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30.-THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.

DOUGLAS JERROLD.

[Douglas William Jerrold was born in London 1803. In his tenth year he was sent to sea, but after serving two years was apprenticed to a printer in London. His nautical drama "Black-eyed Susan " first brought him into notice, but his subsequent dramatic writings, which were numerous, were of a far higher character. Mr. Jerrold was one of the first, and for some time the leading, contributors to Punch. In 1852 he became editor of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, which post he held to his death in 1857. His collected works are published in six vols., forming a mine of wit, wisdom, and recreative literature.] 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 the 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 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 with apparently the most inert!

The Old Man at the Gate.

115

That "Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon his headeighty 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 stung heart, he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed.

Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across a moora 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 imageplough-guiding, 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, is he 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, yes, even the strong man, his only 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 of 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 eating 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 ?

Yet, away from these thoughts, there is reverence due to that old man. What has been his life? A war with suffering. What a beautiful world is this! How rich and glorious! How abundant in blessings great 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 skythe trees-the green sward,—and flowers with the breath of God in them!

(By permission of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans.)

The Planetary and Terrestrial Worlds. 117

31.-THE PLANETARY AND TERRESTRIAL WORLDS. JOSEPH ADDISON.

In

[Joseph Addison was the son of an English dean; he was born in Wiltshire, in 1672. Educated at Oxford, he soon distinguished himself by his Latin poetry, and, in his twenty-second year, published his first English verse. 1713 his tragedy of "Cato" was brought upon the stage, but his place in literature is among the first of British essayists. In conjunction with Sir Richard Steele he published "The Spectator," and it is admitted on all sides that to him "we are indebted for the formation of a pure English style." Addison had official employment, from which he retired on a pension of 15007. a year. He married the Dowager Countess of Warwick, but it has been said "married discord in a noble wife." He died in Holland House, Kensington, 1719.] To us, who dwell on its surface, the earth is by far the most extensive orb that our eyes can anywhere behold: it is also clothed with verdure, distinguished by trees, and adorned with a variety of beautiful decorations; whereas, to a spectator, placed on one of the planets, it wears a uniform aspect, looks all luminous, and no larger than a spot. To beings who dwell at still greater distances it entirely disappears. That which we call alternately the morning and the evening star-as, in one part of the orbit, she rides foremost in the procession of night; in the other, ushers in and anticipates the dawn-is a planetary world; which, with those others that so wonderfully vary their mystic dance, are in themselves dark bodies, and shine only by reflection; have fields, and seas, and skies of their own; are furnished with all accommodations for animal subsistence, and are supposed to be the abodes of intellectual life: all which together with our earthly habitation, are dependent on that grand dispenser of divine munificence, the sun; receive their light from the distribution of his rays, and derive their comfort from his benign

agency.

The sun, which seems to perform its daily stages through the sky, is, in this respect, fixed and immovable: it is the great axle of heaven, about which the globe we inhabit, and other more spacious orbs, wheel their stated courses. The sun, though seemingly smaller than the dial it illuminates, is abundantly larger than this whole earth, on which so many lofty mountains rise, and such vast oceans roll. A line extending from side to side through the centre of that resplendent orb, would measure more than eight hundred thousand miles: a girdle formed to go round its circumference, would require a length of millions. Were its solid contents to be estimated, the account would overwhelm our understanding, and be almost beyond the power of language to express. Are we startled at these reports of philosophy? Are we ready to cry out, in a transport of surprise, "How mighty is the Being who kindled such a prodigious fire; and keeps alive from age to age such an enormous mass of flame!" Let us attend our philosophic guides, and we shall be brought acquainted with speculations more enlarged and more inflaming.

This sun, with all its attendant planets, is but a very little part of the grand machine of the universe: every star, though in appearance no bigger than the diamond that glitters upon a lady's ring, is really a vast globe, like the sun in size and in glory; no less spacious, no less luminous, than the radiant source of day. So that every star is not barely a world, but the centre of a magnificent system; has a retinue of worlds, irradiated by its beams, and revolving round its attractive influence; all which are lost to our sight, in immeasurable wilds of ether. That the stars appear like so many diminutive and scarcely-distinguishable points, is owing to their immense and inconceivable distance. Immense and inconceivable indeed it is; since a ball shot from the loaded cannon, and flying with unabated rapidity, must travel, at this impetuous rate, almost seven hundred thousand years, before it could reach the nearest of these twinkling luminaries!

While, beholding this vast expanse, I learn my own extreme meanness, I would also discover the auject littleness of all terrestrial things. What is the earth with all her ostentatious scenes, compared with this astonishingly grand furniture of the skies? What, but a dim speck, hardly perceivable in the map of the universe! It is observed by a very judicious writer, that, if the sun himself, which enlightens this part of the creation, were extinguished, and all the host of planetary worlds which move about him were annihilated, they would not be missed by an eye that can take in the whole compass of nature, any more than a grain of sand upon the sea shore. The bulk of which they consist, and the space which they occupy, are so exceedingly little in comparison of the whole that their loss would scarcely leave a blank in the immensity of God's works. If then, not our globe only, but this whole system, be so very diminutive, what is a kingdom or a country? What are a few lordships, or the so-much-admired patrimonies of those who are styled wealthy? When I measure them with my own little pittance, they swell into proud and bloated dimensions; but when I take the universe for my standard, how scanty is their size! how contemptible their figure! They shrink intò pompous nothings.

32.-DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT LIONS AT NIMROUD.

AUSTIN HENRY LAYARD, M.P.

[Mr. Layard, the famous traveller, was born in Paris in 1817. His grandfather had been Dean of Bristol, and his father held an important office in Ceylon. In his youth he displayed some skill as an artist, and acquired proficiency in the Italian language at Florence, where he passed a considerable time. He subsequently travelled extensively in the East, devoting himself to the study of Eastern antiquities and manners. In 1853 he published his "Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon," and shortly after entered Parliament as member for Aylesbury. He was for a short time Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He visited the Crimea during the Russian war, and on his return demanded an inquiry into the management of the army. In

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