King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead. Nevertheless, Noble R, come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters--when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidious preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritorious-equal damsels. * * * * * To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fool's Banquet beyond its appropriate day, -for I fear the second of April is not many hours distant-in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Foolas naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with childlike apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables-not guessing at their involved wisdom-I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and-prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness, of their competitors-I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins, I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted, or a friendship, that answered, with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is observed, that "the foolisher the fowl or fish-woodcocks,-dotterells, -cod'sheads, &c., the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys?-Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. A Quakers' Meeting. (The London Magaznie, April, 1821.) [The verses quoted at the head of this essay, are taken from Richard Flecknoe's dramatic pastoral of "Love's Dominion," elsewhere cited by Charles Lamb in his "Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets."] Still-born Silence! thou that art Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind! Secrecy's confident, and he Who makes religion mystery! Leave, thy desert shades among, Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb! READER, Would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would'st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite :--come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence as deep as that " before the winds were made? go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed self-mistrusting Ulysses,—Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes?-here the goddess reigns and revels. "Boreas, and Cecias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl-nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds-than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself has a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by-say, a wife-he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?-can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?-away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-, and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic' solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, timestricken : Or under hanging mountains, is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt."-The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, - sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings- but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE- eldest of things-language of old Night-primitive Discourser-to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hush'd heads Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, anmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory!-if my pen treat of you lightly-as haply it will wander-yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury.-I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you-for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and offscouring of church and presbytery,-I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the Primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth),-James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still !— so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings.-If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling female, generally ancient, voice is heard-you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds-with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty.-The men, from what I have observed, speak seldomer. ་ Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable-he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail-his joints all seemed loosening-it was a figure to set off against Paul preaching-the words he uttered were few, and sound-he was evidently resisting his will-keeping down his own wordwisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. "He had been a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession-understanding the term in its worldly acceptation-with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levites-the Jocos Risus-que-faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna.-By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. remorse. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness.-O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half-hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herdlike-as in the pasture-"forty feeding like one." The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsunconferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. The Old and the New Schoolmaster. 'The London Magazine, May, 1821.) [Where Elia speaks below of "a very dear friend" in New South Wales, allusion is made to Barron Field, the "B. F." to whom is addressed the letter included among these essays under the title of "Distant Correspondents." The Essayist's other "friend M.' is understood to have been Thomas Manning, sometime Mathematical Tutor at Cambridge.] My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays and treatises, have supplied me with most of my. notions and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terræ Incognitæ. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness-and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I verily believe that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have small Latin and less Greek.' I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers-not from the circumstance of my being town-born-for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it "on Devon's leafy shores,”—and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. -Not that I affect ignorance-but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tête-à-tête there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with i |