FORS CLAVIGERA.

[Contents]FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LI.Herne Hill,9th Feb., 1875.I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things, during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous, inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am thankful, to-day, to have one most[54]pleasant thing first to refer to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’ proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first[55]allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again.Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with[56]rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter at my own request; for I had already been once, if not[57]twice, taken to Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,—“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the[58]brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library.This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look[59]of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound moreBolton Abbey24th Jan. 75Dear ArthurWill you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character which has brought on me[60]the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel. And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read, if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God; and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural, modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread).[61]And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.1Nor have I any objection to the[62]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that[63]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion[64]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology2lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering[65]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of“a,the labium, with the two labial palpi;b,the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo, at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas;c,the labrum, andd, the mandible,”[66]Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’ they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company.”Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather[67]than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd, have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’ ” But truly, I have never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to catch a humble bee in my fingers;3only I suppose Bottom would have warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as against being overflown with the honey bag.4Red-hipped, Bottom calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my books.[68]We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic ‘hommolen,’bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in ‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of Edification).Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—“The Bittern, with his bump,The crane, with his trump,”and Chaucer’s single line,“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they[69]are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee.1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and[70]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings.[71]But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation[72]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about[73]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them.[75][Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑8Italics mine throughout.↑9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

[Contents]FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LI.Herne Hill,9th Feb., 1875.I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things, during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous, inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am thankful, to-day, to have one most[54]pleasant thing first to refer to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’ proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first[55]allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again.Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with[56]rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter at my own request; for I had already been once, if not[57]twice, taken to Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,—“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the[58]brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library.This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look[59]of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound moreBolton Abbey24th Jan. 75Dear ArthurWill you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character which has brought on me[60]the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel. And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read, if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God; and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural, modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread).[61]And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.1Nor have I any objection to the[62]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that[63]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion[64]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology2lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering[65]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of“a,the labium, with the two labial palpi;b,the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo, at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas;c,the labrum, andd, the mandible,”[66]Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’ they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company.”Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather[67]than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd, have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’ ” But truly, I have never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to catch a humble bee in my fingers;3only I suppose Bottom would have warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as against being overflown with the honey bag.4Red-hipped, Bottom calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my books.[68]We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic ‘hommolen,’bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in ‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of Edification).Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—“The Bittern, with his bump,The crane, with his trump,”and Chaucer’s single line,“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they[69]are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee.1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and[70]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings.[71]But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation[72]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about[73]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them.[75][Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑8Italics mine throughout.↑9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LI.

Herne Hill,9th Feb., 1875.I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things, during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous, inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am thankful, to-day, to have one most[54]pleasant thing first to refer to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’ proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first[55]allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again.Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with[56]rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter at my own request; for I had already been once, if not[57]twice, taken to Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,—“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the[58]brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library.This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look[59]of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound moreBolton Abbey24th Jan. 75Dear ArthurWill you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character which has brought on me[60]the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel. And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read, if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God; and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural, modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread).[61]And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.1Nor have I any objection to the[62]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that[63]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion[64]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology2lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering[65]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of“a,the labium, with the two labial palpi;b,the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo, at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas;c,the labrum, andd, the mandible,”[66]Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’ they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company.”Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather[67]than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd, have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’ ” But truly, I have never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to catch a humble bee in my fingers;3only I suppose Bottom would have warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as against being overflown with the honey bag.4Red-hipped, Bottom calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my books.[68]We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic ‘hommolen,’bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in ‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of Edification).Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—“The Bittern, with his bump,The crane, with his trump,”and Chaucer’s single line,“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they[69]are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee.1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and[70]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings.[71]But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation[72]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about[73]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them.[75][Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]

Herne Hill,9th Feb., 1875.

I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things, during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.

I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous, inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am thankful, to-day, to have one most[54]pleasant thing first to refer to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’ proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.

Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first[55]allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again.

Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with[56]rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.

These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter at my own request; for I had already been once, if not[57]twice, taken to Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,—

“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”

“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,

With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”

I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.

But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.

I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the[58]brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.

In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library.

This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look[59]of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.

The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound moreBolton Abbey24th Jan. 75Dear ArthurWill you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.

The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound more

Bolton Abbey

24th Jan. 75

Dear Arthur

Will you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.

It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character which has brought on me[60]the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel. And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read, if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God; and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural, modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread).[61]

And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.1Nor have I any objection to the[62]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.

I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that[63]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.

And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.

Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion[64]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”

Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology2lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering[65]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into

‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’

‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’

and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.

Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.

However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of

[66]

Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’ they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company.”

Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather[67]than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd, have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’ ” But truly, I have never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to catch a humble bee in my fingers;3only I suppose Bottom would have warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as against being overflown with the honey bag.4Red-hipped, Bottom calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my books.[68]

We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic ‘hommolen,’bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in ‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of Edification).

Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—

“The Bittern, with his bump,The crane, with his trump,”

“The Bittern, with his bump,

The crane, with his trump,”

and Chaucer’s single line,

“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”

“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”

This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they[69]are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee.

1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and[70]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.

2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings.[71]

But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.

3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation[72]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”

Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.

“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”

Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?

Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about[73]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.

‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?

Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them.[75]

[Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”

“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”

“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,Feb. 12th, 1875.

“My dear Sir,—In your ‘Fors’ published last month you have charged the Pastors, and especially the Chief Pastors of our Church, with ‘preaching a false gospel for hire,’ and thus becoming responsible for the hideous immorality which prevails.

It is very painful to be told this byyou, of whom some of us have learned so much.

I have been reading your words to my conscience, but—is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word ‘Guilty’?

The gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be ‘safe and sound’ now and everlastingly.

Is this ‘a false gospel preached for hire’? If not, what other gospel do you refer to?

“I am very faithfully yours,“John Ruskin, Esq.Edward Z. Lyttel.”

The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]

The gospel which my correspondent preaches (or, at the least, desires to preach)—namely, “Let His life rule your lives,” is eternally true and salutary. The “other gospel which I[76]refer to” is the far more widely preached one, “Let His life be in the stead of your lives,” which is eternally false and damnatory.

The rest of my correspondent’s letter needs, I think, no other reply than the expression of my regret that a man of his amiable character should be entangled in a profession, respecting which the subtle questions of conscience which he proposes can be answered by none but himself; nor by himself with security.

I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but it was of repute in my early days, and I think it right, during the discussion of the subjects to which Fors is now approaching, to refer my readers to a work of his which gives one of the most beautiful types I know of the character of English clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted). His hero is thus introduced: “He was a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages, to which he added a great share of knowledge in the Oriental tongues, and could read and translate French, Italian, and Spanish. He had applied many years to the most severe study, and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university.5He was besides a man of good sense, good parts, and good-nature;—his virtue, and his other qualifications, as they rendered him equal to his office, so they made him an agreeable and valuable companion, and had so much endeared and well recommended him to a Bishop, that, at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.”[77]

Of course, in our present estimate of the good Bishop’s benevolence, we must allow for the greater value of money in those times:—nevertheless, it was even then to be obtained in considerable sums, as it is now, by persons who knew the right channels and proper methods of its accumulation, as our author immediately afterwards shows us by the following account of part of the economy of an English gentleman’s estate:—

“Joseph had not quite finished his letter when he was summoned downstairs by Mr. Peter Pounce to receive his wages; for, besides that out of eight pounds a year, he allowed his father and mother four, he had been obliged, in order to furnish himself with musical instruments,” (Mr. Fielding countenances my own romantic views respecting the propriety of the study of music even by the lower classes, and entirely approves of these apparently extravagant purchases,) “to apply to the generosity of the aforesaid Peter, who on urgent occasions used to advance the servants their wages, not before they were due, but before they were payable,—that is, perhaps half a year after they were due; and this at the moderate premium of fifty per cent., or a little more; by which charitable methods, together with lending money to other people, and even to his own master and mistress, the honest man had, from nothing, in a few years amassed a small sum of twenty thousand pounds or thereabouts.”

Of the character of the modern English country clergyman, from my own personal knowledge, I could give some examples quite deserving place with the Fielding and Goldsmith type;—but these have influence only in their own villages, and are daily diminishing in number; while another type, entirely modern, is taking their place, of which some curious illustration has been furnished me by the third Fors as I was looking over the Christmas books of last year to see if I could find a prize or two for Agnes and some other of my younger cottage friends. Among them, I get two books on natural history, by a country[78]clergyman, who takes his children out on beach and moorland expeditions, and puts a charming portrait of himself, in his best coat, and most elegant attitude of instruction, for the frontispiece. His little daughter has been taught to express herself in such terms as the following:—

(Of a jelly-fish.) “Let me look. If you hold it up to the light, you see it is nearly transparent, and the surface is marked with numerous angular spaces.”

(Of a sand-worm.) “Oh—in this respect the little Pectinaria resembles the fresh-water Melicerta we find abundantly on the weeds in the canal at home.”

(Of a sea-mouse.) “Oh, papa, I do think here is a sea-mouse lying on the shore. Bah! I don’t much like to touch it.”

The childish simplicity and ladylike grace of these expressions need no comment; but the clergyman’s education of his children ingentlenessis the point peculiarly striking to me in the books, collated with my own experience in the case of the boy and the squirrel. The following two extracts are sufficiently illustrative:—

“ ‘Well, papa,’ said Jack, ‘I am tired of sitting here; let us now go and hunt for peewits’ eggs.’ ‘All right, Jack, and if you find any you shall each have one for your breakfast in the morning. When hard-boiled and cold, a peewit’s egg is a very delicious thing, though I think the peewits are such valuable birds, and do so much good, that I should not like to take many of their eggs. We had better separate from each other, so as to have a better chance of finding a nest.’ Soon we hear a shout from Willy, whose sharp eyes had discovered a nest with four eggs in it; so off we all scamper to him. See how the old bird screams and flaps, and how near she comes to us; she knows we have found her eggs, and wishes to lure us away from the spot; so she pretends she has been wounded, and tries to make us follow after her. ‘Now, Jack, run and catch her. Hah! hah![79]There they go. I will back the peewit against the boy. So you have given up the chase, have you? Well, rest again, and take breath.’ ”

“ ‘Well, Mr. Parry Evans, how many salmon have you counted in the pool?’‘There are seven or eight good fish in, sir, this time; and one or two will be ten or eleven pounds each.’ Look at the dog ‘Jack’; he is evidently getting a little impatient, as he sees in the retiring water of the pool every now and then a salmon darting along. And now Mr. Evans takes the silver collar off, and sets ‘Jack’ free; and in a second he is in the middle of the pool. Now for the fun! Willy and Jack6tuck up their trousers, take off their shoes and stockings, and with nets in their hands enter the water. Bah! it is rather cold at first, but the excitement soon warms them. There goes a salmon, full tilt, and ‘Jack’ after him. What a splashing in the water, to be sure! There is another dog learning the trade, and ‘Jack’ is his tutor in the art; he is a brown retriever, and dashes about the water after the salmon as if he enjoyed the fun immensely, but he has not yet learned how to catch a slippery fish. There! there! see! see! good dog; now you have him! No! off again; well done, salmon! Now dog! have at him!

“How immensely rapid is the motion of a frightened salmon ‘Quick as an arrow’ is hardly a figure of speech. Bravo, ‘Jack,’ bravo! Do you see? He has caught the salmon firmly by the head. Good dog! Mr. Parry Evans is immediately on the spot, and takes the fish from old ‘Jack,’ whom he kindly pats on the back, holds the salmon aloft for us all to see, and, consigns him to the basket which his man is guarding on the shore. See, see, again! off they go, dogs and men, and soon another salmon is captured; and there is lots of fun, meanwhile, in catching the mackerel and garfish. Well, the sport of catching[80]the various fish in the pool—there were nine salmon, averaging about five pounds each—lasted about half an hour. ‘Jack’ behaved admirably; it was wonderful to see his skill in the pursuit; he generally caught hold of the salmon by the head, on which he gave one strong bite, and the fish was rendered helpless almost instantaneously. Sometimes he would catch hold of the back fin. When the sport was finished, we went to survey the spoils; and a nice ‘kettle of fish’ there was. I bought one salmon and the gurnard; the rest were soon disposed of by Mr. Evans to his numerous visitors, all of whom were much pleased with the sport. But wait a little; some of the fish lie on the sand. I will look for parasites. Here, on this salmon, is a curious parasite, with a body an inch long, and with two long tail-like projections three times the length of the creature itself. It is a crustacean, and related to theArgulus foliaceus.”

The reverend and learned author will perhaps be surprised to hear that the principal effect of these lively passages on me has been slightly to diminish my appetite for salmon, no less than for sea-side recreations. I think I would rather attend my pious instructor, in discourse on the natural history of the Land. I get his ‘Country Walks of a Naturalist,’ therefore, in which I find a graceful preface, thanking Mr. Gould for permission to copy his Birds of England; and two very gummy and shiny copies (so-called) adorning the volume.

Now there was boundless choice for the pleasing of children in Gould’s marvellous plates. To begin with, the common sparrow’s nest, in the ivy, with the hen sitting:

The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,My sister Emmeline and ITogether visited.She looked at it as if she feared it,—Still wishing, dreading to be near it,Such heart was in her.

The sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by,

My sister Emmeline and I

Together visited.

She looked at it as if she feared it,—

Still wishing, dreading to be near it,

Such heart was in her.

But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed![81]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great[82]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.

I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensationmustbe got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.

And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at[83]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.

The London correspondent of theBrighton Daily Newswrites:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”

For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.

“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”

No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect.[84]

The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.

“I send you a cutting from a recentTimes, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”

Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following[85]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:

“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a smalltide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”

“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.

“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated,that8on the morning of his wedding-day he went[86]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;9so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: forboth himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.

“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.

“At this time the Bishopston Tide-mills were in the occupation of Messrs. Barton and Catt. The former exchanged with Mr. Catt, of Lamberhurst, who went into partnership with his cousin Edmund. The power of the mill was then only five pair of[87]stones, though he ultimately increased it to sixteen.10In this much more important sphere the same habits of industry still marked his character, amidst all disadvantages. It was war-time; corn was of inferior quality and high price; and privateering prevented trading by water. His cousin and he were not suited to each other, and dissolved partnership; but, by the aid of a loan from his worthy friends and neighbours, Mr. Cooper, of Norton, and Mr. Farncombe, of Bishopston, he was enabled to secure the whole of the business to himself. Subsequently Mr. Edmund Cooper, the son of his friend, became his partner in the mills, and the business was for many years carried on under the title of Catt and Cooper.

“During this partnershipa lease was obtained, from the Earl of Sheffield,of the waste lands between the Mills and Newhaven harbour. This was embanked and reclaimed as arable land at first, and subsequently partly used as a reservoir of additional water power. Mr. Catt took great interest in the work;laboured at it himself with spade and barrow; and to it he always referred as the main cause of his success in life. In the third year a crop of oats was grown on the arable portion, which repaid the expenses of reclamation and induced him to increase the power of the mill as mentioned above. Mr. Cooper retired from the concern by agreement, and afterwards, under the firm of William Catt and Sons, in conjunction with his children, Mr. Catt completed fifty years of business at Bishopston. During a considerable portion of those years he had also a large stake with other sons in West Street Brewery, Brighton.

“His faithful wife died in 1823, leaving him the responsible legacy of eleven children—the youngest being not an hour old.[88]This bereavement seemed to stimulate him to renewed exertion and to extraordinary regard for little savings.He would always stop to pick up a nail or any scrap of old iron that lay in the road, and in the repeated enlargements and construction of his mills he was his own architect and surveyor; he was always pleased with the acquisition of a bit of wreck timber, any old materials from Blatchington barracks, or from the dismantled mansion of Bishopston Place, formerly the seat of the Duke of Newcastle. Yet he was ever bountiful as a host, liberal to his neighbours, and charitable to his dependants and the deserving poor.

“To a man of Mr. Catt’s experience in life, ordinary amusements would have few charms. His business was his pleasure, yet he delighted in his garden, and the culture of pears afforded him much recreation. A more bleak and unpromising place for horticulture than the Bishopston Mills could hardly exist; but by the aid of good walls, and the observation of wind effects, he was eminently successful, and no garden in Sussex produced a greater variety, or finer specimens, of that pleasant fruit. His maxim on this subject was, ‘Aim to get a good pear all the year round.’

“In the latter years of his life, Mr. Catt retired from active business and resided at Newhaven, where he died in 1853, in the seventy-third year of his age, leaving behind him not only the good name which an honourable life deserves, but a substantial fortune for his somewhat numerous descendants.”[89]

1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑8Italics mine throughout.↑9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑8Italics mine throughout.↑9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑

1I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find (Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the loose half and tight half;[62]and that in this slit there is a little comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life, perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing as a thorax, or a spiracle.↑

2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑

2“The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.↑

3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑

3Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”↑

4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑

4Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.↑

5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑

5His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in Mr. Lyttel’s letter.↑

6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑

6Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.↑

7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑

7I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but what he tells me.↑

8Italics mine throughout.↑

8Italics mine throughout.↑

9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑

9Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what shall we say of the banking?↑

10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

10The oldestwindmill on record in this country (I speak under correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largestwatermill ever constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.↑

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