As Austin bid? How shall the world be served?
Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.
I do not think that our countrymen in this generation have lost their distaste to devout seclusion and associate task-work, or their passion for individual enterprise; the hearty acceptance, so only indeed they do exist, of all existing things, good, bad, and indifferent; the desire to grapple with common facts, and the feeling, that some way or other the question—How shall the world be served? must receive an answer.
Certainly we may still find in Old England ladies—I quote Chaucer—paining themselves to counterfeit cheer of court, and be estately of manere, and to be held worthy of reverence; busy or busy-seeming lawyers:—
No where so busy a man as he, as he there n’was,
And yet he seemed busier than he was;
country gentlemen, great at the sessions, and greater at the dinner table; the tried soldier, silent and unpretending; the young soldier, much the reverse; the merchant, so discreet and stedfast,
There wistĕ no man that he was in debt;
religious and laborious parish-clergymen, and church dignitaries, not very religious, and not at all laborious. Such is the picture given by Chaucer of his fellow-travellers on the highway from London to Canterbury in the year 1383, as the old tradition of the Tabard Inn in Southwark records, as it might be any present Englishman’s description of his in the year 1852.
From boyhood we step to early manhood; from Chaucer pass to Shakespeare, and behold now, not temper, and tendency, and disposition, but thought, contemplation, doubt. In language less easy far and natural, but infinitely more pregnant, significant, and profound, in a style abounding in faults as in beauties, we hear, not, as from Chaucer, all that Englishmen in his time were like, but all that man in all times may be. As on the mount of vision, from whose secret summit were seen the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, so on the elevation of his own poised intellect stood the spirit of the Elizabethan dramatist, sweeping slowly the horizon of human will and action—all the possible varieties of which were delivered into its power, ‘to be or not to be.’ So shone concentrated in the being of one man, as into the form of some irradiant star, the collective intelligence of centuries gone by,—