est-tree rain upon it the blows of your axe, as long as you can stand; watch the fragments as they fly; and jump briskly out of the way as the reeling giant falls :for all this brisk exertion will stand between you and remembrances that would unman you. There is nothing very philosophical in the plan, to dance sad thoughts away,' which I remember as the chorus of some Canadian song. I doubt whether that peculiar specific will do much good. But you may work sad thoughts away; you may crowd morbid feelings out of your mind by stout daylight toils; and remember that sad remembrances, too long indulged, tend strongly to the maudlin. Even Werter was little better than a fool; and a contemptible fool was Mr. Augustus Moddle.

How many of man's best works take for granted that the majority of cultivated persons, capable of enjoying them, shall have leisure in which to do so. The architect, the artist, the landscape-gardener, the poet, spend their pains in producing that which can never touch the hurried man. I really feel that I act unkindly by the man who did that elaborate picking-out in the painting of a railway carriage, if I rush upon the platform at the last moment, pitch in my luggage, sit down and take to the Times, without ever having noticed whether the colour of the carriage is brown or blue. There seems a dumb pleading eloquence about even the accurate diagonal arrangement of the little woollen tufts in the morocco cushions, and the interlaced network above one's head, where umbrellas go, as though they said, 'We are made thus neatly to be looked at, but we cannot make you look at us unless you choose; and half the people who come into the carriage are so hurried that they

never notice us.' And when I have seen a fine churchspire, rich in graceful ornament, rising up by the side of a city street, where hurried crowds are always passing by, not one in a thousand ever casting a glance at the beautiful object, I have thought, Now surely you are not doing what your designer intended! When he spent so much of time, and thought, and pains in planning and executing all those beauties of detail, surely he intended them to be looked at; and not merely looked at in their general effect, but followed and traced into their lesser graces. But he wrongly fancied that men would have time for that; he forgot that, except on the solitary artistic visitor, all he has done would be lost, through the nineteenth century's want of leisure. And you, architect of Melrose, when you designed that exquisite tracery, and decorated so perfectly that flying buttress, were you content to do so for the pleasure of knowing you did your work thoroughly and well; or did you count on its producing on the minds of men in after-ages an impression which a prevailing hurry has prevented from being produced, save perhaps in one case in a thousand? And you, old monk, who spent half your life in writing and illuminating that magnificent Missal; was your work its own reward in the pleasure its execution gave you; or did you actually fancy that mortal man would have time or patience leisure, in short to examine in detail all that you have done, and that interested you so much, and kept you eagerly engaged for so many hours together, on days the world has left four hundred years behind? I declare it touches me to look at that laborious appeal to men with countless hours to spare: men, in short, hardly now to be found in Britain. No doubt, all this is the old story: for how great a part of the higher and finer

human work is done in the hope that it will produce an effect which it never will produce, and attract the interest of those who will never notice it! Still, the ancient missal-writer pleased himself with the thought of the admiration of skilled observers in days to come; and so the fancy served its purpose.

Thus, at intervals through that bright summer day, did the writer muse at leisure in the shade; and note down the thoughts (such as they are) which you have here at length in this essay. The sun was still warm and cheerful when he quitted the lawn; but somehow, looking back upon that day, the colours of the scene are paler than the fact, and the sunbeams feel comparatively chill. For memory cannot bring back things freshly as they lived, but only their faded images. Faces in the distant past look wan; voices sound thin and distant; the landscape round is uncertain and shadowy. Do you not feel somehow, when you look back on ages forty centu ries ago, as if people then spoke in whispers and lived in twilight?

CHAPTER X.

CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, AND HOW TO MEET THEM.

UT now to my proper task. I have certain suggestions to offer Concerning the Worries of Life and How to Meet them.

I am

quite aware that the reader of a metaphysical turn, after he has read my essay, may be disposed to find fault with its title. The plan which is to be advocated for the treatment of the Worries of Life, can only in a modified sense be described as Meeting them. You cannot be said to face a thing on which you turn your back. You cannot accurately be described as meeting a man whom you walk away from. You do not, in strictness, regard a thing in any mode or fashion, which you do not regard at all. But, after intense reflection, I could devise no title that set out my subject so well as the present: and so here it is. Perfection is not generally attainable in human doings. It is enough, if things are so, that they will do. No doubt this is no excuse for not making them as good as one can. But the fact is, as you get older, you seldom have time to write down any plausible excuse, before you see a crushing answer to it. The man who has thought longest, comes back to the point at which the man stands who has hardly thought at all. He feels, more deeply year by

year, the truth of the grand axiom, that Much may be said on Both Sides.

Now, my reader, you shall have, in a very brief space, the essence of my Theory as to the treatment of Human Worry.

Let us picture to ourselves a man, living in a pleasant home, in the midst of a beautiful country. Pleasing scenes are all around him, wherever he can look. There are evergreens and grass: fields and hedgerows: hills and streams; in the distance, the sea; and somewhat nearer, the smoke of a little country town. Now, what would you think of this man, if he utterly refused to look at the cheerful and beautiful prospects which everywhere invite his eye; and spent the whole day gazing intently at the dunghill, and hanging over the pigsty? And all this though his taste were not so peculiar as to lead him to take any pleasure in the contemplation of the pigsty or the dunghill; all this, though he had a more than ordinary dislike to contemplate pigsties or dunghills? No doubt, you would say the man is a monomaniac.

And yet, my reader, don't you know (possibly from your own experience) that in the moral world many men and women do a thing precisely analogous, without ever being suspected of insanity? Don't you know that multitudes of human beings turn away from the many blessings of their lot, and dwell and brood upon its worries? Don't you know that multitudes persistently look away from the numerous pleasant things they might contemplate, and look fixedly and almost constantly at painful and disagreeable things? You sit down, my friend, in your snug library, beside the evening fire. The blast without is hardly heard through the drawn curtains. Your wife is there, and your two grown-up daughters.