Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/102

 but would still, with the relish of Lazarillo de Tormes, stick to his own "staff of life," and quaff his water, jovially repeating after Armstrong, "Nought like the simple element dilutes."

Now, most excellent reader, are you in something of a condition to understand the man's account of his own failings—his "improvidence" and his "timidity." He had no grasp of things material; but exaggerating his own defects, he so hesitated at any arithmetical effort, that he could scarcely count. He has been seen unable to find 3s. 6d. in a drawer full of half-crowns and shillings, since he could not see the "sixpence." Hence his stewardship was all performed by others. He laboured enormously,—making fresh work out of everything he did; for he would not mention anything, however parenthetically, without "verifying" it. Hence it is true that he had scarcely time for stewardship, unless he had neglected his work and wages as a master-workman. He saw nothing until it had presented itself to him in a sort of literary, theoretical aspect, and hence endowed his friends, all round, with fictitious characters founded on fact. One was the thrifty housewife, another the steady man of business, a third the poetic enthusiast—and so on. And he acted on these estimates, until sometimes he found out his mistake, and confessed that he "had been deceived." The discovery was sometimes as imaginary as the original estimate, and friends, whose sterling qualities he could not overrate, have seen him, for the discovery of his mistake in regard to some fancied grace, avert his eye in cold "disappointment." He made the same supposititious discoveries and estimates with himself. His mother had the jaundice before he was born; he had unquestionably a tendency to bilious affections; in the Greek poet's account of Hercules and the Serpents, the more timid, because mortal, child, who is aghast at the horrid visitors sent by the relentless Juno, is called, as Leigh Hunt translated the oft-repeated quotation, "the extremely bilious Iphiclus;" and being bilious, Leigh Hunt set himself down as "timid." He had probably felt his heart beat at the approach of danger, been startled by a sudden noise, or hesitated "to snuff a candle with his fingers," which Charles the Fifth said would make any man know fear. Yet he had braved persecution in the refusal to fag at school; was an undaunted though not skilful rider; a swimmer not unacquainted with drowning risks; undismayed, except for others, when passing the roaring torrent at the broad ford,—when braving ship-*wreck in the British Channel, or the thunder-hurricane in the Mediterranean; he instantly confronted the rustic boors who challenged him on the Thames, or in the Apennines, and stood unmoved to face the sentence of a criminal court, though the sentence was to be the punishment he most dreaded—the prison.

Such was the character of the man who came from school to be the critic, first of the drama, then of literature and politics; and then to be a workman in the schools where he had criticized. He brought to his labours great powers, often left latent, and used only in their superficial action; a defective perception of the tangible part of the subject; an