Read Ebook: The Lost and Hostile Gospels An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain by Baring Gould S Sabine

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Standing with reluctant feet Where the brook and river meet,

she is no longer a child and yet not quite a woman--that transition time between the closed bud and the full-blown flower which we in England express by the term, among others, of Sweet Seventeen. Without meaning to be sentimental, or to envelope things in a golden haze wrought by the imagination only and nowhere to be found in fact, we cannot deny the peculiar charm which belongs to a girl of this age, if she is nice, and neither pert nor silly. Besides, it is not only what she is that interests us, but what she will be; for this is the time when the character is settling into its permanent form, so that the great thought of every one connected with her is, How will she turn out? Into what kind of woman will the girl develop? and, What kind of life will she make for herself?

Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely creature, and in fact she often is; a creature hard and forward, having lost the innocence and obedience of childhood and having gained nothing yet of the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature whose hopes and thoughts are all centred on the time when she shall be brought out and have her fling of flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may be only a gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind as narrow as her life, given up to the small intrigues and scandals of the dormitory and the playground--a girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters; whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the cleverness with which she can break the rules of the establishment without being found out; who thinks talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions and teachers, and telling silly secrets with less truth than ingenuity in them, the greatest fun imaginable, and all the greater because of the spice of rebellion and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she may be a mere tomboy, regretting her sex and despising its restraints; cultivating schoolboy slang and aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her sisters and disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood a bore and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion to its feminality. Or she may be a budding miss, shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as little good--a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line as yet made out or the dominant colour so much as indicated.

The best and loveliest thing about Sweet Seventeen is her sense of duty--for the most part a new sense. She no longer needs to be told what to do; she has not to be kept to her tasks by the fear of authority nor the submissive grace of obedience; but of her own free will, because understanding that it is her duty and that duty is a holier thing than self-will, she conscientiously does what she does not like to do, and cheerfully gives up what she desires without being driven or exhorted. She has generally before her mind some favourite heroine in a girl's novel, who goes through much painful discipline and comes out all the brighter for it in the end; and she makes noble resolves of living as worthily as her model. She comforts her soul too, with passages from Longfellow and Tennyson and the 'Christian Year,' and learns long extracts from 'Evangeline' and the 'Idyls;' poetry having an almost magical influence over her, nearly as powerful as the Sunday sermons to which she listens so devoutly and tries so patiently to understand. For the first time she wakes to a dim sense of her own individuality, and confesses to herself that she has a life of her own, apart from and extraneous to her mere family membership. She is not only the sister or the daughter living with and for her parents or her brothers and sisters, but she is also herself, with a future of her own not to be shared with them, not to be touched by them. And she begins to have vague dreams of this future and its hero--dreams that are as much of fairyland as if they were of the young prince coming over the sea in a golden boat to find the princess in a tower of brass waiting for him.

Married men are all sacred to Sweet Seventeen when she is a good girl; so are engaged men. For the matter of that, she believes that nothing could induce her to marry either a widower or one who had been already engaged, as nothing could induce her to marry any man under five foot eleven, or with a snub nose or sandy whiskers. Sweet Seventeen has in general the most profound aversion for boys. To be sure she may have her favourites--very few and very seldom; but she mostly thinks them stupid or conceited, and impartially resents either their awkward attentions to herself or their assumptions of superiority. An abnormally clever boy--the Poet-Laureate or George Stephenson of his generation--is her detestation, because he is odd and unlike every one else; while the one that she dislikes least among them is the school hero, who is first in the sports and takes all the prizes, and who goes through life loved by every one and never famous.

For her several brothers she has a range of entirely different feelings. Her younger schoolboy brothers she regards as the torments of her existence, whose unkempt hair, dirty boots and rude manners are her special crosses, to be borne with patience, tempered by an active endeavour after reform. But the more advanced, and those who are older than herself, are her loves for whom she has an enthusiastic admiration, and whose future she believes in as something specially brilliant and successful. If only slightly older or younger than herself, she impresses them powerfully with the sentiment of her superiority, and patronizes them--kindly enough; but she makes them feel the ineffable supremacy of her sex, and how that she by virtue of her womanhood is a glorified creature beside them--an Ariel to their Caliban.

Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on more equal terms; to criticize her dress, and to make her understand that she considers her old-fashioned and inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings for her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and compels her to buy a new one; and, while considering her immeasurably ancient, likes her to look nice, and thinks her in her own way beautiful. Sometimes she opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural state; for one of the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen is her love for her mother and her need of better counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into opposition with her it is only through extreme pain, and the bitter teaching of tyranny and injustice. This is just the age indeed, when the mother's influence is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of her life. But with a low or evil-natured mother we seldom see a Sweet Seventeen worth the trouble of writing about: which shows at least one thing--the importance of the womanly influence at such a time, and how so much that we blame in our modern girls lies to the account of their mothers.

Girls of this age are often wonderfully sad, and full of a kind of wondering despair at the sin and misery they are beginning to learn. They take up extreme views in religion and talk largely on the nothingness of pleasure and the emptiness of the world; and many fair young creatures whom their elders, laden with sorrowful experience, think full of hope and joy, are ready to give up all the pleasure of life, and to lay down life itself, for very disgust of that of which they know nothing. They delight in sorrowful lamentations and sentimental regrets put into rhyme; and one of the funniest things in the world is to see a girl dancing with the merriest in the evening, and to hear her talking broken-hearted pessimism in the morning. It is merely an example of the old proverb about the meeting of extremes; vacuity leading to the same results as experience.

But however she takes this unknown life, it is always in an unreal and romantic aspect. Some of more robust mind delight in the bolder stories of Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part in the sensational heroism of those grand old times; while others go to Venice, and make pictures for themselves out of the gliding gondolas and the mysterious Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim old fathers and high-handed brothers acting as gaolers, and the handsome cavaliers serenading them in the moonlight. That is their idea of love. They have no perception of anything warmer. It is all romance and poetry, and tender glances from afar, and long and patient wooing under difficulties and a little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and nothing more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a fleeting pressure of the finger tips. They know nothing else and expect nothing else. Their cherry is without stone, their bird without bone, their orange without rind, as in the old song; and they imagine a love as unreal as all the rest.

When thrown into actualities, though--say when left motherless, and the eldest girl of perhaps a large family with a father to comfort and a young brood to see after--Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes the burden of her responsibilities is too much for her tender shoulders, and she is overweighted, and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and selfish in such a position, and uses her power ill; and sometimes she is careless and good-humoured, when they all scramble up together, through confusion, dirt and disorder, till the close time is over, and they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she is a martyr, and makes herself and every one else uncomfortable by the perpetual demonstration of her martyrdom, and how she considers herself sacrificed and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a martyr from other causes than heavy duties, being fond of adopting unworkable views which cannot run in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon this rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously proud of voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself especially ill-used because it must be made conformable and is prevented from making itself ridiculous.

But Sweet Seventeen is intolerant of all moral differences. What she holds to be right is the absolute, the one sole and only just law; and she thinks it tampering with sin to allow that any one else has an equal right with herself to a contrary opinion. But on the whole she is a pleasant, loveable interesting creature; and one's greatest regret about her is that she is so often in the hands of unsuitable guides, and that her powers and noble impulses get so stunted and shadowed by the commonplace training which is her general lot, and the low aims of life which are the only ones held out to her.

The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits which in time become automatic and involuntary--habits of association, tricks of repetition, of which the excess is monomania, but which, without attaining to quite that extreme, become more or less masters of the brain and directors of the thoughts. And, of all these tricks of the mind, the habit of fear is the most insidious and persistent. It is seldom that any one who has once given in to it is able to clear himself of it again. However unreasonable it may be, the trick clings, and it would take an exceptionally strong intellect to be convinced of its folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But this is just the intellect which does not allow itself to contract the habit in the beginning; a coward being for the most part a washy, weak kind of being, with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean by this fear that which is physical and personal only, though this is generally the sole idea which people have of the word; but moral and mental cowardice as well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and as pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to say that it is not confined to women, though naturally it is more predominant with them than with men.

As for women, the tyranny of fear lies very heavy on them, taking the flavour out of many a life which else would be perfectly happy; being often the only bitter drop in a cup full of sweetness. But how bitter that drop is!--bitter enough to destroy all the sweetness of the rest. Some women live in the perpetual presence of dread, both mental and personal. It surrounds them like an atmosphere; it clothes them like a garment; day by day, and from night to morning, it dogs their steps and sits like a nightmare on their hearts; it is their very root work of sensation, and they could as soon live without food as live without fear.

Ludicrous as many of their terrors are, we still cannot help pitying these poor self-made martyrs of imaginary danger. Take that most familiar of all forms of fear among women, the fear of burglars, and let us imagine for a moment the horror of the life which is haunted by a nightly dread--by a terror that comes with as unfailing regularity as the darkness--and measure, if we can, the amount of anguish that must be endured before death comes to take off the torture. There are many women to whom night is simply this time of torture, never varying, never relieved. They dare not lock their doors, because then they would be at the mercy of the man who sooner or later is to come in at the window; and if they hear the boards creak or the furniture crack they are in agonies because of the man who they are sure is in the house, and who will come in at the door. They cannot sleep if they have not looked all about the room--under the bed, behind the curtains, into the closet, where perhaps a dress hanging a little fantastically gives them a nervous start that lasts for the night.

But though they search so diligently they would probably faint on the spot if they so much as saw the heels of the housebreaker they are looking for. Yet you cannot reason with these poor creatures. You cannot deny the fact that burglars have been found before now secreted in bedrooms; and you cannot pooh-pooh the murders and housebreakings which are reported in the newspapers; so you have nothing to say to their argument that things which have happened once may happen again, and that there is no reason why they specially should be exempt from a misfortune to which others have been subjected. But you feel that their terrors are just so much pith and substance taken out of their strength; and that if they could banish the fear of burglars from their minds they would be so much the more valuable members of society, while the exorcism of their dismal demon would be so much the better for themselves.

Their fear extends to all who belong to them, for whom they conjure up scenes of deadly disaster so soon as they are out of sight. Their fancy is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry themselves and every one else by exaggerating every chance of danger into a certainty of destruction. When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure all the children will take it; and if they have taken it, they are sure they will never get over it. In illness indeed, those people who have allowed themselves to fall into the habit of fear are especially full of foreboding; not because they are more loving, more sympathetic than others, but because they are more timid and less hopeful. If you believe them, no one will recover who is in any way seriously attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or their friends is the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness. They make no allowance for the elastic power of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion to your cheerfulness.

Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates, because it weakens and narrows, the whole nature. So far from following Luther's famous advice--Sin boldly and leave the rest to God--their sin is their very fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the people who regard our affections as snares and all forms of pleasure as so many waymarks on the road to perdition--who would narrow the circle of human life to the smallest point both of feeling and action, because of the sin in which, according to them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds are set to the trick of terror; and fear of the power of the devil and the anger of God weighs on them like an iron chain from which there is no release. This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as from simple moral cowardice; for you seldom find these very timid people lofty-minded or capable of any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration being the tap-root of their fears, though the cause is assigned to all sorts of pretty things, such as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad health, tender conscience, delicate nerves--to anything in fact but the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced by continual moral selfishness, by incessant thought of and regard for themselves.

Nothing is so depressing as the society of a timid person, and nothing is so infectious as fear. Live with any one given up to an eternal dread of possible dangers and disasters, and you can scarcely escape the contagion, nor, however brave you may be, maintain your cheerfulness and faculty of faith. Indeed, as timid folks crave for sympathy in their terrors--that very craving being part of their malady of fear--you cannot show them a cheerful countenance under pain of offence, and seeming to be brutal in your disregard of what so tortures them. Their fears may be simply absurd and irrational, yet you must sympathize with them if you wish even to soothe; argument or common-sense demonstration of their futility being so much mental ingenuity thrown away.

Fear breeds suspicion too, and timid people are always suspecting ill of some one. The deepest old diplomatist who has probed the folly and evil of the world from end to end, and who has sharpened his wits at the expense of his trust, is not more full of suspicion of his kind than a timid, superstitious, world-withdrawn man or woman given up to the tyranny of fear. Every one is suspected more or less, but chiefly lawyers, servants and all strangers. Any demonstration of kindness or interest at all different from the ordinary jogtrot of society fills them with undefined suspicion and dread; and, fear being in some degree the product of a diseased imagination, the 'probable' causes for anything they do not quite understand would make the fortune of a novel-writer if given him for plots. If any one wants to hear thrilling romances in course of actual enactment, let him go down among remote and quiet-living country people, and listen to what they have to say of the chance strangers who may have established themselves in the neighbourhood, and who, having brought no letters of introduction, are not known by the aborigines. The Newgate Calendar or Dumas' novels would scarcely match the stories which fear and ignorance have set afoot.

Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin. They cannot wait to see how things will turn before they despair; and they cannot hope for the best in a bad pass. They are engulfed in abysses which never open, and they die a thousand deaths before the supreme moment actually arrives. The smallest difficulties are to them like the straws placed crosswise over which no witch could pass; the beneficent action of time, either as a healer of sorrow or a revealer of hidden mercies, is a word of comfort they cannot accept for themselves, how true soever it may be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal for good as well as for bad is what they will not understand; and they know of no power that can avert the disaster, which perhaps is simply a possibility not even probable, and which their own fears only have arranged. If they are professional men, having to make their way, they are for ever anticipating failure for to-day and absolute destruction for to-morrow; and they bemoan the fate of the wife and children sure to be left to poverty by their untimely decease, when the chances are ten to one in favour of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life is a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter; yet they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's decision by thinking the mystery of unknown ills preferable to the reality of those they have on hand.

Over such minds as these the vaticinations of such a prophet as Dr. Cumming have peculiar power; and they accept his gloomy interpretations of the Apocalypse with a faith as unquestioning as that with which they accept the Gospels. They have a predilection indeed for all terrifying prophecies, and cast the horoscope of the earth and foretell the destruction of the universe with marvellous exactitude. Their minds are set to the trick of foreboding, and they live in the habit of fear, as others live in the habit of hope, of resignation, or of careless good-humour and indifference. There is nothing to be done with them. Like drinking, or palsy, or a nervous headache, or a congenital deformity, the habit is hopeless when once established; and those who have begun by fear and suspicion and foreboding will live to the end in the atmosphere they have created for themselves. The man or woman whose mind is once haunted by the nightly fear of a secreted burglar will go on looking for his heels so long as eyesight and the power of locomotion continue; and no failure in past Apocalyptic interpretations will shake the believer's faith in those of which the time for fulfilment has not yet arrived. It is a trick which has rooted, a habit that has crystallized by use into a formation; and there it must be left, as something beyond the power of reason to remedy or of experience to destroy.

The world is notoriously unjust to its veterans, and above all it is unjust to its ancient females. Everywhere, and from all time, an old woman has been taken to express the last stage of uselessness and exhaustion; and while a meeting of bearded dotards goes by the name of a council of sages, and its deliberations are respected accordingly, a congregation of grey-haired matrons is nothing but a congregation of old women, whose thoughts and opinions on any subject whatsoever have no more value than the chattering of so many magpies. In fact the poor old ladies have a hard time of it; and if we look at it in its right light, perhaps nothing proves more thoroughly the coarse flavour of the world's esteem respecting women than this disdain which they excite when they are old. And yet what charming old ladies one has known at times!--women quite as charming in their own way at seventy as their grand-daughters are at seventeen, and all the more so because they have no design now to be charming, because they have given up the attempt to please for the reaction of praise, and long since have consented to become old though they have never drifted into unpersonableness nor neglect. While retaining the intellectual vivacity and active sympathies of maturity, they have added the softness, the mellowness, the tempering got only from experience and advancing age. They are women who have seen and known and read a great deal; and who have suffered much; but whose sorrows have neither hardened nor soured them--but rather have made them even more sympathetic with the sorrows of others, and pitiful for all the young. They have lived through and lived down all their own trials, and have come out into peace on the other side; but they remember the trials of the fiery passage, and they feel for those who have still to bear the pressure of the pain they have overcome. These are not women much met with in society; they are of the kind which mostly stays at home and lets the world come to them. They have done with the hurry and glitter of life, and they no longer care to carry their grey hairs abroad. They retain their hold on the affections of their kind; they take an interest in the history, the science, the progress of the day; but they rest tranquil and content by their own fireside, and they sit to receive, and do not go out to gather.

The fashionable old lady who haunts the theatres and drawing-rooms, bewigged, befrizzled, painted, ghastly in her vain attempts to appear young, hideous in her frenzied clutch at the pleasures melting from her grasp, desperate in her wild hold on a life that is passing away from her so rapidly, knows nothing of the quiet dignity and happiness of her ancient sister who has been wise enough to renounce before she lost. In her own house, where gather a small knot of men of mind and women of character, where the young bring their perplexities and the mature their deeper thoughts, the dear old lady of ripe experience, loving sympathies and cultivated intellect holds a better court than is known to any of those miserable old creatures who prowl about the gay places of the world, and wrestle with the young for their crowns and garlands--those wretched simulacra of womanhood who will not grow old and who cannot become wise. She is the best kind of old lady extant, answering to the matron of classic times--to the Mother in Israel before whom the tribes made obeisance in token of respect; the woman whose book of life has been well studied and closely read, and kept clean in all its pages. She has been no prude however, and no mere idealist. She must have been wife, mother and widow; that is, she must have known many things of joy and grief and have had the fountains of life unsealed. However wise and good she may be, as a spinster she has had only half a life; and it is the best half which has been denied her. How can she tell others, when they come to her in their troubles, how time and a healthy will have wrought with her, if she has never passed through the same circumstances? Theoretic comfort is all very well, but one word of experience goes beyond volumes of counsel based on general principles and a lively imagination.

The old lady who remains a mere child to the end; who looks very much like a faded old wax doll with her scanty hair blown out into transparent ringlets, and her jaunty cap bedecked with flowers and gay-coloured bows; who cannot rise into the dignity of true womanliness; who knows nothing useful; can give no wise advice: has no sentiment of protection, but on the contrary demands all sorts of care and protection for herself--she, simpering and giggling as if she were fifteen, is by no means an old lady of the finest type. But she is better than the leering old lady who says coarse things, and who, like B?ranger's immortal creation, passes her time in regretting her plump arms and her well-turned ankle and the lost time that can never be recalled, and who is altogether a most unedifying old person and by no means nice company for the young.

Twin sister to this kind is the grim female become ancient; the gaunt old lady with a stiff backbone, who sits upright and walks with a firm tread like a man; a leathery old lady, who despises all your weak slips of girls that have nerves and headaches and cannot walk their paltry mile without fatigue; a desiccated old lady, large-boned and lean, without an ounce of superfluous fat about her, with keen eyes yet, with which she boasts that she can thread a needle and read small print by candlelight; an indestructible old lady, who looks as if nothing short of an earthquake would put an end to her. The friend of her youth is now a stout, soft, helpless old lady, much bedraped in woollen shawls, given to frequent sippings of brandy and water, and ensconced in the chimney corner like a huge clay figure set to dry. For her the indestructible old lady has the supremest contempt, heightened in intensity by a vivid remembrance of the time when they were friends and rivals. Ah, poor Laura, she says, straightening herself; she was always a poor creature, and see what she is now! To those who wait long enough the wheel always comes round, she thinks; and the days when Laura bore away the bell from her for grace and sweetness and loveableness generally are avenged now, when the one is a mere mollusc and the other has a serviceable backbone that will last for many a year yet.

Far before the eyes or the mouth or the habitual gesture, as a revelation of character, is the quality of the voice and the manner of using it. It is the first thing that strikes us in a new acquaintance, and it is one of the most unerring tests of breeding and education. There are voices which have a certain truthful ring about them--a certain something, unforced and spontaneous, that no training can give. Training can do much in the way of making a voice, but it can never compass more than a bad imitation of this quality; for the very fact of its being an imitation, however accurate, betrays itself like rouge on a woman's cheeks, or a wig, or dyed hair. On the other hand, there are voices which have the jar of falsehood in every tone, and which are as full of warning as the croak of the raven or the hiss of the serpent. These are in general the naturally hard voices which make themselves caressing, thinking by that to appear sympathetic; but the fundamental quality strikes up through the overlay, and a person must be very dull indeed who cannot detect the pretence in that slow, drawling, would-be affectionate voice, with its harsh undertone and sharp accent whenever it forgets itself.

But without being false or hypocritical, there are voices which puzzle as well as disappoint us, because so entirely inharmonious with the appearance of the speaker. For instance, there is that thin treble squeak which we sometimes hear from the mouth of a well-grown portly man, when we expected the fine rolling utterance which would have been in unison with his outward seeming. And, on the other side of the scale, where we looked for a shrill head-voice or a tender musical cadence, we get that hoarse chest-voice with which young and pretty girls sometimes startle us. This voice is in fact one of the characteristics of the modern girl of a certain type; just as the habitual use of slang is characteristic of her, or that peculiar rounding of the elbows and turning out of the wrists--which gestures, like the chest-voice, instinctively belong to men only and have to be learned before they can be practised by women.

Nothing betrays feeling so much as the voice, save perhaps the eyes; and these can be lowered, and so far their expression hidden. In moments of emotion no skill can hide the fact of disturbed feeling by the voice; though a strong will and the habit of self-control can steady it when else it would be failing and tremulous. But not the strongest will, nor the largest amount of self-control, can keep it natural as well as steady. It is deadened, veiled, compressed, like a wild creature tightly bound and unnaturally still. One feels that it is done by an effort, and that if the strain were relaxed for a moment the wild creature would burst loose in rage or despair--and that the voice would break into the scream of passion or quiver down into the falter of pathos. And this very effort is as eloquent as if there had been no holding down at all, and the voice had been left to its own impulse unchecked.

Again, in fun and humour, is it not the voice even more than the face that is expressive? The twinkle of the eye, the hollow in the under lip, the dimples about the mouth, the play of the eyebrow, are all aids certainly; but the voice! The mellow tone that comes into the utterance of one man; the surprised accents of another; the fatuous simplicity of a third; the philosophical acquiescence of a fourth when relating the most outrageous impossibilities--a voice and manner peculiarly Transatlantic, and indeed one of the American forms of fun--do we not know all these varieties by heart? have we not veteran actors whose main point lies in one or other of these varieties? and what would be the drollest anecdote if told in a voice which had neither play nor significance? Pathos too--who feels it, however beautifully expressed so far as words may go, if uttered in a dead and wooden voice without sympathy? But the poorest attempts at pathos will strike home to the heart if given tenderly and harmoniously. And just as certain popular airs of mean association can be made into church music by slow time and stately modulation, so can dead-level literature be lifted into passion or softened into sentiment by the voice alone.

We all know the effect, irritating or soothing, which certain voices have over us; and we have all experienced that strange impulse of attraction or repulsion which comes from the sound of the voice alone. And generally, if not absolutely always, the impulse is a true one, and any modification which increased knowledge may produce is never quite satisfactory. Certain voices grate on our nerves and set our teeth on edge; and others are just as calming as these are irritating, quieting us like a composing draught, and setting vague images of beauty and pleasantness afloat in our brains.

A good voice, calm in tone and musical in quality, is one of the essentials for a physician--the 'bedside voice' which is nothing if not sympathetic by constitution. Not false, not made up, not sickly, but tender in itself, of a rather low pitch, well modulated and distinctly harmonious in its notes, it is the very opposite of the orator's voice, which is artificial in its management and a made voice. Whatever its original quality may be, the orator's voice bears the unmistakeable stamp of art and is artificial. It may be admirable; telling in a crowd; impressive in an address; but it is overwhelming and chilling at home, partly because it is always conscious and never self-forgetting.

An orator's voice, with its careful intonation and accurate accent, would be as much out of place by a sick-bed as Court trains and brocaded silk for the nurse. There are certain men who do a good deal by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice--a voice a little thrown up for all that it is a chest-voice--a voice with a certain undefined rollick and devil-may-care sound in it, and eloquent of a large volume of vitality and physical health. That, too, is a good property for a medical man. It gives the sick a certain fillip, and reminds them pleasantly of health and vigour. It may have a mesmeric kind of effect upon them--who knows?--so that it induces in them something of its own state, provided it be not overpowering. But a voice of this kind has a tendency to become insolent in its assertion of vigour, swaggering and boisterous; and then it is too much for invalided nerves, just as mountain-winds or sea-breezes would be too much, and the scent of flowers or of a hayfield oppressive.

The clerical voice again, is a class-voice--that neat, careful, precise voice, neither wholly made nor yet natural--that voice which never strikes one as hearty nor as having a really genuine utterance, but which is not entirely unpleasant if one does not require too much spontaneity. The clerical voice, with its mixture of familiarity and oratory as that of one used to talk to old women in private and to hold forth to a congregation in public, is as distinct in its own way as the mathematician's handwriting; and any one can pick out blindfold his man from a knot of talkers, without waiting to see the square-cut collar and close white tie. The legal voice is different again; but this is rather a variety of the orator's than a distinct species--a variety standing midway between that and the clerical, and affording more scope than either.

The voice is much more indicative of the state of the mind than many people know of or allow. One of the first symptoms of failing brain power is in the indistinct or confused utterance; no idiot has a clear nor melodious voice; the harsh scream of mania is proverbial; and no person of prompt and decisive thought was ever known to hesitate nor to stutter. A thick, loose, fluffy voice too, does not belong to the crisp character of mind which does the best active work; and when we meet with a keen-witted man who drawls, and lets his words drip instead of bringing them out in the sharp incisive way that should be natural to him, we may be sure there is a flaw somewhere, and that he is not 'clear grit' all through.

Of all the differences lying between Calais and Dover, perhaps nothing strikes the traveller more than the difference in the national voice and manner of speech. The sharp, high-pitched, stridulous voice of the French, with its clear accent and neat intonation, is exchanged for the loose, fluffy utterance of England, where clear enunciation is considered pedantic; where brave men cultivate a drawl and pretty women a deep chest-voice; where well-educated people think it no shame to run all their words into each other, and to let consonants and vowels drip out like so many drops of water, with not much more distinction between them; and where no one knows how to educate his organ artistically, without going into artificiality and affectation. And yet the cultivation of the voice is an art, and ought to be made as much a matter of education as a good carriage or a legible handwriting. We teach our children to sing, but we never teach them to speak, beyond correcting a glaring piece of mispronunciation or so. In consequence of which we have all sorts of odd voices among us--short yelping voices like dogs; purring voices like cats; croakings and lispings and quackings and chatterings; a very menagerie in fact, to be heard in a room ten feet square, where a little rational cultivation would have reduced the whole of that vocal chaos to order and harmony, and would have made what is now painful and distasteful beautiful and seductive.

An old proverb says that a burnt child dreads the fire. If so, the child must be uncommonly astute, and with a power of reasoning by analogy in excess of impulsive desire rarely found either in children or adults. As a matter of fact, experience goes a very little way towards directing folks wisely. People often say how much they would like to live their lives over again with their present experience. That means, they would avoid certain specific mistakes of the past, of which they have seen and suffered from the issue. But if they retained the same nature as now, though they might avoid a few special blunders, they would fall into the same class of errors quite as readily as before, the gravitation of character towards circumstance being always absolute in its direction.

Our blunders in life are not due to ignorance so much as to temperament; and only the exceptionally wise among us learn to correct the excesses of temperament by the lessons of experience. To the mass of mankind these lessons are for the time only, and prophesy nothing of the future. They hold them to have been mistakes of method, not of principle, and they think that the same lines more carefully laid would lead to a better superstructure in the future, not seeing that the fault was organic and in those very initial lines themselves. No impulsive nor wildly hopeful person, for instance, ever learns by experience, so long as his physical condition remains the same. No one with a large faculty of faith--that is, credulous and easily imposed on--becomes suspicious or critical by mere experience. How much soever people of this kind have been taken in, in times past, they are just as ready to become the prey of the spoiler in times to come; and it would be sad, if it were not so silly, to watch how inevitably one half of the world gives itself up as food whereon the roguery of the other half may wax fat.

In great matters this persistency of endeavour is sublime, and gets a wealth of laurel crowns and blue ribands; but in little things it is obstinacy, want of ability to profit by experience, denseness of perception as to what can and what cannot be done; and the apologue of Bruce's spider gets tiresome if too often repeated. The most hopelessly inapt people at learning why they burnt their fingers last time, and how they will burn them again, are those who, whatever their profession, are blessed or cursed with what is called the artistic temperament. A man will ruin himself for love of a particular place; for dislike of a certain kind of necessary work; for the prosecution of a certain hobby. Is he not artistic? and must he not have all the conditions of his life exactly square with his desires? else how can he do good work? So he goes on burning his fingers through self-indulgence, and persists in his unwisdom to the end of his life. He will paint his unsaleable pictures or write his unreadable books; his path is one in which the money-paying public will not follow; but though his very existence depends on the following of that paying public, he will not stir an inch to meet it, but keeps where he is because he likes the particular run of his hedgerows; and spends his days in thrusting his hand into the fire of what he chooses to call the ideal, and his nights in abusing the Philistinism of the world which lets him be burnt.

And what does any amount of experience do for us in the matter of friendship or love? As the world goes round, and our credulous morning darkens into a more sceptical twilight, we believe as a general principle--a mere abstraction--that all new friends are just so much gilt gingerbread; and that a very little close holding and hard rubbing brings off the gilt, and leaves nothing but a slimy, sticky mess of little worth as food and of none as ornament. And yet, if of the kind to whom friendship is necessary for happiness, we rush as eagerly into the new affection as if we had never philosophized on the emptiness of the old, and believe as firmly in the solid gold of our latest cake as if we had never smeared our hands with one of the same pattern before. So with love. A man sees his comrades fluttering like enchanted moths about some stately man-slayer, some fair and shining light set like a false beacon on a dangerous cliff to lure men to their destruction. He sees how they singe and burn in the flame of her beauty, but he is not warned. If one's own experience teaches one little or nothing, the experience of others goes for even less, and no man yet was ever warned off the destructive fire of love because

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