RETROSPECT AND REGRETS. 325 is the strain of The Prelude from that of Don Juan, in reference to the age in question : "Four years and thirty, told this very week, Have I been now a sojourner on earth, By sorrow not unsmitten; yet for me Life's morning radiance hath not left the hills, One of Charlotte Brontè's letters begins, "I shall be thirtyone next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made it. What have I done these last thirty years?" The plaint is in the tone of that symbolical autobiographer in Hawthorne's looking-glass story, who gazes on his mirrored self, that other self, as a record of his heavy youth, wasted in sluggishness, for lack of hope and impulse, or equally thrown away in toil that had no wise motive and had accomplished no good end; and who perceives that the tranquil gloom of a disappointed soul has darkened through his countenance, where the blackness of the future seems to mingle with the shadows of the past, giving him the aspect of a fated man. In Romola, only a keen eye bent on studying Tito Melema, after his return to Florence, can mark the certain amount of change in him which is not to be altogether accounted for by the lapse of time: it is that change which comes from the "final departure of moral youthfulness." The lines of the face may continue soft, and the eyes pellucid as of old; but something is gone-something as indefinable as the changes in the morning twilight. "Time has not blanched a single hair That clusters round thy forehead now; 'I, too, am changed-I scarce know why- "Time cannot sure have wrought the ill; Though worn in this world's sickening strife, In the first summer month of life; Yet journey on my path below, Ah! how unlike ten years ago!" But the reminder is wholesome, that the recollection of the spring of life being gone, occasions melancholy only because our views are so much confined to this infancy of our existence; and that to cultivate an intimacy with the circumstances relating to its future stages is the only wisdom; for this alone can reconcile us to the decaying conditions of mortality. Frederick Perthes somewhere says, that between youth and age there is a wall of partition, which a man does not perceive till he has passed it; the transition being generally made in middle life, but passing unnoticed amid the necessary cares and labours of one's calling. Rightly he takes the discovery to be a stimulus to action, not a plea or pretext for languid reverie and unavailing regrets. Ever to be noted is the pregnant fact, that when our Lord began to be about thirty years of age, then began His work in earnest, His ministry in public. To many, that age is the signal for selfish indulgence in regrets. To Him it struck the hour of hard work-work that should cease but in death. PRETENCE-MADE LONG PRAYERS. N the audience of all the people was this warning given, IN to beware of the scribes, by One who taught as having authority all His own, and not as the scribes,—to beware of them, the long-robed, smooth-spoken, self-seeking, pretentious dissemblers, "which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers." Short work they made of widows' houses; and their way of compensation was to make their prayers long. MANTIS RELIGIOSA. 327 Dryden's great satire has a vigorous couplet to the purpose.: "Thus heaping wealth, by the most ready way Among the Jews, which was-to cheat and pray." In another part of it we come upon another portrait of a like professor : "Blest times, when Ishban, he whose occupation So long has been to cheat, reforms the nation! As good a saint as usurer ever made." La Bruyère holds that "l'on peut s'enrichir dans quelque art, ou dans quelque commerce que ce soit, par l'ostentation d'une certaine probité." Let the probity be piety, and things go better still-for a time. 66 Why should not piety be made, And men get money by devotion, As well as making of a motion," etc., asks Butler in his Miscellaneous Thoughts. He is full of such pensées. A godly man that has served out his time in holiness -this is another of them-may set up any crime; "as scholars, when they've taken their degrees, may set up any faculty they please." More familiar are the lines in Hudibras: "Bel and the Dragon's chaplains were More moderate than these by far: For they, poor knaves, were glad to cheat, But these will not be fobb'd off so, They must have wealth and power too; Or else with blood and desolation They'll tear it out o' th' heart o' th' nation." Worthy of study, on ethical grounds as well as entomological, is that species of the Mantis family of purely carnivorous insects, which rejoices in the name of Mantis religiosa, being regarded with religious reverence by the natives of the countries it inhabits, on account of its occasionally assuming the attitude of prayer. This, however, naturalists tell us, is the position in which it lies in wait for its prey; the front of the thorax being elevated, and the two fore legs held up together, like a pair of arms, prepared to seize any animal that may fall within their reach. "Holy Will, holy Will, there was wit in your skull, The timmer is scant, when ye're ta'en for a saunt, So judges the author of Holy Willie's Prayer. Swift pitches one stanza of his Newgate's Garland in much the same key : "Some by public revenues, which pass'd through their hands, Have purchased clean houses and bought dirty lands: Some to steal for a charity think it no sin, Which at home (says the proverb) does always begin. Assign'd a trustee, Treat not orphans like masters of the Chancery; In a memorable ode, Thomas Hood invites us to behold yon servitor of God and Mammon, who, binding up his Bible with his ledger, blends Gospel texts with trading gammon, "A black-leg saint, a spiritual hedger, But who on earth can say I am not pious?'" Mr. Thackeray's John Brough, managing director of the Independent West Diddlesex Insurance Company, is punctilious about having his family to prayers every morning at eight precisely; not that his author (who was even severe against hasty charges of hypocrisy) would call him a hypocrite because he had family prayers: "there are many bad and good men who don't go through the ceremony at all, but I am sure the good men would be the better for it, and am not called upon to settle the question with respect to the bad ones ;" and therefore a great deal of the religious part of Mr. Brough's behaviour is designedly passed over: suffice it, that religion was always on MAKING, A TRADE OF PIETY. 329 his lips; that he went to church thrice every Sunday, for a show making long prayers. He belonged to what Molière calls 66 ces gens qui, par une âme à l'intérêt soumise, font de dévotion métier et marchandise." A pronounced example figures in Mr. Tennyson's Sea Dreams-that story of a city clerk whose face would darken, as he cursed his credulousness, "And that one unctuous mouth which lured him, rogue, To buy strange shares in some Peruvian mine;" which oily rogue the impoverished dupe in vain strove to bring to an account, and in vain plied with the demand to be shown the books: 66 When the great Books (see Daniel seven and ten) That makes the widow lean. My dearest friend, My eyes Pursued him down the street, and far away, Read rascal in the motions of his back, And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.” So false, he partly took himself for true; whose pious talk when most his heart was dry, "Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye; Dropping the too rough H in Hell and Heaven, To spread the Word by which himself had thriven." A younger poet has painted for us a banker, well-known as |