threadbare gown, deep in debt, overwhelmed with nursery demands, hungry and cold, is well-nigh wishful for the grave.

"But now should Fortune shift the scene,

And make thy curateship a dean;
Or some rich benefice provide,

To pamper luxury and pride;

With labour small, and income great ;
With chariot less for use than state;
With swelling scarf and glossy gown,
And licence to reside in town;

With haughty spouse in vesture fine,
With plenteous meals and generous wine;
Would'st thou not wish, with so much ease,
Thy years as numerous as thy days?"

Adam Smith's theory of sympathy is effusive on such a topic as this. What pity, we think, that anything should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even, says he, wish these happy proprietors immortal; and it seems hard to us that death should at last put an end to such genuine enjoyment. "It is cruel, we think, in nature, to compel them from their exalted stations, to that humble but hospitable home which she has provided for all her children." And if we think so, much more they: if we, by mere force of sympathy, as spectators, much more they, by sheer personal interest, as principals. All vast possessions, to apply Pope's imitation of Horace, just the same the case whether you call them villa, park, or chase; alas, will they avail?

"Link towns to towns with avenues of oak,
Enclose whole towns in walls, 'tis all a joke!
Inexorable Death shall level all,

And trees, and stones, and farms, and farmer fall."

And the greater the fall of the farm, the greater the fear of the farmer. Epictetus, in the Imaginary Conversation with Seneca, pointedly tells that wealthy philosopher, that where God hath placed a mine, He hath placed the materials of an earthquake. "A true philosopher," replies Seneca (himself, on Landor's showing, a sham one), "is beyond the reach of

THE 'GOOD THINGS' OF THIS LIFE.

209

fortune." "The false one thinks himself so," rejoins Epictetus: "Fortune cares little about philosophers; but she remembers where she hath set a rich man, and she laughs to see the Destinies at his door." "Ease and pleasure," said Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, when near his end, "quake to hear of death; but my life, full of cares and miseries, desireth to be dissolved."

The opening paragraph of M. Jules Simon's elaborate treatise on La Religion Naturelle, concerns those who are taken up with the ways and means of good living, of getting the most they can out of life, this life,—all but ignoring another, any other: "ils s'occupent de bien vivre et de ne pas songer à la mort ;" thus occupied, death takes them off their guard, overtakes them unawares, and finds them pre-occupied with the "good things" that make it sweet to live and terrible to die. "La dernière heure les trouve tout remplis de la pensée, de l'amour des stériles biens qui vont leur être ravis pour jamais." No man, as South has it, can transport his large retinue, his rich furniture, and his sumptuous fare, into another world: nothing of all these things can continue with him then, but the memory of them. "And surely, the bare remembrance that a man was formerly rich or great, cannot make him at all happier there, where an infinite happiness or an infinite misery shall equally swallow up the sense of these poor felicities." It may indeed, adds the preacher, contribute to the man's misery, and heighten his anguish, to reflect upon his abuse of all that wealth with which the good providence of God had entrusted him. Applicable to rich worldlings in general is what a Spanish poet says of a Spanish grandee in particular

* Manrique, as Englished by Longfellow. Is it hypercritical to note the seeming ambiguity of green villas?

P

Madame de Sévigné commends her daughter as having, in her last letter, said something "incomparable" on the freedom taken by death in breaking in upon worldly prosperity; and she finds a solace for those who are not among fortune's favourites, since to them death is less bitter. "C'est ce qui doit consoler de ne pas être au nombre de ses favoris; nous en trouverons la mort moins amère." Musing on the comparative bluntness and unreserve with which the poor tell the sick poor, at once and without any circumlocution, that they will never get over it—whereas to the richer, and above all to the very rich, the proximity of death is a tabooed topic,-an ecclesiastical essayist asks, "Is it that the shock is less to the poor, that they have fewer objects in this world for which life might be desirable ?" As Montaigne says of the poor—à propos of one "now digging in my garden that this morning buried his son"-how many desire to die, or at least die without alarm or regret ! The very names by which they call diseases "sweeten and mollify the sharpness of them: the phthisic is with them no more than a cough, the dysentery but a looseness, a pleurisy but a cold; and as they gently name them, so they lightly endure them." L'Abbé Galiani says, "on n'est attaché à la vie qu'en proportion des plaisirs qu'elle nous procure. J'entends à présent pourquoi les paysans meurent tranquillement et voient mourir les autres stupidement." It is a Mazarin who holds on to life with the frenzied grasp of one whom death is coming to rob of all he counts dear. Sainte-Beuve describes the dying Cardinal as tenant à la vie by all the thousand ties of the possesseur vulgaire who clings fast to the treasures he has amassed. * Brienne relates how he one day saw and heard moribund Mazarin in his gallery of art, bewailing the advent hour of separation. Brienne heard him approaching, by the sound made by his slippers, the feeble

* Mazarin's great predecessor, Richelieu, wrote of Luynes, that his death "lui sembla d'autant plus rude, qu'outre qu'elle est amere, comme dit le Sage, à ceux qui sont dans la bonne fortune, il prenait plaisir à savourer les douceurs de la vie, et jouissait avec volupté de ses contentenents."

'IL FAUT QUITTER TOUT CELA?

211

shuffle of one in mortal languor. Brienne hid himself behind
the tapestry, and listened as the master of the palace moaned
forth a querulous Il faut quitter tout cela !* Then turning to
gaze on another object of art, the dying prince of the Church
added,—“ And that, too! I must leave that, as well! Oh, the
pains I have been at to collect these things! How can I
resign them without regret ?—I shall never see them where I
am going." Je ne les verrai plus où je vais. Brienne professes
to have heard these piteous words very distinctly, and to have
been so touched by them that he could not refrain from a
deep sigh, which betrayed his presence to Mazarin. “Who's
there?" asked his Eminence, and on finding who it was, the
Cardinal, in his furred night-robe, and with night-cap on head,
bade Brienne help him along to his library, where, resuming
the train of thought which now absorbed him, and refusing to
enter upon affairs of state, he thus addressed, partly his com-
panion, partly his beloved pictures: "Look, my friend, at this
beautiful piece by Correggio, and this Venus of Titian's, and
this matchless Deluge by Carracci.
Ah! mon pauvre
ami, I must take leave of all these. Farewell, dear pictures, to
me so dear, and that have cost me so much!" His Eminence
is eminently a trite text for the moralist who, with Blair, con-
templates the Grave:

"How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!
To him that is at ease in his possessions;
Who, counting on long years of pleasure here,
Is quite unfurnish'd for that world to come.
In that dread moment, how the frantic soul
Raves round the walls of her clay tenement,
How wishfully she looks

On all she's leaving, now no longer hers!"

66

Quand il lui fallut, à l'âge richesses, ces merveilles d'art

* A French critic finds or takes occasion in his review of the career of Madame Pompadour, who died at forty-two, to contrast her demeanour in the prospect of death with that of Mazarin. de quarante-deux ans, quitter ces palais, ces amoncelées, ce pouvoir si disputé, si envié, me Mazarin avec soupir, Il faut quitter tout cela! d'un œil ferme," etc.

elle ne dit point comElle envisagea la mort

A KINGDOM'S PEACE INSURED FOR A KING'S

H

LIFE.

ISAIAH XXXIX. 7, 8.

EZEKIAH'S pride went before a fall; but the catastrophe was deferred. All the treasures he had been so eager to display before admiring envoys were to be carried away by the foreign spoiler, and nothing left. His sons too should be taken away, to become the degraded creatures of the king of Babylon. And the glory of Judah should depart, and that fair realm at large be desecrated by the stranger. It was a gloomy prospect. But the king took comfort in the assurance that not till after he was gone should the kingdom be brought low. The kingdom's peace was insured for the king's life; and, however selfishly or narrow-sightedly, the king was therewith content. "Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken. He said moreover, For there shall be peace and truth in my days.” The piety of submission may underlie the king's speech. But near the surface there runs a current of complacency not the most generous or patriotic.

Though good men are often taken away from the evil to come, says old Sir Thomas Browne, in his Christian Morals, and "though some in evil days have been glad that they were old, nor long to behold the iniquities of a wicked world, or judgments threatened by them; yet is it no small satisfaction unto honest minds, to leave the world in virtuous well-tempered times, under a prospect of good to come, and continuation of worthy ways acceptable unto God and man. Men who die in deplorable days, which they regretfully behold, have not their eyes closed with the like content; while they cannot avoid the thoughts of proceeding or growing enormities,* displeasing

* The venerable Chancelier de l'Hôpital, on the eve of the St. Bartholomew massacres, said of, or to, them to whom his hoary head was a bore— que ma vieillesse ennuie,—“Quand je regarde tout autour de moi, je serais bien tenté de leur répondre, comme un bon vieil homme d'évêque, qui portait, comme moi, une longue barbe blanche, et qui, la montrant, disait: 'Quand