CHAPTER XX.
Maria. Here's the brave old man's love,
Bianca. That loves the young man.
The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed.
"No, my dear Clarence, you have placed confidence in me, and it is now
my duty to return it; you have told me your history and origin, and I
will inform you of mine, but not yet. At present we will talk of you.
You have conferred upon me what our universal love of life makes us
regard as the greatest of human obligations; and though I can bear a
large burden of gratitude, yet I must throw off an atom or two in
using my little power in your behalf. Nor is this all: your history
has also given you another tie upon my heart, and, in granting you a
legitimate title to my good offices, removes any scruple you might
otherwise have had in accepting them."
"I have just received this letter from Lord ----, the minister for
foreign affairs: you will see that he has appointed you to the office
of attache at ----. You will also oblige me by looking over this
other letter at your earliest convenience; the trifling sum which it
contains will be repeated every quarter; it will do very well for an
attache: when you are an ambassador, why, we must equip you by a
mortgage on Scarsdale; and now, my dear Clarence, tell me all about
the Copperases."
I need not say who was the speaker of the above sentences: sentences
apparently of a very agreeable nature; nevertheless, Clarence seemed
to think otherwise, for the tears gushed into his eyes, and he was
unable for several moments to reply.
"Come, my young friend," said Talbot, kindly; "I have no near
relations among whom I can choose a son I like better than you, nor
you any at present from whom you might select a more desirable father:
consequently, you must let me look upon you as my own flesh and blood;
and, as I intend to be a very strict and peremptory father, I expect
the most silent and scrupulous obedience to my commands. My first
parental order to you is to put up those papers, and to say nothing
more about them; for I have a great deal to talk to you about upon
other subjects."
And by these and similar kind-hearted and delicate remonstrances, the
old man gained his point. From that moment Clarence looked upon him
with the grateful and venerating love of a son; and I question very
much, if Talbot had really been the father of our hero, whether he
would have liked so handsome a successor half so well.
The day after this arrangement, Clarence paid his debt to the
Copperases and removed to Talbot's house. With this event commenced a
new era in his existence: he was no longer an outcast and a wanderer;
out of alien ties he had wrought the link of a close and even paternal
friendship; life, brilliant in its prospects and elevated in its
ascent, opened flatteringly before him; and the fortune and courage
which had so well provided for the present were the best omens and
auguries for the future.
One evening, when the opening autumn had made its approaches felt, and
Linden and his new parent were seated alone by a blazing fire, and had
come to a full pause in their conversation, Talbot, shading his face
with the friendly pages of the "Whitehall Evening Paper," as if to
protect it from the heat, said,--
"I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
opportunity, a brief sketch of my life. This confidence is due to you
in return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose
the present time to favour you with my confessions."
Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
commenced,--
THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.
I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and
my father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my
person, and my mother said that my good looks came from her. So the
honest pair saw in their eldest son the union of their own
attractions, and thought they were making much of themselves when they
lavished their caresses upon me. They had another son, poor Arthur,--
I think I see him now! He was a shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very
plain personal appearance. My father and mother were vain, showy,
ambitious people of the world, and they were as ashamed of my brother
as they were proud of myself. However, he afterwards entered the army
and distinguished himself highly. He died in battle, leaving an only
daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman of high rank. Her
subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.
Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound
belief in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to
impress every one who came in my way with the same idea. There is a
sentence in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a
painful conviction of its truth: "A restlessness in men's minds to be
something they are not, and to have something they have not, is the
root of all immorality." [And of all good.--AUTHOR.] At school, I
was confessedly the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued
equally as much, I was the best cricketer of the best eleven. Here,
then, you will say my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing! There was
a boy who shared my room, and was next me in the school; we were,
therefore, always thrown together. He was a great stupid, lubberly
cub, equally ridiculed by the masters and disliked by the boys. Will
you believe that this individual was the express and almost sole
object of my envy? He was more than my rival, he was my superior; and
I hated him with all the unleavened bitterness of my soul.
I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing. He could balance
a stick, nay, a cricket-bat, a poker, upon his chin, and I could not;
you laugh, and so can I now, but it was no subject of laughter to me
then. This circumstance, trifling as it may appear to you, poisoned
my enjoyment. The boy saw my envy, for I could not conceal it; and as
all fools are malicious, and most fools ostentatious, he took a
particular pride and pleasure in displaying his dexterity and showing
off my discontent. You can form no idea of the extent to which this
petty insolence vexed and disquieted me. Even in my sleep, the clumsy
and grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a
spectre: my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-
sticks, sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers
dancing a hornpipe upon the tip of a nose. I assure you that I have
spent hours in secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade,
and my face--see how one vanity quarrels with another--was little
better than a mass of bruises and discolorations.
I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to
leave the school. I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father,
in granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in
my learning to go to any other academic establishment than the
University. The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually
the custom, a breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my
tormentor's sharing my room obliged me to invite him among the rest.
However, I was in high spirits, and being a universal favourite with
my schoolfellows, I succeeded in what was always to me an object of
social ambition, and set the table in a roar; yet, when our festival
was nearly expired, and I began to allude more particularly to my
approaching departure, my vanity was far more gratified, for my
feelings were far more touched, by observing the regret and receiving
the good wishes of all my companions. I still recall that hour as one
of the proudest and happiest of my life; but it had its immediate
reverse. My evil demon put it into my tormentor's head to give me one
last parting pang of jealousy. A large umbrella happened accidentally
to be in my room; Crompton--such was my schoolfellow's name--saw and
seized it. "Look here, Talbot," said he, with his taunting and
hideous sneer, "you can't do this;" and placing the point of the
umbrella upon his forehead, just above the eyebrow, he performed
various antics round the room.
At that moment I was standing by the fireplace, and conversing with
two boys upon whom, above all others, I wished to leave a favourable
impression. My foolish soreness on this one subject had been often
remarked; and, as I turned in abrupt and awkward discomposure from the
exhibition, I observed my two schoolfellows smile and exchange looks.
I am not naturally passionate, and even at that age I had in ordinary
cases great self-command; but this observation, and the cause which
led to it, threw me off my guard. Whenever we are utterly under the
command of one feeling, we cannot be said to have our reason: at that
instant I literally believe I was beside myself. What! in the very
flush of the last triumph that that scene would ever afford me; amidst
the last regrets of my early friends, to whom I fondly hoped to
bequeath a long and brilliant remembrance, to be thus bearded by a
contemptible rival, and triumphed over by a pitiful yet insulting
superiority; to close my condolences with laughter; to have the final
solemnity of my career thus terminating in mockery; and ridicule
substituted as an ultimate reminiscence in the place of an admiring
regret; all this, too, to be effected by one so long hated, one whom I
was the only being forbidden the comparative happiness of despising?
I could not brook it; the insult, the insulter, were too revolting.
As the unhappy buffoon approached me, thrusting his distorted face
towards mine, I seized and pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a
violent hand. The sharp point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave
it impetus and weight; it penetrated his eye, and--spare me, spare me
the rest. [This instance of vanity, and indeed the whole of Talbot's
history, is literally from facts.]
The old man bent down, and paused for a few moments before he resumed.
Crompton lost his eye, but my punishment was as severe as his. People
who are very vain are usually equally susceptible, and they who feel
one thing acutely will so feel another. For years, ay, for many years
afterwards, the recollection of my folly goaded me with the bitterest
and most unceasing remorse. Had I committed murder, my conscience
could scarce have afflicted me more severely. I did not regain my
self-esteem till I had somewhat repaired the injury I had done. Long
after that time Crompton was in prison, in great and overwhelming
distress. I impoverished myself to release him; I sustained him and
his family till fortune rendered my assistance no longer necessary;
and no triumphs were ever more sweet to me than the sacrifice I was
forced to submit to, in order to restore him to prosperity.
It is natural to hope that this accident had at least the effect of
curing me of my fault; but it requires philosophy in yourself, or your
advisers, to render remorse of future avail. How could I amend my
fault, when I was not even aware of it? Smarting under the effects, I
investigated not the cause, and I attributed to irascibility and
vindictiveness what had a deeper and more dangerous origin.
At college, in spite of all my advantages of birth, fortune, health,
and intellectual acquirements, I had many things besides the one enemy
of remorse to corrode my tranquillity of mind. I was sure to find
some one to excel me in something, and this was enough to embitter my
peace. Our living Goldsmith is my favourite poet, and I perhaps
insensibly venerate the genius the more because I find something
congenial in the infirmities of the man. I can fully credit the
anecdotes recorded of him. I, too, could once have been jealous of a
puppet handling a spontoon; I, too, could once have been miserable if
two ladies at the theatre were more the objects of attention than
myself! You, Clarence, will not despise me for this confession; those
who knew me less would. Fools! there is no man so great as not to
have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our
virtues are the dupes, and often only the playthings, of our follies!
smile, but it is mournfully, in looking back to that day. Though
rich, high-born, and good-looking, I possessed not one of these three
qualities in that eminence which could alone satisfy my love of
superiority and desire of effect. I knew this somewhat humiliating
truth, for, though vain, I was not conceited. Vanity, indeed, is the
very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to
the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its
opinion of itself.
I knew this truth, and as Pope, if he could not be the greatest of
poets, resolved to be the most correct, so I strove, since I could not
be the handsomest, the wealthiest, and the noblest of my
contemporaries, to excel them, at least, in the grace and
consummateness of manner; and in this after incredible pains, after
diligent apprenticeship in the world and intense study in the closet,
I at last flattered myself that I had succeeded. Of all success,
while we are yet in the flush of youth and its capacities of
enjoyment, I can imagine none more intoxicating or gratifying than the
success of society, and I had certainly some years of its triumph and
eclat. I was courted, followed, flattered, and sought by the most
envied and fastidious circles in England and even in Paris; for
society, so indifferent to those who disdain it, overwhelms with its
gratitude--profuse though brief--those who devote themselves to its
amusement. The victim to sameness and ennui, it offers, like the
pallid and luxurious Roman, a reward for a new pleasure: and as long
as our industry or talent can afford the pleasure, the reward is ours.
At that time, then, I reaped the full harvest of my exertions: the
disappointment and vexation were of later date.
I now come to the great era of my life,--Love. Among my acquaintance
was Lady Mary Walden, a widow of high birth, and noble though not
powerful connections. She lived about twenty miles from London in a
beautiful retreat; and, though not rich, her jointure, rendered ample
by economy, enabled her to indulge her love of society. Her house was
always as full as its size would permit, and I was among the most
welcome of its visitors. She had an only daughter: even now, through
the dim mists of years, that beautiful and fairy form rises still and
shining before me, undimmed by sorrow, unfaded by time. Caroline
Walden was the object of general admiration, and her mother, who
attributed the avidity with which her invitations were accepted by all
the wits and fine gentlemen of the day to the charms of her own
conversation, little suspected the face and wit of her daughter to be
the magnet of attraction. I had no idea at that time of marriage,
still less could I have entertained such a notion, unless the step had
greatly exalted my rank and prospects.
The poor and powerless Caroline Walden was therefore the last person
for whom I had what the jargon of mothers term "serious intentions."
However, I was struck with her exceeding loveliness and amused by the
vivacity of her manners; moreover, my vanity was excited by the hope
of distancing all my competitors for the smiles of the young beauty.
Accordingly I laid myself out to please, and neglected none of those
subtle and almost secret attentions which, of all flatteries, are the
most delicate and successful; and I succeeded. Caroline loved me with
all the earnestness and devotion which characterize the love of woman.
It never occurred to her that I was only trifling with those
affections which it seemed so ardently my intention to win. She knew
that my fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of
fortune with my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of
greater pretensions to myself; added to this, long adulation had made
her sensible though not vain of her attractions, and she listened with
a credulous ear to the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed
to instil.
Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest
treasures of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had
been Vanity and my offerings deceit. She tore herself from the
profanation of my grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence. All
interviews with me were rejected; all my letters returned to me
unopened; and though, in the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I
urged her to accept vows that were no longer insincere, her pride
became her punishment, as well as my own. In a moment of bitter and
desperate feeling; she accepted the offers of another, and made the
marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable barrier to our reconciliation
and union.
Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had
rejected! Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for
which we renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of
old, and while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can
only learn that they expose themselves to every torture and every
pain!
Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties
and the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we
were perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying
the indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least
learnt artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The
depths of my evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I
resolved yet to humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled
to the very quick the morbid acuteness of my self-love. I again
attached myself to her train; I bowed myself to the very dust before
her. What to me were her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---
only still stronger excitements to persevere.
I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes. A woman
may recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace
it with another. That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even
children to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the
gay world, which to many becomes an object, was to her only an escape.
Clarence, my triumph came! Lady Walden (who had never known our
secret) invited me to her house: Caroline was there. In the same spot
where we had so often stood before, and in which her earliest
affections were insensibly breathed away, in that same spot I drew
from her colourless and trembling lips the confession of her weakness,
the restored and pervading power of my remembrance.
But Caroline was a proud and virtuous woman: even while her heart
betrayed her, her mind resisted; and in the very avowal of her
unconquered attachment, she renounced and discarded me forever. I was
not an ungenerous though a vain man; but my generosity was wayward,
tainted, and imperfect. I could have borne the separation; I could
have severed myself from her; I could have flown to the uttermost
parts of the earth; I could have hoarded there my secret yet
unextinguished love, and never disturbed her quiet by a murmur: but
then the fiat of separation must have come from me! My vanity could
not bear that her lips should reject me, that my part was not to be
the nobility of sacrifice, but the submission of resignation.
However, my better feelings were aroused, and though I could not
stifle I concealed my selfish repinings. We parted: she returned to
town; I buried myself in the country; and, amidst the literary studies
to which, though by fits and starts, I was passionately devoted, I
endeavoured to forget my ominous and guilty love.
But I was then too closely bound to the world not to be perpetually
reminded of its events. My retreat was thronged with occasional
migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal
of the day. All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture
her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but
gay, dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy. I
contrasted this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own
feelings, and I resented her seeming happiness as an insult to myself.
In this angry and fretful mood I returned to London. My empire was
soon resumed; and now, Linden, comes the most sickening part of my
confessions. Vanity is a growing and insatiable disease: what seems
to its desires as wealth to-day, to-morrow it rejects as poverty. I
was at first contented to know that I was beloved; by degrees, slow,
yet sure, I desired that others should know it also. I longed to
display my power over the celebrated and courted Lady Merton; and to
put the last crown to my reputation and importance. The envy of
others is the food of our own self-love. Oh, you know not, you dream
not, of the galling mortifications to which a proud woman, whose love
commands her pride, is subjected! I imposed upon Caroline the most
humiliating, the most painful trials; I would allow her to see none
but those I pleased; to go to no place where I withheld my consent;
and I hesitated not to exert and testify my power over her affections,
in proportion to the publicity of the opportunity.
Yet, with all this littleness, would you believe that I loved Caroline
with the most ardent and engrossing passion? I have paused behind
her, in order to kiss the ground she trod on; I have stayed whole
nights beneath her window, to catch one glimpse of her passing form,
even though I had spent hours of the daytime in her society; and,
though my love burned and consumed me like a fire, I would not breathe
a single wish against her innocence, or take advantage of my power to
accomplish what I knew from her virtue and pride no atonement could
possibly repay. Such are the inconsistencies of the heart, and such,
while they prevent our perfection, redeem us from the utterness of
vice! Never, even in my wildest days, was I blind to the glory of
virtue, yet never, till my latest years, have I enjoyed the faculty to
avail myself of my perception. I resembled the mole, which by Boyle
is supposed to possess the idea of light, but to be unable to
comprehend the objects on which it shines.
Among the varieties of my prevailing sin, was a weakness common enough
to worldly men. While I ostentatiously played off the love I had
excited I could not bear to show the love I felt. In our country, and
perhaps, though in a less degree, in all other highly artificial
states, enthusiasm or even feeling of any kind is ridiculous; and I
could not endure the thought that my treasured and secret affections
should be dragged from their retreat to be cavilled and carped at by--
"Every beardless, vain comparative."
This weakness brought on the catastrophe of my love; for, mark me,
Clarence, it is through our weaknesses that our vices are punished!
One night I went to a masquerade; and, while I was sitting in a remote
corner, three of my acquaintances, whom I recognized, though they knew
it not, approached and rallied me upon my romantic attachment to Lady
Merton. One of them was a woman of a malicious and sarcastic wit; the
other two were men whom I disliked, because their pretensions
interfered with mine; they were diners-out and anecdote-mongers.
Stung to the quick by their sarcasms and laughter, I replied in a
train of mingled arrogance and jest; at last I spoke slightingly of
the person in question; and these profane and false lips dared not
only to disown the faintest love to that being who was more to me than
all on earth, but even to speak of herself with ridicule and her
affection with disdain.
In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
which I knew upon the moment. O Heaven! the burning shame and agony
of that glance! It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and
that trembling lip! I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her
soul.
Clarence, I never beheld her again alive. Within a week from that
time she was a corpse. She had borne much, suffered much, and
murmured not; but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from
the hand of him for whom she would have sacrificed all! I stood by
her in death; I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a
pilgrim upon the face of the earth. Verily, I have had my reward.
The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
him no consolation, did not break the silence. In a few minutes
Talbot continued--
From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
old in a single day. Life lost to me all its objects. A dreary and
desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had
only in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image. I left my
country for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the
various courts of the Continent.
At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the
rest of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we
have seen much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our
knowledge, we must be one of two sects,--a politician or a
philosopher. My time was not yet arrived for the latter, so I
resolved to become the former; but this was denied me, for my vanity
had assumed a different shape. It is true that I cared no longer for
the reputation women can bestow; but I was eager for the applause of
men, and I did not like the long labour necessary to attain it. I
wished to make a short road to my object, and I eagerly followed every
turn but the right one, in the hopes of its leading me sooner to my
goal.
The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this,
he is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality
of his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he
is perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless
fruit which a single sun can mature.
This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure. I could not
give myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of
commerce: even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant
attendance and late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two
or three "splendid orations," as my friends termed them, I was
satisfied with the puffs of the pamphleteers and closed my political
career. I was now, then, the wit and the conversationalist. With my
fluency of speech and variety of information, these were easy
distinctions; and the popularity of a dinner-table or the approbation
of a literary coterie consoled me for the more public and more durable
applause I had resigned.
But even this gratification did not last long. I fell ill; and the
friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian. This
disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned
to the Continent. But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon
me, and so it was not to courts and cities, the scenes of former
gayeties, that I repaired; on the contrary, I hired a house by one of
the most sequestered of the Swiss lakes, and, avoiding the living, I
surrendered myself without interruption or control to commune with the
dead. I surrounded myself with books and pored with a curious and
searching eye into those works which treat particularly upon "man."
My passions were over, my love of pleasure and society was dried up,
and I had now no longer the obstacles which forbid us to be wise; I
unlearned the precepts my manhood had acquired, and in my old age I
commenced philosopher; Religion lent me her aid, and by her holy lamp
my studies were conned and my hermitage illumined.
There are certain characters which in the world are evil, and in
seclusion are good: Rousseau, whom I knew well, is one of them. These
persons are of a morbid sensitiveness, which is perpetually galled by
collision with others. In short, they are under the dominion of
VANITY; and that vanity, never satisfied and always restless in the
various competitions of society, produces "envy, hatred, malice, and
all uncharitableness!" but, in solitude, the good and benevolent
dispositions with which our self-love no longer interferes have room
to expand and ripen without being cramped by opposing interests: this
will account for many seeming discrepancies in character. There are
also some men in whom old age supplies the place of solitude, and
Rousseau's antagonist and mental antipodes, Voltaire, is of this
order. The pert, the malignant, the arrogant, the lampooning author
in his youth and manhood, has become in his old age the mild, the
benevolent, and the venerable philosopher. Nothing is more absurd
than to receive the characters of great men so implicitly upon the
word of a biographer; and nothing can be less surprising than our
eternal disputes upon individuals: for no man throughout life is the
same being, and each season of our existence contradicts the
characteristics of the last.
And now in my solitude and my old age, a new spirit entered within me:
the game in which I had engaged so vehemently was over for me; and I
joined to my experience as a player my coolness as a spectator; I no
longer struggled with my species, and I began insensibly to love them.
I established schools and founded charities; and, in secret but active
services to mankind, I employed my exertions and lavished my desires.
From this amendment I date the peace of mind and elasticity which I
now enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my
youth and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown
unsolicited to my breast.
About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to my
family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not
please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire! You may
imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a
vague feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life
I felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a
complaint attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of
this neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without
being exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain
society as a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond
of new faces nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore
contented me: for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears,
remove to a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It
is, at all events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and
exposing me to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for
my old age, and selected from this great universe of strangers one
being to convince my heart that it has not outlived affection. My
tale is done; may you profit by its moral!
When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual
change he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion
remains to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it
is these modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the
channels of our change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it,
"we resemble those vessels which the waves still carry towards the
south, when the north wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age,
this passion, having little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and
inert, and then our good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus,
and have their sway.
Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its
earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the
blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,
that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the
frailties of human nature,--little did he think that the vanity which
had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," undeposed alike by
his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred by
circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still
lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities
dishonouring his age. Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek,
whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais,
finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest
of mankind!
