TREVANION.-Humph! What's all this! (In an under tone)—Am I going to be taken in ? PISISTRATUS.-Do not think me ungrateful, then, when I say I come to resign my office-to leave the house where I have been so happy. I TREVANION.-Leave the house!Pooh!-I have overtasked you. will be more merciful in future. You must forgive a political economist-it is the fault of my sect to look upon men as machines. PISISTRATUS (smiling faintly.)No, indeed that is not it! I have nothing to complain of-nothing I could wish altered-could I stay. TREVANION (examining me thoughtfully.)—And does your father approve of your leaving me thus? PISISTRATUS.-Yes, fully. TREVANION (musing a moment.)— I see, he would send you to the University, make you a book-worm like himself: pooh! that will not do-you will never become wholly a man of books, it is not in you. Young man, though I may seem careless, I read characters, when I please it, pretty quickly. You do wrong to leave me; you are made for the great world-I can open to you a high career. I wish to do so! Lady Ellinor wishes it nay, insists on it for your father's sake as well as yours. I never ask a favour from ministers, and I never will. But (here Trevanion rose suddenly, and, with an erect mien and a quick gesture of his arm, he added) but a minister himself can dispose as he pleases of his patronage. Look you, it is a secret yet, and I trust to your honour. But, before the year is out, I must be in the cabinet. Stay with me, I guarantee your fortunesthree months ago I would not have said that. By-and-by I will open parliament for you-you are not of age yet--work till then. And now sit down and write my letters-a sad arrear!" "My dear, dear Mr Trevanion!" said I, so affected that I could scarcely speak, and seizing his hand, which I pressed between both mine-"I dare not thank you-I cannot! But you don't know my heart-it is not ambition. No! if I could but stay here on the same terms for ever-here-(looking ruefully on that spot where Fanny had stood the night before,) but it is impossible! If you knew all, you would be the first to bid me go! "You are in debt," said the man of the world, coldly. 66 Bad, very bad-still—” "No, sir; no! worse "Hardly possible to be worse, young man-hardly! But, just as you will; you leave me, and will not say why. Good-by. Why do you linger? shake hands, and go!" "I cannot leave you thus: I-I— sir, the truth shall out. I am rash and mad enough not to see Miss Trevanion without forgetting that I am poor, and-" "Ha!" interrupted Trevanion softly, and growing pale, "this is a misfortune indeed! And I, who talked of reading characters! Truly, truly, we would-be practical men are fools-fools! And you have made love to my daughter!" "Sir! Mr Trevanion !-no-never, never so base! In your house, trusted by you,-how could you think it? I dared, it may be, to love--at all events, to feel that I could not be insensible to a temptation too strong for me. But to say it to your daughter—to ask love in return-I would as soon have broken open your desk! Frankly I tell you my folly: it is a folly, not a disgrace." Trevanion came up to me abruptly, as I leant against the book-case, and, grasping my hand with a cordial kindness, said," Pardon me! You have behaved as your father's son shouldI envy him such a son! Now, listen to me-I cannot give you my daughter—” "Believe me, sir, I never—” "Tut, listen! I cannot give you my daughter. I say nothing of inequality-all gentlemen are equal; and if not, all impertinent affectation of superiority, in such a case, would come ill from one who owes his own fortune to his wife! But, as it is, I have a stake in the world, won not by fortune only, but the labour of a life, the suppression of half my nature the drudging, squaring, taming down-all that made the glory and joy of my youth-to be that hard matter-of-fact thing which the English world expect in a-statesman! This station has gradually opened into its natural result-power! I tell you T shall soon have high office in the administration: I hope to render great services to England-for we English politicians, whatever the mob and the press say of us, are not selfish placehunters. I refused office, as high as I look for now, ten years ago. We believe in our opinions, and we hail the power that may carry them into effect. In this cabinet I shall have enemies. Oh, don't think we leave jealousy behind us, at the doors of Downing Street! I shall be one of a minority. I know well what must happen: like all men in power, I must strengthen myself by other heads and hands than my own. My daughter should bring to me the alliance of that house in England which is most necessary to me. My life falls to the ground, like a house of cards, if I waste-I do not say on you, but on men of ten times your fortune (whatever that be,)—the means of strength which are at my disposal in the hand of Fanny Trevanion. To this end I have looked; but to this end her mother has schemed. for these household matters are within a man's hopes, but belong to a woman's policy. So much for us. But for you, my dear, and frank, and high-souled young friend-for you, if I were not Fanny's father-if I were your nearest relation, and Fanny could be had for the asking, with all her princely dower, (for it is princely,)—for you I should say, fly from a load upon the heart, on the genius, the energy, the pride, and the spirit, which not one man in ten thousand can bear; fly from the curse of owing every thing to a wife!-it is a reversal of all natural position, it is a blow to all the manhood within us. You know not what it is: I do! My wife's fortune came not till after marriage so far, so well; it saved my reputation from the charge of fortune-hunting, But, I tell you fairly, that if it had never come at all, I should be a prouder, and a greater, and a happier man than I have ever been, or ever can be, with all its advantages; it has been a millstone round my neck. And yet Ellinor has never breathed a word that could wound my pride. Would her daughter be as forbearing? Much as I love Fanny, I doubt if she has the great heart of her mother. You look incredulous ;- naturally. Oh, you think I shall sacrifice my child's happiness to a politician's ambition! Folly of youth! Fanny would be wretched with you. She might not think so now; she would five years hence! Fanny will make an admirable duchess, countess, great lady; but wife to a man who owes all to her!-no, no, don't dream it! I shall not sacrifice her happiness, depend on it. I speak plainly, as man to man-man of the world to a man just entering it—but still man to man! What say you? "I will think over all you tell me. I know that you are speaking to me most generously as a father would. Now let me go, and may God keep you and yours!" "Go-I return your blessing-go! I don't insult you now with offers of service; but, remember, you have a right to command them-in all ways, in all times. Stop! take this comfort away with you—a sorry comfort now, a great one hereafter. In a position that might have moved anger, scorn, pity, you have made a barren-hearted man honour and admire you. You, a boy, have made me, with my gray hairs, think better of the whole world: tell your father that." I closed the door, and stole out softly-softly. But when I got into the hall, Fanny suddenly opened the door of the breakfast parlour, and seemed, by her look, her gesture, to invite me in. Her face was very pale, and there were traces of tears on the heavy lids. I stood still a moment, and my heart beat violently. I then muttered something inarticulately, and, bowing low, hastened to the door. I thought, but my ears might deceive me, that I heard my name pronounced; but fortunately the tall porter started from his newspaper and his leather chair, and the entrance stood open. I joined my father. "It is all over," said I, with a resolute smile. "And now, my dear father, I feel how grateful I should be for all that your lessons-your life-have taught me ;-for, believe me, I am not unhappy." CHAPTER XLII. We came back to my father's house, and on the stairs we met my mother, whom Roland's grave looks, and her Austin's strange absence, had alarmed. My father quietly led the way to a little room, which my mother had appropriated to Blanche and herself; and then, placing my hand in that which had helped his own steps from the stony path, down the quiet vales of life, he said to me,-"Nature gives you here the soother;"— and, so saying, he left the room. And And it was true, O my mother! that in thy simple loving breast nature did place the deep wells of comfort! We come to men for philosophy-to women for consolation. the thousand weaknesses and regrets -the sharp sands of the minutia that make up sorrow all these, which I could have betrayed to no mannot even to him, the dearest and tenderest of all men-I showed without shame to thee! And thy tears, that fell on my cheek, had the balm of Araby; and my heart, at length, lay lulled and soothed under thy moist gentle eyes. I made an effort, and joined the little circle at dinner; and I felt grateful that no violent attempt was made to raise my spirits-nothing but affection, more subdued, and soft, and tranquil. Even little Blanche, as if by the intuition of sympathy, ceased her babble, and seemed to hush her footstep as she crept to my side. But after dinner, when we had reassembled in the drawing-room, and the lights shone bright, and the curtains were let down-and only the quick roll of some passing wheels reminded us that there was a world without my father began to talk. He had laid aside all his work; the younger, but less perishable child was forgotten, and my father began to talk. "It is," said he musingly, "a well-known thing, that particular drugs or herbs suit the body according to its particular diseases. When we are ill, we don't open our medicinechest at random, and take out any powder or phial that comes to hand. The skilful doctor is he who adjusts the dose to the malady." "Of that there can be no doubt," quoth Captain Roland. "I remember a notable instance of the justice of what you say. When I was in Spain, both my horse and I fell ill at the same time; a dose was sent for each; and, by some infernal mistake, I swallowed the horse's physic, and the horse, poor thing, swallowed mine!" "And what was the result ?" asked my father. "The horse died!" answered Roland mournfully-" a valuable beastbright bay, with a star!" "And you?" "Why, the doctor said it ought to have killed me; but it took a great deal more than a paltry bottle of physic to kill a man in my regiment." "Nevertheless, we arrive at the same conclusion," pursued my father, "I with my theory, you with your experience,-that the physic we take must not be chosen hap-hazard; and that a mistake in the bottle may kill a horse. But when we come to the medicine for the mind, how little do we think of the golden rule which common-sense applies to the body." "Anon," said the Captain, "what medicine is there for the mind? Shakspeare has said something on that subject, which, if I recollect right, implies that there is no ministering to a mind diseased." And "I think not, brother; he only said physic (meaning boluses and black draughts) would not do it. Shakspeare was the last man to find fault with his own art; for, verily, he has been a great physician to the mind." "Ah! I take you now, brother,-books again! So you think that, when a man breaks his heart, or loses his fortune, or his daughter-(Blanche, child, come here) that you have only to clap a plaster of print on the sore place, and all is well. I wish you would find me such a cure." "Will you try it?" "If it is not Greek," said my uncle. CHAPTER XLIII. MY FATHER'S CROTCHET ON THE HYGEIENIC CHEMISTRY Of books, 66 If," said my father-and here his hand was deep in his waistcoat-"if we accept the authority of Diodorus, as to the inscription on the great Egyptian library-and I don't see why Diodorus should not be as near the mark as any one else?" added my father interrogatively, turning round. My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her gracious assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus fortified, my father continued,-"If, I say, we accept the authority of Diodorus, the inscription on the Egyptian library was -The Medicine of the Mind.' Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite and hackneyed, and people repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to apply the medicine is the thing!" "So you have told us at least twice before, brother," quoth the Captain, bluffly. "And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no more than the man of the moon." "I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone between reproach and entreaty. "Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother, stopping from her work, and holding up her needle threateningly-and indeed inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder. "Rem acu tetigisti, my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's pun on the occasion.* "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then, that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. In a great grief like that, you cannot tickle and divert the mind; you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb-bury it in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of middle life and old age, I recommend a strict chronic course of science and hard reasoningCounter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain, (for we have not all got mathematical heads,) something in the reach of the humblest understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest-a new languageGreek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welch ! For the loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the understanding.-I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe that poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them two separate men, quite distinct from each other-the imaginative man, and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture of these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half practical. There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest, the very poet of circumstance,' as Gray has finely called him; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker's book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed Virgil the wise, men Whose verse walks highest, but not flies.' as Cowley expresses it. But Virgil still has genius enough to be two to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed, and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard. There is Horace, charming man of the Cicero's joke on a senator who was the son of a tailor-" Thou hast touched the thing sharply," (or with a needle-acu.) world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good things of this life; but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum, or parva rura. There is Shakspeare, who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyreal fancy-and a great many more, whom I need not name; but who, if you take to them gently and quietly, will not, like your mere philosopher, your unreasonable stoic, tell you that you have lost nothing; but who will insensibly steal you out of this world, with its losses and crosses, and slip you into another world, before you know where you are!—a world where you are just as welcome, though you carry no more earth of your lost acres with you than covers the sole of your shoe. Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels-especially early, out of the way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life; or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards you.'* Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the descendants of Jenghis multiply and disperse over the immense waste desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-serpents and bears, and tusked morses, with the faces of men. Then, what think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious brute Pizarro? and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the ancient Britons? and the American Indians, and the South-Sea Islanders? how petulant, and young, and adventurous, and frisky your hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! * Then, for that vice of the mind which I call sectarianism-not in the religious sense of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door neighbour, because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled; and gossiping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting, and thinking heaven and earth are coming together, if some broom touch a cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains-what like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear) course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head!—better than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the middle ages purged the cerebellum. There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad (storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little, feverish animosity to John Styles; or that unfortunate prepossession of yours, that all the world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife! "I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent pharmacy-its resources are boundless, but require the nicest discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the first strata, I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling crystallised masses; and, by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht, and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear! it is no laughing matter. I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at Cambridge, who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading over his depth in Spinosa. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book, (you should RUBRUQUIS, Sect. xii. |