Part 3

All this while Herbert had been too ill to be addressed on the subject; but symptoms of recovery were now beginning to appear; and as nobody was aware that he had any particular interest in the Lovell family, the affair was communicated to him. At first he refused to believe in his friend’s guilt, and became violently irritated. His informants assured him they would be too happy to find they were mistaken, but that since the inquiry no hope of such an issue remained, and he sank into a gloomy silence.

On the following morning, when his servant came to his room door, he found it locked. When, at the desire of the surgeon, it was broken open, Herbert was found a corpse, and a discharged pistol lying beside him. An inquest sat upon the body, and the verdict brought in was _Temporary Insanity_. There never was one more just.

Preparations were now made for the funeral—that funeral which we had witnessed; but before the day appointed for it arrived, another chapter of this sad story was unfolded.

When Charles left the barracks on that fatal night, instead of going home, he passed the dark hours in wandering wildly about the country; but when morning dawned, fearing the eye of man, he returned to the vicarage, and slunk unobserved to his chamber. When he did not appear at breakfast, his mother sought him in his room, where she found him in bed. He said he was very ill—and so indeed he was—and begged to be left alone; but as he was no better on the following day, she insisted on sending for medical advice. The doctor found him with all those physical symptoms that are apt to supervene from great anxiety of mind; and saying he could get no sleep, Charles requested to have some laudanum; but the physician was on his guard, for although the parties concerned wished to keep the thing private, some rumours had got abroad that awakened his caution.

The parents, meanwhile, had not the slightest anticipation of the thunderbolt that was about to fall upon them. They lived a very retired life, were acquainted with none of the officers—and they were even ignorant of the amount of their son’s intimacy with the regiment. Thus, when news of Herbert’s lamentable death reached them, the mother said to her son: ‘Charles, did you know a young man in the barracks called Herbert; a lieutenant, I believe? By the bye, I hope it’s not Emily’s Mr. Herbert.’

‘Did I know him?’ said Charles, turning suddenly towards her, for, under pretence that the light annoyed him, he always lay with his face to the wall. ‘Why do you ask, mother?’

‘Because he’s dead. He had a fever, and—’

‘Herbert dead!’ cried Charles, suddenly sitting up in the bed.

‘Yes, he had a fever, and it is supposed he was delirious, for he blew out his brains; there is a report that he had been playing high, and lost a great deal of money. What’s the matter, dear? Oh, Charles, I shouldn’t have told you! I was not aware that you knew him!’

‘Fetch my father here, and, Mother, you come back with him!’ said Charles, speaking with a strange sternness of tone, and wildly motioning her out of the room.

When the parents came, he bade them sit down beside him; and then, with a degree of remorse and anguish that no words could portray, he told them all; whilst they, with blanched cheeks and fainting hearts, listened to the dire confession.

‘And here I am,’ he exclaimed, as he ended, ‘a cowardly scoundrel that has not dared to die! Oh, Herbert! happy, happy, Herbert! Would I were with you!’

At that moment the door opened, and a beautiful, bright, smiling, joyous face peeped in. It was Emily Lovell, the beloved daughter, the adored sister, arrived from London in compliance with a letter received a few days previously from Herbert, wherein he had told her that by the time she received it, he would be a captain. She had come to introduce him to her parents as her affianced husband. She feared no refusal; well she knew how rejoiced they would be to see her the wife of so kind and honourable a man. But they were ignorant of all this, and in the fulness of their agony, the cup of woe ran over and she drank of the draught! They told her all before she had been five minutes in the room. How else could they account for their tears, their confusion, their bewilderment, their despair!

Before Herbert’s funeral took place, Emily Lovell was lying betwixt life and death in a brain fever. Under the influence of a feeling easily to be comprehended, thirsting for a self-imposed torture, that by its very poignancy should relieve the dead weight of wretchedness that lay upon his breast, Charles crept from his bed, and slipping on a loose coat that hung in his room, he stole across the garden to the tower, whence, through the arrow-slit, he witnessed the burial of his sister’s lover, whom he had hastened to the grave.

Here terminates our sad story. We left T—— on the following morning, and it was two or three years before any further intelligence of the Lovell family reached us. All we then heard was, that Charles had gone, a self-condemned exile, to Australia; and that Emily had insisted on accompanying him thither.

DREAM WITHIN DREAM; OR, EVIL MINIMISED.

What evil would be, could it be, the Blest Are sometimes fain to know. They sink to rest, Dream, for one moment’s space, of care and strife, Wake, stare, and smile; and this is Human Life.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AT HOME AND ABROAD.

The lamentable deficiency of the commonest rudiments of education, which still exists among the humbler classes of this nation, is never so darkly apparent as when we compare their condition with that of people of similar rank in other countries. When we do so, we find that England stands the lowest in the scale of what truly must be looked upon as _Civilisation_; for she provides fewer means for promoting it than any of her neighbours. With us, education is a commodity to be trafficked in: abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters are perfectly irresponsible except to their paymasters: in other countries, teachers are appointed by the state, and a rigid supervision is maintained over the trainers of youth, both as regards competency and moral conduct. In England, whoever is too poor to buy the article education, can get none of it for himself or his offspring: in other parts of Europe, either the government (as in Germany), or public opinion (as in America), enforces it upon the youthful population.

What are the consequences? One is revealed by a comparison between the proportion of scholars in elementary schools to the entire population of other countries, and that in our own. Taking the whole of northern Europe—including Scotland—and France and Belgium (where education is at a low ebb), we find that to every 2¼ of the population, there is one child acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; while in England there is only one such pupil to every _fourteen_ inhabitants.

It has been calculated that there are, at the present day in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who can neither read nor write—that is to say, nearly one quarter of the population. Also, that of all the children between five and fourteen, more than one half attend no place of instruction. These statements—compiled by Mr. Kay, from official and other authentic sources, for his work on the Social Condition and Education of the Poor in England and Europe, would be hard to believe, if we had not to encounter in our every-day life degrees of illiteracy which would be startling, if we were not thoroughly used to it. Wherever we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to the _experimentum crucis_ of ‘his mark.’ The number of petty jurors—in rural districts especially—who can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only ‘men of mark,’ but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the Post Office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A housewife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen’s bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practical evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We cannot pass through the streets, we cannot enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote—with the attestation of our own experience—the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper:—‘Taking the adult class of agricultural labourers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect, they are perfect strangers. You cannot address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes, nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you accost him, if he is not insolent—which he seldom is—he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you, greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview, while it lasts, and obviously relieved when it is over. These are the traits which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm labourers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult peasant reading for his own or others’ amusement? The invariable answer is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place, _the great bulk of them cannot read_. In the next, a large proportion of those who can, do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say, that many of those who cannot read, have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours.’

We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited—

‘It is a great fact, however much we may be inclined to doubt it, that throughout Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Wirtemberg, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt, Hesse Cassel, Gotha, Nassau, Hanover, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and the Austrian Empire, all the children are actually at this present time attending school, and are receiving a careful, religious, moral, and intellectual education, from highly educated and efficient teachers. Over the vast tract of country which I have mentioned, as well as in Holland, and the greater part of France, _all_ the children above six years of age are daily acquiring useful knowledge and good habits under the _influence_ of moral, religious, and learned teachers. ALL the youth of the greater part of these countries, below the age of twenty-one years, can read, write, and cypher, and know the Bible History, and the history of their own country. No children are left idle and dirty in the streets of the towns—there is no class of children to be compared in any respect to the children who frequent our “ragged schools”——all the children, even of the poorest parents, are, in a great part of these countries, in dress, appearance, cleanliness, and manners, as polished and civilised as the children of our middle classes; the children of the poor in Germany are so civilised that the rich often send their children to the schools intended for the poor; and, lastly, in a great part of Germany and Switzerland, the children of the poor are receiving a _better_ education than that given in England to the children of the greater part of our middle classes.’

‘I remember one day,’ says Mr. Kay in another page, ‘when walking near Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diesterweg’s Normal College, and of another teacher, we saw a poor woman cutting up, in the road, logs of wood for winter use. My companions pointed her out to me and said, “Perhaps you will scarcely believe it, but in the neighbourhood of Berlin, poor women, like that one, read translations of Sir Walter Scott’s Novels, and many of the interesting works of your language, besides those of the principal writers of Germany.” This account was afterwards confirmed by the testimony of several other persons. Often and often have I seen the poor cab-drivers of Berlin, while waiting for a fare, amusing themselves by reading German books, which they had brought with them in the morning, expressly for the purpose of supplying amusement and occupation for their leisure hours. In many parts of these countries, the peasants and the workmen of the towns attend regular weekly lectures or weekly classes, where they practise singing or chanting, or learn mechanical drawing, history, or science. The intelligence of the poorer classes of these countries is shown by their manners. The whole appearance of a German peasant who has been brought up under this system, _i. e._ of any of the poor who have not attained the age of thirty-five years, is very different to that of our own peasantry. The German, Swiss, or Dutch peasant, who has grown up to manhood under the new system, and since the old feudal system was overthrown, is not nearly so often, as with us, distinguished by an uncouth dialect. On the contrary, they speak as their teachers speak, clearly, without hesitation, and grammatically. They answer questions politely, readily, and with the ease which shows they have been accustomed to mingle with men of greater wealth and of better education than themselves. They do not appear embarrassed, still less do they appear gawkish or stupid, when addressed. If, in asking a peasant a question, a stranger, according to the polite custom of the country, raises his hat, the first words of reply are the quietly uttered ones, “I pray you, Sir, be covered.” A Prussian peasant is always polite and respectful to a stranger, but quite as much at his ease as when speaking to one of his own fellows.’

Surely the contrast presented between the efforts of the schoolmaster abroad and his inactivity at home—refuting, as it does, our hourly boastings of ‘intellectual progress,’—should arouse us, energetically and practically, to the work of Educational extension.

THE LADY ALICE.

I. What doth the Lady Alice so late on the turret-stair, Without a lamp to light her but the diamond in her hair; When every arching passage overflows with shallow gloom, And dreams float through the castle, into every silent room?

She trembles at her footsteps, although their fall is light; For through the turret-loopholes she sees the murky night,— Black, broken vapours streaming across the stormy skies,— Along the empty corridors the moaning tempest cries.

She steals along a gallery, she pauses by a door; And fast her tears are dropping down upon the oaken floor; And thrice she seems returning,—but thrice she turns again;— Now heavy lie the cloud of sleep on that old father’s brain!

Oh, well it were that _never_ thou should’st waken from thy sleep! For wherefore should they waken who waken but to weep? No more, no more beside thy bed may Peace her vigil keep; Thy sorrow, like a lion, waits[1] upon its prey to leap.

II. An afternoon in April. No sun appears on high; A moist and yellow lustre fills the deepness of the sky; And through the castle gateway, with slow and solemn tread, Along the leafless avenue they bear the honoured dead.

They stop. The long line closes up, like some gigantic worm; A shape is standing in the path; a wan and ghostlike form; Which gazes fixedly, nor moves; nor utters any sound; Then, like a statue built of snow, falls lifeless to the ground.

And though her clothes are ragged, and though her feet are bare; And though all wild and tangled, falls her heavy silk-brown hair; Though from her eyes the brightness, from her cheeks the bloom, has fled; They know their Lady Alice, the Darling of the Dead.

With silence, in her own old room the fainting form they lay; Where all things stand unaltered since the night she fled away; But who shall bring to life again her father from the clay? But who shall give her back again her heart of that old day?

Footnote 1:

The lion was said to ‘prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.’

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS. A GLOBE.

One of the most remarkable of self-educated men, James Ferguson, when a poor agricultural labourer, constructed a globe. A friend had made him a present of ‘Gordon’s Geographical Grammar,’ which, he says, ‘at that time was to me a great treasure. There is no figure of a globe in it, although it contains a tolerable description of the globes, and their use. From this description I made a globe in three weeks, at my father’s, having turned the ball thereof out of a piece of wood; which ball I covered with paper, and delineated a map of the world upon it, made the meridian ring and horizon of wood, covered them with paper, and graduated them; and was happy to find that by my globe (which was the first I ever saw) I could solve the problems.’

‘But,’ he adds, ‘this was not likely to afford me bread.’

In a few years this ingenious man discovered the conditions upon which he could earn his bread, by a skill which did not suffer under the competition of united labour. He had made also a wooden clock. He carried about his globe and his clock, and ‘began to pick up some money about the country’ by cleaning clocks. He became a skilled clock-cleaner. For six-and-twenty years afterwards he earned his bread as an artist. He then became a scientific lecturer, and in connection with his pursuits, was also a globe maker. His name may be seen upon old globes, associated with that of Senex. The demand for globes must have been then very small, but Ferguson had learned that cheapness is produced by labour-saving contrivances. A pretty instrument for graduating lines upon the meridian ring, once belonging to Ferguson, is in use at this hour in the manufactory of Messrs. Malby and Son. The poor lad ‘who made a globe in three weeks’ finally won the honours and riches that were due to his genius and industry. But he would never have earned a living in the continuance of his first attempt to turn a ball out of a piece of wood, cover it with paper, and draw a map of the world upon it. The nicest application of his individual skill, and the most careful employment of his scientific knowledge, would have been wasted upon those portions of the work in which the continued application of common routine labour is the most efficient instrument of production.

Let us contrast the successive steps of Ferguson’s first experiment in globe-making with the processes of a globe manufactory.

A globe is not made of ‘a ball turned out of a piece of wood.’ If a solid ball of large dimensions were so turned, it would be too heavy for ordinary use. Erasmus said of one of the books of Thomas Aquinas, ‘No man can carry it about, much less get it into his head;’ and so would it be said of a solid globe. If it were made of hollow wood, it would warp and split at the junction of its parts. A globe is made of paper and plaster. It is a beautiful combination of solidity and lightness. It is perfectly balanced upon its axis. It retains its form under every variety of temperature. Time affects it less than most other works of art. It is as durable as a Scagliola column.

A globe may not, at first sight, appear a cheap production. It is not, of necessity, a low-priced production, and yet it is essentially cheap; for nearly all the principles of manufacture that are conditions of cheapness are exhibited in the various stages of its construction. There are only four globe-makers in England and one in Scotland. The annual sale of globes is only about a thousand pair. The price of a pair of globes varies from six shillings to fifty pounds. But from the smallest 2-inch, to the largest 36-inch globe, a systematic process is carried on at every step of its formation. We select this Illustration of Cheapness as a contrast, in relation to price and extent of demand, to the Lucifer Match. But it is, at the same time, a parallel in principle. If a globe were not made upon a principle involving the scientific combination of skilled labour, it would be a mere article of luxury from its excessive costliness. It is now a most useful instrument in education. For educational purposes the most inexpensive globe is as valuable as that of the highest price. All that properly belongs to the excellence of the instrument is found in combination with the commonest stained wood frame, as perfectly as with the most highly-finished frame of rose-wood or mahogany.