I may as well end by copying a document which shows that an example has been set for us in high places. It is an order issued by the Lord Steward of the Queen’s household.
‘Board of Green Cloth, May 12, 1847.
‘Her Majesty, taking into consideration the present high and increasing price of provisions, and especially of all kinds of bread and flour, has been graciously pleased to command that from the date of the order, no description of flour except seconds shall be used for any purpose in her Majesty’s household; and that the daily allowance of bread shall be restricted to one pound per head for every person dieted in the palace.
‘By her Majesty’s command, Fortescue.’
It may simplify the subject of ‘benefit of trade,’ to observe the following distinctions. If I buy old books or pictures from a friend, the money is merely transferred: the country suffers no loss, and may indeed be the gainer, if my friend is more economical and a better distributer than I. If I give a man a shilling for holding my horse, the country suffers in case the man could have been doing something else; for instance, if I have called him off from mowing or reaping. Thirdly, if I give a confectioner half a crown for sweetmeats, which I could have done without, I have wasted the substance of the country, certainly in one way, by consuming without requiring it; perhaps in two, that is, if the confectioner’s work could have been spent upon somebody who did require it. All that is gone into my stomach is a pure waste, and the paltry percentage which goes to the vendor as profit is very likely waste also. He might have got the same for doing what was really wanted.
LECTURE ON THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth was born in April 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland; his father, of a family which came originally from Yorkshire, was a solicitor in the town. Left an orphan early in life, his recollections attach themselves less to his home than to the neighbourhood in which he was placed at school. Hawkshead, an antique village, the centre of one of the large straggling parishes of the North country, possessing an ancient and once famous grammar foundation, stands a little way from the west side of Windermere, beside a small lake of its own. Here, lodged in a country cottage, he spent most of his time from 1778 to 1787—nine years.
His reminiscences of this period and this locality form the most beautiful part of his biographical poem, ‘The Prelude’; and a considerable number of his most pleasing minor poems refer to the same years and place. It was then and there, beyond a doubt, that the substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall rock and sounding cataract became his passion and his appetite, and his genius and whole being united and identified itself with external nature.
From this provincial, primitive seclusion, he passed, in October 1787, to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where his three years of academical residence, not much improved by attention to the studies of the place, were happily broken for him by visits to his own country, to Hawkshead, amongst his mother’s relations, and more remarkably by a bold pedestrian tour (almost wholly and literally pedestrian) through France, Switzerland, and the districts of the Italian lakes—regions which the revolutionary wars almost immediately afterwards closed to all English, and which were before comparatively unknown. The account of the journey is again one of the fine points of ‘The Prelude,’ and in particular the description of the passage of the Simplon, and of night on the shores of Lago Maggiore.
Taking his degree at Cambridge in January 1791, he again went over to France, led, it would seem, by enthusiasm for the political changes then at work there. He remained there, at Orleans and at Paris, about fifteen months, during which he was a witness of the culmination of the revolutionary tumult, and beheld the commencement of its period of bloodshed and terror. It gives a feeling of strange contrast to the after tranquillity of his life, to hear him speaking of the desire he then felt to enter himself as an actor into that terrible arena, and seriously seeming to consider it a thing, at the time, likely enough to happen, and from which chance, rather than his own wish, diverted him.