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.

66 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.

THE

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. it is even a vapour that appeareth for a vanisheth away." Boast not thyself of knowest not what a day may bring forth. called to-day,-hardly this can be called thine. 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.

For what is your life? little time, and then to-morrow, for thou To-day, while it is But to-morrow,

Macbeth's threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue :

cry

"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
The way to dusty death."

So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the is still, They come-even the enemy and the avenger; a cry

varied by one of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of "The queen, my lord, is dead," but elicits for response, "She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.-Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."

In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,"Here will I lie to-night;

[Soldiers begin to set up the King's tent.

But where to-morrow?-Well, all's one for that."

To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur's encounter with the king's forces at Shrewsbury,—

"To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day

Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men
Must 'bide the touch."

While there's life there's hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? "When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity, replies,

"Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in ;

I'll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel,
Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow."

Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo's decree against another (quite another) Claudio:

"Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,

It would be thus with him ;-he must die to-morrow.

Isab. To-morrow! O, that's sudden! Spare him, spare him;

He's not prepared for death."

Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man :

"Look, here's the warrant, Claudio, for thy death:

'Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow
Thou must be made immortal."

Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,—

"Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,

But he must die to-morrow?

One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night :

Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to him,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of illustration.

Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment—"the fear of personal oblivion in one's own home"-artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists:

'To-morrow,' said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way;
'To-morrow,' cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Then life stood still at blessed noon,
I, only I, had passed away :
'To-morrow and to-day,' they cried :
I was of yesterday."

It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade's story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker's clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. "A sleepy languor now came over him; . . but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, My head, how heavy it feels.' But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, 'I'll take it to-Pembroke-street to-morrow: tomor- -row." Fool-like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and

6

so did the detectives, dead.

Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.

"I have spent all my life in pursuit of it," adds the sage old gentleman, "being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me."

"This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend," said the Man of Intelligence, "is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your