By the way, I think your taking dress as an illustration of extreme conformity is not bad. Really, it is wonderful, the degree of square and dull hideousness to which, in the process of time and tailoring, and by severe conformity, the human creature's outward appearance has arrived. Look at a crowd of men from a height, what an ugly set of ants they appear! Myself, when I see an Eastern man, one of the people attached to their ambassies, sweeping by us in something flowing and stately, I feel inclined to take off my hat to him, (only that I think the hat might frighten him,) and say, here is a great unhatted, uncravated, bearded man, not a creature clipt and twisted, and tortured into tailorhood.

But,

DUNSFORD. Ellesmere broke in upon me just now, so that I did not say all that I meant to say. Milverton, what would you admit that we are to conform to? In silencing the general voice, may we not give too much opportunity to our own headstrong suggestions, and to wilful license?

MILVERTON. Yes: to be somewhat deaf to the din of the world may be no gain, even loss, if then we only listen more to the worst part of ourselves; but in itself it is a good thing to silence that din. It is at least a beginning of good. If anything good is then gained, it is not a sheepish tendency, but an independent resolve growing out of our nature. And, after all, when we talk of non-conformity, it may only be that we non-conform to the immediate sect of thought or action about us, to conform to a much wider thing in human nature.

ELLESMERE. Ah me! how one wants a moral essayist always at hand, to enable one to make use of moral essays.

MILVERTON. Your rules of law are grand thingsthe proverbs of justice; yet has not each case its specialities, requiring to be argued with much cir cumstance, and capable of different interpretations? Words cannot be made into men.

DUNSFORD. I wonder you answer his sneers, Mil

verton.

ELLESMERE. I must go and see whether words cannot be made into guineas; and then guineas into men is an easy thing. These trains will not wait even for critics, so, for the present, good bye.

3

СНАРТER III.

ELLESMERE Soon wrote us word that he would be able to come down again: and I agreed to be at Worth-Ashton (Milverton's house) on the day of his arrival. I had scarcely seated myself at our usual place of meeting before the friends entered, and after greeting me, the conversation thus began:

ELLESMERE. Upon my word, you people who live in the country have a pleasant time of it. As Milverton was driving me from the station through Durley Wood, there was such a rich smell of pines, such a twittering of birds, so much joy, sunshine and beauty, that I began to think, if there were no such place as London, it really would be very desirable to live in the country.

MILVERTON. What a climax! But I am always very suspicious when Ellesmere appears to be carried away by any enthusiasm, that it will break off suddenly, like the gallop of a post horse.

DUNSFORD. Well, what are we to have for our ?

essay

MILVERTON. Despair.

ELLESMERE. I feel equal to anything just now, and so, if it must be read sometime or other, let us have it now.

MILVERTON. You need not be afraid. I want to take away, not to add, gloom. Shall I read?

We assented, and he began.

DESPAIR.

DESPAIR may be serviceable when it arises from a temporary prostration of spirits; during which the mind is insensibly healing, and her scattered powers silently returning. This is better than to be the sport of a teasing hope without reason. But to indulge in despair as a habit, is slothful, cowardly, short-sighted; and manifestly tends against nature. Despair is then the paralysis of the soul.

These are the principal causes of despair: remorse, the sorrows of the affections, worldly trouble, morbid views of religion, native melancholy.

REMORSE.

Remorse does but add to the evil which bred it, when it promotes, not penitence, but despair. To have erred in one branch of our duties does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute the whole life of man: whereas they are often not fair representatives of portions even of that life. The fragments of rock in a mountain stream may tell much of its history, are in fact results of its doings, but they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its waters and may scarcely show more than that it has not been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better indications of the men themselves.