(which I have no money to give myself) what can I do? I am not clever enough to turn my hand to anything, and, besides, there is Mr. Hardy (I am to call him Mr. now, after my 'disgraceful conduct')." And Tom's hand was clenched on the knees of his poor thin trousers, and a word rose in his throat at the remembrance. There was a woman sitting next him, with a baby in her arms and a sleepy child at her knee. It was hot work having to watch the sleepy child and amuse the cross baby, with so little by way of amusement. "If any one would hold it!" said the poor mother, doubtfully. " I will," said Tom, and took it. Tom was not ornamental; he had no glittering ring or chain to hold up to its eyes, and fill them with wondering delight. His clothes were only of that strictly necessary character usually worn by children at institutions. They had not even that air of bygone betterness which cling to some garments to the last. And yet the baby ceased crying when Tom danced it up and down in his arms. Perhaps those baby eyes saw deeper into poor Tom than the rest of them did, with eyes that could generally see so much more. At all events, the baby was good, and even the baby's smiles seemed to bring a softer light into Tom's grey eyes. It was a very little would bring that soft light there, but that little had never been given him. The train stopped, and Tom handed back the baby at the little wooden shed which was the station, two or three miles from Uncle Michael's. There was no one to meet him. Why should there be? He shouldered his small box, and went across the fields. In a happier light, Tom would not have been insensible to the brooks and hedgerows glowing under the warm sunshine, which were all such a change to him, but, as things were, he took little notice of them. "A new life of dependence! a new life of dependence!" sang the birds, little knowing what they sang to him, little knowing what a different song they sing to half the ears that hear them. Might he not strike out into a new and better path? Tom looked down at his hands. They were not great, strong, muscular hands, still they could work-why didn't they? He had failed once, so no one seemed to think he could ever succeed. Tom wasn't a ninepin worth setting up often, and so, with the knowledge of what others thought of him, there seemed to come crushing on him a new knowledge of himself, which had been taught him at every step of his young life. What every one said must have some truth in it. So he went on gloomily to Uncle Michael's. It was a great house, with large shady gardens, and rooks cawing among the elms, but, altogether, the place looked rather neglected. Nature had done a great deal, but art had added nothing. The lawn was green, but the grass was long, and covered with daisies, while all the other flowers had a sort of air as if they were left to grow as they could by themselves. Did Tom expect a welcome? I don't think so, and yet he would have felt that dull dreary feeling round his heart grow less if there had been It is pleasant to every one of us to have some kind hand in He walked up the avenue, rang at the glass door, and his ring brought out a maid (very unlike the lawn, being very much cared for). one. greeting. "Is Mr. Oldfield at home?" asked Tom. "Oh! you are the gentleman, sir." expression.) "I'll tell Mr. Oldfield. stairs?" (This was said with no amiable Will you want your box up Tom thought he hardly wanted it there at all. He felt rather choked as Mr. Oldfield was "told," and came out into the hall. He was a very undemonstrative man, rarely even shook hands with any one, and though anything but an unkind man at heart, hid his kindness so much under a bushel, that few ever thought of removing the bushel and finding it. "Uncle Michael" was a bachelor, with bachelor affections; his pipe was wife and family to him; he greeted Tom in his usual manner to those outside the family circle (which one might call the wreaths of tobaccosmoke). Why should he make an exception of him, with Tom's testimonials sent by Mr. Hardy, whom, however, he did not like? "How do you do?" grunted "Uncle Michael," as a matter of form. "How do you do?" responded Tom. "Bring in a couple of cups at tea," said the master of the house to his servants, who had come out to eye Tom, and regarded him discontentedly. After these sentences the two men settled down into every-day life from the moment. "Two plates more, and two cups," that expressed the difference exactly to "Uncle Michael" of Tom living with him. Each going his own way, and about his own business, so silently, meeting each other about the place more like two shadows than two men; so the sun fell on the old dial, and marked the passing hours, nothing else. Tom took the gardens under his care, and they flourished under it. The long grass and daisies disappeared, and flowers grew so abundantly that passers-by looked in at them admiringly through the white gates. And still the birds sang to Tom as he worked there, "A life of dependence-a life of dependence." What was the miserable care of a few flowers for a man (prematurely old, though only just turned twenty-one) to live for? Could not any gardener, for twenty pounds a year, do all he did, and do it better? Was he happier now than at the doctor's? I think not, for at all events it was work there, and here it was a life still more solitary and purposeless, without that work as a companion. 272 ABOUT COMING TO BELIEVE ONE'S OWN. LIE. A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE. BY FRANCIS JACOX. PROSPERO, duke of Milan, enamoured of study and the liberal arts, cast upon his brother, Antonio, the government of his realm. Antonio abused the trust. He new created the creatures that were Prospero's, "or changed them, or else new-formed them." And thus it came to pass that while the rightful-though hardly can he be called the reigningduke was rapt in secret studies, the false Antonio, having both the key of officer and office, set all hearts in the state to what tune pleased his ear; so that now he was, as Prospero, fretting in exile, phrases it, The ivy which had hid my princely trunk, Prospero neglecting worldly ends, "all dedicate to closeness,"-his usurping brother found usurpation easy work, and got so used to the daily exercise of supreme power, that before very long he came to believe, virtually and in effect, to all practical intents and purposes, that he himself, Antonio, was the duke: -like one Who, having, unto truth, by telling of it, The construction of this sentence, as Mr. Grant White observes, is a little involved, and so the MS. corrector of Mr. Collier's folio of 1632 changes the words "unto truth" in the first line, to to untruth. But this, the American critic objects, will never do. "How can a man make a sinner of his memory to untruth by telling a lie? The correction achieves nothing but nonsense. The plain construction of the passage, as the original gives it, is, 'Who, having made such a sinner of his memory unto truth, to credit his own lie by telling of it,' which gives us a portrait of a kind of liar that is not uncommon."† A deceived heart, in the language of the Hebrew prophet,‡ hath so turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? Manifold and variegated are the forms which self-credulous lying, or self-mystification, assumes, from white lies to the biggest of black ones. Shaftesbury remarks, in his Letter concerning Enthusiasm, that men are wonderful happy in a faculty of deceiving themselves, whenever they set heartily about it, and that a very small foundation of any passion will serve us, not only to act it well, but even to work ourselves into it beyond our own reach.§ Elsewhere his lordship owns himself so charitable, as to think there is more of innocent delusion than voluntary imposture in the world; and that they who have most imposed on mankind, have first imposed upon themselves, and are so much the more successful, as they can act their part more naturally, and to the life.* Nor needs there any abstruse depth of philosophy to see, and sing, that * The Tempest, Act I. Sc. 2. Shakspeare's Scholar. By R. G. White, A.M. Notes on the Tempest (p.91). Isaiah, xliv. 20. See the opening pages of Shaftesbury's Characteristics. Fresh confidence the speculatist takes Vires acquirit eundo. Of his very eccentric and troublesome contemporary, the Earl of Buchan, Sir Walter Scott observes, on journalising his death, that his imagination was so fertile, that he seemed really to believe the extraordinary fictions which he delighted in telling. It is a melancholy reflection that scarcely more than a year after entering this note in his Diary, Sir Walter himself became gradually subject from the progress of disease-to a hallucination of a painful character, though to him at the time soothing and satisfactory. Towards the autumn of 1831 his friends could see that he was beginning to entertain the notion that his debts were paid off. By degrees, says his son-in-law and biographer, "dwelling on this fancy, he believed in it fully and implicitly"§-and though a gross delusion, neither his publisher nor any one else had the heart to disturb it by any formal statement of figures. Like good-natured, fussy little Lady Bellair, in Mr. Disraeli's lovestory, who, a systematic match-maker by benevolence or malice prepense, persuaded herself into a belief of her having brought together the two happy pairs who figure off in the tale in question, and whom she made a point of so constantly visiting on the strength of that assurance. "As her ladyship persists in asserting, and perhaps now really believes, that both matches were the result of her matrimonial craft, it would be the height of ingratitude if she ever could complain of the want of a hearty welcome."|| One may apply to this subject what we are told of Elliston the actor, that when the Coronation was performed, in which he took the principal part, he, by dint of the nightly fiction, came at length to fancy himself the king, and would burst into tears, and hiccough a blessing on the people, -his people. And Mr. Thackeray assures us of George IV., that he had heard so much of the war, knighted so many people, and worn such a prodigious quantity of marshal's uniforms, cocked-hats, cock's feathers, scarlet and bullion in general, that he actually fancied he had been present in some campaigns, and, under the name of General Brock, led a tremendous charge of the German legion at Waterloo. Mr. Sala, who pronounces the Marseillais to be the most barefaced and most entertaining liars he ever met with, -adding, however, that they lie, not from malice or uncharitableness, but from habit, from constitution, * The Moralists, A Rhapsody, sect. v. † Cowper, The Progress of Error. Sir Walter Scott's Diary, April 20, 1829. Lockhart, Life of Scott, ch. lxxx. || Henrietta Temple, book vi. ch. xxv. The Four Georges. from a vivid imaginativeness, rather than from a deliberate desire to deceive and defraud, -has a story to tell of them, in evidence that sometimes, as he thinks, they believe in their own lies. A Marseillais (thus runs the story), visiting some relations at an adjoining village, told them, as a mere Munchausenism and pastime, that a lion had escaped from a menagerie at Marseilles, and was rushing up and down La Cannébière,* biting and rending the affrighted inhabitants by scores. The villagers, "impelled by an irresistible curiosity, rushed into the city to see this devouring wild-beast who was decimating La Cannébière. The Marseillais was left alone. He began to scratch his bushy head, and at last faltered forth, Mon Diou! si c'était vrai, ciou que z'avais dit! - Suppose, after all, that what I told them was true! And he, the arch-deceiver, made the best of his way back to Marseilles, to see if by chance a roaring lion was not careering up and down La Cannébière."† An acute writer has recently published an essay on the frequent fondness people show for attributing to a false step in life that want of success which is really due to their incapacity, -the reflection serving so conveniently to soothe their vanity and restore their self-esteem. We did wrong, it is true, thus the essayist supposes them to commune with themselves;-but then, if luck had not been incorrigibly hostile, the error would have been speedily repaired, and all would have gone on well. "And after a certain time, a man gets into the way of looking back even upon the false step to which he pleads guilty as something for which he was not altogether responsible. Just as people go on telling an untrue story until they believe it to be true, they can in the same way go on ascribing all their ills to some one mistake, and to talk of it as they might be expected to talk of a blight that had descended upon them from the clouds." For it is surprising, as this writer shows, how the lapse of time assists us in the pleasant process of divesting ourselves, as it were, of our own conduct. After relating how notably Perkin Warbeck acquitted himself, in the capacity of Pretender to the throne, insomuch that great folks as well as the vulgar generally believed that he was indeed Duke Richard, Lord Bacon adds: "Nay, himself, with long and continual counterfeiting, and with oft telling a lie, was turned by habit almost into the thing he seemed to be, and from a liar to a believer."§ Lord Brougham's political portrait of Mr. Dundas (Lord Melville) includes this feature-that, as a skilful debater, he was capable of producing a great effect in the House by his broad and coarse appeals to popular prejudices, and his confident statement of facts-those statements which, Sir Francis Burdett once happily observed, men fall into through an inveterate habit of official assertion."|| Now Swift published elaborate Proposals for printing a very Curious Discourse, entitled ΨΕΥΔΟΛΟΓΙΑ * Of which the Marseillais sublimely say-with a positively superlative stretch of the comparative-that if Paris had a Cannébière, Paris would be a little Marseilles. † The Streets of the World: Marseilles, La Cannébière. ‡ Essay (anonymous) on "False Steps" - apparently by the author, always keen of vision and pen, of a double series (may arithmetical progression be its lot) of Essays on Social Subjects. Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. |