On Unaccomplished Purposes.

I READ not long ago, in the pages of this Magazine, the words-they were a quotation from the prose writings of Shelley-" A monument of an unaccomplished purpose." And they set me thinking about unaccomplished purposes generally, with or without their "monuments," the latter being immeasurably the more numerous. There are such monuments to be seen, and very sad they are to contemplate-unfinished buildings, unfinished poems, unfinished histories, unfinished romances. I never think of the words, which have been long familiar to me, without recalling my application of them, years ago, to a picturesquely-seated mansion, just twenty miles from the capital, where the noble owner and his wife dispensed their modest genial hospitality occasionally to a friend or two. There was a magnificent hall, in the Italian style, with pillars and floors in which all the marbles of Italy vied with each other for admiration, and frescoes by Keats's friend, Severn, and the commencemencement of a grand staircase leading heavenward; but you entered the house with this glorious atrium by a door of which the proprietor of a villa at Norwood or Hampstead would have been ashamed; and if not forewarned you have been startled by coming suddenly on this scrap of a palace. Of course there was a story about it. It had been designed by a previous owner of the place-a departed member of the familywhose intention it had been to erect by degrees a palatial residence, on the Surrey Hills. The site, indeed, was worthy of anything that marble and stone and the art of man could create. But death had stepped in, and the ambition of one could not be realised by the poverty of another; and so there is nothing but "a monument of an unaccomplished purpose." I confess that I never felt any sadness in contemplating this. If the original design had been carried out, my host and hostess could not have been happier than they were. It was merely a chapter in the great history of the "vanity of human wishes" for which they were not responsible. But I have seen lesser architectural failures which have given me many pangs. It is a sad thing to see an unfinished house-and worse, an unfinished row of houses. You see many such in the suburbs of London. They suggest thoughts of broken fortunes, insolvencies, bankruptcies, perhaps workhouses in the end. Yet for more than eighteen centuries we have been declaiming against this folly. Did not our great Redeemer say: "For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first ard counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he had laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that

behold him begin to mock him. Saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish." Yet men begin to build and are not able to finish, even by hundreds, in this nineteenth century.

I have all my life long had a morbid sensitiveness with respect to the failures of other people, though I have had failures of my own which have not much distressed me. I enter keenly into the disappointments of my neighbours. If I go to a theatre and see a "beggarly account of empty boxes," I have no pleasure in the night's performances, however good they may be. If I go to church, in town or country, and see empty pews, it saddens me to think of the unappreciated labour of the good man who has prepared a discourse for his congregation, and yet finds no congregation to listen to it—as may often, indeed, be found in the Established churches of Wales and Ireland and the temples of the City of London. ministers are, probably, used and are reconciled to it, knowing all circumstances and conditions, but it has a depressing effect upon me. I cannot bear to hear that a friend's book has met with scant recognition from the public. I am saddened by the sight of the unsold pictures in the Exhibition-rooms at the end of the season. And so it is with respect to these unfinished houses. They may have been "run up by speculative builders," but somebody must have suffered by all this waste of brick and mortar. There they stand-" monuments of an unaccomplished purpose."

The

The unfinished works of builders of another kind-the monuments of which they could never write "Exegi "-the grand fragments of poetry, history, and romance, which lie before us, are still more touching, for death has closed the account. What noble purposes are here unaccomplished! Think of the unfinished poems of Shelley and Keats-of what they might have done, had they not been cut off in the flower of their youth! Think of that great history which Macaulay was to have brought down to a period "within the memory of living men "-how the greatest of the land sorrowed with a not unselfish sorrow, when they saw all that was mortal of that brilliant historian lowered into the vaults of the old Abbey, the great desire of his life unfulfilled! Think of the sudden close, in the midst of their work, of the careers of those two great novelists who were delighting us, from month to month, with their humour and their pathos! Tidings of the death of Thackeray came to me through a newspaper-placard on entering a market-town in Somersetshire; and the death of Charles Dickens startled me in the same way, as I was being driven through a townlet in Wales. I was taking a brief holiday on each occasion, and truly it may be said that I went on my way a sadder and a wiser man." Each has left behind him a monument of an unaccomplished purpose-the one in Dennis Donne, the other in Edwin Drood. Was it for evil or for good? Was it better or worse for their memories that they died thus suddenly, in the fulness of their fame ?—I mean, for their reputation's sake? I do not think that anyone had cause to write with respect to them those dreadful words, "falling off." Yet, it must come to all of us, some day, if we outlive the maturity of our powers. I have

fifty volumes of Walter Scott's novels on my book-shelves—I could not
put my finger on the volume whence the decline of power is to be counted.
I think it would be rather early in the series, though there is nothing
finer than the Talisman, which now, in an operatic form, is the delight of
the musical world. Still, it is sad to think of his last days-of so
eminently healthy an intellect in its youth and its maturity coming to
what it did at the last-those sad, servile attempts not wholly to forsake
the old craft-not to confess the victory of age. I remember, many
years ago, in the City of London, often to have seen a venerable-looking,
grey-bearded old man, apparently almost blind, turning about in a vacant
sort of way the handle of an empty barrel-organ, which produced never
a sound. Men's hearts soon get hardened in large towns by repeated
impositions, and it is difficult to discern rightly between the reality and
the sham. But, looking at it in its worst aspects, it was to me an
exceedingly touching piece of acting. It brought many pennies and
"fourpenny-bits" into the old man's palm. He was clinging to the old
craft; he thought he was producing harmonious sounds out of that empty
box. He seemed to be quite crazed. What his history was I never
learnt. But I thought of the many sad spectacles that I had seen in the
course of my life, of which this soundless organ reminded me of the broken.
down actors, singers, authors-of the old beaux living upon by-gone
fascinations, the old diners-out on their old jests, and still thinking them-
selves irresistible. I was present at the last appearance of Edmund
Kean on the stage-and a very painful thing it was. It is better, there-
fore, I think, that, at least as far as his own reputation is concerned, a
great genius should be stricken down in the fulness of his work, with
many unaccomplished purposes to his account. In all our English poetry
there are no sadder lines than these-

From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.

But, apart from these great historical monuments of unaccomplished purposes, think, too, of the number of smaller unaccomplished literary purposes discharged into the great "limbo of vanities." For any man of active imagination to write all the books that he has purposed to write he must live twice over the longest life of the Antediluvian period. Histories-Philosophies-Dramas-Poems-Romances-Essays -whole libraries of a most comprehensive character-conceived, sketched out-written, indeed, "all but the chapters," and in no few instances many of the chapters actually written. Who, after a long literary life, exploring the contents of old drawers, boxes, baskets, portfolios, &c., does not come across unfinished manuscripts" essay, poem, or romance -put aside under stress of more important business and forgotten, or never returned to for lack of time? All these are so many unaccomplished purposes on a smaller scale, not to be named with those tragic exemplars cited above, but still not uninstructive. I do not speak of the dreamers,

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idlers, of the world, who think that genius can carry everything before it, and who wait for "an impulse "-I speak of the genuine, honest workmen, who believe in work. But many an honest workman is not a systematic workman. There is a certain desultoriness about even the most industrious and conscientious toilers of the pen. They are somewhat prone to begin, and not to finish. When a new idea seizes them, or, what is of more importance, a new order comes, they break off from the business in hand. Perhaps they attempt too much at the same time. This may be the result of a foolish ambition, which "o'erleaps itself and falls on the other side." I knew a man who was really a hardworker, and who had a certain versatility about him, which caused him to conceive the idea of publishing at the same time a volume of history, a collection of essays, and a novel, and to produce on the stage an Elizabethan drama in blank verse. The result of this preposterous impulse of vanity was what might be expected.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to scourge us.

The history, having been interrupted by these lesser exploits in the realms of fiction, was not brought to a conclusion within the expected time. The ambitious author having moved his residence (and "two removes are as bad as a fire"), the novel, unfinished, and the drama, completed, were lost the former, after a year or two, turned up from the recesses of an unopened box; the latter is supposed to be passing out in driblets from some butterman's shop. The essays, having already appeared in a magazine, were in type, and of course safe. And this was the issue of my friend's absurd project-this was his unaccomplished purpose. It served him right. His vanity, some will say, was rightly punished. I think that perhaps he was saved from a greater punishment by the mishaps which I have recorded. He had a very good reputation in a particular path of literature; but his drama, if accepted, would probably have been damned, and his novel cut to pieces by the reviewers. He had the good sense to admit all this, and I believe that he has never murmured over his "unaccomplished purpose."

But all people are not house-builders, structurally or intellectually ; and unfinished houses or unfinished works are but an insignificant portion, numerically speaking, of our "unaccomplished purposes." Of course, it would not become me, in a secular essay of this kind, to write of the subject in its graver aspects-to illustrate that which Johnson so powerfully described in the well-known epigram, "Hell is paved with. good intentions." How gallantly we put out to sea, sails full and streamers flowing, and how easily we go to pieces on some unseen and unsuspected rock! The great chart by which we ought to steer is laid aside and forgotten, and we yield to the first cogent temptation that assails us. The unaccomplished purpose of a good and pure life haunts us until the day of our death. But this, as I have said, is a subject for

the divine, not for the essayist. Everybody knows how, in common life, the ordinary plans and projects, on the accomplishment of which he had set his heart, have egregiously failed in the issue. They may have failed owing to force of circumstances-they may have failed owing to the absence of that strength of will, that indomitable perseverance, which alone can enable a man to work out his resolves. It has been said that every smirking barrister, on first putting on his wig and gown, believes that he will be Lord High Chancellor of England; and that every young Member of Parliament, on delivering his maiden speech, believes that he will live to be Prime Minister. There is no reason why he should not, if he has ability and perseverance, and a certain command of money. But these disappointments or non-fulfilments of the aspirations of early ambi tion are not to be accounted among the " unaccomplished purposes" of which I am writing. There are others, however, of a more substantial character, where the disappointment comes later in life (for we are soon purged of our early vanities), where men set themselves to the work of building up great fortunes, of founding families, of sending their names down to posterity as the first constructors of that which later history may reverence and applaud. They toil early and late. From small beginnings they produce great results. Self-denial is commonly at the root of their success. Yet self-denial, in its fulness and perfection, I do not think that I ever saw. In the lives of all economical, money-making men, there is a point of reservation-there is a weak spot in the self-denying constancy of the man. Some favourite inclination must be satisfied. It may be a love of horses-it may be something worse. I knew a man-a very honest, worthy, hard-working man-most frugal and economical, speaking scorn of those who live in fine West-end houses and gave expensive dinner-parties-he himself living, for a great part of the year, over his business works at Limehouse, and limiting himself always to a glass or two of humble port. But he always kept excellent horses and rode to hounds when the exigencies of business would permit. I remember his mounting me on a long-backed chestnut mare, of great feminine impetuosity, who rushed at her fences, and nearly broke my neck. But he always gave me the plainest fare for dinner and a shake-down on his drawing-room sofa-a spare room" being, in his opinion, a temptation. He achieved the objects of his ambition, which were but moderate he made provision for a very fine family. I knew, still better, another man, who vowed, early in life, never to spend more than half his income-and he kept to his resolution. But, from the earliest days of my remembrance, though tied to an arduous profession, in which, with little or no education, he achieved great success, he kept a very fine stud, and was seldom absent from the meets of the Surrey hounds. He was a marvellous exemplar of well-deserved success-for be rose from very humble beginnings, and left behind him a quarter-of-amillion of money, all earned by his industry and integrity—and he might have left behind him half-a-million, but for the fact that he left also an