AT THE SEASIDE. 15 



seaside influences. Telegrams should be strictly interdicted, 

 and only the most unimportant letters forwarded. The holiday 

 should be set apart for some intellectual treat reading the 

 Laureate's last poem or George Eliot's latest story. Some 

 study, however, out of the ordinary line of a man's business 

 ought to be professed say geology, or investigations into the 

 marine zoophytes to redeem idleness from the charge of 

 being idle ; or a big book may be taken to the sea, a history or 

 a stiff theological treatise, to be able to put the amiable sophism 

 upon ourselves that we intend to work, to give, in short, a back- 

 bone to a molluscous purpose. We lately met a clergyman on 

 a six weeks' tour in Scotland who had thus taken with him 

 Butler's Analogy and the judicious Hooker, for much the same 

 reason, we suppose, as the ancient Egyptians were wont to 

 introduce a skeleton at their feasts. Solitude at the seaside is 

 a great mistake. Diirer very suitably introduced^the sea as 

 the background of his Melancholia. The immensity of the sea 

 overwhelms the personality ; but let a man have wife, sister, or 

 friend with him, and then the presence of a kindred soul, and 

 the ordinary everyday remarks upon the sea, vanquish the un- 

 vanquished. Above all, no one should seek the sea for enjoy- 

 ment who is compelled to economise and strictly scan the day's 

 expenses. Butchers have a trick at the seaside of not supply- 

 ing the finest joints and of charging unconscionable prices, 

 while landladies proverbially must make hay while the sun 

 shines. Unless a man can wholly fling base domestic cares to 

 the winds when he visits the sea, let him spend, say three 

 weeks there entirely free from anxiety, instead of the month he 

 at first purposed, which would demand nice calculations and 

 unsleeping thrift. Nothing so soon mars a holiday as care. 

 It is the bunch of hyssop in our autumnal cup of joy. 



Though it is easy when inland to fancy the sea's delights, to 

 lavish poetic phrases on it, and to persuade oneself, when dis- 

 inclined to travel, that imagination can satisfy as well as sight, 



