on each other not to be down-hearted. In them, as Shak

speare says,

patience and sorrow strive

Who shall express her goodliest."

A popular song of the street folk ends thus,

"Oh! bad luck can't be prevented,

Fortune she smiles or she frowns;

He's best off that's contented

To mix, sirs, the ups and the downs."

Mr. Manby Smith, describing his blind fiddler, says that he used to add always, when relating the sufferings of his life, "Well! 'taint no use grievin." His tale concluded, he said, "I don't know as I can tell you anythin' more, sir. We does the best we can. When the sun shines, and people walks about and enjoys theirselves, I gits a little money, and my wife and I is cheerful and contented. When the bad, wintry weather comes down upon us, we do feel what it is to be hungry and poor, but we can't help it, and it aint no use frettin'. My wife's a merry little ooman, and can go without a dinner, and never grumble; many's the day she gets no vittles no more than myself. Then I tells her not to git up, and so she lies a-bed all day, cos 'tis easier fastin' in bed than when you are up and about. If I brings home anythin', then she gits up and cooks it, and then we're all right. We always hopes for better times, and if we don't live to see 'em, why then we shan't grieve for the want of 'em. I plays the song 'There's a good Time comin', boys,' and my wife sings it. There's no harm in hopin' that we may all live to see it. That's all I've got to say, sir.' I have given his history," adds this interesting writer, "as he detailed it. It is just one of those revelations of the mysteries of common life which are only remarkable because the world in general has not chosen to make them the object of remark. But, verily, it has a use and a signification which discontented respectability, cushioned in its easy-chair, may do well to ponder *." "God keeps all his pity for the proud," says a poet. It is such details as these that enable us to under

* Curiosities of London Life.

66

stand the adage. The resignation of the poor is accompanied, also, with a charitable estimate of others that is truly astonishing. Thus, one poor woman said to Mayhew, Charing is better than needlework, though you may be the best shirtmaker. There's broken victuals sometimes for your children. It's a hard world, sir, but there's many good people in it." "Visiting one poor costerwoman," Mr. Mayhew says, “I never yet beheld so much destitution borne with so much content. Verily, the acted philosophy of the poor is a thing to make those who write and preach about it hide their heads." "I sell all kinds of shell-fish," said one poor man to him, "but my great dependence is on winkles." The confidence of not a few rests on nothing more substantial, while they are merrier and lighter-hearted than many fund-holders, whose dependence is on the Bank of England. And what is the prospect generally before the eyes of the lower classes, and hardly ever absent from their thoughts, and, as we just remarked, from their dreams? The house that holds the parish poor.

"Where children dwell who know no parent's care;
Parents who know no children's love dwell there;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,

And crippled age, with more than childhood fears."

Yet, with all this load of anxiety, these poor people contrive to practise the Pindaric maxim, saying, in words that you might have thought taken almost verbatim from the seventh Isthmian ode, "It is better always to look to what is present. For deceitful time hangs over men, rolling life's stream along; but even these evils are capable of a remedy to mortals, if only they have liberty; and a man should cherish good hope." "We lay dreadful cold of a night," said one poor woman, a groundselseller, " on account of having so little on our beds. But I'm not at all discontented at my lot. That wouldn't mend it. We strive and do the best we can, and may as well be contented over it. I think it's God's will we should be as we are. Providence is kind to me, even badly off as we are. I know it's all for the best." "Often of an evening," said one poor man, "I can see things in my imagination, and that's why I like to sit alone then; for of all the beautiful thoughts that ever a man possessed, there's none to equal a blind man's, when he's

by himself. I feel thankful that God has reduced me to this state. If I had run my race, and not been stopped, I might never have believed there was a God." To the poor, generally, besides these highest resources, belongs the common consolations of humanity which consist in the imagination and in dreams by day or night, some of which would almost seem to be admonitory.

66

How far men see in dreams!

In dreams they can accomplish worlds of things;
The heart then suffers a fusion of all feeling
Back to its youthful hours of innocence,

And nakedness, and paradise, ere yet

The world had wound a perishing garb around it."

The resignation in sufferings of the poor might be considered with an especial reference to what women have to endure under those circumstances, when human virtue assumes an angelic form. We might credit the poet, when he says,

The life of woman is full of woe?

Toiling on, and on, and on,

With breaking heart, and tearful eyes,

And silent lips, and in the soul

The secret longings that arise,

Which this world never satisfies;

Some more, some less, but of the whole
Not one quite happy; no, not one!"

However, we have not space to delay here. We have seen, in general, the patience of the common people, their moderation, their tranquillity, and modesty in suffering,-all common things, presenting a daily spectacle, but not the less excellent and admirable. It is a theme, we may add, that has formed the subject of a living writer, in many of his works, destined to immortality:

"Who, with right earnest zeal, despising scorn,

Paints Britain's poor and pleads for souls forlorn ;

Aye, while his merriest jests the surface hit,

The deepest pathos mingles with his wit *."

* Gurney.

Still, however pressed for time, we ought not to leave the subject without considering, for a moment, the state of the young in all these circumstances, for this is necessary to complete the picture. It is none of the least frightful features in the condition of absolute indigence, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. "The children of the very poor," says Elia, "have no young times."

"Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,

The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west;
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly;

They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free *."

It is the same nearly with the boy and the adolescent.

"Su

dorem originis suæ," says one of the fathers, "in ipso lucis limine meditatur."

"There may you see the youth of slender frame,
Content with weakness, weariness, and shame;
Yet, urged along, and proudly loath to drop,
He strives to join his fellows of the shop,
Till long-contending nature droops at last,
Declining health rejects his poor repast;
Then, from the rising generation thrust,
He falls alone, unnoticed to the dust."

A poet, when contemplating woes like these, exclaims,

O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth-viewing his progress through

What perils past, what crosses to ensue

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."

But, in spite of all efforts to be cheerful, those who are only

*Eliz Barrett.

passing from adolescence will often show a face long since razed out of the book of youth and pleasure. Alas! a mother's eye foresaw all this. He was her pride and joy, and she might say,

"But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,

And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,

And so he'll die."

Yet the young of both sexes who are born in these circumstances, while anticipating nothing brighter, surrounded with common things in this darkest form, find pleasure in life. “I want you to be merry," writes a poor girl to her absent friend, as we read in the work of Patell. "Do let me persuade you to try and be merry as a lark in a summer morning, and then we shall be the same as each other." The boy with his stock of herbs, that offers "a double andful of fine parsley for a penny," has a smile for every one. As in the comic song, a mother even can say of him, "Why should he leave the court where he was better off than all the other boys, with two bricks, an old shoe, and nine oyster shells, and a dead kitten by way of toys?" The young are thus sustained; they will not complain; though from the point of view from which we are surveying life this lot is hard to think of. Some Juletta will be heard exclaiming with a sigh,

"That handsome youth should suffer such a penance!
How young and sweet he suffers!"

But we must close this view of the sufferings of the lower orders, as constituting one of the common things in relation to virtue of which an attentive eye can discern the beauty. The whole chapter has related to the literature of tragedy and sorrow. We admire pathetic scenes upon the stage; we gaze upon them with sympathy even in a picture. The actor and the painter, by representing them, can command enthusiasm and tears. It would be strange to deny their excellence when seen-not in such imitative art, but in the original from which it was taken in the common every-day events and circumstances of human life, in the sad but sublime reality as exhibited around