The new Cymon, as in one sense the young rustic might be called, quitted the house in May Fair, filled with vague admiration and ambition. In the fascinations surrounding Miss Pendarrel, he recognised a power superior to anything within his experience; and he framed fantastic expectations from the career he supposed opening before him. But the lover of Iphigenia had concealed a noble heart under a rugged exterior, and his passion developed its high qualities. Michael Sinson was a very different character from Boccaccio's hero.
And was Mercy Page already forgotten?—Happy, perchance, for the too faithful maiden, if so it were.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Nam veluti pueri trepidant, atque omnia cœcis
In tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
Interdum, nihilo quæ sunt metuenda magis, quam
Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant, finguntque futura."
Lucret.
As children tremble, and in darkness quake
At all things near, so we too sometimes shake
At daylight fancies, vain as those which scare
Children in darkness with foreboding fear.
They were not halcyon days in England that succeeded the termination of the long struggle for liberty and existence, which, during more than twenty years, had taxed to the uttermost all the resources of the country; and which, as a whole, must always be regarded by Britons with pride and exultation. We had given peace to the world; but we were unable to preserve tranquillity at home. War is, at the best, a bad education, if sometimes a necessary one, for a young people; and a mature nation will find that its costs are not only money and men. It is a lottery on the grandest scale, both of fortune and life, inducing waste of the one, and recklessness of the other; removing, therefore, in a great measure, the vulgar motives of action, and importing a general laxity of principle. In various ways a long war produces an intestinal feverishness, aggravating any incidental disorder, and favourable to the designs of incendiaries.
The peace was followed by a general fall in wages. It was a result beyond the control of legislation; and it would probably have been unfelt, if prices also had fallen, as naturally they should have done. But the legislature was able in part to prevent this decline, and exercised its power in favour of agricultural produce. Flaming homesteads and shattered machinery soon proclaimed the discontent of the labouring population.