RICHARD ARKWRIGHT-LABOUR. 501 take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love alone do, and for the sediment and scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do. And then, to guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, nowhither, which was this poor captain's problem in this prison, with oakum for its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by "love," or by any conceivable method? That is a warp wholly false. Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or methods of "love" and suchlike, there arises for our poor captain the falsest of problems, and, for a man of his faculty, the unfairest of situations. His problem was not to command good men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial disguises) nothing. 2. RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful man; no romance-hero, with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and gesture like the herald Mercury; a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire-man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of copious free digestion; a man stationed by the community to shave certain dusty beards, in the northern parts of England, at a halfpenny each. To such end, we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrangement, had Richard Arkwright been, by the community of England and his own consent, set apart. Nevertheless, in strapping of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the contradictions and confusions attendant thereon, the man had notions in that rough head of his-spindles, shuttles, wheels, and contrivances plying ideally within the same rather hopeless-looking, which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not without difficulty. His townsfolk rose in mob around him, for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten wages, so that he had to fly, with broken washpots, scattered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay, his wife too, as I learn, rebelled; burnt his wooden model of his spinning-wheel-resolute that he should stick to his razors rather for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand, packed her out of doors. O reader, what a historical phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring, much-inventing barber! French Revolutions were a-brewing; to resist the same in any measure, imperial kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England; and it was this man that had to give England the power of cotton! 3. LABOUR. There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get work done will itself lead one more and more to truth,-to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth. The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself;" long enough has this poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe ! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan. It has been written, "An endless significance lies in work a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself,-all these, like hell-dogs, lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled; all these shrink, murmuring, far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him-is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright, blessed flame! Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a chaos, but a round, compacted world. What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, as long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the potter's wheel, -one of the venerablest objects, old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes! And fancy the most assiduous potter-but without his wheel-reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man, the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch, not a dish; no: a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,mere enamelled vessel of dishonour ! Let the idle think of this. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water, gradually, from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force; the sacred celestial Life-Essence breathed into him by Almighty God, from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge,-" Selfknowledge," and much else,—so soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly, thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools,—a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try it and fix it. Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone." 4. LIBERTY. 66 Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for: and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, "liberty," and maximum of wellbeing; if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, -you that are wise, and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is but a less palpable madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my Senior, Seigneur, my Elder, Presbyter or Priest, if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to conquer me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called, by all the newspapers a free man," will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained, not death, but life! Liberty requires new definitions. 66 XIX. SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON has been long known to the public as one of the most voluminous of our novelists. He is the youngest son of the late General Bulwer, and was educated at Cambridge. His turn for composition was manifested at a precociously early period; he is said to have written some rhyme while in his nursery. He published in 1820, "Poems written between Thirteen and Fifteen;" and in 1826 he issued a volume of miscellaneous poems, and his first novel, "Falkland," appeared the next year. This was followed in rapid succession by " Pelham," "The Disowned," "Devereux," "Paul Clifford," "Eugene Aram," and "Godolphin." In these, his earliest works, there were exhibited considerable power of observation, a lively fancy, no small share of sarcasm, and extensive information; but they were disfigured by an air of foppishness, by occasional unsteadiness of moral purpose, and frequent digressions into the unmeaning æsthetical commonplaces of the German philosophers; and the author's knowledge of life and character was evidently limited to a few phases and one or two classes. His "Last Days of Pompeii," and "Rienzi," were more vigorous, and more healthy in their tone. Time has wonderfully developed his excellences, and corrected his faults; and his last three novels, "The Caxtons," " My Novel," and "What will he do with it?" are worthy to rank with any works of fiction in the language. In them he has taken Sterne as his model: between the first mentioned, indeed, and "Tristram Shandy," the resemblance is obvious and striking, both in the structure of the work, and in the characters of the two interesting humorists, Mr Caxton and his brother, who figure so prominently in "The Caxtons." Sir Edward is also a distinguished parliamentary orator. Some of his poems possess no ordinary merit, and his "Lady of Lyons" is one of the most popular dramas which this generation has produced. 1. UNCLE JACK. ("THE CAXTONS.") You never saw a more charming man than Uncle Jack. All plump people are more popular than thin people. There is something jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy could succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow like Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspere. Uncle Jack was as plump as a partridge-not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese, not vast (which Cicero objects to in an orator), but every crevice comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, "Time wrote no wrinkles on his glassy (or brassy) brow." His natural lines were all upward curves, his smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank; even his trick of rubbing his clean, well-fed, English-looking hands, had something about it coaxing and débonnaire, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully applied the expression, "He had his soul's seat in his finger-ends." The critics observe, that few men have ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific faculties. "Happy he," exclaims Schiller, "who combines the enthusiast's warmth with the worldly man's light"-light and warmth, Uncle Jack had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching enthusiasm and convincing VANCE AND LIONEL AT THE COUNTRY FAIR. 505 calculation. Dicaopolis in his "Acharnenses," in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes:-" He is small, I confess, but there is nothing lost in him: all is knave that is not fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say, that though Uncle Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker. Uncle Jack was comely, too, clear-skinned and florid, had a little mouth, with good teeth, wore no whiskers, shaved his beard as close as if it were one of his grand national companies; his hair, once somewhat sandy, was now rather greyish, which increased the respectability of his appearance; and he wore it flat at the sides, and raised in a peak at the top; his organs of constructiveness and identity were pronounced by Mr Squills to be prodigious, and those freely-developed bumps gave great breadth to his forehead. Well-shaped, too, was Uncle Jack, about five feet eight, the proper height for an active man of business. He wore a black coat, but to make the nap look the fresher, he had given it the relief of gilt buttons, on which were wrought a small crown and anchor; at a distance this button looked like the king's button, and gave him the air of one who has a place about court. He always wore a white neckcloth without starch, a frill, and a diamond pin; which last furnished him with observations upon certain mines of Mexico, which he had a great but hitherto unsatisfied desire of seeing worked by a Grand National United Britons Company. His waistcoat of a morning was pale buff-of an evening, embroidered velvet; wherewith were connected sundry schemes of an "association for the improvement of native manufactures." His trousers, matutinally, were of the colour vulgarly called "blotting paper;" and he never wore boots, which, he said, unfitted a man for exercise, but short drab gaiters and squaretoed shoes. His watch-chain was garnished with a vast number of seals; each seal, indeed, represented the device of some defunct company, and they might be said to resemble the scalps of the slain, worn by the aboriginal Iroquois, concerning whom, indeed, he had once entertained philanthropic designs, compounded of conversion to Christianity on the principles of the English Episcopal Church, and of an advantageous exchange of beaver skins for Bibles, brandy, and gunpowder. 2. VANCE AND LIONEL AT THE COUNTRY FAIR." WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?") It was a summer fair in one of the prettiest villages in Surrey. The main street was lined with booths, abounding in toys, gleaming crockery, gay ribbons, and gilded gingerbread. Farther on, where the street widened into the ample village-green, rose the more pretending fabrics which lodged the attractive forms of the Mermaid, the Norfolk Giant, the Pig-faced Lady, the Spotted |