church is a desolate ruin. Only the eastern and western gables remain, with the south wall of the nave, the beau tiful windows framing bits of sky. Almost everywhere, you can trace the foundations: and the bases of the shafts that bore up the central vault remain. In this carefully tended grave-yard, with innumerable daisies growing over them, Christian folk have been buried for twelve hundred years through niches in the fortified wall, that looks north and east, you discern the ceaseless fluctuation of the wide sea. Doubtless the Reformation brought inestimable gains yet in this country we had to take them accompanied by grievous æsthetic loss, which need not at all have been.

LET

CONCLUSION.

ET a small essayist, departing from the field wheron he has had his day, say a word about his craft.

He has always tried to write fairly and kindly to say what he thought true: and if possible to help his anxious fellow-pilgrims to bear the burden of the day. He has sought to set things in an encouraging and consolatory light. To this end he has turned away as far as might be from the great field of the tragical and distressing, of which we have all known only too much. I knew well that round my little precinct there howls a great stormy wicked world: I did not want to see or hear more of it than I could help. I have kept to a small region of unexciting topics, fit to be thought of quietly. We have quite enough of vexation and worry in our actual life: I wished that any one taking up such a volume should be sure that he would not find any additional vexation here. There are wild tracts in the world of thought: very sublime, very awful, very heart-breaking sometimes no worse than stinging with a million little envenomed stings. Other feet walk these. Great geniuses, in fiction

and in tragedy, have led us through these realms, fascinated, shuddering, catching glimpses of awful black chasms, of irremediable wrong, of grinding misery, of inexpiable crime. Doubtless it is good for us sometimes to give ourselves up to that grand guidance: but it is not rest that we get under it. Many human beings find it hard wear of heart and head. "Of course, I read it,” said Dr Parr of Sardanapalus; "and could not sleep a wink after it." Not such should be the result of reading an essay. Indeed, just the contrary. I wished that whoever came with me should (as it were) turn into a little green corner of a quiet garden, to rest a while. I was quite sure that we should not be suffered to rest too long. Something would soon come, and call us away from the peaceful place. But one would go back to the worry, the better for the quiet. And written in little intervals of rest, these pages were meant to be read in the little intervals of rest intercalated in the lives of busy people.

Not without awe does the humble essayist think of the feverish wear through which writers of great genius do their work. These distinguished men work at an immensely high pressure. Most human beings work at low pressure. They do not know what they are capable of doing, under some awful necessity. We are told that any one seeing the fearful effort with which the French galley-slaves bent to their oars, would have said that no human being could have kept it up for so much as half an hour: yet by the very extremity of savage cruelty these poor wretches were often forced to

row with that mortal exertion for fifteen hours at a stretch. Something analogous to that unutterable strain is in the case of writers who delineate the grander passions. Shakspere, indeed, probably wrote with pulse unquickened the wildest bursts of Othello: not so with lesser men. Once upon a time, there sat a man at a London window, whence he looked across the narrow street into an opposite chamber. Therein he beheld another man, who appeared to him as one mad. For he wildly strode the floor: tore his hair: dashed his head against the wall: then with eldritch laughter flew towards a little table, and sitting down wrote a few words on an awfully blotted leaf. But it proved not to be a madman at all; but an eminent dramatic author composing a tragedy. And Mr Dickens has put on record that when he had written that beautiful and touching chapter which records little Paul Dombey's death, he restlessly walked the streets of Paris all night, with a heavy heart. Yes: he had himself experienced the emotion whose reflection was to draw tears from scores of thousands of women and men. Very differently is the essayist's work done. There is no tearing of the hair: no wearily pacing the midnight streets. When he intermits his toil for a few minutes, he rather sits down by the fire in an easy chair, and with a thoughtful face looks into the flame. And when his theme would lead to exciting and painful reflections, he has learned by much use to evade them. Doubtless the essay-writing I mean would be a school of unworthy self-indulgence, were

it not that it takes up so small a part of the writer's

life.

It soothed and worry, to write all like to read them. that in the case of many it has done so.

quieted one, amid much work and these pages: it was meant to do the And the writer has reason to believe Good people in his own country have shaken their heads at the notion of a clergyman giving his little leisure to the production of such essays; and have said his small ability might be better employed, in a way reminding one of the words of the country magistrate: "Prisoner at the bar, Providence has blest you with health and strength, instead of which you go about the country stealing ducks." For the opinion of these good people the writer can say sincerely he never in any degree cared. But he is resolved not to go on with the old thing till it becomes a weariness. And so, thanking many unknown friends for their patience, I cease for the while: in all likelihood, for altogether.

Ballantyne and Company, Printers, Edinburgh.