Robert Chambers

“ What change, to be sure, to these good people, is the close alley of the Old Town of Edinburgh, the changeless prospect of house tops and chimneys, and the black wall opposite to their windows, ever casting its dark shade into their little apartments, for the pleasant open fields in which they have sown and reaped for half a lifetime, and where every little rustic locality is endeared to them by a thousand delightful recollections! ”

“ As you pass about nine, you observe, on looking in, that the discipline and rigour of shop-life has dissolved. Master, men, and boys, feel the approach of the moment of emancipation, with a peculiar salience of thought, alternating with a deep and tranquil delight. The confessor reigns in the spirit of this glorious hour, and his laugh, and his joke, and his news, and his proffered pinch, are listened to, re-echoed, and partaken of by his devotee, with a pleasure of the keenest nature, and ominous, you may make sure, of oysters and gin punch on the way home. ”

“ There, by the lonely hearth—the fire sunk to a cinder and a mass of ashes—the candle verging to its close in the socket—the dingy silent apartment strewed with the toys and furniture of the children, sent hours since to bed—there, in the midst of this domestic wilderness sits the drooping, desponding, almost broken-hearted wife, counting the hours, and conning over in her wearied mind the numbers of times she has been so deserted, and foreseeing the still greater misery which awaits her by such a course of profligacy in her husband. ”

“ Such is the melancholy story of Edward Lord Bruce, a young nobleman, who, but for a false point of honour, arising from the incorrect judging of the world, might have lived to make many fellow-creatures happy, and adorn the annals of his country. The sacred griefs of those to whom he was most peculiarly endeared, it would be vain to paint. A mistress who wore mourning, and lived single for his sake all the rest of her life—a mother, who survived him only to mourn his irreparable loss—upon such holy sorrow it is not for me to intrude. ”

“ All think upon saying something, yet nobody speaks. The national mauvaise honte is now displayed to the height of its perfection. The agony of the company, however, approaches its crisis. The awful stillness is broken, and in a most natural and unexpected manner. The young man in the starched cravat sitting in a corner of the room, near the end of the piano, who has been thinking what he should say or do for the last half hour, takes heart of grace; he rises and snuffs the candles, going through the self-imposed duty in as neat and elegant a style as he can possibly affect. ”

“ It was often a subject of wonder that the pure and elevated nature of young Lord Bruce should tolerate the reckless profligacy of Sackville; but those who were surprised did not take a very extended view of human nature. The truth is, that real goodness is often imposed upon by vice, and sees in it more to attract and delight than it does in goodness similar to itself. The gentle character of Bruce clung to the fierce and turbulent nature of Sackville, as if it found in that nature a protection and comfort which it needed. ”

“ Almost every fine morning you rise about seven for a walk, and, by a strange chance, you invariably take the house of promise in your way, and enjoy a survey of its external excellencies. When you observe, from the closed shutters, that its present occupants, so far from being agog about it like yourself, are snugly snoozing in their beds, you wonder at their indifference. If you were they, you would have been up hours ago, enjoying the air in the back-green, or playing the king of the Vandals in the front-plot. ”

“ The only true way to make a happy progress through this world, is to go on in a dogged, persevering pursuit of one good object, neither turning to the right nor to the left, making our business as much as possible our pleasure, and not permitting ourselves to awake from our dream of activity—not permitting ourselves to think that we have been active—till we suddenly find ourselves at the goal of our wishes, with fortune almost unconsciously within our grasp. ”

“ For my part, I wonder how any man can dare to despise a fellow-creature upon other grounds. Is it difference of tongue, of rank, of personal character, of external manners, that makes you despise any one? What, I would ask, are all these distinctions to the great fellowship of our common humanity—the social end which we are working to as parts of a great community—as parts of a glorious world, or the general destiny which awaits us at the close of this brief life? ”

“ If a parent has been imprudent, and now suffers the bitter effects of his folly, in misfortunes which have exposed him to the contempt of mankind, here still is a resource. He can steal by night to the couch of his children, and, beside the unconscious babes, whose fate hangs all upon his, and who yet reprove not, in their silent innocence, the guilt which has exposed them to misery, weep himself into good resolutions, and into comfort. ”

“ As he walks along, he hardly feels that any other part of him is in existence, besides that. But he feels his tuft most intensely. Thought, feeling, every thing, lies concentrated in that: head, body, and limbs, are all alike mere members devolved from it. If you were to cut off the side-bunch of a modern beau in his sleep, he would, for the time, be utterly ruined. ”

“ It is amazing how much a youth can endure of the company of his principal “acquaintance.” Virgil’s expression, “tecum consumerer ævo,” is realised in his case; for he veritably appears as if he could spend his whole life in the society of the treasured individual. At the approach of that person, every other matter is cast aside; the most important business seems nothing in contrast with the interchange of a smile or a jest with this duplicate of himself. ”

“ But even in nursery tales Lady Jean could find examples which justified her own passion. The vilest animals, she knew, on finding some beautiful dame, who was so disinterested as to fall in love with them, usually turned out to be the most beautiful princes that ever were seen, and invariably married and made happy the ladies whose affection had restored them to their natural form and just inheritance. Who knows, she thought, but Richard may some day, in a transport of passion, throw open his coat, exhibit the star of nobility glittering on his breast, and ask me to become a countess? ”

“ You are now in the same predicament as if you had met your friend in the same cool part of the day in a perfectly empty street, and therefore, when he has answered your precious question as to his health, you are as fairly in for a quarter of an hour of wretched, bald, wishy-washy conversation about all kinds of nothings that you don’t care one farthing about, as ever you were in your life. ”

“ If we are obliged at every moment to abandon some sacred principle in order to gratify a paltry appetite; if the extensive future is perpetually to be sacrificed for the sake of the momentary present; if we are to lead a life of Esau-like bargains from the first to the last—then we are totally unfit for any purpose above the meanest. Self-indulgence makes brutes out of gods; self-denial is the tangent line by which human nature trenches upon the divine. Now, self-indulgence is not inherent except in very few natures ”

“ Lady Clementina Sackville, eldest daughter of the Earl of Dorset, was just two years younger than Sir George and his friend, and there was not a more beautiful or accomplished gentlewoman in the court of Queen Anne. Whether in the walking of a minuet, or in the personation of a divine beauty in one of Ben Jonson’s court masks, Lady Clementina was alike distinguished; while her manners, so far from betraying that pride which so often attends the triumphs of united beauty and talent, were of the most unassuming and amiable character. ”

“ It would astonish any man, accustomed, day after day, to go home to a spread table at a regular hour, to know the strange shifts which victims have to make in order to satisfy hunger—how much is done by raising small hard-wrung subsidies from former acquaintance—how much by duping—how much by what the Scotch people very expressively call skeching—how much by subdivision of mites among the wretches themselves. Your victim is often witty, can sing one good comic song, has a turn for mimicry, or at least an amusing smack of worldly knowledge ”

“ Young men—by which, I mean men in the mason-lodge time of life, say between twenty and five-and-twenty—are most apt to indulge in confession. They think friends all in all, and for friends would give up every thing. All business and duty is to them an episode, only consented to because it is unavoidable; while the enjoyment of the countenance of their friends seems the main and true concern of life. Then are the joys of confession truly relished. Then does the vampire confessor suck deepest into the vitals of his devotee. ”

“ Wherever this man goes, the wind rises behind him, by reason of the vacuum which he has produced. He puffs, pants, fights, strives, struggles for health. When he returns from his morning walk, he first looks in the glass to congratulate himself on the bloom which he has been cultivating in his cheek, and thereafter sits down to solace the appetite which he finds he has nursed into a kind of fury. At any ordinary time, he could spring from his bed at nine o’clock, and devour four cups of tea, with bread, ham, eggs, and haddocks, beyond reckoning. ”

“ A man cannot altogether seclude himself from the world in the bosom of his family; neither can he always carry his wife along with him: but he must not for a light reason allow himself to be detained from her society. A woman’s hours are often lonely; and after she has bestowed her whole cares for a day to set her house in order, and anxiously awaits her husband’s return, in the hope of enjoying a few hours of mutually endearing converse by the cheerful hearth, if she have to watch every approaching footstep in vain, it is a cruel disappointment. ”

“ Then she recalled one gentle recollection, which occasionally would steal into her mind, even in her darkest hours, and fill it with an agreeable but still painful light—the thought of Russell—Russell, the kind and good, whom, in a moment of girlish vanity, she had treated harshly, so that he vanished from her presence for ever, and even from the place where he had suffered her scorn. ”

“ The more common position of a shopkeeper’s confessor is a chair opposite the door, whence he may command a view of all that passes on the street, with a full front inspection of every individual that makes bold to enter. Into this chair the confessor invariably glides as a matter of course. There he sits down, and, throwing one limb over the other, considers himself entitled to inflict his company upon the unhappy shopkeeper for any length of time. He notices, as if he were not noticing, all that goes on in the premises. ”

“ The young Englishman, in order to cultivate this delightful intimacy with the greater convenience, removed from his former lodgings to a house directly opposite to Mrs Macfarlane’s, in the High Street, where, at such times as a visit was out of the question, he would sit for hours watching patiently for the slightest glimpse of her through the windows, and judging even a momentary gleam of her figure within the dim glass as an ample compensation for his pains. ”

“ Beneath all this gloss of the world—this cold conventional aspect, which all more or less present, and which the business of life renders necessary—there resides for certain a fountain of goodness, pure in its inner depths as the lymph rock-distilled, and ready on every proper occasion to well out in the exercise of the noblest duties. ”