[2] My correspondent will perhaps be surprised to hear that I have never in my life voted for any candidate for Parliament, and that I never mean to. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXX.
Brantwood, April 19, 1873.
On the thirteenth shelf of the south bookcase of my home-library, stand, first, Kenelm Digby’s ‘Broad Stone of Honour,’ then in five volumes, bound in red, the ‘History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha;’ and then, in one volume, bound in green, a story no less pathetic, called the ‘Mirror of Peasants.’
Its author does not mean the word ‘mirror’ to be understood in the sense in which one would call Don Quixote the ‘Mirror of Chivalry;’ but in that of a glass in which a man—beholding his natural heart—may know also the hearts of other men, as, in a glass, face answers to face.
The author of this story was a clergyman; but employed the greater part of his day in writing novels, having a gift for that species of composition as well as for sermons, and observing, though he gave both excellent in their kind, that his congregation liked their sermons to be short, and his readers, their novels to be long.
Among them, however, were also many tiny novelettes, of which, young ladies, I to-day begin translating for you one of the shortest; hoping that you will not think the worse of it for being written by a clergyman. Of this author I will only say, that, though I am not prejudiced in favour of persons of his profession, I think him the wisest man, take him all in all, with whose writings I am acquainted; chiefly because he showed his wisdom in pleasant and unappalling ways; as, for instance, by keeping, for the chief ornament of his study (not being able to afford expensive books), one book beautifully bound, and shining with magnificence of golden embossing; this book of books being his register, out of which he read, from the height of his pulpit, the promises of marriage. “Dans lequel il lisait, du haut de la chaire, les promesses de mariage.”
He rose always early; breakfasted himself at six o’clock; and then got ready with his own hands the family breakfast, liking his servants better to be at work out of doors: wrote till eleven, dined at twelve, and spent the afternoon in his parish work, or in his fields, being a farmer of shrewdest and most practical skill; and through the Sundays of fifteen years, never once was absent from his pulpit.