prove it, knowing it in its details with a minuteness which the feeling of property can alone give. It is, in the Laureate's phrase, his proper patchproper, in the grammatical and the legal sense; and even so ill-favoured a thing as Audrey could become dear to court-bred Touchstone, as being his very own. Happy they that can create a rose-tree or erect a honeysuckle that can watch the brood of a hen, or see a fleet of their own ducklings launch into the water so exclaims Gray the poet, in a letter from London, and adds: "It is with a sentiment of envy I speak of it, who shall never have even a thatched roof of my own, nor gather a strawberry but in Covent Garden." Wordsworth glorifies in verse the humble cottage whither he brought his bride, in its little nook of mountain-ground; bidding it a temporary (au revoir) farewell, in eight graceful stanzas, when he went to bring her to it as her future home. We go for one to whom ye will be dear; And she will prize this bower, this Indian shed, The poet's complacency differed in degree, but not in kind, from that of Lorenzo de' Medici, when he gave as a reason for preferring one of his seats above all the others, that all the ground within view of it was his own. Few who have passed the same age without a 'settlement," but will sympathise with Gibbon's repeated avowal, in his personal memoirs, that on finding himself thirty and upwards, he began to feel the desire of having a house of his own. In a letter from his place in Lausanne, in 1789, he writes to the most intimate of his correspondents: "I feel (perhaps it is foolish), but I feel that this little paradise will please me still more when it is absolutely my own." Years before, he had exulted, in a letter to the same correspondent's lady-wife, in having got from a country visit back to Bentinckstreet, "and am now comfortably seated in my library, in my own easy chair, and before my own fire; a style which you understand, though it is unintelligible to your lord." "For my own part," he writes again, a year or two later, after another visiting experience," my late journey has only confirmed me in the opinion, that number seven in Bentinckstreet is the best house in the world." Between being a guest in the palace and master in one's own modest home, there is a distinction with a difference -all in favour of the latter. The rustic baron in Herr Freytag's chef-d'œuvre sometimes half compassionates the baroness his wife on being reduced, by her marriage to him, from the splendour of courts to the dull vacuity of a country life. But like a sensible woman the baroness replies, with a smile, "There I was a servant, here I am mistress: except my toilet I had nothing that I could call my own. . . . Here our furniture is not of rich silk, and there are no malachite tables in our drawing-room, but what the house does contain is mine [and here she “ puts her arms round the baron's neck]; you are mine, the children, the castle, and the silver candlesticks [which are only plated, the baron reminds her], all are mine." We love the scenes and people about us, it has been observed, as we love our children, not because they are better or prettier than other places or other children, but because the good and beauty in them have spoken to us, are incorporated with our nature till we are blended in an absolute union. It was one of many drawbacks in Plato's Republic that the soldier part of the community were allowed no property; not a fragment; even their arms were to be the property of the state; "not a chattel, article of furniture, or personal ornament, but would have a public stamp, as it were, upon it, making it felony to sell, or give, or exchange it." And what though this honoured class were privileged to have many wives (in common), while none of their fellowcitizens might, could, or should have more than one? As an English critic of the Ideal Republic exclaims : How gladly would the majority, after two years' experience of the dissolute barrack, accept in exchange the quiet privacy of the artizan's cottage!" A poor thing that, probably; possibly a very poor thing but it, and the wife inside of it, the individual man's very own. Washington Irving, advising a friend who enjoyed the sea-coast of Long Island, as an invalid visitor— in lodgings-to set up a retreat there, makes the remark: "I can say from experience, that a man has tenfold more enjoyment from any rural retreat that belongs to himself, than from any that he hires as a temporary sojourn." "I like a home, if it is only a garret," Etty the painter was ever wont to say. It was a grand day for him when he became bonâ fide possessor of a house in York, on payment of some eleven hundred pounds. Proud to command such a sum, and to possess a "house of his own," he never regretted the bargain. Fond as a child, says Mr. Gilchrist, "of his new possession, he was more constant to his liking. The more he sees of his mansion,- open, quiet, with a pleasant bit of garden,' &c., the more he likes it.'" Tastes and temperaments vary, however; and some prefer-at least practically, whatever they may say about it— to have no certain dwelling-place they can call their own, but to shift to and fro, and in policeman's dialect, keep moving. Gay the poet writes to Swift: “You have often told me there is a time of life that every one wishes for some settlement of his own. I have frequently that feeling about me, but I fancy it will hardly ever be my lot." Poor John Gay was at once a movable and a fixture of the Queensberrys. Swift wrote back to him, some four months later: “You want no settlement (I call the family where you live, and the foot you are upon, a settlement) till you increase your fortune to what will support you with ease and plenty, a good house and garden. The want of this I much dread for you." But the Queensberry pet knew no such dread, and died without ever having really known VOL. L 8 it.—A man of sufficiently contrasted character to his, in every respect, the thoroughly domesticated, independent, and respectable Frederick Perthes, could never be persuaded, in his declining years, to buy a house in his beloved Friedrichoda. "I have never,” said he, "had any other landed property than my travelling carriage and my corner in the churchyard; and just before the order comes to march, I do not want to bind myself to any earthly spot." It was as though, like Archbishop Leighton, he would fain die at an inn-and at one the archbishop did die-consistently to the last (and especially at the last) a stranger and pilgrim on the earth. Or as though, in an applied sense, he would be as one of the first Christians, of whom neither said any one that ought of the things which he possessed was his own. |