might have observed a short and spare, but thick-set figure of an elderly man, buried in a newspaper, or exchanging a few snappish incisive words with some journalistic friend or chance acquaintance of the place. By-and-by, he would start up suddenly, push away his paper with a jerk, waste no valediction on his interlocutor, and start forth briskly into the open air. You watched him as he disappeared, and set him down as an oddity. His hat, unconscious of brush, was set well back on his occiput, displaying a broad intellectual forehead; his nose was in the air; his keen blue-gray eyes peered out over the rim of his spectacles; his "roguish Hibernian mouth" was mobile with the mocking humor within; his hands were thrust into his pockets, or otherwise, his right arm was clasped behind him in his left hand; his coat, of scholarly black, was loose, threadbare, and greasy; his shirt was buttonless, and not too white; his face was smooth-shaven; he stooped in figure and shambled in gait; and he turned his head from side to side with the quick movement of some "strange old bird." If you had asked an habitual frequenter of the room who this queer personage might be, with the air of a scholar, the cut of a cleric, and the shabby slovenry of a mendicant, you might have been informed that it was no other than the Rev. Francis Mahony, French correspondent, and part proprietor of the Globe newspaper, and known wherever English letters had found their way as Father Prout, "Incumbent of Watergrasshill, in the county of Cork." EDWARD THE FIRST 1 JOHN RICHARD GREEN In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national King. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended 1 From History of the English People. * forever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier Kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he said in his old age, “and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. "It is I who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink." Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the King who wept bitterly at the news of his father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier rested. "I loved her tenderly in her life time," wrote Edward to Eleanor's friend, the Abbot of Clugny; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead." And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign Kings disappeared in Edward. He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her, England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between King and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong. 2. Imaginary Persons AN ACCOUNTANT 1 CHARLES LAMB JOHN TIPP neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle Street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notion of himself that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier of them now), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of 1 From "The South-Sea House" in Essays of Elia. "sweet breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms, and orchestras - chorus singers first and second violoncellos — double basses - - and clarionets who ate his cold mutton and drank his punch and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of figure. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25l. Is. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they called them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days): but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world: he was plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand that commended their interests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) · a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honor is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. A PORTRAIT 1 JOHN GALSWORTHY It is at the age of eighty that I picture him, without the vestige of a stoop, rather above middle height, of very wellproportioned figure, whose flatness of back and easy movements were the admiration of all who saw them. His iron-gray eyes had lost none of their color, they were set-in deep, so that their upper lids were invisible, and had a peculiar questioning directness, apt to change suddenly into twinkles. His head was of fine shape one did not suspect that it required a specially made hat, being a size larger than almost any other head; it was framed in very silky silvery hair, brushed in an arch across his forehead, and falling in becoming curves over the tips of his ears; and he wore always a full white beard and moustaches, which concealed a jaw and chin of great determination cleft by a dimple. His nose had been broken in his early boyhood; it was the nose of a thinker, broad and of noticeable shape. The color of his cheeks was a fine dry brown; his brow very capacious, both wide and high, and endowed with a singular serenity. But it was the balance and poise of his head which commanded so much attention. In a theatre, church, concerthall, there was never any head so fine as his, for the silvery hair 1 From A Motley. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. |