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mare? His large-lipped, globe-eyed daughter too, she, with all her plumpness, was no more substantial! And then that dim garret in the alley, the death and enduring innocence, the heaviness and misery of human days, the suffering that made of mortal breath a wearying disease, all the worst penalty of life-had I known and witnessed it? Could it be possible? And was there really a Patty Butler, looking with meek face upon a frowning world, and smiling down misfortune into pity?

I confess that having delighted in the atmosphere of a palace for scarcely an hour-all these realities seemed waning into visions of a fevered sleep. It was only by a strong effort, by a determination to analyze my past emotions, that I could convince myself of the existence of a world of wretchedness without, of want and suffering, and all the sad and wicked inequalities of human life. How may sudden prosperity mingle Lethe in its nectar!

I pass by moments of tumultuous anxiety—of hope, painful in its sweet intensity, of the delirium of assured aggrandizement. It is now the remnant of my former self that speaks, and therefore be the utterance calm and philosophic.

It was my fate to be chosen one of the three plumes-be it remembered, the middle and the noblest one-to nod above the baby Prince of Wales, all royally slumbering in his royal cradle.

It was my destiny, in 1762, to commemorate the conquest and bloodshed of 1345-to represent an ancestral plume whereof poor John of Bohemia was plucked that he of the black-mail might be nobly feathered: yes, it was my happy duty to wave above Ich Dien in 1762.

Ich Dien-" I serve." Such is the Prince of Wales's motto; and looking down upon the princelet's face, upon his velvet cheek, brought into the world for the world's incense, viewing the fleshly idol in its weak babyhood, I repeated for it, "I serve." And then, in the spirit of the future, asked--what? Bacchus, Venus, or what nobler deity?

The Prince of Wales-a six weeks' youngling-sleeps, and ceremony, with stinted breath, waits at the cradle. How glorious that young one's destinies! How moulded and marked-expressly fashioned for the high delights of earth-the chosen one of millions for millions' homage. The terrible beauty of a crown shall clasp those baby temples; that rosebud mouth shall speak the iron law; that little pulpy hand shall hold the sceptre and the ball. But now, asleep in the sweet mystery of babyhood, the little brain already busy with the things that meet us at the vestibule of life-for even then we are not alone, but surely have about us the hum and echo of the coming world,—but now thus, and now upon a giddying throne ! What grandeur, what intensity of bliss, what an almighty heritage to be born to-to be sent upon this earth, accompanied by invisible angels to take possession of!

The baby king coos in his sleep, while a thousand spirits meet upon the palace floor, sport in the palace air, hover about the cradle, and, with looks divine and loving as those that watched the bulrush ark tossed on

the Lord's anointed!

the wave of Egypt, gaze upon the bright new-comer, on him that shall be What purifying blessings purge the atmosphere of all earthly taint! What a halo of moral glory beams around that baby head, that meek vicegerent of the King of kings! Wisdom will nurse him on her knees, Pity and Goodness be his playfellows, Humility and Gentleness his close companions, and love for all men a monitor constant as the pulses of his heart!

And will it indeed be so? Poor little child, hapless creature, most unfortunate in the fortune of a prince! Are such, indeed, the influences about your cradle; will such, in very truth, be your teaching? Will you, indeed, be taught as one of earth-a thing of common wants and common affections? Will you be schooled in the open pages of humanity, or taught by rote the common cant of princes? Will you not, with the first dim glimmerings of human pride, see yourself a thing aloof from all, a piece of costly selfishness, an idol formed only for the knees of men, a superhuman creature, yea, a wingless deity? Will not this be the teaching of the court, this the lesson that shall prate pure nature from your heart, and place therein a swelling arrogance, divorcing you from all, and worshipping self in its most tyrannous desires, in its deepest abominations? Will you remain among the brotherhood of men, or will you be set apart only to snuff their incense and to hear their prayers? Splendid solitude of state-most desolate privilege of princes!

With this thought I felt a strange compassion for the Prince of Wales. All the glories of the palace seemed to vanish from about me, and I looked down upon the sleeping creature whom I was there to honour, with a deep pity, a sorrow, for the slippery, trying fortune he was born to.

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IN Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet, sequestered nook called Shepperton Green. At the time whereof we write the olden charity dwelt in an old workhouse-a primitive abiding-place for the broken ploughman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant, for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die. The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the lower part of the building, and therein, as the village trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the plain truth be said the governor was a cobbler. Within a stone's cast of the workhouse was a little white gate, swung between two hedge-banks in the road to Chertsey. Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for which service the passenger would drop some small benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant. This man was a pauper, one of the almsmen of the village workhouse.

There was a custom-whether established by the governor aforesaid or by the predecessors of a vanished century, we know not-that made it the privilege of the oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his perquisite, by right of years, the halfpence of the rare pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior succeeded to the office. Now the gate, and now the grave.

And this is all the history? All. The story is told-it will not bear another syllable. The Old Man" is at the gate; the custom which places him there has been made known, and with it ends the narrative.

How few the incidents of life-how multitudinous its emotions! How flat, monotonous may be the circumstance of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape, broken into hill and dale, with trees of every hue and form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet fields. How beautiful; for how various! Cast your eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate-barren as barren rock? Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colours of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness-audibly as where the corn grows and the grape

ripens? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor-with the most active and apparently the most inert?

That " Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon his head-eighty years, covering it with natural reverence. He was once in London-only once. This pilgrimage excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles from the cottage in which he was born; of which he became the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his children saw the light, and their children after; where many of them died; and whence, having with a stout soul fought against the strengthening ills of poverty and old age, he was thrust by want and sickness out, and, with a strong heart, he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed.

Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across a moor--a flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered, the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have compassed him round; yet has he been subdued to the blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the unwrit page that schoolmen talk of-has his heart become a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving image—a plough-grinding, corn-thrashing instrument? Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within his brain-thoughts that elevated yet confused him with a sense of eternal beauty, coming upon him like the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not been beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has been a ploughman. In the eye of the well-to-do, dignified with the accomplishments of reading and writing, he is of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the glebe. Yet who shall say that the influence of nature-that the glories of the rising sun-may not have called forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the moving statue of a man!

That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitable-shall inevitable be said?—injustice of the world invests it with majesty; the majesty of suffering meekly borne and meekly decaying. "The poor shall never cease out of the land." This text the self-complacency of competence loveth to quote; it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweetness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger, and cold, and nakedness, are the hard portion of man; there is no help for it, rags must flutter about us; man, yea, even the strong man, his own wealth (the wealth of Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand to his brother of four meals per diem; it is a necessity of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking of their own purses. Necessity of evil is an excellent philosophy, applied to everybody but ourselves. These easy souls will see nothing in our "Old Man at the Gate" but a pauper, let out of the workhouse for the chance of a few halfpence. Surely he is something more? He is old, very old. Every day, every hour, earth has less claim in him. He is so old, so feeble, that even as you look he seems sinking. At sunset he is scarcely the man who opened the gate to you in the morning. Yet there is no disease in him-none. He is dying of old age. He is working out that most awful problem o

life-slowly, solemnly. He is now the badged pauper, and now in the unknown country with Solomon !

Can man look upon a more touching solemnity? There stands the old man, passive as a stone, nearer, every moment, to churchyard clay! It was only yesterday that he took his station at the gate. His predecessor held the post for two years; he too daily, daily dying,—

"Till like a clock, worn out with beating time,

The weary wheels of life at length stood still."

How long will the present watcher survive? In that very uncertainty —in the very hoariness of age which brings home to us that uncertainty— there is something that makes the old man sacred; for, in the course of nature, is not the oldest man the nearest to the angels?

man.

Yet, away from these thoughts, there is a reverence due to that old What has been his life? A war with suffering. What a beautiful world is this! How rich and glorious! How abundant in blessingsgreat and little-to thousands! What a lovely place hath God made it! and how have God's creatures darkened and outraged it to the wrong of one another! Well, what had this man of the world? What stake, as the effrontery of selfishness has it? The wild fox was better cared for. Though preserved some day to be killed, it was preserved until then. What did this old man inherit? Toil, incessant toil, with no holiday of the heart; he came into the world a badged animal of labour, the property of animals. What was the earth to him? A place to die in. "The poor shall never cease out of the land." Shall we then, accommodating our sympathies to this hard necessity, look serenely down upon the wretched? Shall we preach only comfort to ourselves from the doomed condition of others? It is an easy philosophy; so easy, there is but little wonder it is so well exercised.

But "The Old Man at the Gate" has, for seventy years, worked and worked, and what his closing reward? The workhouse. Shall we not, some of us, blush crimson at our own world-successes, pondering the destitution of our worthy, single-hearted fellows? Should not affluence touch its hat to "The Old Man at the Gate" with a reverence for the years upon him; he, the born soldier of poverty, doomed for life to lead life's forlorn hope? Thus considered, surely Dives may unbonnet to Lazarus.

To our mind, the venerableness of age made “The Old Man at the Gate" something like a spiritual presence. He was so old, who could say how few the pulsations of his heart between him and the grave? But there he was, with a meek happiness upon him—gentle, cheerful. He was not built up in bricks and mortar, but was still in the open air, with the sweetest influences about him; the sky-the trees-the greensward-and flowers with the breath of God in them!

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