from Mr. Percival, and smiling salutations from the ladies, the carriage drove off.

"There was a time," sighed Rose," when he would have let his wife go home alone, or only with old Mr. Montague, and would have come after me! And that Captain St. George-who nearly made a quarrel between Mr. Alfred and me- -he pretended, too, not to see me to-day; and Robert Charlton! it is not a fortnight yet since he asked father's consent to let him marry me; and now he marches off with that little ugly toad, Sally Bennet !""

Poor Rose's soul was full of bitterness; she had found out that

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

But in battalions!

"Deserted by them all!" she exclaimed. "But no-no! not by Mr. Alfred Percival-he loves me still."

She had moved on a little way, and then stopped in deep thought. Rousing herself, she looked around; there was no living creature stirring, even the worms had hidden themselves from the broad glare of day. Suddenly her eye fell on a gravestone near, on which was inscribed:

John Ashford, died 18th May, 18-.

And beneath the name two lines:

Weary pilgrim, rest in peace!

Here, life's cares and sorrows cease!

Rose stood appalled—as if a voice from the grave had spoken to her; it was the simple tombstone of her grandfather on which she was gazing; she had forgotten exactly where it stood in the churchyard.

Rose threw herself down by the quiet grave, and bursting into a passion of tears, she exclaimed:

"Oh, grandfather! I wish I had died instead of you; I wish I had gone when my mother went! For all this trouble is hard, hard to bear." Poor Rose hid her face in her hands and sobbed aloud; she did not hear the approach of any footsteps, and supposed that, every one having gone home to dinner or luncheon, according to their different ranks and habits, she was quite alone with the dead. She was startled, therefore, when a coarse voice sounded on her ear, exclaiming:

ઃઃ

What-my beauty! Sitting among the graves in a churchyard! This is no place for you, I'm sure.'

Rose looked up in the midst of her tears, and saw the broad red face and vulgar figure of Daniel O'Flynn. She made him no answer, but got up to go.

"Come now, Rose dear, I'm not going to part with you in such a hurry. A living man is better than the old bones in the coffin down yonder, and you won't make me believe that you are crying about your grandfather. I know very well what vexes you. That slippery dog, Alfred Percival, is the cause of those tears in your pretty eyes. It is only a wonder he has not thrown you overboard before; he has stuck to you wonderfully long for him. He made shorter work with a poor girl called Lizzy Lee, who used to live at Barwell Lodge. I never saw her, and did not know him then, but he does not deny it himself."

"Lizzy Lee!" exclaimed Rose, facing round. "She went off with a showman, a sort of strolling player, or tumbler."

"Nothing of the sort, my pretty dear; she just went off with Alfred Percival, and nobody else.""

"It is a lie !" cried Rose, who was roused to indignation by O'Flynn's attack on her dear Mr. Percival.

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Now, my beauty, keep a civil tongue in your head. I make allowance for you, but everybody would not. Lizzy Lee went to live in London with Percival; there's no doubt about that; and the Barwells have found this out, or suspect it, for they are always very distant to him."

"I don't believe it-I won't believe it," said Rose, impetuously.

Well, I can only say, my dear, that when Alfred Percival gives you up, I'm ready to step into his shoes." And Mr. O'Flynn attempted to put his arm round Rose's waist.

Casting on him a look of loathing and disgust, Rose flung off his arm as if it had been a noxious reptile twining round her, and with the swiftness of a fawn she fled from the churchyard, and hurried across the field, which was a short cut from the village to her home. On reaching the other extremity of the field, she crouched down for a few moments behind the hedges so as to recover her breath and some degree of composure before entering the house at the toll-bar. But even when she sat down to dinner with her father she looked agitated, and he observed that her eyes were red from weeping.

"Rose, my darling, what is the matter?" asked the good man, much alarmed.

"Nothing, father; nothing of any consequence, at least. I was only vexed at these rude Charltons to-day; on coming out of church, that odious Mary and her sister almost knocked me down, they pushed as roughly past me as if I had been no better than a dog, and Robert himself did not so much as nod his head to me, but walked off full of smiles with that frightful creature Sally Bennet. That vexed me, father, but it does not signify, he may marry her, and welcome."

And Rose tossed her head and tried to laugh, but it was rather a hysterical laugh.

"Ah, darling! I wish you had not refused poor Robert in such haste -indeed, I wish you could have brought yourself to have taken up with him, although I know that you thought more of your poor grandmother and me than of yourself. You see, Robert is vexed. I shall be sorry for him if he goes and marries that Sally in a pet. He can't care for her when he loves you."

"I'll go

"If he chooses to act like a fool I can't help it," said Rose. and sit awhile with grandmother, and then I'll take a walk, father, for Mr. Percy roared so in church this morning that he has quite given me a headache; I can't imagine what got into him; I almost think he must have been drunk."

Rose sat for some time with her old grandmother, and read the Bible to her; she then set off on her afternoon walk, and took her way to "the trysting-place" in the lonely wood, but Alfred Percival was not there; she waited, and waited in vain; he never came, and when the last rays of the sun were gilding the landscape around she retraced her steps homeward, even more dispirited than she had been when she had left the church which had been such a scene of mortification to her.

THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN.

A CUE FROM WORDSWORTH.

BY FRANCIS JACOX.

MIDWAY between his thirtieth and fortieth

year was Wordsworthand he lived to see his tale of forty years twice told-when he bore record in verse how to that very day his heart leaped up at beholding a rainbow in the sky. So had it leaped when he was a boy. So would he have it leap when he should grow old. Rather would he die first than have it otherwise; rather leave the world, than live on with a heart dead or dull to that ecstasy of simple, natural emotion. Fain would he be at fourscore, if he should live so long, what he had been at fourteen, as regards freshness of feeling and vivid sympathy with Nature. The Child is father of the Man; and he could wish his days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wordsworth was metaphysician as well as poet; and a metaphysical vein of thought permeates the little poem in question. Although accepted so largely as practically a truism, the line which derives the genesis of the full-grown man from his immature, little-boy self, is a puzzle to very literal folks. Matter-of-fact objectors will never be wanting of the Nicodemus sort, to urge his style of cavil, How can this thing be? But in spite of the captious and stolid, the paradox of the poet has long since passed into a proverb.

Milton had long ago said that

The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.*

And long before him had a heathen philosopher tersely said that the first day gives the last, primusque dies dedit extremum.†

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Wordsworth's pregnant line is expounded by Mr. de Quincey as calling into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing fruit, must have pre-existed by way of germ in the infant. Yes; all that is now broadly emblazoned in the man, once was latent-seen or not seen -as a vernal bud in the child." But not, therefore, contends this masterly expositor, is it true inversely-that all which pre-exists in the child, finds its development in the man. Rudiments and tendencies, he argues, which might have found, sometimes by accident, do not find, sometimes under the killing frost of counter forces, cannot find, their natural evolution. "Infancy, therefore, is to be viewed, not only as part of a larger world that waits for its final complement in old age, but also as a separate world itself; part of a continent, but also a distinct peninsula. Most of what he has, the grown-up man inherits from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance."

Sturdy impugners of the doctrine of Wordsworth's line are of course not lacking, who deny, with Mr. Sala, for instance, that yonder fair

haired innocent, with eyes beaming confidence, joy, pity, tenderness, is or can be father to "yon hulking, sodden, sallow-faced, blue-gilled, crop-haired, leaden-eyed, livid-lipped, bow-shouldered, shrunken-legged, swollen-handed convict in a hideous grey uniform branded with the broad arrow," &c. &c. "Is this the father to-can this ever become that ?" Can it ever? why, do we not see it daily with our eyes-an ugly fact in esse, and not merely a cynical bravura ? Mr. Sala asks who ever knew a child to discount bills at forty per cent., or pawn his sister's playthings, or hoard halfpence in a rag or a teapot, or lie for gain, or libel their nurse, and vilify the doctor?* Something uncommonly near to all these mal-practices are only too observable in the tender years of very many who indulge in them when grown. The man is then but a magnified image, the very image, of his father—the child.

Goethe's English biographer remarks, in a chapter which has for its heading Wordsworth's suggestive line, that as in the soft round lineaments of childhood we trace the features which after-years will develop into decisive forms, so in the moral lineaments of the Child may be traced the characteristics of the Man. But Mr. Lewes is of opinion that an apparent "solution of continuity" often takes place in the transition period, so that the youth is in many respects unlike what he has been in childhood, and what he will be in maturity. In youth, he says, when the passions begin to stir, the character is made to swerve from the orbit previously traced. "Passion, more than Character, rules the hour. Thus we often see the prudent child turn out an extravagant youth; but he crystallises once more into prudence, as he hardens into age.

"This was certainly the case with Goethe, who, if he had died-young, like Shelley or Keats, would have left a name among the most genial, not to say enthusiastic, of poets; but who, living to the age of eighty-two, had fifty years of crystallisation to form a character which perplexes critics. In his childhood, scanty as are the details which enable us to reconstruct it, we see the main features of the man."†

For instance, Goethe's manysidedness is exemplified-it being very seldom indeed that a boy has exhibited such completeness of human faculties. Mr. Lewes shows him to us as an orderly, somewhat formal, inquisitive, reasoning, deliberative child, a precocious learner, an omnivorous reader, and a vigorous logician who thinks for himself-so independent that at six years he doubts the beneficence of the Creator; at seven, doubts the competence and justice of the world's judgment. He is inventive, poetical, proud, loving, volatile, with a mind open to all influences, swayed by every gust, and yet, while thus swayed as to the direction of his activity, master over himself.‡

Goethe himself makes Werther mark in children the seeds of future character in the obstinate, all the future firmness and constancy of a noble character; in the capricious, that levity and gaiety of temper which will float them lightly over the sea of life,§-for young Werther is not

* See the essay on Little Children in "Dutch Pictures."

† Lewes, Life of Goethe, ch. v.

"The first quality which strikes us in Goethe-the Child and Man, but not the Youth-is intellect, with its clearness, calmness, and provoking immunity

from error."

And again in a subsequent paragraph, Mr. Lewes remarks that "the Child and the Man are at times scarcely traceable in the Youth."-Vol. i. pp. 46, 48, 49. § Werther, § June 29.

as yet deep enough in his Sorrows to talk of possible shipwreck and a seat of troubles.

Plutarch's Lives abound with illustrations to the general purposeexemplifying what may be expressed in a line of Alexander Pope's (written long before an individual, like a party, had become a low-bred highpolite personage), that

The Boy and Man an individual makes.*

Aristides and Themistocles, said to have been at school together, were, when boys, always at variance, and their tempers were discovered from the first by that opposition: Themistocles, insinuating, daring and artful, variable, and at the same time impetuous in his pursuits; Aristides, solid and steady, inflexibly just, and incapable of using any falsehood, flattery, or deceit, even at play.† Elsewhere Plutarch tells us of Themistocles in boyhood, that he was full of spirits and fire, quick-witted, and bidding fair to make a great statesman: "his hours of leisure he spent not, like other boys, in idleness and play; but he was always inventing and composing declamations, the subjects of which were either the impeachment or defence of some of his schoolfellows." To Coriolanus, again,-not as yet dimmed to historical vision by a mythological haze-Plutarch§ assigns a martial disposition from childhood, signalised by a passion for handling weapons of war. So Philopomen "from a child was fond of everything in the military line, and readily entered into whatever exercises tended that way." Cato the younger, we are told, from his infancy discovered, in his voice, his looks, and his very diversions, a firmness and solidity which neither passion nor anything else could move. Of Cassius, again, the story goes that he showed even when at school his innate hostility to "the whole race of tyrants." When Faustus, one of his schoolfellows, the son of Sylla, was boasting amongst the boys the unlimited power of his father, Cassius sprang up and struck him on the face.** How many of the stories in vogue, of the same sort, may be purely mythical, or misunderstood, or mistold, it boots not to guess. A deal of nonsense has been written, first and last, in designed glorification of the beginnings. of celebrated men, as though Qualis ab incepto were the indispensable rule of faith as regards genius. The American biographer of Dr. Kane, the Arctic explorer, relates, with at least the due emphasis, how his hero, when a boy, climbed on to a stack of chimneys at the gable end of his father's house. "His child-history is full of this sort of incidents," Dr. Elder remarks, and then discusses the philosophy of them. An Englishman, English reviewers objected, would probably be satisfied with the obvious solution that Dr. Kane was a bold, venturesome lad. Not so Dr. Elder. "It might be only the impulse which lifts the lark into the clouds to sing her morning hymn," &c. &c. "Or it might be a habitude providentially induced and adjusted for the after-work of his adventurous life. Opinions upon such points as these are not always reason, and reason itself is not quite capable of a solution."†† More than

* Essay on Man, ep. iv.
Ibid., Themistocles.

Plutarch, Life of Philopomen.
Idem, Life of Cato Uticensis.

** Id., Life of M. Brutus.

† Plutarch's Lives, Aristides. § Life of Coriolanus.

tt Biography of Elisha Kent Kane, by Wm. Elder. 1858.