changed into the archbishop. The man which his own forgotten brother had years who had played his natural part so well, so ago dealt the first blow. Here is the great zealously, as a great royal official, is going, minister of one of our greatest kings, the as a confessor and martyr of the Church, fellow-worker of that king in his great to play an artificial part, no less sincerely, work, the man who brought back peace no less zealously, but in the awkward and after the anarchy, the man who has left overdone fashion of one who is playing an his mark on the law and constitution of artificial part. I must confess that, at this England for all later time, the man who by point, where with many the history of his device of scutage dealt a blow to feuThomas begins, for me it loses its main dalism second only to the blow which Wilpersonal interest. From this point, as far liam the Great had dealt at Salisbury, the as my immediate feelings are concerned, I man who gave to the great post of chanam tempted to look at him mainly as the cellor the dignity which it has kept to our man who withstood the Danegeld-if own times, the man who, if he cast away Danegeld it was the "sort of Hamp- the duties of his proper calling for the den" as even Mr. Robertson is forced to cares of state and for the storm of battle, call him, and as the man who, even while still lived a life, just, pure, devout, a life striving in the cause of Rome, sent forth which, if it had been usual to canonize not a few hearty English denunciations ministers of state as easily as kings and against her corruptions. I demand truth bishops, might have won him the honors and justice for him, as for every man, from of saintship without any exile at Pontigny his birth to his death; but from the time or any martyrdom at Canterbury. And when he ceases to be chancellor, I feel no here is a man calling himself a historian, longer called on to strive for him as one of professing to report and to balance the his own following. On many points that statements of contemporary writers, but are to come I could be satisfied to sit by who, instead of the statements of contemand look on at what, if it were not a strife porary writers, instead of any inference between the living and the long dead, one which can be fairly drawn from these might call the Theban strife of the elder statements, gives us a monstrous fabric of and the younger Froude. In the times pure fiction, consistent in one thing only, which we have thus far gone through my that everything is turned to the discredit interest is nearer. Here is a great and of the man who gave England light and representative man of the generation in peace after her blackest day of darkness which the descendants of the Norman and anarchy. I have done my best to settlers in England became Englishmen, undo the wrong, and to set up the true the generation which beheld the anarchy chancellor Thomas of history against the and the restoration of peace, each of purely imaginary chancellor Thomas of which events, in its own way, helped to Mr. Froude's fantastic, but somehow carry out the work of fusion yet more always slanderous, dreams. I have further fully. Norman by descent, English by tested him, not only by the witness of the birth and feeling, proud of England as his contemporary writers as it appears to me, native land, of London as his native city; but also by their witness as it appears to a trained by travel and study in other writer many of whose ideas are very diflands, but never losing his love for his na-ferent from my own, whose estimate of tive soil; trusted by the Angevin king, Thomas is only a little more favorable beloved by the English people, Thomas than that of Mr. Froude himself, but who of London is the very embodiment of that knows, what Mr. Froude seems not to blending together of Normans and English know, what truth and accuracy are. My on English ground which was the great inferences from the facts will often be work of the twelfth century, and of which found widely different from the inferences we feel the blessings in the nineteenth. of Mr. Robertson; but I believe that my And here is a man who comes forward to facts and Mr. Robertson's facts will be write his life and times, but who shows at found to be on all essential points the once that this, the most instructive aspect same. What pass for facts with Mr. of his life and times, has never once en- Froude will be found to be altogether diftered his mind; a man who, instead of the ferent from either. All this could be done true history of the birth and parentage of only at some detail, and at some detail I him of whom he writes, has nothing to have done it. Those who have followed give us but old wives' fables which schol- me thus far have perhaps learned what ars have cast aside for years, fables at Thomas of London was as a maker of history, what Mr. Froude is as a writer of it. If so, my main object has been gained, • P. 73. and we may pass over what remains at a the spot, or must be illogical. Unfortuswifter pace. Mr. Froude, Mr. Robert-nately the modern way of looking at things son, every other writer of the "Life and interferes with that strict syllogism of Times of Thomas," has naturally given a which the conclusion is suicide. Thus the much greater space to Thomas the arch- study of Marcus Aurelius, or of Cicero, or bishop than to Thomas the chancellor. I of Epictetus, is only so far a consolation should do the same, if I were either writ- as it distracts the mind from its grief. ing a formal life or dealing with the subject This is so generally acknowledged that in its place in a formal history. For my the fashion of writing to unfortunate acpresent immediate objects it will better quaintances stereotyped suggestions of serve to reverse the proportion. Three any but religious comfort has almost enpapers have been needed to bring me to tirely fallen into abeyance. After all, this the consecration of Thomas; I trust that is in itself a consolation, and grief and one more will be enough to bring me to bankruptcy have partly lost their sting. his martyrdom.* EDWARD A. FREEMAN. * Owing to complete separation from books, I have been unable to verify my references and extracts on the proof-sheet. It is possible therefore that some slips of pen or press may have crept in, especially in the French of Garnier, where it is not easy to carry the exact spelling in the memory. From The Saturday Review. CONSOLATION. CONSOLATION is the active work of moral philosophy, which, if it does little else that is effective, is supposed to soothe us in our pains. As nothing is more generally acknowledged than the emptiness and futility of the consolations which we administer to others, it might be hastily supposed that moral philosophy is of no use at all. There is, however, all the difference imaginable between individual examples of consolation, which are generally as absurd as they are well-meaning, and the useful disposition to look about the world for consolation in general. Suppose a man has lost his child or his fortune, we all know the kind of commonplaces which it was once fashionable to address to him. At certain times in the history of the world clever men set their wits to devise formulæ of comfort. The industry of the Stoics came to little more than this, and if grief can be beguiled by a game with verbal counters, the writings of the Stoics are still the best reading for the afflicted. Let a man persuade himself that in the system of the universe he is less than the fly on the wheel, or the dust by the way; and it is not a bard matter to be reasonably convinced of that. As it is undeniable that the feelings of the fly and the experience of the blown motes of dust are things infinitely unimportant, it follows that the loss of children or of fortune is unimportant too. A reader must be consoled on Though the actual and complacent philosophy of the thing has gone out, the systems of this morality are still worth glancing at. They contain all the elements of popular consolation, which, as we shall see, may be put shortly in brief and familiar maxims. For example, it is a favorite trick with Marcus Aurelius to contemplate the vast distances of time, past and future, in the midst of which the fortunes of the individual dwindle to nothingness. Consider the men who lived before Divus Julius, and those others who were even by them forgotten, and all the myriads in every land who have not left a memorial stone. What they are you will be, neither more nor less, and your sufferings are no more to the world than theirs. This would be admirable consolation if the sufferer were the world, for then, to be sure, his annoyances would be infinitesimal. As it happens, however, he is but an individual, and of vastly more interest and importance to himself than is a whole wilderness of worlds. Toothache is of more moment to him than the crashing and jostling of planets without number, than the extinction of a dozen stars, and the spontaneous combustion of half a universe. To a philosophic eye these cosmic movements and that decay of nature's secular handiwork may seem of more interest than a petty nervous disarrangement; but the sufferer really cannot see things in the same light. In all the vastnesses of time he himself has but a few brief hours; and of these a large appreciable portion is made bitterness by pain. It is no real consolation to know that this waste is but a poignant example of the immense waste of the universe. These reflections reply to the philosophy of the imperial Stoic, and they answer as well to the humble consolation of resigned old ladies. All the eloquence of Marcus Aurelius, and his sublime remarks about the speck in infinity which is all we own, are stated briefly in the popu lar saying, "It will be all the same a hun dred years hence." No consolation is more irritating, for none is more false. The sufferer does not care one pin for the effect that his present inconvenience will have on men and things a hundred years hence. Nay, he would rather be pleased to know that his grief or anguish might so work that things should not be the same. It is no comfort to have to bear what is disagreeable because the endurance is to have no effect. The martyr on his pile is supported by the belief that, a hundred years hence, things will not be the same as they would have been had he not been tormented. On the other hand, the saw may be said to promise rest and forgetfulness. In a hundred years it will be all the same to us, and our tired nerves will ache no longer. But what we complain of is that they ache at present, and that the too short hours which we still have, before that peace which approaches more swiftly than we like, are racked and harassed. In moments of disappointment with the conduct of others, in moments when ingratitude and dishonesty make themselves felt, the sage advises us that the dishonest and ungrateful only acted according to their nature. They, too, are parts of the scheme of the universe, like the rattlesnake and the mosquito; and it is impious to complain of their doing what they were born to do. The popular rendering of this thought is the aphorism," It takes all sorts to make a world." Pangloss could not have improved on this happy optimism. Without postulating that this is the best of all possible worlds, the popular philosophy takes it as the only type of an actual system. We see that scamps and scoundrels and bores make part of it, and comfort ourselves by the thought that they too are necessary to the scheme and patchwork of things. Another consolatory idea, more popular, perhaps, than scientific, is that of the possible worse." There are few positions so bad but that of a position still more evil can be imagined. Thus, if you break your collar-bone, you are told to be contented because it might be worse you might have broken your neck. The thought is familiar to the Calvinistic fancy of the poor in Scotland. They always have what they think the very probable worst before their minds, a condition compared with which mere mortal misery is a trifle not worth grumbling about. A lady who complained that she had missed a train was astonished, and perhaps offended, at being told, "Ye micht be waur, ye micht be in Hell." This is the ordinary mental attitude of the descendants of the Cameronians, and their theology, The consolations to be derived from the contemplation of a possible worse are naturally laid great stress on by Petrarch, in that peculiarly futile manual of stoicism which the old French translator calls "Le Sage résolu contre Pune et l'autre Fortune" (Brussels: Foppens. M.D.C.L.X.) Probably no one ever gave more irritating advice than Petrarch does in this curious treatise. He approaches his friends when they are in all manner of misfortunes, and tenders the most maddening condolences. He seems to say, in a tone of extraordinary and fatuous superiority, If you were not rather a fool you would enjoy old age, the possession of a faithless wife, low birth, illegitimacy, the loss of all your money, hatred and the public envy, disgrace, bereavement, blindness, battle, murder, and sudden death. Petrarch has a good word for all these accidents. All might have been worse, or might be made worse. Take the case of a fire: "You have escaped the flames, and yet you complain because you were in peril therein. Dare you revile Fortune because she permitted you to escape? You have not been harmed by the fire of earth, but dread " (a pretty consolation truly !)" the fire of heaven. Ask Tullus Hostilius and Carus, the one king the other emperor of the Romans, of whom one was smitten by a thunderbolt in his palace, and the other in his camp near the river Tigris. You say you left your property in the flames, suppose you had left your person!" and so forth. Another standing source of comfort is the statement that you are no worse off than other people. This is the kind of condolence which Mr. Tennyson truly styles "vacant chaff: ". That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more. No one ever surely abused the formula more than Petrarch. In his essay on the conveniences and pleasures of having one's house burned down, he gives a brief list of eminent persons whose mansions have not been more fortunate than those of his victim. "The founders of the empire of Rome came out of the conflagration of Troy. Scripture tells us that Elijah was carried away in a chariot of fire, and God showed himself to Moses in a burning bush. It is not without reason that cities light bonfires as a sign of joy, and will you make your domestic bonfire matter of repining? You are vexed because your house was burned to the ground; had the temple of Ephesian Diana any better fate? Not to speak of smaller towns, Saguntum, Numantia, and Corinth have been destroyed by the flames, and Rome was all ablaze in the time of the emperor Nero. Carthage was burned once, Troy twice, and the whole world itself is one day to be destroyed by fire." These wise sayings are the reductio ad absurdum of consolation, and a burnedout friend to whom Petrarch might have addressed them would almost have been justified in breaking the poet's laurelled head. Another handful of vacant chaff is the comfort suggested by him who congratulates you that you escape the dangers of an entirely opposite state of things. You are of unknown parentage. Well, no one can tell you that your father was a better man than yourself. You are a pauper; then you cannot be guilty of haughty display. You have lost your wife; then she cannot quarrel with you. Your son is dead; he will never disgrace you. These are among the most favorite pearls of Petrarch's wisdom, and he casts them before his public with a haughty arrogance, as if they were not the commonplaces of old women contented with their neighbors' misfortunes. Indeed there is no real consolation in the world except what sympathy, time, and occupation give. If no chance of other love were ours, we should not survive the death of friends; if the dust of time did not choke up our memories, we should die of grief and pain. The search of the mind for consolation among the maxims and wise sayings of the sages is itself a kind of employment and salutary distraction, as the purchasing of mourning raiment is to women, and insensibly wins the soul from the contemplation of its own trouble. To this extent works of consolation, and even the letters of the well-meaning, are not wholly useless. If they only set the unhappy on the intellectual task of tearing up the threadbare fallacies and dissecting the old sophisms, it is something. Even Petrarch's book may have helped a man in bitter grief or cha grin to a fit of healthy anger and scorn, and when he returned from his passion he would find the old burden lighter. He has been taken out of himself at least, and his mind has touched on a hundred foreign matters, and has begun to renew its alli ance and familiarity with the world. Nothing, to be sure, of comfort he has found, or ever will find, by searching; but the activity of the quest and the change of intellectual air themselves make a break between his heart and his grief, and are the beginnings of consolation, a process not to be finished in this life. Properly speaking, all regret is inconsolable, and waits in the background to revive when other matters leave the mind time to return to itself and review the skeletons in its closet. Only the moral philosopher is ignorant of his, and hopes to please the bereaved by telling them that all must die, or the burned-out by the remark that Chicago too was burned, and that the world will be burned one day. DESULTORINESS. From Truth. Des IF idleness, according to the good old copybook proverb, is the root of all evil, the root of most idleness in this world is what is aptly called "desultoriness." ultoriness consists in hesitating among a number of occupations, any one of which would be sufficient to fill up a person's time, and employ his energies, but all of which, taken together, seem to exercise separate and conflicting attraction and repulsion over him, till he remains irresolute, on a sort of neutral ground amidst them all. Desultoriness usually begins at the breakfast-table; and you may generally distinguish the desultory from the decided guests of a house, by the length of time they linger at their breakfast after the meal is over. Women carry off the palm for desultoriness, at all hours of the day; and they display their talent for it in a conspicuous manner at this early period of the twentyfour. One knows what "poor hands" they are at breakfast, but they are invariably the last to quit the table. There they sit, with their letters before them; all of which have been read, and none of which are of the slightest importance, apparently unable to make up their minds to rise and go. It is at this period, usually, that arrangements for the day are made; and you may see the men of the house coming back, one by one, to the room they left half an hour ago, in order to ascertain the wishes of the fair creatures as to the pro-and if he is doing nothing, it is obvious to gramme for the morning and afternoon. They will be found to talk about the point, not really to discuss it, interspersing their discursive remarks with a host of irrelevant observations, but utterly incapable and, apparently, anything but anxious, to arrive at a decision upon it. They are perfectly content to keep men dangling, to share their desultoriness. At last, some one having authority, probably the host, says that the arrangements are so-and-so, | for those who like to participate in them, and away the male members of the party go again. Two or three women will still remain at the table, trying to keep each other from doing anything, and will linger there till they are practically bundled out by the servants "clearing away," though, all the time, there has been a spacious hall, a comfortable boudoir, and a handsome drawing-room awaiting them. Having wandered for an indefinite time from one to the other of these apartments, they suddenly discover that they must write some letters. Do they thereupon go and write them? Not in the least. Tables with every possible accommodation for correspondence are standing about in all direc-will not descend from the five-barred gate tions; but the proximity of paper, pens, at anybody's beck, and, least of all, will he and ink seems to divert them from their quit it, and return to it, and quit it again, original intention, and to abolish the neces- as though he did not know his own mind. sity of which they just now spoke with as A strenuously idle man may not be a very much fervor as though it were a matter of exalted personage, but he is perfectly life and death. It will become a matter of harmless, and is passing life according to life and death later on, but not till the post his own notion of how it should be passed. is just going, or has just gone, and then But desultory people are a pest, a nuisance, a special messenger will have to be and a kill-joy, no matter to which sex the despatched with a letter that ought to have may belong. been written eight hours ago, but which the fair procrastinator will then declare, with admirable sang froid, she has never been able to find a moment to write. of desultoriness. But, as a rule, the charge is brought against men who hate doing nothing, and who cannot hang about a parcel of petticoats, who have entered into a silent conspiracy to settle down to no task or occupation whatever. When a man is not smoking, he generally likes to be doing something or other, no matter what it is; himself and to the whole world that he is doing nothing. He is manifestly "at a loose end." But the most desultory of women always make believe to be doing something, and wear the solemn aspect and calm conscience of a serious purpose. If they are not doing some "work," they are pulling it to pieces, or they are showing it to somebody, or they are just going to show it to somebody. No doubt, there are men as well as women, who are desultory; but among them should, perhaps, chiefly be named those "tame cats," who are distinguishable from women only by their dress. There is a wide distinction between a desultory man, and a man who never does anything of use or profit. What has been well called strenuous idleness is something very different from desultoriness. A strenuously idle man may be reading the most worthless novel imag inable, but he goes on reading it till it is finished. He may be smoking, but nothing will move him till the cigar or the pipe be finished. Perhaps he sits on a fivebarred gate; and there he will sit, until it pleases him to do anything else. But he Sensible men, when they find themselves in the company of women infected by this particular humor, seize an early opportunity of stealing away. If they linger they are lost. They will soon catch the contagion of desultoriness, and their morning will pass without either profit or pleasure. Women very often declare that men are restless, and some men, no doubt, are so, in the sense of being restless, without a purpose, which is only a more feverish sort From The Pall Mall Gazette. LOTTERIES. THE following little paragraph has been going the rounds of the Italian papers: "At the last drawing of the lottery at Naples the Padre Mattia Salvatore, son of the lottery agent at the Piazza Dante, won a sum of 2,110.000 lire £84,400). Since the Neapolitan lottery was founded, two centuries ago, no such prize has ever been gained by one man." How tantalizingly |