Royaity Reminded of the Poor.
Content
ROYAITY REMI DED OF THE POOR. BY FRA CIS JACOX 1825-1897. Daniel iv. 27. GREAT was ebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, even as the tree that he saw in his dream ; for, by the avowal of the Hebrew prophet who interpreted that dream, the king was indeed become strong, and his greatness was grown, and reached unto the heaven, and his dominion unto the ends of the earth. But sentence had gone forth, as against the tree, so against the king. ebuchadnezzar was to be degraded; despoiled of his kingdom, cast down from his throne, and driven from men, to eat grass as oxen. This counsel, however, the prophet urged upon the sovran, that he should break off his sins by righteousness, and his " iniquities by showing mercy to the poor " ; if it might be a lengthening of his tranquillity, or a healing of his error. What error? That of which ex-king Lear accused himself, when he owned, amid words of frenzy, all however with more or less of tragic significance in them, that he had taken too little care of Mw*,— of sympathy with desolate indigence, and of readiness to relieve the sufferings of the destitute and forlorn. The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by ; some friendship will it lend him against the tempest ; the tyranny of the open night's too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone. "Wilt break my heart?" he exclaims, in answer to Kent's fresh entreaty : Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin ; and so it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him ; and " where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt." Let Kent go in, by all means : the king enjoins it — at least the ex- king desires it : let Kent
seek his own ease — and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Mean-
i6 /ROYALTY /REMI DED OF THE POOR, while, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear's thoughts perforce are turned to "houseless poverty," to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, — ^how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these ? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal, *« O, I have ta'en Too little care of this ! Take physic, pomp ; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel ; That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just." Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by " poor mad Tom," — ^the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the " naked fellow " whose identity he so little suspects : " Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues Have humbled to all strokes : that I am wretched, Makes thee the happier : — Heavens, deal so still ! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly ; So distribution should undo the excess, And each man have enough."
Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited firom the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said. The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 17 eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol, — ^but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race — ^pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as some scholars interpret the passage, " content to be fed " on the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table ; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs : indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. "The rich man's sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity.'* * He took too little care of this — that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. La Bruyfere observes that ** la sant^ et les richesses otent aux hommes Texpdrience du mal, leur inspirent la durete pour leurs semblables;" and adds, that "les gens ddjk charges de leur propre misfere sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d'autrui." If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. Hand ignari tnali, miseris succurrere discunt. In another chapter of his " Characters," La Bruy^re sketches the portrait
of one he styles Champagne, who " au sortir d'un long diner qui lui enfle Testomac, et dans les douces fumdes d'un vin d'Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu'on lui pr^sente, qui oterait le pain \ toute une province, si Ton n'y rem^iait : il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la premiere heure de la digestion, qu'on puisse quelque part mourir de faim ? " // est excusable^ on the principle of Horace Walpole's similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to
• See on the scope of the words iiriOvfiiay x**^*^'^^^*'** (St. Luke xvi. 21), Attalecta Theologica (Rev. W. Trollope's) in he. C
1 8 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t'other prince — ^but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. "They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation ? Poor creatures ! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered ! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath — somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards sugar-plumed) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. o part of a royal brat's memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of htunan suffering." ^^ H y a une espke de honte ditre heureux d la vue de certaines miseres" writes La Bruyfere again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those " whining and melancholy moralists," who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our bre-
thren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. " Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow<reatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men." Adam Smith opposes this " extreme sympathy " as altogether absurd and unreasonable ; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it ; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other piupose than to render miserable the person who possessed it This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser's relief.
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 19 Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson's celebrated passage : ^' Ah 1 little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround ; They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And TB'anton, often cruel, riot waste ; Ah ! little think they, while they dance along. How many feel this very moment death And all the sad variety of pain." Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings : moving accidents by flood and fire, — pining want, and dungeon glooms, — the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery — sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc.
" Thought fond man Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills That one incessant struggle render life One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate, Vice in his high career would stand appalled. And heedless rambling impulse learn to think ; The conscious heart of charity would warm, And her wide wish benevolence dilate ; The social tear would rise, the social sigh, And into clear perfection, gradual bliss, Refining still, the social passions work." This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a • charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed, — this, perhaps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed. So Bums — ** O ye who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think for a moment on his wretched fate Whom friends and fortune quite disown, Ill-satis6ed keen nature's clamVous caU, Stretch'd on his straw he lays himself to sleep. While through the ragged roof and chinky wall, Chill, o*er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap. ••••• Ct
20 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR.
Affliction's sons are brothers in distress : A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss !'* Again and again the question recurs, to quote from an able casuist on casual charity, why one man should be literally dying of want, whilst another is able to send him a cheque for j^ioo without thinking about it, or knowing that the money is gone ? If Dives, it is asked, feels bound to give Lazarus so much, where does he draw the line ? If the demand upon the superfluities of the rich is to be measured by the wants of the poor, why stop at ^^loo rather than ;^iooo or ;^i 0,000 or ;^ 1 00,000? "This is the question which lies at the root of half the melancholy sarcasms and still more melancholy wit of the present day. The writings of such men as Hood are little more than embodiments of it in a variety of forms, ludicrous or pathetic. It forms the burden of a whole class of literature, not the less influential because it is somewhat vague in its doctrines, and rests rather on sentiments than on dogmas." ow this writer believes it to be always the best to look such questions in the face, and to attempt at least to give the true answer to them. And the answer, at least in part, in this instance, he takes to be that the antithesis is only sentimental, and not logical. The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be relieved by their permanent impoverishment " That it is not a cause of their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer." But not to follow out a line of argument that would take us too far afield, we may advert to a corresponding essay, in the same Reineiv, if not by the same contributor, — in which a picture is drawn of a rich man at church, who hears some stray verses in the second lesson, or some eloquent menace from the pulpit, which makes him very uncomfortable about the contrast between his own easy life and the massive wretchedness of Spitalfields^ or Poplar. The uneasiness is supposed to rankle in him for some time, spoiling his digestion, and making him very cross to his wife and daughters. ot that he "for a
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 21 moment dreams of literally obeying the texts in the ew Testament that have hit him hard ; for he has a shrewd notion that they imply a very different state of society from the busy nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting the sick, and that if he had, the sick would think him a great nuisance ; and he knows that when he got to the bedside, he would probably be at his wits' ends for anything to say, and would end by twisting his watch-chain, and remarking that it was a cold day." The practical inference is, that if he is to do any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by commission ; — and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers. Hcy at least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious beneficence may avail, from any possible charge of branded fellowship with such as the poet of the Seasons depicts, in **The crad wretch Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled. Himself a useless load, has squandered vile Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered A drooping family of modest worth." Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies : " If people of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent, I fear, do not consider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot out of millions not so fortunate ; yet less do they reflect that chance, not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel.*' Crabbe portrays this nonreflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales : "Month after month was passed, and all were spent In quiet comfort and in rich content : Miseries there were, and woes, the world around,
But these had not her pleasant dwelling found ; She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept, And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah's board Gave what the seasons to the rich afford ; For she indulged," etc.
22 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, ot so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, " But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying," etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe's Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered : " To have this money in my purse — to know What grief was his, and what to grief we owe ; To see him often, always to conceive How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve ;* And every day in ease and peace to dine, And rest in comfort 1 — ^what a heart is mine ! *' Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as {mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. " Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you — when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. *The tiir bites shrewdly, it is very cold,' sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be — ^whether thou dost not
pray prayers of long omission — ^whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!" As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,
* Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath : ** * Know you his conduct ?' * Yes, indeed, I know, And how he wanders in the wind and snow ; Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear. But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.*"
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 23 "Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows ; You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood, And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind." Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day — which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. " That day," he often told a friend, in after life, " I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful." As the saUor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe's tragedies: "We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care ; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling." And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at
our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. "Luxury is indeed possible in the future — innocent and exquisite ; luxury for all, and by the help of all ; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant ; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold." Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiffs temporal government of Rome, that he — Gregory the Great — relieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy — his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit " or would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion." A non possumus this, in its beneficent nisi prius scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran's interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellowsubjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her
24 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR^ early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms, " Too generous-happy to endure The thought of all the wofiil poor Who that same night Uy down their heads In mockeries of starving beds, In cold, in wet, disease, despair, In madness that will say no prayer ; With wailing in&nts some ; and some By whom the little clay lies dumb ; And some, whom feeble love's excess. Through terror, tempts to murderousness. And at that thought che big drops rose In pity for her people's woes ; And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen, And vowing in her princely will That they should thrive and bless her still." Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the " vulgar herd," that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance — by courtesy historical ; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of FalstafFs bread bill to his running account for sack — one of Anne of Austria's sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering in propria pgrsond, — the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress — but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger : " that he luld have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, 25 enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment's thought [O, I have ta'en too little thought of this !] on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty. The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture as was inflicted by that man upon so many others." — It is in a glowing descrip-
tion of one of the great f§tes at Versailles under the auspices of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Ars^ne Houssaye delivers himself of this pensive aside : " Et la musique de LuUi achfeve d'enivrer tout ce beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que pr^s de Ik, k la grille m^me du chiteau des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout affam^e, pour ses enfants. Qu*importe ! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus tard. Comment t'appelles-tu, bonne femme ? — ^Je m'appelle la France : je reviendraij* Part of the education of the royal heir-apparent of the Incas consisted in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of skill — during which, for a period of thirty days, " the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire, —a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute." It is to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, " Alas ! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people's sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, . . . But when the hour of trouble comes — and seldom may it visit your leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours— O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled waQ penetrates through the " ofiicial cotton-
26 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. stuflfed ears of district police auditoria, district chambers of domains, military chiefs of governments, and imperial chan* celleries without number," and comes soughing into the private cabinet of the czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff, —goes on to say: "The empress, good soul, sheds tears when
she hears of the dreadfiil sufferings of the poor people so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don't take to plum-cake ; the Emperor is affected, but goes to work," etc. Which last expression, by the way, reminds us of a <^i«w/ quotation by Mr. Carlyle of Shakespeare's text in juxtaposition with mention of the greatest of czars : " Descend, O Donothing Pomp ; quit thy down-cushions ; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it ! The czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright ; . . . and his aim was small to thine." There was a miserable day in the Highland wanderings of Prince Charles when, with ed Burke and Donald Macleod for companions, after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine — there being no fresh water within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for even this nauseous food — "salt-water drammock" — ^and to have declared, on the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to remember "those who dined with him to-day." When Flora Macdonald and Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast, — on entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could not help shedding tears. "Charles, always the least concerned at his distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings if they had to come through' such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring." At a subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls of oatmeal and about a pound of butter — referring to which he afterwards told a Highland gentleman that he had
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 27
come to know what a quarter of a peck of meal was, having
once subsisted on such a quantity for the better part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and Strathglass, — a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry him. ".Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of smoking a pipe." Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath. In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, bui by some extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion : the incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. " The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks — for what ? — for having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss." Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Samson at St Edmund's shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, sine omni expensdy and returned only to sit down at the foot of St Edmund's shrine to shackles and bread and water. Patriotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be generated by a passive enjoyment of good ; the evil tendency of which he bids us see by merely looking to a city like London ; where the rich who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have every comfort provided for them
28 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, without their intaference, and need nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor, — ^such rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says Professor Ringsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for statistics — and of course, where possible, for profits. " There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these n^lects of ours — ^not in the gross." Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in " orth and South," lest, in her West-€nd ease, she should become sleepily deadened into foigetfulness of anything beyond the life that was lapping her round with luxury. " There might be toilers and moUers there in London, but she never saw them ; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears ; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them." Mr. Thackeray presents Ethel ewcome in the fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her indigent neighbours — giving much time to them and thought ; visiting from house to house without ostentation ; awe-stricken by that spectacle of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity, humility, and devotion. " Death never dying out ; hunger always crying ; and children bom to it day after day, — our young London lady, flying from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found herself in the presence of these ; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with wTetched life ; sitting by naked beds, whither by God's blessing she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation ; or whence she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by the patient resignation, of the new firiends to whom fate had directed her." o longer ignara mali^ miseris succurrere discit. An essayist of Mr. Thackeray's
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 29 • school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks out, or off, into the apostrophe: "Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver crackers ; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal ; gay riders in padded chariots ; proud cavaliers of bloodhorses, — you don't know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare." Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful interest with which one of Mr. Dickens's Christmas books affected him : '* sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe ourselves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler creatiures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God." Lord Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, when the gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been unknown to him : " Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience . . . you are startled and dismayed " at the sight : you say within yourself, " Can such things be ? I never dreamed of this before ! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself — I will remember this dread experiment" The like is the moral of Hood's poem of the Lady's Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night ; never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly ball — disease, and hunger, and pain, and want ; but now she dreams x)f them all — of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed, the sorrowing she might have solaced ; of each pleading that, long ago, she scanned with a heedless eye.
** I drank the richest draughts ; And ate whatever is good — Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit Supplied my hungry mood ;
30 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. But I never remembered the wretched ones That starve for want of food« I dressed as the noble dress, In doth of silver and gold. With silk, and satin, and costly iiirs, In many an ample fold ; But I never remembered the naked limbs That froze with winter's cold. The wounds I might have healed 3 The human sorrow and smart I And yet it never was in my soul To play so ill a part : But evil is wrought by want of Thought [So Lear's " O, I have ta'en tM little thought of this ! "] As well as want of Heart ! She clasped her fervent hands, And the tears b^an to stream ; Large, and bitter, and &st they fell. Remorse was so extreme ;
And yet, O yet, that many a dame Would dream the Lady's Dream ! ** An Edinburgh Reviewer of mortality in trades and professions, dwelling on the fatal conditions under which very many classes earn their daily bread, and sometimes not so much as that, — observes that the great middle and upper classes, accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of easy life and luxury, seldom give a thought as to the manner in which their wants are supplied. " Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the working-bee. The lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workmen in nearly every article that lies before her.** To take one example out of the many upon which Dr. Wynter dilates — the case of the silverer of looking-glasses : " If the charming belle, as she surveys her beauty in the glass, could but for a moment see reflected this poor shattered human creature, with trembling muscles, brown visage^and blackened teeth, she would d<»ibtless start with
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 31 horror ; but, as it is, the slaves of luxury and vanity drop out of life unobserved and uncared for, as the stream of travellers disappeared one by one through the bridge of Mirza." " O let those cities that of plenty's cup, And her prosperities) so largely taste, With their superfluous riots, hear these tears! The misery of Tharsus may be theirs." The moral of the eastern tale of ourjahad is practical and pertinent He delivers himself up to luxury and riot. He forgets that there are wants and distresses among his fellowcreatiures. He lives only for himself, and his heart becomes as hard as the coffers which hold his misapplied treasures. But
before it is too late he is awakened to remorse, and looks back with shame and horror on his past life. What shall he do to expiate his offences ? One thing at least is within his power, and that will he do at once : expend his riches in the relief of want — nor rest until he has found out every family in Ormuz whom calamity has overtaken, that he may restore them to prosperity. Henceforth he spends his days in his closet, laying plans for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. Ben Jonson's Sordido promises the like amendment : — " Pardon me, gentle friends, I'll make fair 'mends For my foul errors past. . . . My bams and .gamers shall stand open still To all the poor that come, and my best grain Be made alms-bread, to feed half-famished mouths. Though hitherto amongst you I have lived Like an unsavoury muck-hill to myself, * Yet now my gathered heaps, being spread abroad, Shall turn to better and more fmitful uses. O how deeply The bitter curses of the poor do pierce I I am by wonder changed ; come in with me And witness my repentance : now I prove o life is blest that is not graced with love." So again with the rich man in one of Crabbe's Borough sketches from life ; that rich man, to wit, who " built a house, both large and high. And entered in and set him down to sigh ; And planted ample woods and gardens fair And walked with anguish and compunction there; The rich man*s pines to every friend a treat, He saw with pain and he refused to eat ; His daintiest food, his richest wines, were all Turned by remorse to vin^ar and gall : The softest down by living body pressed
The rich man bought, and tried to take his rest ; But care had thorns upon his pillow spread. And scattered sand and nettles in his bed : ervous he grew — ^would often sigh and groan, — He talked but little, and he walked alone ; Till by his priest convinced, that from one deed Of genuine love would joy and health proceed. He from that time with care and zeal began To seek and soothe the grievous ills of man ; And as his hands their aid to grief apply, He leams to smile and he forgets to sigh. ow he can drink his wine and taste his food, And feel the blessings Heaven has dealt are good ; And since the suffering seek the rich man's door, Pie sleeps as soundly as when young and poor."
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seek his own ease — and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Mean-
i6 /ROYALTY /REMI DED OF THE POOR, while, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear's thoughts perforce are turned to "houseless poverty," to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, — ^how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these ? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal, *« O, I have ta'en Too little care of this ! Take physic, pomp ; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel ; That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just." Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by " poor mad Tom," — ^the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the " naked fellow " whose identity he so little suspects : " Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues Have humbled to all strokes : that I am wretched, Makes thee the happier : — Heavens, deal so still ! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly ; So distribution should undo the excess, And each man have enough."
Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited firom the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said. The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 17 eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol, — ^but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race — ^pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as some scholars interpret the passage, " content to be fed " on the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table ; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs : indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. "The rich man's sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity.'* * He took too little care of this — that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. La Bruyfere observes that ** la sant^ et les richesses otent aux hommes Texpdrience du mal, leur inspirent la durete pour leurs semblables;" and adds, that "les gens ddjk charges de leur propre misfere sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d'autrui." If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. Hand ignari tnali, miseris succurrere discunt. In another chapter of his " Characters," La Bruy^re sketches the portrait
of one he styles Champagne, who " au sortir d'un long diner qui lui enfle Testomac, et dans les douces fumdes d'un vin d'Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu'on lui pr^sente, qui oterait le pain \ toute une province, si Ton n'y rem^iait : il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la premiere heure de la digestion, qu'on puisse quelque part mourir de faim ? " // est excusable^ on the principle of Horace Walpole's similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to
• See on the scope of the words iiriOvfiiay x**^*^'^^^*'** (St. Luke xvi. 21), Attalecta Theologica (Rev. W. Trollope's) in he. C
1 8 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t'other prince — ^but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. "They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation ? Poor creatures ! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered ! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath — somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards sugar-plumed) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. o part of a royal brat's memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of htunan suffering." ^^ H y a une espke de honte ditre heureux d la vue de certaines miseres" writes La Bruyfere again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those " whining and melancholy moralists," who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our bre-
thren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. " Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow<reatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men." Adam Smith opposes this " extreme sympathy " as altogether absurd and unreasonable ; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it ; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other piupose than to render miserable the person who possessed it This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser's relief.
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 19 Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson's celebrated passage : ^' Ah 1 little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround ; They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And TB'anton, often cruel, riot waste ; Ah ! little think they, while they dance along. How many feel this very moment death And all the sad variety of pain." Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings : moving accidents by flood and fire, — pining want, and dungeon glooms, — the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery — sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc.
" Thought fond man Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills That one incessant struggle render life One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate, Vice in his high career would stand appalled. And heedless rambling impulse learn to think ; The conscious heart of charity would warm, And her wide wish benevolence dilate ; The social tear would rise, the social sigh, And into clear perfection, gradual bliss, Refining still, the social passions work." This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a • charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed, — this, perhaps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed. So Bums — ** O ye who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think for a moment on his wretched fate Whom friends and fortune quite disown, Ill-satis6ed keen nature's clamVous caU, Stretch'd on his straw he lays himself to sleep. While through the ragged roof and chinky wall, Chill, o*er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap. ••••• Ct
20 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR.
Affliction's sons are brothers in distress : A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss !'* Again and again the question recurs, to quote from an able casuist on casual charity, why one man should be literally dying of want, whilst another is able to send him a cheque for j^ioo without thinking about it, or knowing that the money is gone ? If Dives, it is asked, feels bound to give Lazarus so much, where does he draw the line ? If the demand upon the superfluities of the rich is to be measured by the wants of the poor, why stop at ^^loo rather than ;^iooo or ;^i 0,000 or ;^ 1 00,000? "This is the question which lies at the root of half the melancholy sarcasms and still more melancholy wit of the present day. The writings of such men as Hood are little more than embodiments of it in a variety of forms, ludicrous or pathetic. It forms the burden of a whole class of literature, not the less influential because it is somewhat vague in its doctrines, and rests rather on sentiments than on dogmas." ow this writer believes it to be always the best to look such questions in the face, and to attempt at least to give the true answer to them. And the answer, at least in part, in this instance, he takes to be that the antithesis is only sentimental, and not logical. The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be relieved by their permanent impoverishment " That it is not a cause of their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer." But not to follow out a line of argument that would take us too far afield, we may advert to a corresponding essay, in the same Reineiv, if not by the same contributor, — in which a picture is drawn of a rich man at church, who hears some stray verses in the second lesson, or some eloquent menace from the pulpit, which makes him very uncomfortable about the contrast between his own easy life and the massive wretchedness of Spitalfields^ or Poplar. The uneasiness is supposed to rankle in him for some time, spoiling his digestion, and making him very cross to his wife and daughters. ot that he "for a
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 21 moment dreams of literally obeying the texts in the ew Testament that have hit him hard ; for he has a shrewd notion that they imply a very different state of society from the busy nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting the sick, and that if he had, the sick would think him a great nuisance ; and he knows that when he got to the bedside, he would probably be at his wits' ends for anything to say, and would end by twisting his watch-chain, and remarking that it was a cold day." The practical inference is, that if he is to do any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by commission ; — and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers. Hcy at least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious beneficence may avail, from any possible charge of branded fellowship with such as the poet of the Seasons depicts, in **The crad wretch Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled. Himself a useless load, has squandered vile Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered A drooping family of modest worth." Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies : " If people of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent, I fear, do not consider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot out of millions not so fortunate ; yet less do they reflect that chance, not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel.*' Crabbe portrays this nonreflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales : "Month after month was passed, and all were spent In quiet comfort and in rich content : Miseries there were, and woes, the world around,
But these had not her pleasant dwelling found ; She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept, And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah's board Gave what the seasons to the rich afford ; For she indulged," etc.
22 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, ot so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, " But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying," etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe's Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered : " To have this money in my purse — to know What grief was his, and what to grief we owe ; To see him often, always to conceive How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve ;* And every day in ease and peace to dine, And rest in comfort 1 — ^what a heart is mine ! *' Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as {mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. " Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you — when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. *The tiir bites shrewdly, it is very cold,' sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be — ^whether thou dost not
pray prayers of long omission — ^whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!" As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,
* Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath : ** * Know you his conduct ?' * Yes, indeed, I know, And how he wanders in the wind and snow ; Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear. But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.*"
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 23 "Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows ; You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood, And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind." Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day — which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. " That day," he often told a friend, in after life, " I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful." As the saUor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe's tragedies: "We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care ; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling." And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at
our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. "Luxury is indeed possible in the future — innocent and exquisite ; luxury for all, and by the help of all ; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant ; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold." Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiffs temporal government of Rome, that he — Gregory the Great — relieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy — his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit " or would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion." A non possumus this, in its beneficent nisi prius scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran's interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellowsubjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her
24 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR^ early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms, " Too generous-happy to endure The thought of all the wofiil poor Who that same night Uy down their heads In mockeries of starving beds, In cold, in wet, disease, despair, In madness that will say no prayer ; With wailing in&nts some ; and some By whom the little clay lies dumb ; And some, whom feeble love's excess. Through terror, tempts to murderousness. And at that thought che big drops rose In pity for her people's woes ; And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen, And vowing in her princely will That they should thrive and bless her still." Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the " vulgar herd," that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance — by courtesy historical ; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of FalstafFs bread bill to his running account for sack — one of Anne of Austria's sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering in propria pgrsond, — the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress — but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger : " that he luld have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, 25 enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment's thought [O, I have ta'en too little thought of this !] on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty. The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture as was inflicted by that man upon so many others." — It is in a glowing descrip-
tion of one of the great f§tes at Versailles under the auspices of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Ars^ne Houssaye delivers himself of this pensive aside : " Et la musique de LuUi achfeve d'enivrer tout ce beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que pr^s de Ik, k la grille m^me du chiteau des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout affam^e, pour ses enfants. Qu*importe ! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus tard. Comment t'appelles-tu, bonne femme ? — ^Je m'appelle la France : je reviendraij* Part of the education of the royal heir-apparent of the Incas consisted in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of skill — during which, for a period of thirty days, " the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire, —a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute." It is to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, " Alas ! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people's sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, . . . But when the hour of trouble comes — and seldom may it visit your leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours— O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled waQ penetrates through the " ofiicial cotton-
26 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. stuflfed ears of district police auditoria, district chambers of domains, military chiefs of governments, and imperial chan* celleries without number," and comes soughing into the private cabinet of the czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff, —goes on to say: "The empress, good soul, sheds tears when
she hears of the dreadfiil sufferings of the poor people so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don't take to plum-cake ; the Emperor is affected, but goes to work," etc. Which last expression, by the way, reminds us of a <^i«w/ quotation by Mr. Carlyle of Shakespeare's text in juxtaposition with mention of the greatest of czars : " Descend, O Donothing Pomp ; quit thy down-cushions ; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it ! The czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright ; . . . and his aim was small to thine." There was a miserable day in the Highland wanderings of Prince Charles when, with ed Burke and Donald Macleod for companions, after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine — there being no fresh water within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for even this nauseous food — "salt-water drammock" — ^and to have declared, on the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to remember "those who dined with him to-day." When Flora Macdonald and Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast, — on entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could not help shedding tears. "Charles, always the least concerned at his distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings if they had to come through' such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring." At a subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls of oatmeal and about a pound of butter — referring to which he afterwards told a Highland gentleman that he had
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 27
come to know what a quarter of a peck of meal was, having
once subsisted on such a quantity for the better part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and Strathglass, — a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry him. ".Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of smoking a pipe." Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath. In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, bui by some extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion : the incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. " The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks — for what ? — for having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss." Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Samson at St Edmund's shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, sine omni expensdy and returned only to sit down at the foot of St Edmund's shrine to shackles and bread and water. Patriotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be generated by a passive enjoyment of good ; the evil tendency of which he bids us see by merely looking to a city like London ; where the rich who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have every comfort provided for them
28 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR, without their intaference, and need nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor, — ^such rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says Professor Ringsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for statistics — and of course, where possible, for profits. " There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these n^lects of ours — ^not in the gross." Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in " orth and South," lest, in her West-€nd ease, she should become sleepily deadened into foigetfulness of anything beyond the life that was lapping her round with luxury. " There might be toilers and moUers there in London, but she never saw them ; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears ; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them." Mr. Thackeray presents Ethel ewcome in the fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her indigent neighbours — giving much time to them and thought ; visiting from house to house without ostentation ; awe-stricken by that spectacle of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity, humility, and devotion. " Death never dying out ; hunger always crying ; and children bom to it day after day, — our young London lady, flying from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found herself in the presence of these ; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with wTetched life ; sitting by naked beds, whither by God's blessing she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation ; or whence she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by the patient resignation, of the new firiends to whom fate had directed her." o longer ignara mali^ miseris succurrere discit. An essayist of Mr. Thackeray's
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 29 • school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks out, or off, into the apostrophe: "Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver crackers ; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal ; gay riders in padded chariots ; proud cavaliers of bloodhorses, — you don't know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare." Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful interest with which one of Mr. Dickens's Christmas books affected him : '* sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe ourselves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler creatiures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God." Lord Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, when the gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been unknown to him : " Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience . . . you are startled and dismayed " at the sight : you say within yourself, " Can such things be ? I never dreamed of this before ! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself — I will remember this dread experiment" The like is the moral of Hood's poem of the Lady's Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night ; never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly ball — disease, and hunger, and pain, and want ; but now she dreams x)f them all — of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed, the sorrowing she might have solaced ; of each pleading that, long ago, she scanned with a heedless eye.
** I drank the richest draughts ; And ate whatever is good — Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit Supplied my hungry mood ;
30 ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. But I never remembered the wretched ones That starve for want of food« I dressed as the noble dress, In doth of silver and gold. With silk, and satin, and costly iiirs, In many an ample fold ; But I never remembered the naked limbs That froze with winter's cold. The wounds I might have healed 3 The human sorrow and smart I And yet it never was in my soul To play so ill a part : But evil is wrought by want of Thought [So Lear's " O, I have ta'en tM little thought of this ! "] As well as want of Heart ! She clasped her fervent hands, And the tears b^an to stream ; Large, and bitter, and &st they fell. Remorse was so extreme ;
And yet, O yet, that many a dame Would dream the Lady's Dream ! ** An Edinburgh Reviewer of mortality in trades and professions, dwelling on the fatal conditions under which very many classes earn their daily bread, and sometimes not so much as that, — observes that the great middle and upper classes, accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of easy life and luxury, seldom give a thought as to the manner in which their wants are supplied. " Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the working-bee. The lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workmen in nearly every article that lies before her.** To take one example out of the many upon which Dr. Wynter dilates — the case of the silverer of looking-glasses : " If the charming belle, as she surveys her beauty in the glass, could but for a moment see reflected this poor shattered human creature, with trembling muscles, brown visage^and blackened teeth, she would d<»ibtless start with
ROYALTY REMI DED OF THE POOR. 31 horror ; but, as it is, the slaves of luxury and vanity drop out of life unobserved and uncared for, as the stream of travellers disappeared one by one through the bridge of Mirza." " O let those cities that of plenty's cup, And her prosperities) so largely taste, With their superfluous riots, hear these tears! The misery of Tharsus may be theirs." The moral of the eastern tale of ourjahad is practical and pertinent He delivers himself up to luxury and riot. He forgets that there are wants and distresses among his fellowcreatiures. He lives only for himself, and his heart becomes as hard as the coffers which hold his misapplied treasures. But
before it is too late he is awakened to remorse, and looks back with shame and horror on his past life. What shall he do to expiate his offences ? One thing at least is within his power, and that will he do at once : expend his riches in the relief of want — nor rest until he has found out every family in Ormuz whom calamity has overtaken, that he may restore them to prosperity. Henceforth he spends his days in his closet, laying plans for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. Ben Jonson's Sordido promises the like amendment : — " Pardon me, gentle friends, I'll make fair 'mends For my foul errors past. . . . My bams and .gamers shall stand open still To all the poor that come, and my best grain Be made alms-bread, to feed half-famished mouths. Though hitherto amongst you I have lived Like an unsavoury muck-hill to myself, * Yet now my gathered heaps, being spread abroad, Shall turn to better and more fmitful uses. O how deeply The bitter curses of the poor do pierce I I am by wonder changed ; come in with me And witness my repentance : now I prove o life is blest that is not graced with love." So again with the rich man in one of Crabbe's Borough sketches from life ; that rich man, to wit, who " built a house, both large and high. And entered in and set him down to sigh ; And planted ample woods and gardens fair And walked with anguish and compunction there; The rich man*s pines to every friend a treat, He saw with pain and he refused to eat ; His daintiest food, his richest wines, were all Turned by remorse to vin^ar and gall : The softest down by living body pressed
The rich man bought, and tried to take his rest ; But care had thorns upon his pillow spread. And scattered sand and nettles in his bed : ervous he grew — ^would often sigh and groan, — He talked but little, and he walked alone ; Till by his priest convinced, that from one deed Of genuine love would joy and health proceed. He from that time with care and zeal began To seek and soothe the grievous ills of man ; And as his hands their aid to grief apply, He leams to smile and he forgets to sigh. ow he can drink his wine and taste his food, And feel the blessings Heaven has dealt are good ; And since the suffering seek the rich man's door, Pie sleeps as soundly as when young and poor."
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