only the modest reserve and self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes less regard for others, and the cover is taken off. A clerical essayist on "Future Years," "can well believe," he tells us, "that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to that !" "Mansie Wauch's glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame." And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be an aggravation in that view-to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it-that being the worst of all. Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if you will-the hue of blood-a degraded instance of the degrading power of guilt-a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse, or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects, "Till creatures born, For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed) But yester-morn." THE OPEN RIGHT HAND'S SECRET FROM THE LEFT. ST. MATTHEW vi. 3. O some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." The atmosphere is of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret, as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy. Yet are there, and ever will be, those-else had this earth of ours lost the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?-who "Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame." The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit, Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as Virgil's Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: Et se cupit ante videri. Another of Chamfort's cynical maximes et pensées runs thus: "Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, Si cadens adoraveris me." Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the right hand's largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon's famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV. know what were his designs against the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme of action; "but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left." And the vulgar mean the commonalty, the many, the polloi. The doer of good, therefore, who does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is treated in literature and life as what is called a "character." Goldsmith makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him unobserved. "He had, however," writes the Chinese citizen of the world, "no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor." And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin's curiosity to know "what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take such pains to display," is natural, and finds natural expression; and thereby hangs the tale of the "reluctantly good " Man in Black. Smollett, again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving, retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: "Numberless were the objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved." It cannot be affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did: "Yet was thy liberality discreet, Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat; And though in act unwearied, secret still, As in some solitude the summer rill Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green, And cheers the drooping flowers, unheard, unseen."' When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees ; but "he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall." Free gifts by stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron's; of whom, for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland's death, the poet reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant [Byron a sponsor!but let that pass]; and that after the "christening" he inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house. Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him "un de ces dieux bienfaiteurs de l'humanité, mais qui n'en partagent point la tendresse.” Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only the hand was opened behind his own back: il sut être bienveillant en secret. Amid James Watt's donations in aid of sound and useful learning, testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted; but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better "had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the frost." "Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth ;* but nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind in general." The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John Newton: "Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever, and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: "I shall probably never see him," writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide of benefactions; but "he will always have a niche in the museum of my reverential remembrance." Even without that, the Unknown had his reward. 'Charity ever Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet In the receiver." A broken-down old schoolmaster bore witness to Dr. Chalmers' modus operandi. "Many a pound-note has the doctor given me, and he always did the thing as if he were afraid that any person should see him. May God reward him!"-Hanna's "Life of Chalmers," chap. i. TH TO-MORROW. ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14. HE rich man in the parable was self-complacently farsighted in his foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years; but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the worldlings censured by St. James. "Go to now, ye that say, to-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain : whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is called to-day,-hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a memento mori,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter, whose style is, "Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant." Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. Macbeth's threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue : "TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, They come-even the enemy and the avenger; a cry |