1857.]

likely to deny a duke, because he is one, the courtesy due to a man. We think that Archbishop Whately holds the balance very fairly between the two extremes :

In reference to nobility in individuals, nothing was ever better said than by Bishop Warburton-as is reported-in the House of Lords, on the occasion of some angry dispute which had arisen between a peer of noble family and one of a new creation. He said that, 'high birth was a thing which he never knew any one disparage, except those who had it not; and he never knew any one make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.'

It was a remark by a celebrated man, himself a gentleman born, but with nothing of nobility, that the difference between a man with a long line of noble ancestors, and an upstart, is that the one knows for certain, what the other only conjectures as highly probable, that several of his forefathers deserved hanging. (pp. 131-2.)

In the Annotations on the Essay 'Of Friendship,' the Archbishop puts down, by irresistible force of argument, one of the most silly, mischievous, purposeless, and groundless errors which have ever been taught: we mean the doctrine that in a future life, happy souls will be no longer capable of special individual friendship. We have often been filled with burning indignation at finding in the book of some empty-headed divine who never learned logic, or in the sermon of some popular preacher thoroughly devoid of sense, taste, scholarship, modesty, and the reasoning faculty, lengthy tirades about the perfection of another world consisting much in an entire elevation above such earthly things as specific attachments. We have seen and heard it stated that in a future life, blessed spirits will never remember or recognize those who were dearest to them in this; and perhaps, indeed, will not remember or recognize their own identity. It is satisfactory to know that this doctrine is as groundless as it is revolting: and most truly does Archbishop Whately say, that

this is one of the many points in which views of the eternal state of the heirs of salvation are rendered more uninteresting to our feelings, and consequently, more uninviting, than there is any need to make them.

77

There is much social wisdom in the remarks upon the Essay 'Of Expense.' And here the Archbishop, in a graver tone, propounds a like philosophy to that which Mr. Thackeray has in several of his writings enforced so well. It would be hard to reckon up the misery and anxiety which are produced in this country by absurd and foolish straining to keep up appearances:' that is, with five hundred a year to entertain precisely like a man with five thousand, and generally to present a false face to the world, and seem other than what one is. When will this curse of our civilized life cease? Surely, if people knew how transparent are all the pretences by which they think to pass for wealthy folk,-how readily neighbours see through them,-how incomparably more respectable and more respected is sterling yet unaffected honesty in this matter,-this foolish display would cease, and the analogous forms of deception would cease with it.

No one is taken in by them. Any one who knows the world knows thoroughly how, by an accompanying process of mental arithmetic, to make the deductions from the big talk or the pretentious show of some people, which are needed to bring the appearance down to the reality. The greengrocer got in for the day is never mistaken for the family butler. The fly jobbed by the hour is easily distinguished from the brougham which it personates. And when Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones talks largely of his or her aristocratic acquaintances, mentioning no

name

without a handle to it,' no one is for a moment misled into the belief that of such is the circle of society in which Mrs. Jones or Mr. Smith moves.

In the Annotations on the Regimen of Health,' there are some useful remarks upon early and late hours, and upon times of study, which we commend to the notice of hard-working college-men. And these remarks close with the following suggestive paragraph :

:

Of persons who have led a temperate life, those will have the best chance of longevity who have done hardly anything but live;-what may be called the neuter verbs-not active or passive, but

:

only being who have had little to do, little to suffer; but have led a life of quiet retirement, without exertion of body or mind,-avoiding all troublesome enterprise, and seeking only a comfortable obscurity. Such men, if of a pretty strong constitution, and if they escape any remarkable calamities, are likely to live long. But much affliction, or much exertion, and, still more, both combined, will be sure to tell upon constitution-if not at once, yet at least as years advance. One who is of the character of an active or passive verb, or, still more, both combined, though he may be said to have lived long in everything but years, will rarely reach the age of the neuters.-(p. 305.)

'It is better,' said Bishop Cumberland, to wear out than to rust out:' yet there can be no question that when the energies of body and mind are husbanded, they will go farther and last longer. Never to light the candle is the way to make it last for ever. Yet it may suffice the man who has crowded much living into a short life, to think that he has lived long in everything but years.'

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs.
He most lives,

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

*

In remarking on the Essay Of Suspicion,' the Archbishop writes as follows:

'Multitudes are haunted by the spectres, as it were, of vague surmises and indefinite suspicions, which continue thus to haunt them, just because they are vague and indefinite,-because the mind has never ventured to look them boldly in the face, and put them into a shape in which reason can examine them.'-(p. 317.)

A valuable practical lesson is to be drawn from the principle here laid down. Only experience can convince a man how wonderfully the mind's burden is lightened, by merely getting a clear view of what it has to do, or bear, or encounter. Some persons go through life in a ceaseless worry, oppressed and confused by an undefined feeling that they have a vast number and variety of things to do, and never feeling at

doubts. If any one who is possessed with the general impression that he is an extremely ill-used and unhappy man, would write down the special items of his troubles-even though the list should be of considerable length, he will find that matters are not so bad after all. There is nothing, we believe, that so aggravates all evil to the minds of most men, as when the sense of the vague, indeterminate, and innumerable, is added to it. And we are strong believers in the power of the pen to give most people clear and welldefined thoughts.

on

on

We may particularize as especially worthy of attention, Archbishop Whately's observations the different periods of life at which different men attain their mental maturity (pp. 403-4); the license of counsel in pleading a client's cause (pp. 509-12); on the necessity of the forms and ceremonies of etiquette, even among the closest friends (p. 479); and upon the causes of sudden popularity (pp. 500-2). Students will find some valuable advice at pp. 460-1; and young preachers at pp. 323-4. Dissenting ministers, and other persons who pretend an entire contempt for worldly wealth, either because the grapes hang beyond their reach, or from envy of people who are more fortunate, may turn with advantage to pp. 350-1. Those amiable individuals who are wont to express their satisfaction that such an acquaintance has met with some disappointment, because it will do him good, are referred to the Archbishop's keen and just remark upon such as bestow posthumous praise upon a man whom they reviled and calumniated during his life, and may profitably consider whether the real motive from which they speak is not highly analogous :

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a close. We feel how imperfect an idea we have given of Archbishop Whately's Annotations,-of range, their

their

cogency,

their

wisdom, their experience, their practical instruction, their wit, their eloquence. The extracts we have quoted are like a sheaf of wheat brought from a field of a hundred acres; but we trust our readers may be induced to study the book for themselves.

I

PERFECTLY agree with you in considering a Hampshire trout stream to be a very charming thing in its way; that bright chalk-water, so smooth and clear that one might fancy that it was nothing more than limpid air' a little condensed, with its waving tufts of green weed and glassy swirls, is a thing not to be sneezed at. Moreover, I admire exceedingly your Hampshire trout, in all their marvellous beautydropped with tiny bright crimson spots, small in the head, deep in girth, mighty in spread of fin and power of tail, astute beyond all fishes. But yet I frankly confess that I would not give up the chance of catching one wee black trootie,' even in his most disreputable and out-of-season state-when his eye is wild and lurid, and his jowl ravenous and dyspeptic; with a back like a toad, and a stomach like a water-snake; with dim, dull rings and spots about him, each with a reddish centre mark like a bruised bayonet wound-for all the trout in Test; and why?-not only for the fish himself, and the quantity of him, but also for the sake of his vagabond cousin who lives with him he who rises like a shark, and fights like the Devil; who spends more of his time, after being hooked, in the air than in the water, and whose pluck never leaves him for a moment; but who, in spite of whacks on the head, lives and kicks in the creel, till he has to be re-extracted and his head rebashed on a stone.

VOL. LV. NO. CCCXXV.

Oh, ever plucky sea-trout of the whalebone back! and, besides, the chance of-but hush, it is close time, and we had better hold our tongues-however, if we do get her, our knickerbockers will conceal her. And moreover and above, setting the fish entirely on one side, I look down upon you for the sake of the river itself.

True it is that our river is dark and swarthy, with its very foam of a rich, racy, gipsy tinge, likened unto liquefied cairngorums by romantic young ladies, and unto bottled porter by their matter-of-fact brothers. But, mark you! it is a river-no stream; bright, in spite of its brownness; strong, wayward, flashing and bounding and hustling along, moving big stones when in spate as if they were dropped rowan berries, and rounding and rattling the little ones till each bit of granite and pudding-stone is smooth and polished enough to be admitted into her Grace's boudoir as a pressepapier.

Your stream is a mere streama natural excavation, a by-drain, spout, gutter, conduit, conveyer of liquid manure to fat meadows, without personality or soul. Our river is a river-a real live thing-never mentioned but with due respect, and in the feminine, as 'she.' Ever charming, capricious, wayward daughter of the hills! Never as one wishes her to be-never as one wants her to be; knowing her power, and knowing how all adore her;

F

having her own way in spite of lord and loon. Rising like anything on Saturday night; perfect 'o'Sabbath,' when no one may go near her; and leaving her bed as dry as the summit of Benmore before Monday morning. The centre of all thought -the starting-point of all conversation; How is she?' the first question each morning; How will she be?' the last question each night; her 'waxing' and 'waning' is more studied than ever were moon changes by Chaldæan star-gazers. On her depends everything. If she be but in good order, who cares for the weather?-let it blow from the north, east, south, or west, or straight down from the zenith in an Irish hurricane, what care we? Let her but be all right,' and a fig for the weather! though the jingling ice-films cut your shins, or the sun bake your brains to an omelette.

Will she fish the day?'

'I'm thinking she'll fush the day' -what bliss!

'I'm jealousing she'll no fush the day'-what woe!

Then, oh my friend! reflect on the beginning and ending of your stream. Ponder over its insignificant commencement in a bed of splashy rushes, from which it oozes out in such a tiny, grass-concealed rivulet, that you are not aware of its existence till you put your horse's foreleg into it up to the shoulder, as you are cantering quietly after the United Agricul turists' harriers, along what seems a'clere' of smoothest and soundest chalk turf, and go hurling headlong, horse and man, to the just too-late chorus of Ware green spring!' Turn, then, with grief and shame to its end or endings-flattened out into a sham pool, impiously called a lake, three feet deep, so weed-andslime-begrown that you cannot even skate on it without prostrating yourself ignominiously before the object of your affections, whilst performing your pet figure; teeming with jack and perch; nay, even demoralized enough to harbour within its bosom that sour, scaly, puritanical abomination, the chub; and then trickling feebly over an artificial tumbling bay, to be absorbed into some crawling, muddy river that would choke a sturgeon, or to

bear coal-barges and beery bargees, as part of the Bargetown and Muddyford Canal.

How different is her life from beginning to end. Rushing fullgrown out of that wild loch, that lay far down below us as we crouched flat, flat on the heather, waiting for the deer to rouse, about three o'clock this bright September afternoon, stretching in a bright blue curve between the hills, like the cast-away sword of some old Norse god; so fair and calm that, in spite of one'sself, the eye wandered ever and anon from the brown, sharp, ivory-tipped antlers that just peered over the heather before us, and which we had crawled after such a weary way, through moss and peat bog—to gaze on its beauty:-calm enough now, when the breeze only crisps its surface, deadening the purple into a steely blue, but wild and stern enough when the gale sweeps down from the hills, and dashes it in short, crisp, angry waves on the sandy shore of the little birch-fringed bay, and carries the white spray in whirling, ghostly columns across its lead-covered bosom. Mighty ranges of shivered cliffs overhang it on one side their bases a wild mass of moss-grown rock, with the feathering birches balancing themselves about them like birds ready to take wing; where the roe steps hesitatingly and daintily, so light of footfall that the waiter at the pass-not him of the napkin, but perchance yourself, with the old loved and trusted double-hears not the fall of her fairy feet,' till she is so near you that the wire case of your cartridge reaches her heart as soon as the shot; where the cautious, longeared hinds love to shelter themselves and their calves from the autumnal sun and storm, and where the stag keeps close, jealous of his velvety, tumid horns.

Over on the other side, look at that patch of bright yellow cornfield, with the tufts of dark-green alder by the water-side, and the grey tumble-down stone walls, and the new farm-house, twelve feet high at the roof-poles, dwindling down through cowbyre and coalshed, till you cannot distinguish the grass-and-ragweed-covered sod roof from the hill-side against which it

1857.]

rests. And above, the belt of dark pines, planted by the late laird; and above them, sweep after sweep of purple heather, and rich yellow brown deer-grass, sprinkled with grey stones, tier above tier and swell above swell, till it ends in broad-shouldered, quartz-gleaming hill and corrie; where the ptarmigan run and cower amongst the stones, and the blue hare makes her last attempt to mesmerize you with her fore paws as she sits on her doup against the sky line, looking more like a hill kangaroo than a thing to make hare-soup of; and then, away, far away-are they clouds or purple hills?

Away, up above, at the head of the lake, are her parent springs. Brown, rushing cascades Papa from Strath More, stern and noisy and hardy-without a tree to shelter him-rough, and strong, and impetuous, very valiant in spate, and not bad to fish when in good order; and soft-tripping, tinkling Mamma from Strath Beg, gentle and graceful-playing with her pebbles in her girlhood up amongst the hills, and getting thoughtful and calm, and resting in bright, smooth pools as she grows on to womanhoodshaded and fringed all the way down by modest alder copse; glancing and twinkling between the darkgreen leaves. Her end, again to return to the mighty daughter-it is not right to call that an endingthere, thirty miles down below, where she flows calm and still between the seaweed-covered rocks to join the blue sea, with a little cluster of fishing huts nestling round her, and loving her for the shelter which she gives to the storm-sped fisher boat. Call you that an end, oh Southron,

that wedding of the brown river with the broad blue North Sea?

No fat commonplace cows chevy us when we fish 'her;' no pauper-grinding farmer comes down to bully us for trampolining up and down' in his grass. Wild ducks fly over us-grouse come down to drink, and fly off with a choking crow. Stags of ten stand at gaze on the tops of the shingly, heathery banks as we turn the corner; in the hot mid-day the croak, croak of the raven comes stealing down the wind from the far-off corrie; and great

81

lordly salmon rush up out of her ever and anon, and fall back with a splash that sends the water ouzel scurrying down the stream in an agony of terror.

Laugh not at my lingering over her beauties, or getting mildly Ossianic whilst talking of them. Just over that hill, a little to the left, is the valley where Bran fought the Sutherland dog; a little to the right is the wild glen where he was buried; and the very wind that rustles by us was whispering amongst the bent on Morven not ten minutes ago: and, more than this, is she not gone from us ?-lost, lost, till next March! Och hone aree!

On that sad Saturday, the last on which she was fishable, she was terribly low; and no wonder! She was lower than she had been known to be for years, exposing her pebbles in the most reckless manner, and leaving yards of bare, slippery stones between her gracious self and her swardy, heathery, broombirch and gorse - fringed banks, whilst the rows of pre-Adamite stepping-stones stood out like sets of ancient teeth. Nathless, and I determined to try her, with a lingering hope that some of her finny children might possibly be kind enough, knowing it to be the last day,' to permit themselves to be persuaded that a small bundle of golden pheasant, pea-fowl, and cock's feathers represented something good to eat, or that Hairy Jack' was a veritable caterpillar; not that I believed-not that I did believe, that they would be betrayed into such a weakness, with a bright sun, and a river so low that one had to take care not to lose it between the pools, and fish the turnpike road instead. I knew that the case was almost hopeless. As Somebody's forester said to Somebody, the other day, who, having missed a stag, and killed a hind who had a young calf with her, applied to him for consolation, 'It could na pawsibly be waur.'

But I had loaned a spoon, mysterious Yankee invention, evidently discovered by a 'cute Help, who had vampoosed into the swamp with the family plate, and found himself hard up for baits; and with this I determined to try. I fished two or three