J. Ewing Ritchie

“ The Countess and the priest could do nothing; and Rose and her husband soon tired of the fruitless search and returned, to remember in after years the delights of the Bay of Naples—‘the most beautiful spot in the world,’ writes George Eliot. Everything takes us back to the past. It was in the bay that pious Æneas landed. Caligula, and Nero, and Tiberius, all loved the spot. The grotto of the Sybil was near, too; the tomb of Virgil is yet shown in that neighbourhood. Capua, famed for its luxury and ease, was not far off. No wonder the world flocks to the Bay of Naples. ”

“ Behind the footlights every night, what time has actor or actress to realize the great ends of life as something real, and not a show with its pretended tragedy or farce?
‘In fact,’ said the lady, ‘I wish to live and not to act.’
‘And then return to the stage when you are getting old,’ said the manager in dismay. ‘Well, the public are indulgent, I admit. A favourite is a favourite, whether old or young. There are old men and women now on the stage who ought to have retired years ago. They cannot act decently; with all their making up they are scarcely presentable. ”

“ We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be—that if you lose your chance, another will take it—that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat—those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. ”

“ Men who add to British wealth, who carry British commerce all over the world; without whom England would never have become mistress of the seas. Infinitely superior is the British merchant to the British landlord. Yet, how much we think of the one, how little of the other. Will it ever be so?’ he asks himself. Wise as he is, he fails to anticipate a time when circumstances shall break the power of the landlord, and the produce of Canada and America make the land an unsaleable commodity. ”

“ There is very little beauty among the common people, and you have plenty of scope for observation, as women dress their back hair in the broad streets, and the babies are washed in the same public manner. Nor can you wonder that this is so, as you contemplate the dingy streets and high houses, divided by narrow lanes, just like Yarmouth Rows, where no fresh air can enter, no ray of sunlight can shine. What strikes a stranger especially is the awful noise. There is an everlasting clatter of wheels and cracking of whips, and braying of donkeys—and in Naples they bray louder than anywhere else ”

“ I have heard that you went to the land of the heretics—that Island of England which has so long denied the faith, but which I am glad to find is abandoning its heresy, repenting of its sin, and returning to the Holy See. When we see the sister of an English Prime Minister find salvation in the bosom of the Holy Church, when our sacred officials are run after in all the highest circles, when they astonish all London by their works of charity and labours of love, by their eloquence and learning and saintly lives ”

“ All Naples is asleep in the middle of the day, and even the policeman nods. Happily he has little to do, as, ignorant and priest-ridden as the people may be, they never get drunk. At night the city is gay, as families, old and young, rush off to the music-hall, or to hear the bands play, or to navigate the peaceful waters by the light of Chinese lanterns. ”

“ Her father compelled her to suffer the brutality of a marriage with a low wretch utterly unfit to be her lord and master. Was not her marriage an immorality? Was it not a shame that society should have compelled her to live with such a man?—so much so ‘that her only hope,’ as she told a friend, was death, ‘because we Methodists always die in transports of joy.’ But what do men and women know of each other, as a rule, before marriage? ”

“ I cannot believe that society in England will last long in its present position; that the wealth of the country shall be in the hands of the few, who toil not, neither do they spin, and that the men who make that wealth, without whom it could not exist, shall be stowed away in unhealthy cities to live, and breed, and die in such bitterness of poverty as can be found nowhere else. Does not James the Apostle tell the rich man to go to and howl? and I believe that end is near; that is, as soon as the working man has his political rights—a boon that now cannot be long delayed. ”

“ Are they to be uncared for till they have lost all heart, and sink down to the pit of misery and despair, never more, till death comes to them as a friend, to rise again? Is it not time that we think of them? In Ireland, a hundred patriots would have rent the air with the story of their wrongs. In England, we take small note of them. Yet they are our flesh and blood, with honest hearts and hands. A scheme has been devised for their benefit. ”

“ Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified God at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. “The end of all things is at hand,” is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. ”

“ They were sitting one morning at breakfast—that pleasantest of meals, unless you have to be up at an unusually early hour to catch the train and be off to London. Modern life is not such an improvement on that of the past as we are apt to fancy. The breakfast was the one meal at which people could meet and discuss matters—private, local, political, literary, or religious, in an informal way. We have no pleasant breakfast in these more ostentatious days, when society is too large to admit of friendship; but it seems to me that in my younger days we got a good deal more pleasure out of life. ”

“ At that very time—in autumn, when everyone is supposed to be out of town and blinds are drawn down in all Belgravia; when the moors of Scotland and the health resorts of our own highly-favoured land or of the Continent are crammed, and white-winged yachts, like sea-fowl or flakes of snow, bedeck the peaceful waters of the Solent, and sparkle as they shine along our summer seas—a small party might be seen drawing up at the registrar’s office somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Strand. ”

“ It is high time that we do something for our bold peasantry, once their country’s pride.
It is a fine, bright, sparkling morning, one rare in England, but to be made the most of when it comes. There are no clouds in the sky, and there is scarce a breath of air to bring them down from the vasty deep above. Every hedgerow is bright with flowers, and musical with the song of birds. ”

“ The father dies of consumption before he has reached middle age, after being in a hospital for months, supported at the public expense, and he leaves his children, if they live, to be supported by the parish. If there is to be compensation, it is not the State that ought to be asked to pay it. If drink be one cause of poverty, surely hereditary disease is another. In a perfect community neither should be allowed to exist. Think of such awful things as epilepsy and insanity, and cancer and scrofula, none of which science can cure! Why not ask society to stamp them out? ”

“ In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. ”

“ All boasting is unbecoming, and the true humble Christian feels that he is an unprofitable servant after all; but I am constrained to add that with the Lord’s blessing they have been made useful in bringing many who were in darkness and sitting in the valley of the shadow of death into His own marvellous light. Be assured that at the throne of grace this morning I particularly remembered the case of your poor protégé, who is much to be pitied. Oh, it grieves me to the heart to see how much we all make of wealth and rank! ”

“ Heavily tolled the bell of the old-fashioned church, in the gloomy vaults of which slept the family ancestors, whose varied virtues were recorded in marble in all parts of the building, and whose rotting carcases poisoned the atmosphere of the place, and had done so for many generations.
When are we going to reform this and to cremate our dead, so that we may go to church in safety and with no fear of detriment to our physical well-being? The ancients burnt their dead. Is there any earthly reason why we moderns should not do the same? ”

“ I, and other miserable sinners like unto me, come to town through tunnels, and over the tops of houses, or along cuttings in which one gets an unlovely view of the backs of dirty houses and slovenly yards, in a closely-packed railway carriage, where we can neither talk, nor hear, nor read, and grow nervous as the engine screams and shrieks on all occasions, while the railway porters close the doors with a bang sufficient to send one into a fit. ”

“ The man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one visibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human decency. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death and having a late part yet to act upon the stage of earth.’ In vain is all earthly vanity, but there is no vanity so vain as that connected with the grave. ”

“ And, then, what a monarch was a landlord in his domains, almost armed with the power of life and death! How much pleasanter the talk of such a man than of one who was in a counting-house all day, and whose favourite literature was to be found in the money articles of the Times! Should she become Lady Watkin? ”

“ How glad we were when the coachman, as he climbed up into his lofty seat, and gathered up the reins in his capacious hand, gave the signal, ‘Let ’em go!’ How beautiful it was to us lads to see the coach bound off like a thing of life, while the guard blew a farewell flourish on his horn, and the horses settled down steadily to their work after a playful flourish or two! ”

“ It is to the credit of our aristocracy that they aimed to be the leaders of the people; that they did not sink into mere courtiers; that they were bold and hardy—ready to take their share in the fighting and adventure which became the necessity of our insular position. It is more to their credit that the relation between them and their tenants was pleasant and mutually advantageous. The great landlord was a power in the land, a centre of civilization, the friend of all within his sphere of influence. ”

“ It is now the fashion to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. ”

“ In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. ”

“ The fact is, Naples is always hot in summer. All day long the burning sun bakes up the streets and the shops, and the old bits of rocks, all built over; and the heat seems to me to radiate from them all night long. If it were not for the tramcars, which are numerous and cheap, and the conductors of which are uncommonly civil and well-behaved, locomotion would be impossible. There are no flags more trying than those of Naples, and as the cabs drive all over the road you are never safe. ”

“ Every time,’ added the lady piteously, ‘every time that I take up an English newspaper, I see the country going to the bad, the people more intolerant of good government, the upper classes more careless as to the future, recklessly acting in accordance with the motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” The Sunday is desecrated by all classes, and the Lord will have no pity in the day of His wrath for Sabbath-breakers. The philosophers are in favour of Godless education, and now they tell me there are people who argue that Atheists have a right to sit in a Christian Parliament. ”