it was a burden which many parallels. How different from the egotism of suffering is the inspired letter which reminded men that 'the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.' How terrible

was the secret which Poe avowed! "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank-God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.' We are afraid that this last would prove a difficult question to decide.

Still it has also to be said that some error may underlie this generalisation, and that instances of a nobler type might be adduced. A vein of cantankerousness has pervaded many a noble nature; not the very highest natures, I think, but still some natures that stand very high in the just estimation of men. cannot help thinking, if I may say it, with all due respect, and simply judging from style, that some great literary names are cases in point. Voltaire is one. Cob

I

bett is another. On the other hand, how perfectly free from it have been our great soldier-dukes, Marlborough and Wellington! A noble life deposits all such sedimentary matter, and glides off, swift and pure, on its course. Very often we find really good people nursing their oddities, and even carefully nursing them, as something extremely interesting to the general public. Sometimes there are exceedingly crabbed-looking people who, like the crooked and crabbed tree, may produce very sweet and healthy fruit. They may be, like Socrates, Silenus outside and solid gold within. They put on the out

ward armour of a cantankerous nature to shield and screen the soft substance within. These are very often the men with a history.' Some great sorrow may have arrested the healthy development of their nature. The sense of a great abiding loss may have given an isolation of heart and life that has left them no more en rapport with humanity. But perhaps in these very natures there are abiding treasures of goodness, great capacities for use and happiness that may yet be used, as the cool waters may be stored up in the mountain caverns to be yet led forth to irrigate and refresh. How often too it happens in daily life that there are those whom we love and regard, but who we feel do themselves so much injustice, while they show the rough side to others and only the smooth side to ourselves! And of course we who are their friends look at such things in a very hopeful and pleasant sort of way. We remark, with cheerfulness, How interesting!' How original!' 'How characteristic !' 'It is just what we should have expected of him!' But in our own hearts we think that such oddities are a mistake, that they constitute a defect and a wrinkle in character, and that, though we like our friends in spite of these oddities, we should really like them a great deal more if these oddities could be dispensed with. As it is, we make the best of them, and are content to argue that they give force and picturesqueness to character.

Occasionally, too, these oddities are liable to be mistaken, and even to give occasion to complications. For instance, I knew a very worthy man who set up a gouty toe, and if you happened to tread on it he would indulge in a great variety of British and

foreign oaths. There is a very distinguished person who has the credit of always secreting a silver fork on his person when he goes out to dinners. A servant always calls the first thing next morning for the fork, which is duly extracted from the trousers-pocket. Such little matters are appropriately placed among the eccentricities of genius.' But a superficial and irreflective world would probably place the first instance under the category of profane swearing, and would ascribe the second to the want of any innate sense of meum and tuum.

I am really sorry for these can tankerous people. I do not suppose that their angularities hurt anybody except themselves, unless indeed it should be their children and feminine belongings-a kind of small tyranny that suits their small minds. But their friends -or those who are pleased to call themselves their friends-in general laugh at them. They trot them out to display their peculiarities to the world at large. They label them with appropriate nicknames. A whole nomenclature might be compiled from the odd names which the oddities of people have accumulated. To the British drama and fiction their peculiarities have been of the highest value. The irascible uncle, the heavy father, the man of the 'royal Bengal tiger' stamp, the man who cuts off his heir with a shilling, the old lady who leaves her fortune to the pew-opener, the man who can be safely relied upon to make an ass of himself every twenty-four hours, all the elements of comedy, with now and then a dash of tragedy thrown in-all these are illustrations of the cantankerous temperament. Such angularities deserve to be treated with a very scant degree of respect. For if we analyse

them they will often be found to be a mixture of obstinacy, vanity, and selfishness. The best thing is to take no notice of them whatever. They may then have a chance of dying a natural death, perishing from inanition. When cantankerous people shuffle of the mortal coil, their memory is probably embalmed in a phrase that preserves the recollection of their cantankerousness. You hear that 'the old blunderbuss has gone off at last,' or that there is 'a lucky end to the shrew's curt tongue and temper.' I think, my friends, that we should all desire to be remembered by something else than such phrases as these.

It is easier to give instances of cantankerousness than to explain them, to describe the symptoms rather than diagnose the complaint. When I take into account vanity and egotism, I have gone some way towards explaining the general conditions. But, if I may be permitted the use of formal terms, vanity and egotism constitute not a causa causans, but a causa causata. What brought about the vanity and egotism! They did not cause themselves, but were caused by something. We say of the sharp but unpleasant boy that he will in time find his level, and be licked into shape. But your fractious people are very vulgar fractions that have never been reduced to a common

denominator. They have the upper hand, and they use it. They are in a position of authority, and they abuse it. They have it in their power to take liberties which no one else could take, and it gratifies their egotism and vanity to avail themselves of that power. Thus I have known fathers act in their families like martinet captains walking their quarter-decks, in the love of power and the exercise of tyranny. The ignorance

of such persons constitutes another reason or excuse. They have never travelled out of their own narrow ways. They have never put their minds to the minds of other people. They have no knowledge of the world. They think they will be cocks of their own dunghill; and their motto is, 'While I live, I crow.' They are people who have always tried, and with an immense degree of success, to narrow their minds. In family life something special is due to the character of each man, who is the bread-winnner, and to each lady, which means bread-divider; but some natural nobleness ought to prevent them from taking an ungenerous advantage of such a position; and perhaps a generous nature hardly realises the vantage point, and certainly does not dwell upon it. There is an immense loss for the cantankerous elders the loss of 'all that should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.' But, at the same time, it is quite possible for the young ones to be cantankerous as well as their elders. Only it is to be hoped in the one case, what can hardly be hoped in the other, that they will grow out of their cantankerousness. But nothing is more sad than the occasional beholding of cantankerous and ungracious young people, who take all the blessings of Heaven without a thought of Heaven itself, or of the earthly media through whom Heaven's blessings come.

The opposite to this cantankerousness is graciousness. And of all the gracious gifts of Heaven, surely this is supreme. When I reckon up the people whom I have met, it is the gracious people whose memory is the greenest and most refreshing. I own I entertain a deep prejudice in favour of good manners. prefer their flow

ing graceful curves to all the angularities. That old armorial legend on the gateway of New College is still true, 'Manners makyth man,' and so is the poet's saying that manners are the fruit of noble mind.' You may tell me that these manners are just a matter of social training; that it is all mere polish and veneer; that your well-mannered people may be insincere and superficial, and that they mean nothing, or at least profess much more than they mean. But I take them for what they may be worth, and am content to take them even at this low valuation. But surely they answer admirable ends. They facilitate social intercourse; they lessen the friction of life; they are pleasing while they last, and shed much sweetness and some light within their limited range.

But the man who is gracious, and, still better, the woman who is gracious, need not necessarily be superficial and insincere. Indeed, I think that the probabilities are all the other way. A really cantankerous woman ought simply to be mobbed with rough music or ducked in a horsepond, according to the method of our forefathers. Happily such a phenomenon is scarcely in existence, and would be promptly ignored by what is preeminently the gracious sex. The peculiar charm of women is their graciousness. To watch their manner is to listen to fine music. They have the breadth of understanding and the capacity of sympathy that lift you to a rarer air, and make you try to do. your best because you are believed in. To know even one such person is in itself a liberal education. These are the fine natures that elevate, strengthen, purify, and bless. There are some men that give you at once the gracious kindly grasp, the gracious kindly

glance; they are prepared to think and do for you whatever is kindest and best. They do not assume that you are their natural enemy until they know the contrary, but accept you at once in a brotherly and sympathetic way.

And all this is founded on principle-clear, deep, thoroughly defined principle. They are attuned to listen to the still small music of humanity.' They think with the wise old heathen: 'Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto.' They have obtained some measure of insight and sympathy. They are sure that the story of their own lives is repeated in some sort of way in the lives of those around us. Whenever there is any frankness, generosity, or breadth of nature, if the years bring the proper lessons of maturity, those who

have learned to comprehend human life will have arrived at some such fixed rule of life as this. Before some also there will ever be present the divine portraiture of love, the portraiture of the perfect gentleman, in which, methinks, the element of cantanker ousness seems to find no place. 'Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth_all things, endureth all things.' Perhaps the very reverse of all these would best describe the character of the really cantankerous

man.

It was but one word, yet it rent the stillness of the silent house as a flash of lightning cleaves the darkness of night.

There was not a living creature within the walls but heard that cry.

'Lord bless and save us, what's that?' said Mrs. Larrup in the kitchen.

Simonds, meditating in his pantry concerning the shortcomings of all gentry, ran up, actually ran up, into the hall, wondering what had happened. Maids left off making beds, Winter threw down her mending, Miss Aggles opened the door of the library, Rachel ran down the stairs from her room like a lapwing, to find her sister at the bottom of the flight.

'Wina,' she asked, 'what is the matter?'

'Mamma!' gasped the girl hoarsely, mamma !'

The door stood open, and Rachel passed in. She just looked at the bed, looked at the quiet figure lying there, and then, with an exceeding bitter cry, fell on her knees beside all that remained of the mother who had never loved her.

By this time the whole household was either gathered in the room or assembled on the landing. Some of the women screamed, others uttered exclamations. The only person who retained his

VOL. XXXVII. NO. CCXXVIII.

presence of mind was Mr. Simonds.

'Don't stand there with your mouth wide open,' he said severely to the page-boy, but run for the doctor. Be off, now!'

The lad needed no second bidding; he sped down the front staircase like an arrow, and was rushing across the hall, when he encountered a severe - looking elderly lady, who asked,

'What has happened?'

'Her ladyship,' answered the boy; they say she is dead in her bed.'

Dead! For a moment hall and garden and staircase seemed to reel before her sight; then Miss Aggles walked straight up to the next floor, and entered the chamber filled with wondering and frightened women.

No one took any notice of her, no one seemed to think her appearance an intrusion. If the greatest stranger passing along the road had walked in at that moment, not even Mr. Simonds could sufficiently have recollected himself to bar his progress.

Edwina was lying on a sofa, face downwards, sobbing hysterically. Rachel was kneeling beside the bed, holding one of the cold hands that would never feel warmth more. The girl seemed stunned.

'Come away, dear,' said Miss Aggles, raising her almost by force. 'Come with me ;' and led her unresisting out of the room, and through the first open door they came to.

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