‘Gives the first watch of the night
To the red planet Mars,’
who feels a stern and dogged pride in the consciousness that he
‘Knows how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.’
No: in the moral as in the physical battle, though you be pinned to the earth, yet writhe yourself up against the spear, like the ‘grim Lord of Colonsay,’ who, in his very death-pang, swung his claymore, set his teeth, and drove his last blow home.
“Besides, if you are to avoid the struggle entirely, how are you ever to learn the skill of self-defence, by which a thrust may be parried or returned? the art of tying an artery or stanching a wound? How are you to help others who cannot help yourself? A man is put into this world to do a certain share of the world’s work; to stop a gap in the world’s fencing; to form a cog, however minute, in the world’s machinery. By the defalcation even of the humblest individual, some of its movements must be thrown out of gear. The duty is to be got through, and none of us, haunted or unhaunted, ghost or no ghost, may shirk our share. Stick to your post like a Roman soldier during the watches of the night. Presently morning will come, when every phantom must vanish into air, every mortal confront that inevitable reality for which the dream we call a lifetime is but a novitiate and a school.”
CHAPTER X
WEIGHT CARRIERS
Fifty years ago, when the burning of a bishop at Smithfield would scarce have created more sensation in clerical circles than a Ritualistic Commission or a Pan-Anglican Synod, our divines took their share of secular pastime far more freely than at present. It was the parson who killed his thirty brace of partridges, and this, too, with a flint-and-steel gun, over dogs of his own breaking, on the broiling 1st of September. It was the parson who alone got to the end of that famous five-and-forty minutes from “The Church Spinneys,” when a large field were beat off to a man, and the squire broke his horse’s back. It was the parson who knew more about rearing pheasants, circumventing wild ducks, otter-hunting, fly-fishing, even rat-catching, than any one else in the parish; and it was the parson, too, who sometimes took the odds about a flyer at Newmarket, and landed a good stake by backing his own sound ecclesiastical opinion.
Concerning one of these racing divines I remember the following anecdote:—