"It was already near four o"clock ere I bethought me of making any preparation for my lecture. The day had been, throughout, one of those heavy and sultry ones that autumn so often brings in our climate, and I felt from this cause much oppressed and disinclined to exertion, independently of the fact that I had been greatly over-fatigued during the preceding week, some cases of a most trying and arduous nature having fallen to my lot--one of which, from the importance of the life to a young and dependent family, had engrossed much of my attention, and aroused in me the warmest anxiety for success. In this frame of mind I was entering my carriage to proceed to the lecture-room, when an unsealed note was put into my hands; I opened it hastily, and read that poor H-----, for whom I was so deeply interested, had just expired. I was greatly shocked. It was scarcely an hour since I had seen him; and from the apparent improvement since my former visit, I had ventured to speak most encouragingly, and had even made some jesting allusions to the speedy prospect of his once more resuming his place at hearth and board. Alas! how short-lived were my hopes destined to be! how awfully was my prophecy to be contradicted.
"No one but him who has himself experienced it knows anything of the deep and heartfelt interest a medical man takes in many of the cases which professionally come before him. I speak here of an interest perfectly apart from all personal regard for the patient, or his friends; indeed, the feeling I allude to has nothing in common with this, and will often be experienced as thoroughly for a perfect stranger as for one known and respected for years. To the extreme of this feeling I was ever a victim. The heavy responsibility, often suddenly and unexpectedly imposed; the struggle for success, when success was all but hopeless; the intense anxiety for the arrival of those critical periods which change the character of a malady, and divest it of some of its dangers or invest it with new ones; the despondence when that period has come only to confirm all the worst symptoms, and shut out every prospect of recovery; and, last of all, that most trying of all the trying duties of my profession, the breaking to the perhaps unconscious relatives that my art has failed, that my resources are exhausted, and, in a word, that there is no longer a hope--these things have preyed on me for weeks, for months long, and many an effort have I made in secret to combat this feeling, but without the least success, till at last I absolutely dreaded the very thought of being summoned to a dangerous and critical illness. It may then be believed how very heavily the news I had just received came upon me; the blow, too, was not even lessened by the poor consolation of my having antic.i.p.ated the result and broken the shock to the family. I was still standing with the half-opened note in my hands, when I was aroused by the coachman asking, I believe for the third time, whither he should drive. I bethought me for an instant, and said, "To the lecture-room."
"When in health, lecturing had ever been to me more of an amus.e.m.e.nt than a labour; and often, in the busy hours of professional visiting, have I longed for the time when I should come before my cla.s.s, and divesting my mind of all individual details, launch forth into the more abstract and speculative doctrines of my art. It so chanced, too, that the late hour at which I lectured, as well as the subjects I adopted, usually drew to my cla.s.s many of the advanced members of the profession, who made this a lounge after the fatigues of the morning.
"Now, however, I approached this duty with fear and trembling; the events of the morning had depressed my mind greatly, and I longed for rest and retirement. The pa.s.sing glance I threw at the lecture-room through the half-opened door showed it to be crowded to the very roof, and as I walked along the corridor I heard the name of some foreign physician of eminence, who was among my auditory. I cannot describe the agitation of mind I felt at this moment. My confusion, too, became greater as I remembered that the few notes I had drawn up were left in the pocket of the carriage, which I had just dismissed, intending to return on foot. It was already considerably past the usual hour, and I was utterly unable to decide how to proceed. I hastily drew out a portfolio that contained many scattered notes and hints for lectures, and hurriedly throwing my eye across them, discovered some singular memoranda on the subject of insanity. On these I resolved at once to dilate a little, and eke out, if possible, the materials for a lecture.
"The events of the remainder of that day are wrapped in much obscurity to my mind, yet I well remember the loud thunder of applause which greeted me on entering the lecture-room, and how, as for some moments I appeared to hesitate, they were renewed again and again, till at last, summoning resolution, I collected myself sufficiently to open my discourse. I well remember, too, the difficulty the first few sentences cost me--the doubts, the fears, the pauses, which beset me at every step as I went on--my anxiety to be clear and accurate in conveying my meaning making me recapitulate and repeat, till I felt myself, as it were, working in a circle. By degrees, however, I grew warmed as I proceeded; and the evident signs of attention my auditory exhibited gave me renewed courage, while they impressed me with the necessity to make a more than common exertion. By degrees, too, I felt the mist clearing from my brain, and that even without effort my ideas came faster, and my words fell from me with ease and rapidity. Simile and ill.u.s.tration came in abundance, and distinctions which had hitherto struck me as the most subtle and difficult of description I now drew with readiness and accuracy. Points of an abstruse and recondite nature, which under other circ.u.mstances I should not have wished to touch upon, I now approached fearlessly and boldly, and felt, in the very moment of speaking, that they became clearer and clearer to myself. Theories and hypotheses which were of old and acknowledged acceptance I glanced hurriedly at as I went on, and with a perspicuity and clearness I never before felt exposed their fallacies and unmasked their errors. I thought I was rather describing events, things actually pa.s.sing before my eyes at the instant, than relating the results of a life"s experience and reflection. My memory, usually a defective one, now carried me back to the days of my early childhood; and the whole pa.s.sages of a life lay displayed before me like a picture. If I quoted, the very words of the author rushed to my mind as palpably as though the page lay open before me. I have still some vague recollection of an endeavour I made to trace the character of the insanity in every case to some early trait of the individual in childhood, when, overcome by pa.s.sion or overbalanced by excitement, the faculties run wild into all those excesses which in after years develop eccentricities of character, and in some weaker temperaments aberrations of intellect. Anecdotes ill.u.s.trating this novel position came thronging to my mind; and events in the early years of some who subsequently died insane, and seemed to support my theory, came rushing to my memory.
"As I proceeded, I became gradually more and more excited; the very ease and rapidity with which my ideas suggested themselves increased the fervour of my imaginings, till at last I felt my words come without effort and spontaneously, while there seemed a commingling of my thoughts which left me unable to trace connection between them, though I continued to speak as fluently as before. I felt at this instant a species of indistinct terror of some unknown danger which hung over me, yet which it was impossible to avert or to avoid. I was like one who, borne on the rapid current of a fast-flowing river, sees the foam of the cataract before him, yet waits pa.s.sively for the moment of his destruction, without an effort to save. The power which maintained my mind in its balance had gradually forsaken me, and shapes and fantasies of every odd and fantastic character flitted around and about me.
The ideas and descriptions my mind had conjured up a.s.sumed a living, breathing vitality, and I felt like a necromancer waving his wand over the living and the dead. I paused; there was a dead silence in the lecture-room. A thought rushed like a meteor-flash across my brain, and bursting forth into a loud laugh of hysteric pa.s.sion, I cried, "And I, and I too am a maniac!" My cla.s.s rose like one man; a cry of horror burst through the room. I know no more.
"I was ill, very ill, and in bed. I looked around me--every object was familiar to me. Through the half-closed window-shutter there streamed one long line of red sunlight; I felt it was evening. There was no one in the room, and as I endeavoured to recall my scattered thoughts sufficiently to find out why I was thus, there came an oppressive weakness over me. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, and was roused by some one entering the room. It was my friend Dr. G------; he walked stealthily towards my bed, and looked at me fixedly for several minutes.
I watched him closely, and saw that his countenance changed as he looked on me; I felt his hand tremble slightly as he placed it on my wrist, and heard him mutter to himself in a low tone, "My G.o.d! how altered!"
I heard now a voice at the door, saying in a soft whisper, "May I come in?" The doctor made no reply, and my wife glided gently into the apartment. She looked deathly pale, and appeared to have been weeping; she leaned over me, and I felt the warm tears fall one by one upon my forehead. She took my hand within both of hers, and putting her lips to my ear, said, "Do you know _me_, William?" There was a long pause.
I tried to speak, but I could not. I endeavoured to make some sign of recognition, and stared her fully in the face; but I heard her say, in a broken voice, "He does not know _me_ now"; and then I felt it was in vain. The doctor came over, and taking my wife"s hand, endeavoured to lead her from the room. I heard her say, "Not now, not now"; and I sank back into a heavy unconsciousness.
"I awoke from what appeared to have been a long and deep sleep. I was, however, unrefreshed and unrested. My eyes were dimmed and clouded, and I in vain tried to ascertain if there was any one in the room with me.
The sensation of fever had subsided, and left behind the most depressing debility. As by degrees I came to myself, I found that the doctor was sitting beside my bed; he bent over me, and said, "Are you better, William?" Never until now had my inability to reply given me any pain or uneasiness; now, however, the abortive struggle to speak was torture. I thought and felt that my senses were gradually yielding beneath me, and a cold shuddering at my heart told me that the hand of death was upon me. The exertion now made to repel the fatal lethargy must have been great, for a cold, clammy perspiration broke profusely over my body; a rushing sound, as if of water, filled my ears; a succession of short convulsive spasms, as if given by an electric machine, shook my limbs.
I grasped the doctor"s hand firmly in mine, and starting to the sitting posture I looked wildly about me. My breathing became shorter and shorter, my grasp relaxed, my eyes swam, and I fell back heavily in the bed. The last recollection of that moment was the muttered expression of my poor friend G------, saying, "It is over at last."
"Many hours must have elapsed ere I returned to any consciousness. My first sensation was feeling the cold wind across my face, which seemed to come from an open window. My eyes were closed, and the lids felt as if pressed down by a weight. My arms lay along my side, and though the position in which I lay was constrained and unpleasant, I could make no effort to alter it; I tried to speak, but I could not.
"As I lay thus, the footsteps of many persons traversing the apartment broke upon my ear, followed by a heavy dull sound, as if some weighty body had been laid upon the floor; a harsh voice of one near me now said, as if reading, "William H------, aged thirty-eight years; I thought him much more." The words rushed through my brain, and with the rapidity of a lightning flash every circ.u.mstance of my illness came before me; and I now knew that I had died, and that for my interment were intended the awful preparations about me. Was this then death?
Could it be that though coldness wrapped the suffering clay, pa.s.sion and sense should still survive, and that while every external trace of life had fled, consciousness should still cling to the cold corpse destined for the earth? Oh, how horrible, how more than horrible, the terror of the thought! Then I thought it might be what is termed a trance; but that poor hope deserted me as I brought to mind the words of the doctor, who knew too well all the unerring signs of death to be deceived by its counterfeit, and my heart sank as they lifted me into the coffin, and I felt that my limbs had stiffened, as I knew this never took place in a trance. How shall I tell the heart-cutting anguish of that moment, as my mind looked forward to a futurity too dreadful to think upon--when memory should call up many a sunny hour of existence, the loss of friends, the triumph of exertion, and then fall back upon the dread consciousness of the ever-buried life the grave closed over; and then I thought that perhaps sense but lingered round the lifeless clay, as the spirits of the dead are said to hover around the places and homes they have loved in life ere they leave them for ever, and that soon the lamp should expire upon the shrine when the temple that sheltered it lay mouldering and in ruins. Alas! how fearful to dream of even the happiness of the past, in that cold grave where the worm only is a reveller! to think that though
"Friends, brothers, and sisters are laid side by side, Yet none have ere questioned, nor none have replied;"
yet that all felt in their cold and mouldering hearts the loves and affections of life, budding and blossoming as though the stem was not rotting to corruption that bore them. I brought to mind the awful punishment of the despot who chained the living to the dead man, and thought it mercy when compared to this.
"How long I lay thus I know not, but the dreary silence of the chamber was again broken, and I found that some of my dearest friends were come to take a farewell look at me ere the coffin was closed upon me for ever. Again the horror of my state struck me with all its forcible reality, and like a meteor there shot through my heart the bitterness of years of misery condensed into the s.p.a.ce of a minute. And then I remembered how gradual is death, and how by degrees it creeps over every portion of the frame, like the track of the destroyer, blighting as it goes, and said to my heart, All may yet be still within me, and the mind as lifeless as the body it dwelt in. Yet these feelings partook of life in all their strength and vigour; there was the will to move, to speak, to see, to live, and yet all was torpid and inactive, as though it had never lived. Was it that the nerves, from some depressing cause, had ceased to transmit the influence of the brain? Had these winged messengers of the mind refused their office? And then I recalled the almost miraculous efficacy of the will, exerted under circ.u.mstances of great exigency, and with a concentration of power that some men only are capable of. I had heard of the Indian father who suckled his child at his own bosom, when he had laid its mother in her grave; yet was it not the will had wrought this miracle? I myself have seen the paralytic limb awake to life and motion by the powerful application of the mind stimulating the nervous channels of communication, and awakening the dormant powers of vitality to their exercise. I knew of one whose heart beat fast or slow as he did will it. Yes, thought I, in a transport, the will to live is the power to live; and only when this faculty has yielded with bodily strength need death be the conqueror over us.
"The thought of reanimation was ecstatic, but I dared not dwell upon it; the moments pa.s.sed rapidly on, and even now the last preparations were about to be made, ere they committed my body to the grave. How was the effort to be made? If the will did indeed possess the power I trusted in, how was it to be applied? I had often wished to speak or move during my illness, yet was unable to do either. I then remembered that in those cases where the will had worked its wonders, the powers of the mind had entirely centred themselves in the one heart-filling desire to accomplish a certain object, as the athlete in the games strains every muscle to lift some ponderous weight. Thus I knew that if the heart could be so subjected to the principle of volition, as that, yielding to its impulse, it would again transmit the blood along its accustomed channels, and that then the lungs should be brought to act upon the blood by the same agency, the other functions of the body would be more readily restored by the sympathy with these great ones. Besides, I trusted that so long as the powers of the mind existed in the vigour I felt them in, that much of what might be called latent vitality existed in the body. Then I set myself to think upon those nerves which preside over the action of the heart--their origin, their course, their distribution, their relation, their sympathies; I traced them as they arose in the brain, and tracked them till they were lost in millions of tender threads upon the muscle of the heart. I thought, too, upon the lungs as they lay flaccid and collapsed within my chest, the life-blood stagnant in their vessels, and tried to possess my mind with the relation of these two parts to the utter exclusion of every other endeavoured then to transmit along the nerves the impulse of that faculty my whole hopes rested on. Alas! it was in vain. I tried to heave my chest and breathe, but could not; my heart sank within me, and all my former terrors came thickening around me, more dreadful by far as the stir and bustle in the room indicated they were about to close the coffin.
"At this moment my dear friend B------ entered the room.
He had come many miles to see me once more, and they made way for him to approach me as I lay. He placed his warm hand upon my breast, and oh the throb it sent through my heart! Again, but almost unconsciously to myself, the impulse rushed along my nerves; a bursting sensation seized my chest, a tingling ran through my frame, a crashing, jarring sensation, as if the tense nervous cords were vibrating to some sudden and severe shock, took hold on me; and then, after one violent convulsive throe which brought the blood from my mouth and eyes, my heart swelled, at first slowly, then faster, and the nerves reverberated, clank! clank! responsive to the stroke. At the same time the chest expanded, the muscles strained like the cordage of a ship in a heavy sea, and I breathed once more.
"While thus the faint impulse to returning life was given, the dread thought flashed on me that it might not be real, and that to my own imagination alone were referable the phenomena I experienced. At the same instant the gloomy doubt crossed my mind it was dispelled; for I heard a cry of horror through the room, and the words, "He is alive! he still lives!" from a number of voices around me. The noise and confusion increased.
I heard them say, "Carry out B------ before he sees him again; he has fainted!" Directions and exclamations of wonder and dread followed one upon another; and I can but call to mind the lifting me from the coffin, and the feeling of returning warmth I experienced as I was placed before a fire, and supported by the arms of my friend.
"I will only add that after some weeks of painful debility I was again restored to health, having tasted the full bitterness of death."
CHAPTER XXIX. THE STRANGE GUEST
The Eil Wagen, into whose bowels I had committed myself on leaving Frankfort, rolled along for twenty-four hours before I could come to any determination as to whither I should go; for so is it that perfect liberty is sometimes rather an inconvenience, and a little despotism is now and then no bad thing; and at this moment I could have given a ten-gulden piece to any one who should have named my road, and settled my destination.
"Where are we?" said I, at length, as we straggled, nine horses and all, into a great vaulted _porte cochere_.
"At the "Koenig von Preussen," mein Herr," said a yellow-haired waiter, who flourished a napkin about him in truly professional style.
"Ah, very true; but in what town, city, or village, and in whose kingdom?"
"Ach, du lieber Gott!" exclaimed he, with his eyes opened to their fullest extent. "Where would you be but in the city of Hesse-Ca.s.sel, in the Grand-Duchy of Seiner Koniglichen Hoheit-----"
"Enough, more than enough! Let me have supper."
The Speisesaal was crowded with travellers and townspeople as I entered; but the room was of great size, and a goodly table, amply provided, occupied the middle of it Taking my place at this, I went ahead through the sliced shoe-leather, yclept beef, the Kalbs-braten and the Gurken-salat, and all the other indigestible abominations of that light meal a German takes before he lies down at night The company were, with the exception of a few military men, of that nondescript cla.s.s every German town abounds with--a large-headed, long-haired, plodding-looking generation, with huge side-pockets in their trousers, from one of which a cherry-wood pipe-stick is sure to project; civil, obliging, good sort of people they are, but by no means remarkable for intelligence or agree-ability. But then, what mind could emerge from beneath twelve solid inches of beetroot and bouilli, and what brain could bear immersion in Bavarian beer?
One never can understand fully how atrocious the tyranny of Napoleon must have been in Germany, until he has visited that country and seen something of its inhabitants; then only can one compute what must the hurricane have been that convulsed the waters of such a landlocked bay. Never was there a people so little disposed to compete with their rulers, never was obedience more thoroughly an instinct. The whole philosophy of the German"s mind teaches him to look within rather than without; his own resources are more his object in life than the enjoyment of state privileges, and to his peaceful temper endurance is a pleasanter remedy than resistance. Almost a Turk in his love of tranquillity, he has no sympathy with revolutions or public disturbances of any kind, and the provocation must indeed be great when he arouses himself to resist it. That when he is thus called on he can act with energy and vigour, the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 abundantly testify.
Twice the French armies had to experience the heavy retribution on unjust invasion. Both Spain and Germany repaid the injuries they had endured, but with a characteristic difference of spirit. In the one case it was the desultory attacks of savage guerillas, animated by the love of plunder as much as by patriotism; in the other, the rising of a great people to defend their homes and altars, presented the glorious spectacle of a nation going forth to the fight. The wild notes of the Basque bugle rang not out with such soul-stirring effects as the beautiful songs of Korner, heard beside the watch-fire or at the peasant"s hearth. The conduct of their own princes might have debased the national spirit of any other people; but the German"s attachment to Fatherland is not a thing of courtly rule nor conventional agreement.
He loves the land and the literature of his fathers; he is proud of the good faith and honesty which are the acknowledged traits of Saxon character; he holds to the "sittliche Leben," the orderly domestic habits of his country; and as he wages not a war of aggression on others, he resists the spoliation of an enemy on the fields of his native country.
When the French revolution fire broke out, the students were amongst its most ardent admirers; the destruction of the Bastile was celebrated among the secret festivals of the Burschenschaft; and although the fever was a brief one, and never extended among the more thinking portion of the nation, to that same enthusiasm for liberty was owing the great burst of national energy which in 1813 convulsed the land from the Baltic to the Tyrol, and made Leipsic the compensation for Jena.
With all his grandeur of intellect, Napoleon never understood the national character--perhaps he may have despised it. One of his most fatal errors, undoubtedly, was the little importance he attached to the traits which distinguish one country from another, and the seeming indifference with which he propounded notions of government diametrically opposed to all the traditions and prejudices of those for whom they were intended. The great desire for centralisation; the ambition to make France the heart of Europe, through whose impulse the life-blood should circulate over the entire Continent; to merge all distinctions of race and origin, and make Frenchmen of one quarter of the globe--was a stupendous idea, and if nations were enrolled in armies, might not be impossible. The effort to effect it, however, cost him the greatest throne of Christendom.
The French rule in Spain, in Italy, and in Holland, so far from conciliating the good-will and affection of the people, has sown the seeds of that hatred to France in each of these countries that a century will not eradicate; while no greater evidence of Napoleon"s ignorance of national character need be adduced than in the expectations he indulged in the event of his landing an army in England. His calculation on support from any part of the British people--no matter how opposed to the ministry of the day, or how extreme in their wishes for extended liberties--was the most chimerical thought that ever entered the brain of man. Very little knowledge of our country might have taught him that the differences of party spirit never survive the mere threat of foreign invasion; that however Englishmen may oppose one another, they reserve a very different spirit of resistance for the stranger who should attack their common country; and that party, however it may array men in opposite ranks, is itself but the evidence of patriotism, seeking different paths for its development.
It was at the close of a little reverie to this purpose that I found myself sitting with one other guest at the long table of the Speisesaal; the rest had dropped off one by one, leaving him in the calm enjoyment of his meerschaum and his cup of black coffee. There was something striking in the air and appearance of this man, and I could not help regarding him closely; he was about fifty years of age, but with a carriage as erect and a step as firm as any man of twenty. A large white moustache met his whiskers of the same colour, and hung in heavy curl over his upper lip; his forehead was high and narrow, and his eyes, deeply set, were of a greenish hue, and shaded by large eyebrows that met when he frowned. His dress was a black frock, braided in Prussian taste and decorated by a single cordon, which hung not over the breast, but on an empty sleeve of his coat, for I now perceived that he had lost his right arm near the shoulder. That he was a soldier and had seen service, the most careless observer could have detected; his very look and bearing bespoke the _militaire_. He never spoke to any one during supper, and from that circ.u.mstance, as well as his dissimilarity to the others, I judged him to be a traveller. There are times when one is more than usually disposed to let Fancy take the bit in her mouth and run off with them; and so I suffered myself to weave a story, or rather a dozen stories, for my companion, and did not perceive that while I was inventing a history for him he had most ungratefully decamped, leaving me in a cloud of tobacco-smoke and difficult conjectures.
When I descended to the Saal the next morning I found him there before me; he was seated at breakfast before one of the windows, which commanded a view over the platz and the distant mountains. And here let me ask, Have you ever been in Hesse-Ca.s.sel? The chances are, not. It is the highroad--nowhere. You neither pa.s.s it going to Berlin or Dresden.
There is no wonder of scenery or art to attract strangers to it; and yet if accident should bring you thither, and plant you in the "Konig von Preussen," with no pressing necessity urging you onward, there are many less pleasant things you could do than spend a week there. The hotel stands on one side of a great platz, or square, at either side of which the theatre and a museum form the other two wings; the fourth being left free of building, is occupied by a ma.s.sive railing of most laboured tracery, which opens to a wide gate in a broad flight of steps, descending about seventy feet into a s.p.a.cious park. The tall elms and beech-trees can be seen waving their tops over the grille above, and seeming, from the platz, like young timber; beyond, and many miles away, can be seen the bold chain of the Taunus Mountains stretching to the clouds, forming altogether a view which for extent and splendour I know no city that can present the equal. I could scarce restrain my admiration; and as I stood actually riveted to the spot, I was totally inattentive to the second summons of the waiter, informing me that my breakfast awaited me in another part of the room.
"What, yonder?" said I, in some disappointment at being so far removed from all chance of the prospect.
"Perhaps you would join me here, sir," said the officer, rising, and with a most affable air saluting me.
"If not an intrusion----"
"By no means," said he. "I am a pa.s.sionate admirer of that view myself.
I have known it many years, and I always feel happy when a stranger partic.i.p.ates in my enjoyment of it."
I confess I was no less gratified by the opportunity thus presented of forming an acquaintance with the officer himself than with the scenery, and I took my seat with much pleasure. As we chatted away about the town and the surrounding country, he half expressed a curiosity at my taking a route so little travelled by my countrymen, and seemed much amused by my confession that the matter was purely accidental, and that frequently I left the destination of my ramble to the halting-place of the diligence. As English eccentricity can, in a foreigner"s estimation, carry any amount of absurdity, he did not set me down for a madman--which, had I been. French or Italian, he most certainly would have done--and only smiled slightly at my efforts to defend a procedure in his eyes so ludicrous.
"You confess," said I, at last, somewhat nettled by the indifference with which he heard my most sapient arguments--" you confess on what mere casualties every event of life turns, what straws decide the whole destiny of a man, and what mere trivial circ.u.mstances influence the fate of whole nations, and how in our wisest and most matured plans some unexpected contingency is ever arising to disconcert and disarrange us; why, then, not go a step farther--leave more to fate, and reserve all our efforts to behave well and sensibly, wherever we may be placed, in whatever situations thrown? As we shall then have fewer disappointments, we shall also enjoy a more equable frame of mind, to combat with the world"s chances."
"True, if a man were to lead a life of idleness, such a wayward course might possibly suffice him as well as any other; but, bethink you, it is not thus men have wrought great deeds, and won high names for themselves. It is not by fickleness and caprice, by indolent yielding to the accident of the hour, that reputations have been acquired----"
"You speak," said I, interrupting him at this place--"you speak as if humble men like myself were to occupy their place in history, and not lie down in the dust of the churchyard undistinguishable and forgotten."
"When they cease to act otherwise than to deserve commemoration, rely upon it their course is a false one. Our conscience may be--indeed often is--a bribed judge; and it is only by representing to ourselves how our modes of acting and thinking would tell upon the minds of others, reading of but not knowing us, that we arrive at that certain rule of right so difficult in many worldly trials.
"And do you think a man becomes happier by this?"