,
we cannot wonder that books are little fitted for its cultivation.”
Except that there was no coarseness in his nature,
this would apply to Mr Allison. He had been bred up with

the notion, that it behoved him to attend to his business,
and that reading formed to part of it. Nevertheless he had
acquired some liking for books, by looking casually now and
then over the leaves of those unfortunate volumes with
which the shop was continually supplied for its daily consumption.

went there; and many a tome of old law, old physic, and
old divinity; old history as well; books of which many
were at all times rubbish; some which, though little better,
would now sell for more shillings by the page than they
then cost pence by the pound; and others, the real value
of which is perhaps as little known now, as it was then.
Such of these as in latter years caught his attention, he now
and then rescued from the remorseless use to which they
had been condemned. They made a curious assortment
with his wife's books of devotion or amusement wherewith
she had sometimes beguiled, and sometimes soothed,
the weary hours of long and frequent illness. Among
the former were Scott's “Christian Life,” Bishop Bayly's
“Practice of Piety,” Bishop Taylor's “Holy Living and
Dying,” Drelincourt on Death, with De Foe's lying story
of Mrs. Veal's ghost as a puff preliminary, and the Night
Thoughts. Among the latter were Cassandra, the Guardian
and Spectator, Mrs. Rowe's Letters, Richardson's Novels,
and Pomfret's Poems.

Mrs. Allison had been able to do little for her daughter
of that little, which, if her state of health and spirits had
permitted, she might have done; this, therefore, as well as
the more active duties of the household, devolved upon Elizabeth,
who was of a better constitution in mind as well

as body. Elizabeth, before she went to reside with her
brother, had acquired all the accomplishments which a
domestic education in the country could in those days
impart. Her book of receipts, culinary and medical, might
have vied with the “Queen's Cabinet Unlocked.” The
spelling indeed was such as ladies used in the reign of
Queen Anne, and in the old time before her, when every
one spelt as she thought fit; but it was written in a well-proportioned
Italian hand, with fine down-strokes and broad
up-ones, equally distinct and beautiful. Her speech was
good Yorkshire, that is to say, good provincial English, not
the worse for being provincial, and a little softened by five-and-twenty
years' residence in London. Some sisters, who
in those days kept a boarding-school of the first repute, in
one of the midland counties, used to say, when they spoke
of an old pupil, “her went to school to we.” Miss Allison's
language was not of this kind, — it savored of rusticity, not
of ignorance; and where it was peculiar, as in the metropolis,
it gave raciness to the conversation of an agreeable
woman.

She had been well instructed in ornamental work as well
as ornamental penmanship. Unlike most fashions, this had
continued to be in fashion because it continued to be of use;
though no doubt some of the varieties which Taylor, the
Water-Poet, enumerates in his praise of the Needle, might
have been then as little understood as now: —

There was a book published in the Water-Poet's days,

with the title of “School House for the Needle”; it consisted
of two volumes in oblong quarto, that form being
suited to its plates “of sundry sorts of patterns and examples”;
and it contained a “Dialogue in Verse between
Diligence and Sloth.” If Betsey Allison had studied in
this “School House,” she could not have been a greater
proficient with the needle than she became under her
Aunt's teaching: nor would she have been more
if she had gone through a course of practical lessons in one
of the Pastry Schools which are common in Scotland, but
were tried without success in London, about the middle of
the last century. Deborah partook of these instructions at
her father's desire. In all that related to the delicacies of
a country table, she was glad to be instructed, because it
enabled her to assist her friend; but it appeared strange to
her that Mr. Bacon should wish her to learn ornamental
work, for which she neither had, nor could forsee any use.
But if the employment had been less agreeable than she
found it in such company, she would never have disputed,
nor questioned his will.

For so small a household, a more active or cheerful
one could nowhere have been found than at the Grange.
Ben Jonson reckoned among the happinesses of Sir Robert
Wroth that of being “with unbought provision blest.” This
blessing Mr. Allison enjoyed in as great a degree as his
position in life permitted; he neither killed his own meat
nor grew his own corn; but he had his poultry-yard, his
garden and his orchard; he baked his own bread, brewed
his own beer, and was supplied with milk, cream, and butter
from his own dairy. It is a fact not unworthy of notice,
that the most intelligent farmers in the neighborhood of
London are persons who have taken to farming as a business,

because of their strong inclination for rural employments;
one of the very best in Middlesex, when the Survey
of that County was published by the Board of Agriculture,
had been a tailor. Mr. Allison did not attempt to manage
the land which he kept in his own hands; but he had a
trusty bailiff, and soon acquired knowledge enough for
superintending what was done. When he retired from
trade he gave over all desire for gain, which indeed he had
never desired for his own sake; he sought now only wholesome
occupation, and those comforts which may be said to
have a moral zest. They might be called luxuries, if that
word could be used in a virtuous sense without something so
to qualify it. It is a curious instance of the modification
which words undergo in different countries, that luxury has
always a sinful acceptation in the southern languages of
Europe, and lust an innocent one in the northern; the
harmless meaning of the latter word, we have retained in
the verb to list.

Every one who looks back upon the scenes of his youth,
has one spot upon which the last light of the evening sunshine
rests. The Grange was that spot in Deborah's retrospect.

14. CHAPTER XIV.

Robert Greene.

One summer evening the Doctor, on his way back from a
visit in that direction, stopped, as on such opportunities he
usually did, at Mr. Bacon's wicket, and looked in at the

open casement to see if his friends were within. Mr. Bacon
was sitting there alone, with a book open on the table before
him; and looking round when he heard the horse stop,
“Come in, Doctor,” said he, “if you have a few minutes to
spare. You were never more welcome.”

The Doctor replied, “I hope nothing ails either Deborah
or yourself?”

“No,” said Mr. Bacon, “God be thanked! but something
has occurred which concerns both.”

When the Doctor entered the room, he perceived that the
wonted serenity of his friend's countenance was overcast by
a shade of melancholy thought. “Nothing,” said he, “I
hope, has happened to distress you?”

“Only to disturb us,” was the reply. “Most people would
probably think that we ought to consider it a piece of good
fortune. One who would be thought a good match for her,
has proposed to marry Deborah.”

“Indeed!” said the Doctor; “and who is he?” feeling,
as he asked the question, an unusual warmth in his face.

“Joseph Hebblethwaite, of the Willows. He broke his
mind to me this morning, saying that he thought it best to
speak with me before he made any advances himself to the
young woman: indeed he had had no opportunity of so
doing, for he had seen little of her; but he had heard enough
of her character to believe that she would make him a good
wife; and this, he said, was all he looked for, for he was
well to do in the world.”

“And what answer did you make to this matter-of-fact
way of proceeding?”

“I told him that I commended the very proper course he
had taken, and that I was obliged to him for the good opinion
of my daughter which he was pleased to entertain: that
marriage was an affair in which I should never attempt to
direct her inclinations, being confident that she would never
give me cause to oppose them; and that I would talk with

her upon the proposal, and let him know the result. As
soon as I mentioned it to Deborah, she colored up to her
eyes; and with an angry look, of which I did not think those
eyes had been capable, she desired me to tell him that he
had better lose no time in looking elsewhere, for his thinking
of her was of no use. `Do you know any ill of him?' said
I. `No,' she replied, `but I never heard any good, and
that's ill enough. And I do not like his looks.'”

“Well said, Deborah!” cried the Doctor: clapping his
hands so as to produce a sonorous token of satisfaction.

“`Surely, my child,' said I, `he is not an ill-looking person?'
`Father,' she replied, `you know he looks as if he
had not one idea in his head to keep company with another.'”

“Well said, Deborah!” repeated the Doctor.

“Why, Doctor, do you know any ill of him?

“None. But, as Deborah says, I know no good; and if
there had been any good to be known, it must have come
within my knowledge. I cannot help knowing who the persons
are to whom the peasantry in my rounds look with respect
and good-will, and whom they consider their friends
as well as their betters. And, in like manner, I know who
they are from whom they never expect either courtesy or
kindness.”

“You are right, my friend; and Deborah is right. Her
answer came from a wise heart; and I was not sorry that
her determination was so promptly made, and so resolutely
pronounced. But I wish, if it had pleased God, the offer
had been one which she could have accepted with her own
willing consent, and with my full approbation.”

“Yet,” said the Doctor, “I have often thought how sad
a thing it would be for you ever to part with her.”

“Far more sad will it be for me to leave her unprotected,
as it is but too likely that, in the ordinary course of nature
I one day shall; and as any day in that same ordinary

course, I so possibly may! Our best intentions, even when
they have been most prudentially formed, fail often in their
issue. I meant to train up Deborah in the way she should
go, by fitting her for that state of life in which it had pleased
God to place her; so that she might have made a good wife
for some honest man in the humbler walks of life, and have
been happy with him.”

“And how was it possible,” replied the Doctor, “that you
could have succeeded better? Is she not qualified to be a
good man's wife in any rank? Her manner would not do
discredit to a mansion; her management would make a farm
prosperous, or a cottage comfortable; and for her principles,
and temper and cheerfulness, they would render any home
a happy one.”

“You have not spoken too highly in her praise, Doctor.
But as she has from her childhood been all in all to me,
there is a danger that I may have become too much so to
her; and that, while her habits have properly been made
conformable to our poor means and her poor prospects, she
has been accustomed to a way of thinking, and a kind of
conversation, which have given her a distaste for those
whose talk is only of sheep and of oxen, and whose thoughts
never get beyond the range of their every day employments.
In her present circle, I do not think there is one man with
whom she might otherwise have had a chance of settling in
life, to whom she would not have the same intellectual objections
as to Joseph Hebblethwaite: though I am glad that
the moral objection was that which first instinctively occurred
to her.

“I wish it were otherwise, both for her sake and my
own: for hers, because the present separation would have
more than enough to compensate it, and would in its consequences
mitigate the evil of the final one, whenever that
may be; for my own, because I should then have no cause
whatever to render the prospect of dissolution otherwise

than welcome, but be as willing to die as to sleep. It is
not owing to any distrust in Providence, that I am not thus
willing now, — God forbid! But if I gave heed to my own
feelings, I should think that I am not long for this world;
and surely it were wise to remove, if possible, the only cause
that makes me fear to think so.”

“Are you sensible of any symptons that can lead to such
an apprehension?” said the Doctor.

“Of nothing that can be called a sympton. I am to all
appearance in good health, of sound body and mind; and
you know how unlikely my habits are to occasion any disturbance
in either. But I have indefinable impressions, —
sensations they might almost be called, — which, as I cannot
but feel them, so I cannot but regard them.”

“Can you not describe these sensations?”

“No better than by saying, that they hardly amount to
sensations, and are indescribable.”

“Do not,” said the Doctor, “I entreat you, give way to
any feelings of this kind. They may lead to consequences
which, without shortening or endangering life, would render
it anxious and burdensome, and destroy both your usefulness
and your comfort.”

“I have this feeling, Doctor; and you shall prescribe for
it, if you think it requires either regimen or physic. But at
present you will do me more good by assisting me to procure
for Deborah such a situation as she must necessarily
look for on the event of my death. What I have laid by,
even if it should be most advantageously disposed of, would
afford her only a bare subsistence; it is a resource in case
of sickness, but while in health, it would never be her wish
to eat the bread of idleness. You may have opportunities
of learning whether any lady within the circle of your practice
wants a young person in whom she might confide, either
as an attendant upon herself, or to assist in the management
of her children, or her household. You may be sure this is

not the first time that I have thought upon the subject; but
the circumstance which has this day occurred, and the feeling
of which I have spoken, have pressed it upon my consideration.
And the inquiry may better be made, and the
step taken while it is a matter of foresight, than when it has
become one of necessity.”

“Let me feel your pulse!”

“You will detect no other disorder there,” said Mr. Bacon,
holding out his arm as he spake, “than what has been caused
by this conversation, and the declaration of a purpose, which,
though for some time perpended, I had never till now fully
acknowledged to myself.”

“You have never then mentioned it to Deborah?”

“In no other way than by sometimes incidentally speaking
of the way of life which would be open to her, in case
of her being unmarried at my death.”

“And you have made up your mind to part with
her?”

“Upon a clear conviction that I ought to do so; that it is
best for herself and me.”

“Well, then, you will allow me to converse with her
first upon a different subject. — You will permit me to see
whether I can speak more successfully for myself, than you
have done for Joseph Hebblethwaite. — Have I your consent?”

Mr. Bacon rose in great emotion, and taking his friend's
hand, pressed it fervently and tremulously. Presently they
heard the wicket open, and Deborah came in.

“I dare say, Deborah,” said her father, composing himself,
“you have been telling Betsey Allison of the advantageous
offer that you have this day refused.”

“Yes,” replied Deborah; “and what do you think she
said? That little as she likes him, rather than that I
should be thrown away upon such a man, she could almost
make up her mind to marry him herself.”

“And I,” said the Doctor, “rather than such a man should
have you, would marry you myself.”

“Was not I right in refusing him, Doctor?”

“So right, that you never pleased me so well before; and
never can please me better, — unless you will accept of me
in his stead.”

She gave a little start, and looked at him half incredulously,
and half angrily withal; as if what he had said was
too light in its manner to be serious, and yet too serious in
its import to be spoken in jest. But when he took her by
the hand, and said, “Will you, dear Deborah?” with a pressure,
and in a tone that left no doubt of his earnest meaning,
she cried, “Father, what am I to say? speak for me!” —
“Take her, my friend!” said Mr. Bacon. “My blessing be
upon you both. And, if it be not presumptuous to use the
words, — let me say for myself, `Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace!'”

15. CHAPTER XV.

In the month of April, 1761, the Doctor brought home
his bride to Doncaster. Many eyes were turned upon her
when she made her appearance at St. George's Church.
The novelty of the place made her less regardful of this
than she might otherwise have been. Hollis Pigot, who
held the vicarage of Doncaster thirty years, and was then
in the last year of his incumbency and his life, performed
the service that day. I know not among what description
of preachers he was to be classed; whether with those who
obtain attention, and command respect, and win confidence,
and strengthen belief, and inspire hope, or with the far more
numerous race of Spintexts and of Martexts. But if he

had preached that morning with the tongue of an angel,
the bride would have had no ears for him. Her thoughts
were neither upon those who on their way from church
would talk over her instead of the sermon, nor of the service,
nor of her husband, nor of herself in her new character,
but of her father, — and with a feeling which might
almost be called funereal, that she had passed from under
his pastoral as well as his paternal care.

16. CHAPTER XVI.

Henry Smith.

Deborah found no one in Doncaster to supply the place
of Betty Allison in the daily intercourse of familiar and
perfect friendship. That indeed was impossible; no aftermath
has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop.
But why do I call her Deborah? She had never been
known by that name to her new neighbors; and to her very
father she was now spoken of as Mrs. Dove. Even the
Allisons called her so in courteous and customary usage, but
not without a melancholy reflection, that when Deborah
Bacon became Mrs. Dove, she was in a great measure lost
to them.

Doncaster has less of the Rus in Urbe now than it had in
those days, and than Bath had when those words were

placed over the door of a lodging-house, on the North
Parade. And the house to which the Doctor brought home
his bride, had less of it than when Peter Hopkins set up
the gilt pestle and mortar there as the cognizance of his
vocation. It had no longer that air of quiet respectability
which belongs to such a dwelling in the best street of a
small country town. The Mansion House, by which it was
dwarfed and inconvenienced in many ways, occasioned a
stir and bustle about it, unlike the cheerful business of a market
day. The back windows, however, still looked to the
fields, and there was still a garden. But neither fields nor
garden could prevail over the odor of the shop, in which, like
in Milton's Chaos, rhubarb and peppermint, and valerian, and
assafœtida, “strove for mastery,” and to battle brought their
atoms. Happy was the day when peppermint predominated;
though it always reminded Mrs. Dove of Thaxted
Grange, and the delight with which she used to assist Miss
Allison in her distillations. There is an Arabian proverb
which says, “The remembrance of youth is a sigh.”
Southey has taken it for the text of one of those juvenile
poems in which he dwells with thoughtful forefeeling upon
the condition of declining life.

Miss Allison had been to her, not indeed as a mother, but
as what a stepmother is, who is led by natural benevolence,
and a religious sense of duty, to perform as far as possible
a mother's part to her husband's children. There are more
such stepmothers than the world is willing to believe, and
they have their reward here as well as hereafter. It was
impossible that any new friend could fill up her place in
Mrs. Dove's affections, — impossible that she could ever feel
for another woman the respect, and reverence, and gratitude,
which blended with her love for this excellent person.
Though she was born within four miles of Doncaster, and

had lived till her marriage in the humble vicarage in which
she was born, she had never passed four-and-twenty hours
in that town before she went to reside there; nor had she
the slightest acquaintance with any of its inhabitants, except
the few shopkeepers with whom her little dealings had lain,
and the occasional visitants whom she had met at the
Grange.

An Irish officer in the army, happening to be passenger
in an armed vessel during the last war, used frequently to
wish that they might fall in with an enemy's ship, because
he said, he had been in many land battles, and there was
nothing in the world which he desired more than to see
what sort of a thing a sea-fight was. He had his wish,
and when after a smart action, in which he bore his part
bravely, an enemy of superior force had been beaten off,
he declared with the customary emphasis of an Hibernian
adjuration, that a sea-fight was a mighty sairious sort of
thing.

The Doctor and Deborah, as soon as they were betrothed,
had come to just the same conclusion upon a very
different subject. Till the day of their engagement, nay,
till the hour of proposal on his part, and the very instant
of acceptance on hers, each had looked upon marriage,
when the thought of it occurred, as a distant possibility,
more or less desirable, according to the circumstances which
introduced the thought, and the mood in which it was entertained.
And when it was spoken of sportively, as might
happen, in relation to either the one or the other, it was
lightly treated as a subject in which they had no concern.
But from the time of their engagement, it seemed to both
the most serious event of their lives.

In the Dutch village of Broek, concerning which, singular
as the habits of the inhabitants are, travellers have related
more peculiarities than ever prevailed there, one
remarkable custom shows with how serious a mind some of

the Hollanders regard marriage. The great house-door is
never opened but when the master of the house brings
home his bride from the altar, and when husband and
wife are borne out to the grave. Dr. Dove had seen that
village of great baby-houses; but though much attached
to Holland, and to the Dutch as a people, and disposed to
think that we might learn many useful lessons from our
prudent and thrifty neighbors, he thought this to be as preposterous,
if not as shocking a custom, as it would be to
have the bell toll at a marriage, and to wear a winding-sheet
for a wedding garment.

We look with wonder at the transformations that take
place in insects, and yet their physical metamorphoses are
not greater than the changes which we ourselves undergo
morally and intellectually, both in our relations to others
and in our individual nature. Chaque individu, considéré
separément, differe encore de lui-même par l'effet du tems;
il devient un autre, en quelque manière, aux diverses époques
de sa vie. L'enfant, l'homme rait, le vieillard, sont comme
autant d'étrangers unis dans une seule personne par le lien
mystérieux du souvenir.[28] Of all changes in life, marriage is
certainly the greatest, and though less change in every respect
can very rarely be produced by it in any persons
than in the Doctor and his wife, it was very great to
both. On his part it was altogether an increase of happiness;
or rather, from having been contented in his station
he became happy in it, so happy as to be experimentally
convinced that there can be no “single blessedness”
for man. There were some drawbacks on her
part, — in the removal from a quiet vicarage to a busy
street; in the obstacle which four miles opposed to that
daily and intimate intercourse with her friends at the
Grange, which had been the chief delight of her maiden
life; and above all, in the separation from her father, — for

even at a distance which may appear so inconsiderable, such
it was; but there was the consolatory reflection, that those
dear friends and that dear father concurred in approving
her marriage, and in rejoicing in it for her sake; and the
experience of every day and every year made her more and
more thankful for her lot. In the full liturgic sense of the
word, he worshipped her, that is, he loved and cherished and
respected and honored her; and she would have obeyed
him cheerfully as well as dutifully, if obedience could have
been shown where there was ever but one will.