Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day” he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only.
The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’”
John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William, ‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time before.”
THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND.
Proverbs xviii. 24.
In the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which, incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is added, “which is as thine own soul.”[36] An ever memorable verse in the book of Proverbs has immortalized the truth, that “there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.”
None too many are the testimonies on record of brotherly attachment such as Columbus signalizes in his correspondence. To his elder son, Diego, the affectionate father writes concerning the younger, Fernando, then a stripling midway in his teens, “To thy brother conduct thyself as the elder brother should unto the younger. Thou hast no other, and I praise God that this is such a one as thou dost need. Ten brothers would not be too many for thee. Never have I found a better friend to right or left than my brothers.” General testimony points the other way. Cicero, who, himself a good brother, in one place moots the question whether it is just to prefer our friends to our relations—quæritur sitne æquum amicos cognatis anteferre,—in another decides that friendship is better than relationship: præstat amicitia propinquitati. It has been remarked by Samuel Bailey, of Sheffield, that parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, reciprocally complain of each other’s deficiency of affection, and think it hard that the tie of relationship should not secure invariable kindness and indestructible love: expecting some secret influence of blood, some physical sympathy, some natural attraction, to retain the affection of their relatives, without any solicitude on their part to cherish or confirm it; and forgetting that man is so constituted as to love only what in some way or other, directly or indirectly, immediately or remotely, gives him pleasure,—that even natural affection is the result of pleasurable associations in his mind, or at least may be overcome by associations of an opposite character, and that the sure way to make themselves beloved is to display amiable qualities to those whose regard they wish to obtain.[37] Crabbe has a terse couplet on—
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