BRINGING FORTH FRUIT IN OLD AGE. 413 where?" said Colby. "You married my eldest sister, Susannah." "I married your eldest sister! Then who are you?" "I am little Dan," was the reply. Wonder, astonishment, half-incredulity passed over Colby's face. "You Daniel Webster!" The two men looked at each other a moment, and then took each other in the arms, and they both wept. Then, after the first shock of recognition was over, Colby of course began to talk of the newspapers which were always full of Daniel Webster, and he continued, "You are a great man, a famous man; but, Daniel, the time is short, you won't be here very long. I know you are a great man; are you a good man, Daniel? Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ, Daniel? You know what I have been! one of the wickedest of men, and your poor sister well knew that," and many more words to the same purpose, in the most intensely earnest manner. "John Colby," said Webster, "your question cannot be answered lightly; I hope I am a Christian, I profess to be a Christian, but I must say with shame, not such a Christian as I wish I were; I have lived in a world surrounded by the highest honours, but also by temptations; I am not such a Christian as I ought to be; I am afraid I have not your faith and your hopes; but I am a Christian, and the same grace which converted you, John, and made you an heir of salvation, will do the same for me. No, it will not be long before our summons will come; and I came here today, John Colby, only to see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears the reality of your conversion; for, oh! John, what a wicked man you used to be!" There the two old men continued, in the presence of Mr. Harvey, talking of the conversion. "I was worse," said John, "than a heathen till I felt the grace of Christ, saw my sinfulness, and heard the voice of my Saviour. Daniel," said he, "shall we pray together? Will you pray?" So they knelt down, and Webster poured out a prayer which, from such a nature, we need not be informed, was touching; then Colby followed. Then, after they rose from their knees, the table was spread with a pure white cloth, and they shared a primitive meal, of a bowl of pure milk and bread together, over which Webster exclaimed, "Doesn't it taste good? doesn't it taste like the old times?" And shortly after, the brothers-in-law took an affectionate farewell; parting, very likely, to see each other no more on earth, John pursuing his simple way in his remote New England farm, Webster to take up his duties in the Cabinet and the Senate. As they got into their conveyance, tears were in his eyes, and he began to moralize. "I should like to know," he said, "what the enemies of religion would say to John Colby's conversion. There was a man as unlikely to become a Christian as any man I ever saw; he was reckless, impious, never attended church, never experienced the good influence of associating with religious people, so he lives on until a period of life when you do not expect a man's habits to change, and yet he has been brought into a condition such as you have seen to-day, a penitent, trusting, humble believer. Whatever people may say, nothing," continued Webster, "can convince me that any means 414 THE FLOURISHING OF THE ALMOND-TREE. short of the grace of Almighty God could make such a change, as I with my own eyes have this day seen, in the life of John Colby." When they got back to Franklin in the evening, John Taylor, Mr. Webster's chief steward, and managing farmer, was waiting for them at the door, and Webster called out to him, "Well, John Taylor, miracles happen in the later days as well as in the times of old." "What now, Squire?" said Taylor. "Why, John Colby has become a Christian! and if that is not a miracle, what is?" This little incident sheds a pleasant side-light upon the character and reality of Daniel Webster's religious convictions. Among the old Hindoo words the following half-parable, half-proverb is very pleasant,— "As the Aloe is green rock liking, till the last best summer of its age, NOBLESSE OBLIGE.—A PERFECT GENTLEMAN. Is character before us and beyond us. T is one of the most healthful exercises of life to contemplate an ideal It has been truly said, that the child in a little boat moored to a great vessel, and attempting to draw the great ship to his little boat, fails in that; but every effort it makes to draw the vessel to its boat draws its own boat nearer to the greater ship; -it is exactly so in all our relations to great ideals-as we attempt to draw them nearer to ourselves, we are really drawn nearer to them. The great painter was not all the grace, the strength, and sweetness he attempted to portray. Michael Angelo, the wonderful sculptor, embodied in his marbles every form of majesty and might; it is not to be supposed that he was all he so wonderfully delineated; but in his attempts he not only strengthened his own nature, but he also attracted to his ideals and impressed by them the minds of multitudes, who, in all ages, have admired him since. And we conceive the perfect gentleman to be very greatly ideal; but then we must strive to make the character actual, or real. Why, of course, such a person is a very bundle of virtuous attributes; and almost the worst effect of the study is the feeling that the character is all but unattainable. And even as some, when they have heard the enumeration of the qualifications essential to a poet, have only been filled with despair, and have said, Who then can be a poet? and others have felt the same despair at the enumeration of the qualifications essential to an orator, or an historian; so also a gentleman is a being so compounded of God's best clay, and so filled and informed by a Divine soul, that we often think we may exclaim, Who then can be a gentleman? For all men are not gentlemen-cela va sans dire-any more than all men are poets, or statesmen, or wits. Perhaps all men cannot be gentlemen. Some men look as if they were only of a near kinsmanship to the animal and the earthly nature. You may shoot a divine spark into their being; you may lead them to suspect that they have a soul for which Christ died; they claim a fellowship with you by the affinities of sense, of common feeling, of love, of hate, of passion; but you feel that, whatsoever they are, and wheresover born, they can only do the rough, hard work of the world; and, sometimes, there are such of these whom society labels gentlemen." In the catalogue they pass for such, but they are not; 66 416 WHAT, AND WHO, IS A GENTLEMAN? they are a coarse compound, made up of mud and money, kneaded together by circumstances, and baked by public opinion, and gilded over by respectability, and varnished by conventionalisms. We know a man may be a gentleman, and he may do the very roughest of the world's rough work; but it is still true there are those who, whatever they have, seem to be destitute and devoid of the tenderness, the delicacy, the quick perception and sense of honour, and the keenness of soul which enters into the character of a gentleman. Certainly, we pray that in attempting to show what is not gentlemanly, we may not, to quote Malvolio, "be like a pair of snuffers, snipping off the blackness only to keep it to ourselves." What is a gentleman? Is it the old generation? Is it the antique blood? Is it Norman? The Saxon is the oldest-manifestly it is not this for have we not all one father? We can all go far back, and all our ancestors were in Noah's ark. "When Adam delved and Eve span, "The grand old gardener and his wife Manifestly there must be something more than the mere remoteness of generation. We know a certain joke, which says, a man who is no gentleman, is a man who has no grandfathers. Still we fancy that, gentle or not, we all have had, or have, grandfathers; so we must seek the gentleman in some other circumstances. Is it in race? And there you have it, say some; it is not in the ancientness of the blood, but in its purity. But where is it? Where is the uncontaminated stem; and, when it is found, is it so noble? Has it the great attributes of self-restraint, selfconquest and magnanimity. Let the house of Hastings or of Churchill answer "What can ennoble fools, or slaves, or cowards? To come to lower standards. What constitues a gentleman? Is it dress? According to some, we believe, Pope's celebrated stanzas would be reversed, and they would run "Dress makes the man, the want of it the fellow." We are sure many have thought so. Why, is not this exactly the conception many form of him, that he represents the drawing-room view of the world? Was not Beau Brummell a gentleman-" the autocrat of cravats," "who introduced starch into neckcloths," and fed the pampered appetite of his boots on champagne, and whose friend or whose coat were cut with equal grace? And truly some men form a world in which we exclaim, How great is dress! and we bow before the majesty of the tailor;-the man is what he wears, even more than how he wears it, and so, as Carlyle teaches, the man degenerates into a clothes horse! Is TESTS OF THE GENTLEMAN. 417 it respectability? What is respectability, etymologically? We suppose it is, what will bear looking at over and over again; but respectable, what is that? To live in a large house, to keep a carriage, to give good dinners? and the respectable so changes its feature, it depends on opinion, on a breath! Think what has been execrated, detested, and martyred in this world! think what wickedness has received ovations! and then determine if respectability shall be the test of the gentleman. It is not admiration alone we covet, we must know whom we admire. The gentleman has little care for the "good opinion" of the "mob," who may shout "crown him!" to-day, and "crucify him!" to-morrow; calmly he smiles on both alike. Least of all should we be disposed to test the gentleman by his possession of money-a very nice thing, money; but two questions go to the possession of it. How did you come by it? A thief passes for a gentleman when stealing has made him rich. And how do you behave with it? In a word, what do you do with it? You cannot enclose the gentleman, then, in any of the circumstances we have mentioned, for a gentleman is not compounded of circumstances, he is moved by soul, by some spring of character; you cannot make a gentleman; he must be born, but you may assist the birth. Undoubtedly, if you show the gentleman by some leading characteristics, there are two by which he may best be known: first, he respects himself; second, he honours all men. It is impossible to take a liberty with him; he takes no liberties with others. These are, after all, the chief; limit the attributes to these, and you will not find them insufficient to represent the life we have distinguished. It is a great power and virtue, that old faculty of self-respect, for it lifts a man above meanness, and cowardice, and falsehood. We do not mean the strut of the man through the street, who feels that he is "worth" so much. We do not mean the mere autocratic assumption. There are men who will never either melt or carve into the shape of gentlemen, because of their innate roughness, meanness, cowardice, and faithlessness-they are like lost souls on earth. The reverse side saves from this: the man respects others; he reverences the rights of other men; he neither hedges himself round by a remote inaccessibility, nor moves among men with careless and cruel effrontery. Will anybody say we should not take lessons in the cultivation of this character? The gentleman illustrates the beautiful in life. "The true gentleman is one that is God's servant, the world's master, and his own man; his virtue is his business, his study, his recreation, contentedness his rest, and happiness his reward. He is necessitated to take the world on his way to heaven; but he walks through it as fast as he can, and all his business by the way is to make himself and others happy. Take him all in two words, he is a man and a Christian." And does not the Bible set forth the character of the gentleman? What finer one than Abraham ? How illustriously, how beautifully he rises there, how courteous, how forbearing, a child and prophet of the unseen,-for no man can be a E E |