NOVEMBER. S35 



the past is all our own. And what are the lessons it inculcates ? 

 Endurance of the now ; — hope — unlading hope of the hebe after. 

 The truth of the moral is none the less, because the majority of human 

 kind fails in its practical ap{)lication. 



Listen to that battered old warrior, as he 



" Shoulders his crutch, and shows how fields were won." 



Note how he revels in the past. The dreadful day, whose minutest 

 events he is so vividly relating, was one fraught with danger and with 

 death ; and though we doubt not he did his duty well and nobly, like 

 a true son of Britain, and that in the excitement of the fray he 

 experienced something akin to delight, we feel assured that the old hero 

 cherishes the remembrance of that well-fouglit field as his dearest 

 earthly possession. 



*' 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view." 



So sang the Bard of Hope ; and the same sentiment has (I think) been 

 expressed — with equal, if not greater, truth — by the Bard of Memory. 



The antiquated beau, who boasts of the havoc he committed among 

 the hearts of our grandmothers in his " hot youth, when George the 

 Third was King ; " think ^''ou he felt half the pride in his conquests — 

 real or assumed — as he derives from the bare recollection of them, 

 after the lapse of more than an entire 'generation ? 



Mark yonder ancient squire — him of the rubicund visage — through 

 whose veins circulates a fluid compounded of human blood and " old 

 port " in about equal proportions. What is it that lights up his " lack- 

 lustre eye " and almost animates his dull and sensual countenance ? 

 He is narrating — for the thousandth time — the particulars of that 

 wonderful run with Sir Harry Crashall's famous pack, when after " a 

 tremendous burst of forty minutes, without a check, &c., &c." As he 

 warms with his subject, the old man waxes eloquent. Half a century 

 of time is overleaped in a moment. The ill-assorted marriage, the 

 spendthrift heir, the heavy mortgages, the tortures of the gout itself — 

 all are forgotten, and he becomes, in imagination, once more the ruddy, 

 well a}>pointed young gentleman of fifty years ago, who, mounted on 

 his favourite hunter, Daredevil, showed the way to a numerous field, 

 comprising the best blood in the whole county. 



Yet one picture more. Tread softly : we are on hallowed ground. 

 Another aged man, stretched on the bed of sickness — " sickness unto 

 death : " the expression of his face is calm, placid — almost angelic. 

 Wherefore so ? Look around the bare and almost squalid apartment : 

 — observe the miserable pallet — the scanty covering — tlie surly 

 ministrations of the hireling virago, redolent of gin, made doubly savacre 

 by the premature termination of her stertorous slumber, lie heeds 

 them not : his thoughts have wandered back far away into the shadowy 

 past, when, in the days of his prosperity, his life was spent in the 

 exercise of active benevolence. His good deeds have been ill requited; 

 but the memory of them has been his solace through long years of 

 adversity, — ^has assuaged the bitter pangs of disease and poverty, and 

 is even now fulfilling its last and most exalted office, by robbing Death 



