CHAPTER CXXIII.

SOME ALLUSION TO, AND SOME USE OF THE FIGURE OF SPEECH CALLED PARENTHESIS.

J'ecrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre, et non pas peut-étre dans une confusion sans dessein; c'est le veritable ordre, et qui marquera toujours mon objet par le desordre même.

PASCAL.             

Gentle reader,—and if gentle, good reader,—and if good, patient reader; for if not gentle, then not good; and if not good, then not gentle; and neither good nor gentle, if not patient;—dear reader, who art happily for thyself all three, it is, I know, not less with thy good will than with my own, that I proceed with this part of my subject. Quelle matiére que je traite avec vous, c'est toujours un plaisir pour moi. 1 You will say to me “amuse yourself (and me) in your own way; ride your own round-about, so you do but come to the right point at last.”2 To that point you are well assured that all my round-abouts tend; and my care must be to eschew the error of that author, engineer, statesman, or adventurer of any kind,

Which of a weak and niggardly projection,
Doth like a miser spoil his coat with scanting
A little cloth.3

1 MADAME DE MAINTENON.

2 CUMBERLAND.

3 SHAKESPEAR.

Lady Hester Stanhope had an English Physician with her in Syria who, if he be living, can bear testimony that her Ladyship did not commit this fault, when she superintended the cutting out of his scarlet galligaskins. Neither will I commit it.

You indeed, dear reader, would express no displeasure if, instead of proceeding in the straight line of my purpose, I should sometimes find it expedient to retrograde; or, borrowing a word of barbarous Latin coined in the musician's mint, cancrizare, which may be rendered to crab-grade. For as Roger North says, when, at the commencement of his incomparable account of his brother the Lord Keeper's life, he confesses that it would be hard to lead a thread in good order of time through it—“there are many and various incidents to be remembered, which will interfere, and make it necessary to step back sometimes, and then again forwards;—and in this manner I hope to evacuate my mind of every matter and thing I know and can remember materially concerning him. And if some things are set down which many may think too trivial, let it be considered that the smallest incidents are often as useful to be known, though not so diverting, as the greater, and profit must always share with entertainment.”

I am not however side-ling toward my object crab-like; still less am I starting back from it, like a lobster, whose spring upon any alarm is stern-foremost: nor am I going I know not where, like the three Princes Zoile, Bariandel and Lyriamandre, when, having taken leave of Olivier King of England, to go in search of Rosicler, they took ship at London sans dessein d'aller plustôt en un lieu qu'en un autre. Nor like the more famous Prince Don Florisel and Don Falanges, when having gone on board a small vessel, y mandada por ellos en lo alto de la mar meter, hazen con los marineros que no hagan otro camino mas de aquel que la nao movido por la fuerza de los ayres, quisiesse hazer, queriendo yr a buscar con la aventura lo que a ella hallar se permitia segun la poca certinidad que para la demanda podian llevar.

I should say falsely were I to say with Petrarch,

Vommene in guiza d'orbo senza luce,
Che non sa ove si vada, e pur si parte.

But I may say with the Doctor's name-sake Daniel de Bosola in Webster's tragedy,4 “I look no higher than I can reach: they are the gods that must ride on winged horses. A lawyer's mule, of a slow pace, will both suit my disposition and business: for mark me, when a man's mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both tire.”—Moreover

        ———This I hold
A secret worth its weight in gold
To those who write as I write now,
Not to mind where they go, or how,
Thro' ditch, thro' bog, o'er hedge and stile,
Make it but worth the reader's while,
And keep a passage fair and plain
Always to bring him back again.5

4 DUCHESS OF MALFI.

5 CHURCHILL.

“You may run from major to minor,” says Mrs. Bray in one of her letters to Dr. Southey, “and through a thousand changes, so long as you fall into the subject at last, and bring back the ear to the right key at the close.”

Where we are at this present reading, the attentive reader cannot but know; and if the careless one has lost himself, it is his fault, not mine. We are in the parenthesis between the Doctor's courtship and his marriage. Life has been called a parenthesis between our birth and death; the history of the human race is but a parenthesis between two cataclasms of the globe which it inhabits; time itself only a parenthesis in eternity. The interval here, as might be expected after so summary a wooing, was not long; no settlements being required, and little preparation. But it is not equally necessary for me to fix the chapter, as it was for them to fix the day.

Montaigne tells us that he liked better to forge his mind than to furnish it. I have a great liking for old Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, which the well-read reader may have perceived;—who indeed has ever made his acquaintance without liking him? I have moreover some sympathies with him; but upon this point we differ. It is more agreeable to me to furnish than to forge,—intellectually speaking, to lay in than to lay out;—to eat than to digest. There is however (following the last similitude) an intermediate process enjoyed by the flocks and herds, but denied to Aldermen; that process affords so apt a metaphor for an operation of the mind, that the word denoting it has passed into common parlance in its metaphorical acceptation, and its original meaning is not always known to those who use it.

It is a pleasure to see the quiet full contentment which is manifested both in the posture and look of animals when they are chewing the cud. The nearest approach which humanity makes toward a similar state of feeling, seems to be in smoking, when the smoker has any intellectual cud on which to chew. But ruminating is no wholesome habit for man, who, if he be good for any thing, is born as surely to action as to trouble;—it is akin to the habit of indulging in day dreams, which is to be eschewed by every one who tenders his or her own welfare.

There is however a time for every thing. And though neither the Doctor nor Deborah had thought of each other in the relation of husband and wife, before the proposal was made, and the silent assent given, they could not chuse but ruminate upon the future as well as the past, during the parenthesis that ensued. And though both parties deliberately approved of what had been suddenly determined, the parenthesis was an uneasy time for both.

The commentators tell us that readers have found some difficulty in understanding what was Shakespear's meaning when he made Macbeth say

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

Johnson says he never found them agreeing upon it. Most persons however are agreed in thinking, that when anything disagreeable must be done, the sooner it is done the better. Who but a child ever holds a dose of physic in his hand,—rhubarb to wit,—or Epsom salts—delaying as long as possible to take the nauseous draught? Who ever, when he is ready for the plunge, stands lingering upon the side of the river, or the brink of the cold bath?—Who that has entered a shower-bath and closed the door, ever hesitates for a moment to pull the string? It was upon a false notion of humanity that the House of Commons proceeded, when it prolonged the interval between the sentence of a murderer and the execution. The merciful course in all cases would be, that execution should follow upon the sentence with the least possible delay.

“Heaven help the man, says a goodnatured and comely reader who has a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand,—Heaven help the man! Does he compare marriage to hanging, to a dose of physic, and to a plunge over head and ears in cold water?” No madam, not he: he makes no such unseemly comparisons. He only means to say that when any great change is about to take place in our circumstances and way of life,—any thing that is looked on to with anxiety and restlessness, any thing that occasions a yeasty sensation about the pericardium,—every one who is in that state wishes that the stage of fermentation were past,—that the transition were over.

I have said that little preparation was needed for a marriage which gave little employment to the upholsterers, less to the dress-makers, and none to the lawyers. Yet there was something to be done. Some part of the furniture was to be furbished, some to be renewed, and some to be added. The house required papering and painting, and would not be comfortably habitable while the smell of the paint overpowered or mingled with the odour of the shop. Here then was a cause of unavoidable delay; and time which is necessarily employed, may be said to be well employed, though it may not be upon the business which we have most at heart. If there be an impatient reader, that is to say an unreasonable one, who complains that instead of passing rapidly over this interval or parenthesis (as aforesaid), I proceed in such a manner with the relation, that many of my chapters are as parenthetical as the Euterpe of Herodotus, which whole book as the present Bishop Butler used to say, is one long parenthesis, and the longest that ever was written;—if, I say, there be so censorious a reader, I shall neither contradict him, nor defend myself, nor yet plead guilty to the fault of which he accuses me. But I will tell him what passed on a certain occasion, between Doctor, afterwards Archbishop, Sharp, when he was Rector of St. Giles's, and the Lord Chancellor Jefferies.

In the year 1686 Dr. Sharp preached a sermon wherein he drew some conclusions against the Church of Rome, to show the vanity of her pretensions in engrossing the name of Catholic to herself. The sermon was complained of to James II, and the Lord Chancellor Jefferies was directed to send for the preacher, and acquaint him with the King's displeasure. Dr. Sharp accordingly waited upon his Lordship with the notes of his sermon, and read it over to him. “Whether,” says his son, “the Doctor did this for his own justification, and to satisfy his Lordship that he had been misrepresented, or whether my Lord ordered him to bring his sermon and repeat it before him, is not certain; but the latter seems most probable: because Dr. Sharp afterwards understood that his Lordship's design in sending for him and discoursing with him, was, that he might tell the King that he had reprimanded the Doctor, and that he was sorry for having given occasion of offence to his Majesty, hoping by this means to release Dr. Sharp from any further trouble. However it was, his Lordship took upon him, while the Doctor was reading over his sermon, to chide him for several passages which the Doctor thought gave no occasion for chiding; and he desired his Lordship when he objected to these less obnoxious passages, to be patient, for there was a great deal worse yet to come.”

The sermon nevertheless was a good sermon, as temperate as it was properly timed, and the circumstance was as important in English history, as the anecdote is pertinent in this place. For that sermon gave rise to the Ecclesiastical Commission, which, in its consequences, produced, within two years, the Revolution.