ET MULIERIS CRUDELITAS. the Restoration. 203 He describes some of the highest rank as insatiable in their demands for blood: it would seem, he says, that generosity is the companion of force, and that the weaker the sex is, the more it is pitiless.* The administrators of the law are often heard to say that no offenders brought before them are so audacious as depraved women;t and it has passed into a proverb, Mrs. Gore reminds us, that "A shameless woman is the worst of men." Readers of The Last of the Barons may remember the bad eminence occupied in that historical fiction by a choir of timbrel-girls, upon whose bronzed faces the ineffable, unmistakable seal of vice had been set, and to whose eyes had never sprung the tears of compassion or woman's gentle sorrow; whose very voices half belied their sex-so harsh they were, and deep, and hoarse. "Womanless, through the worst vices of women," they seemed to stand between the sexes like foul and monstrous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank depravities of both. There is a scene of violence and riot in which they take the leading part-described as a scene the she-fiends revelled in; for dear are outrage and malice, and the excitement of turbulent passion, and the thirst of blood, to "those everlasting furies of a mob-under whatever name we know them, in whatever time they taint with their presence— women in whom womanhood is blasted." The Caxtonian essayist discusses the popular saying that a bad woman is worse than a wicked man; and, "if so," partly he takes it to be because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly * If Marie could have her way, that plague of a child, Topsy, should be sent out and thoroughly whipped: "I'd have her whipped till she could not stand." "I don't doubt it," is St. Clare's reply. "Tell me of the lovely rule of women! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn't half kill a horse, or a servant either, if they had their own way with them, let alone a man." Par est leanæ et mulieris crudelitas. After paying a tribute to the character of Irishwomen of the lower class, such as carry on street traffic in London, as unquestionably more chaste than the corresponding rank of English birth and breeding, the author of London Labour has this remark to add: "When the uneducated Irishwoman, however, has once fallen into licentious ways, she is, as I once heard it expressed, the most 'savagely wicked' of any" (i. 458). over cherished ideas, whether good or evil; partly also for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and low-bred-namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness; but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty made more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman; where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger; and he may decline to push evil to a point at which it is clear to his understanding that profit vanishes and punishment rests; while woman, once abandoned to it, finds sufficient charm in its mere excitement; and regardless of consequences, where the man asks, "Can I?" raves out, "I will!" Thus man, as Lord Lytton reads him, and differentiates him, may be criminal through cupidity, vanity, love, jealousy, fear, ambition; rarely in civilized, that is, reasoning life, through hate and revenge; for hate is a profitless investment, and revenge a ruinous speculation. "But when women are thoroughly depraved and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes them so." And so made, too nearly do they justify the misogynic adage-feris omnibus immanior, mala mulier. Richardson has made a point, in each of his three fictions, of urging the fact that bad and cruel women are, as such, worse and more cruel than men of that character. As a student of character he indites the reflection; and he piqued himself on being an advanced student of woman's character in particular. He makes his Pamela exclaim, in consternation at the wickedness of Mrs. Jewkes, "Oh, what a black heart has this poor wretch! So I need not rail against men so much; for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman." Miss Grandison, again, lifts up her hands and eyes as she reads the letter of Mrs. O'Hara, and declares her to verify the words of the wise man, "There is no wickedness like the wickedness of a woman." Of the treatment of Clarissa Harlowe by her degraded, derisive, utterly depraved house THE WICKEDNESS OF A WOMAN. 205 mates, the narrator indignantly exclaims, "Insolent devils!how much more cruel and insulting are bad women even than bad men!" and later on, another correspondent has only too good reason for the remark, "By this letter of the wicked man it is apparent that there are still wickeder women." When Jeanie Deans is brought by the footpads to the old barn by night, and the hag who admits them wants to know of the fellows what, in the name of all that is unnameable, they have brought the wench there for, and why they did not strip her and turn her abroad on the common,-“Come, come, Mother Blood," says one of the men, "we'll do what's right to oblige you, and we'll do no more; we are bad enough, but not such as you would make us-devils incarnate." Meg Murdockson is one instance in Sir Walter of surpassing wickedness in woman, so that men of her own grade cry shame upon her. In Lady Ashton he elsewhere paints an almost equally hard, unscrupulous, and unrelenting woman, in another class of life, and therefore of manners. And her he describes as surviving all the unhappy persons whose ruin was the effect of her implacable resolve, and as never to the last evincing the slightest symptom of either repentance or remorse. HEZEKIAH'S EXPOSITION OF HIS TREASURES. ISAIAH xxxix. 1, 2. THE HE King of Babylon's envoys, charged with a message of congratulation to the King of Judah, on his recovery from an almost fatal sickness, were welcome to, and cordially welcomed by, the royal convalescent. "And Hezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house of his precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that was found in his treasures: there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah showed them not." Evidently his heart was in the display of his treasures; and the strangers would become tired of seeing, before he would be of showing, them. Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also. Good king, exceptionally good king, as Hezekiah was, his heart was, in this matter, not right in the sight of God; and a dreary doom upon his house was the penalty of his complacent pomp. And who shall say how far that intense deprecation of death, that passionate clinging to life, to which he had given pathetic utterance in his prayer for recovery from sickness—may not have been influenced by the delight in worldly pomps and vanities, and the cherished indulgence in a taste for treasures, which came out so signally, and, for his descendants, so disastrously, on the occasion of Merodach-baladan's mission? What said Dr. Johnson to Garrick, when the prosperous actor was taking him over his mansion and showing him all the rich accumulation of treasures, whether in the way of present or purchase, it contained? "Ah, Davy, Davy, these are the things that make a death-bed terrible!" We are told of that great Mahmoud the Gaznevide, who was the first Mohammedan conqueror to enter India, that in the last days of his life, when a mortal disease was consuming him, and he himself knew that no human means could arrest its course, he ordered all his costliest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his pearls and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East, to be displayed before him-the latter so numerous as to be arranged in separate cabinets according to their colour and size. "It was in the royal residence which he had built for himself in Gazna, and which he called the Palace of Felicity, that he took from this display, wherewith he had formerly gratified the pride of his eye, a mournful lesson; and in the then heartfelt conviction that all is vanity, he wept "The Orientals exceed the measure of credibility in the account of millions of gold and silver, such as the avidity of man has never accumulated; in the magnitude of pearls, diamonds, and rubies [for instance, a ruby of six pounds three ounces], such as have never been produced by The workmanship of nature."- Gibbon, Roman Empire, ch. lvii. IT IS SO HARD TO QUIT. 207 like a child. 'What toils,' said he, 'what dangers, what fatigues of body and mind have I endured for the sake of acquiring these treasures, and what care in preserving them, and now I am about to die and leave them!"" In this same palace, adds Southey, he was interred, and there it was that his unhappy ghost, a century afterwards, was believed to wander. Wordsworth has an occasional Sonnet on perilous times, such as 66 strike monied worldlings with dismay; Even rich men brave by nature taint the air To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death." Father Newman explains death to be an unwelcome topic to the rich and powerful, because it takes from them those comforts which habit has made necessary to them, and throws them adrift on a new order of things, of which they know nothing, save that in it there is no respect of persons. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, in a letter to a clergyman, quotes Wesley's saying, on being called upon, by Act of Parliament, to give an account of his plate, in order to be taxed, "I have five silver spoons; they are all I have, and all I mean to have, while my poor neighbours want bread." That, adds the baronet, is the spirit which becomes a minister. "Will you say, twenty years hence, to Death, when he pays you a visit, 'I built this house-by the confession of all men a parsonage in the purest taste; I selected these pictures; observe the luxuriance of the trees I planted; just do me the favour to notice the convenience of this library, and the beauty of the prospect from that window'?" etc. Swift's True and Faithful Narrative contains more than one characteristic hit on "the reverend clergy," and their demeanour in time of peril: "the degrees of apprehension and terror could be distinguished to be greater or less according to their ranks and degrees in the Church"-the higher their rank, and the richer their benefice, the greater was their fear. And among the Dean's minor poems is a copy of verses entitled The Parson's Case, in which a poor curate, in rent cassock and |