A series of uncommon calamities had been for many years the lot of the elder Henry; a succession of prosperous events had fallen to the share of his brother William. The one was the envy, while the other had the compassion, of all who thought about them. For the last twenty years, William had lived in affluence, bordering upon splendour, his friends, his fame, his fortune, daily increasing, while Henry throughout that very period had, by degrees, lost all he loved on earth, and was now existing apart from civilised society; and yet, during those twenty years, where William knew one happy moment, Henry tasted hundreds.
That the state of the mind, and not outward circumstances, is the nice point on which happiness depends is but a trite remark; but that intellectual power should have the force to render a man discontented in extraordinary prosperity, such as that of the present bishop, or contented in his brother’s extreme of adversity, requires illustration.
The first great affliction to Henry was his brother’s ingratitude; but reasoning on the frailty of man’s nature, and the force of man’s temptations, he found excuses for William, which made him support the treatment he had received with more tranquillity than William’s proud mind supported his brother’s marriage.
Henry’s indulgent disposition made him less angry with William than William was with him.
The next affliction Henry suffered was the loss of his beloved wife. That was a grief which time and change of objects gradually alleviated; while William’s wife was to him a permanent grief, her puerile mind, her talking vanity, her affected virtues, soured his domestic comfort, and, in time, he had suffered more painful moments from her society than his brother had experienced, even from the death of her he loved.
In their children, indeed, William was the happier; his son was a pride and pleasure to him, while Henry never thought upon his without lamenting his loss with bitterest anguish. But if the elder brother had in one instance the advantage, still Henry had a resource to overbalance this article. Henry, as he lay imprisoned in his dungeon, and when, his punishment being remitted, he was again allowed to wander, and seek his subsistence where he would, in all his tedious walks and solitary resting-places, during all his lonely days and mournful nights, had this resource to console him—
“I never did an injury to any one; never was harsh, severe, unkind, deceitful. I did not merely confine myself to do my neighbour no harm; I strove to do him service.”
This was the resource that cheered his sinking heart amidst gloomy deserts and a barbarous people, lulled him to peaceful slumber in the hut of a savage hunter, and in the hearing of the lion’s roar, at times impressed him with a sense of happiness, and made him contemplate with a longing hope the retribution of a future world.
The bishop, with all his comforts, had no comfort like this; he had his solitary reflections too, but they were of a tendency the reverse of these. “I used my brother ill,” was a secret thought of most powerful influence. It kept him waking upon his safe and commodious bed; was sure to recur with every misfortune by which he was threatened to make his fears still stronger, and came with invidious stabs, upon every successful event, to take from him a part of his joy. In a word, it was conscience which made Henry’s years pass happier than William’s.
But though, comparatively with his brother, William was the less happy man, yet his self-reproach was not of such magnitude, for an offence of that atrocious nature as to banish from his breast a certain degree of happiness, a sensibility to the smiles of fortune; nor was Henry’s self-acquittal of such exquisite kind as to chase away the feeling of his desolate condition.