“In daily toil, in deadly fight,
God’s chosen found their time to pray;
And still He loves the brave and strong,
Who scorn to starve, and strive with wrong,
To mend it, if they may.”
Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed to God to prosper his honesty; but then he only tried to do right in a spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed regardless of his entreaties.
Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by introducing into “The Wishes” a Chorus after the manner of the ancient Greeks, who are informed by one of the dramatis personæ, that a madman with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, “O unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman’s fury—or thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him, and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy—or three and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in the door,” etc., etc.
The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, “Help us, oh blessed martyr St. Trophimus!” is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward’s forefather, in the story of the Wake, “What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough arm is worth a score of martyrs here,” in the thick of the fight for dear life.
When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, “Well, God mend all!” his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed, “Nay,” with an undevout expletive, “Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it!” One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: “Notwithstanding all their talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and perseverance—so much precisely, and not more.” Or again of that homely thrust in the “Biglow Papers,” where one of the interlocutors, on a critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is thus answered by his plain-spoken mate:—
“‘Strike soon,’ sez he, ‘or you’ll be deadly ailin’,—