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to order-half a dozen of them, for instance, a missionary bespoke for the Portuguese colonies, and is said to have paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each. Mr. Carlyle is caustic in his commemoration of this incident in Denis Diderot's career. "Further, he made sermons, to order; as the Devil is said to quote Scripture." In Mr. Carlyle's latest and longest history, we find once and again the like allusion. Frederick William, and his advisers, bent on a certain match for the Princess Wilhelmina, which the queen, her mother, as steadfastly opposed, took to quoting Scripture by way of subduing her majesty's resistance. "There was much discourse, suasive, argumentative. Grumkow quoting Scripture on her majesty, as the devil can on occasion," says Wilhelmina. "Express scriptures, Wives, be obedient to your husbands,' and the like texts; but her majesty, on the Scripture side, too, gave him as much as he brought." And at a later stage of the negotiation, the same Grumkow appears again, citing the Vulgate to a confidential correspondent, in reference to their political schemings. "But Si Deus est nobiscum'—'If God be for us, who can be against us?' For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay, solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the devil is competent to." Shakespeare embodies in Richard of Gloster a type of the political intriguer of this complexion; as where that usurper thus answers the gulled associates who urge him to be avenged on the opposite faction:

"But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil.
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint when most I play the devil."

An unmitigated scoundrel in one of Mr. Dickens's books is represented as overtly grudging his old father the scant remnant of his days, and citing holy writ for sanction of his complaint. "Why, a man of any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty -let alone any more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten's the mark; and no man with a conscience,

and a proper sense of what's expected of him, has any business to live longer." Whereupon the author interposes this parenthetical comment, and highly characteristic it is: "Is any one surprised at Mr. Jonas making such a reference to such a book for such a purpose? Does any one doubt the old saw that the devil quotes Scripture for his own ends? If he will take the trouble to look about him, he may find a greater number of confirmations of the fact in the occurrences of a single day than the steam-gun can discharge balls in a minute." Fiction would supply us with abundant illustrations-fiction in general, and Sir Walter Scott in particular. As where Simon of Hackburn, the inartial borderer, backs his hot appeal to arms, for the avenging a deed of wrong, by an equivocal reference to holy writ. "Let women sit and greet at hame, men must do as they have been done by; it is the Scripture says it." "Haud your tongue, sir," exclaims one of the seniors, sternly; "dinna abuse the Word that gate; ye dinna ken what ye speak about." Or as where the Templar essays to corrupt the Jewess by citing the examples of David and Solomon: "If thou readest the Scriptures," retorts Rebecca, "and the lives of the saints, only to justify thine own licence and profligacy, thy crime is like that of him who extracteth poison from the most healthful and necessary herbs." One other example. Undy Scott, that plausible scamp of Mr. Trollope's making, propounds an immoral paradox, to the scope of which one of his dupes is bold enough to object. But how is the objector disposed of? "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,' said Undy, quoting Scripture, as the devil did before him." Dupes can quote Scripture, too, and perhaps that is more demoralizing still. For Cowper did not rhyme without reason when he declared, that

"Of all the arts sagacious dupes invent,

To cheat themselves, and gain the world's assent,
The worst is-Scripture warped from its intent."

GR

ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR.

DANIEL iv. 27.

REAT was Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, even as the tree that he saw in his dream; for, by the avowal of the Hebrew prophet who interpreted that dream, the king was indeed become strong, and his greatness was grown, and reached unto the heaven, and his dominion unto the ends of the earth. But sentence had gone forth, as against the tree, so against the king. Nebuchadnezzar was to be degraded; despoiled of his kingdom, cast down from his throne, and driven from men, to eat grass as oxen. This counsel, however, the prophet urged upon the sovran, that he should break off his sins by righteousness, and his "iniquities by showing mercy to the poor"; if it might be a lengthening of his tranquillity, or a healing of his error.

What error? That of which ex-king Lear accused himself, when he owned, amid words of frenzy, all however with more or less of tragic significance in them, that he had taken too little care of this, of sympathy with desolate indigence, and of readiness to relieve the sufferings of the destitute and forlorn.

The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by; some friendship will it lend him against the tempest; the tyranny of the open night's too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone. "Wilt break my heart?" he exclaims, in answer to Kent's fresh entreaty: Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin; and so it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him; and "where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt." Let Kent go in, by all means: the king enjoins it—at least the ex king desires it: let Kent seek his own ease—and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Mean

while, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear's thoughts perforce are turned to "houseless poverty," to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,—how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal, "O, I have ta'en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp ;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel;

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just."

Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout. And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by "poor mad Tom,”—the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the "naked fellow" whose identity he so little suspects:

"Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues
Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched,

Makes thee the happier :-Heavens, deal so still!

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo the excess,

And each man have enough."

Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited from the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said.

The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and

eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol,-but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race-pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as some scholars interpret the passage, "content to be fed" on the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs: indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. "The rich man's sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity.” He took too little care of this-that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.

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La Bruyère observes that "la santé et les richesses ôtent aux hommes l'expérience du mal, leur inspirent la dureté pour leurs semblables;" and adds, that "les gens déjà chargés de leur propre misère sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d'autrui." If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them SO. Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt. In another chapter of his "Characters," La Bruyère sketches the portrait of one he styles Champagne, who "au sortir d'un long dîner qui lui enfle l'estomac, et dans les douces fumées d'un vin d'Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu'on lui présente, qui ôterait le pain à toute une province, si l'on n'y remédiait: il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la première heure de la digestion, qu'on puisse quelque part mourir de faim?" Il est excusable, on the principle of Horace Walpole's similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to

*See on the scope of the words évμv xoрrao@ĥvai (St. Luke xvi. 21), Analecta Theologica (Rev. W. Trollope's) in loc.

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