Calm he is, for he lives with God. He neither derides

blames them, he is man "How prudent and how. How sensible he is that

human passions, nor overmuch of the world enough for that. courageous he proves himself! to irritate by opposition the longings and emotions of his protégés is to augment their danger! What admirable sympathy he shows with Romeo and with Juliet! "Leur sympathie naïve est à ses yeux un fragment sacré de la grande religion universelle." The father confessor is glad to be the fatherly confidant. In him the Montagues and the Capulets can alike confide, and to his counsel confidently resort. It is a happy function, that of playing the friendly arbiter and family referee: such as that "venerable Priest," described from the life by Scott,—

"Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,

Show'd what in youth its glance had been ;

them. But the faith and practice are made over mostly, nowadays, to "old women," of dubious gender. In the case of his Father Clement, as a sort of Laurentian amateur, Mr. Charles Reade shrewdly surmises that he killed nobody, for his remedies were "womanish and weak "—sage, and wormwood, hyssop, borage, spikenard, dog's-tongue, our Lady's mantle, feverfew, and Faith-and all in small quantities except the last. Sir Walter assigns a saving efficacy to the vulnerary plants and salves employed by Norna of the Fitful Head. His Highland Widow too was skilful in the use of herbs, with which, knowing how to select as well as how to distil them, "she could relieve more diseases than a regular medical person could readily believe." And in Waverley, again, there is an old Highlander equally expert in the collection and concoction of simples, to whom the hero is indebted accordingly, after his accident in the stag-hunt. Mrs. Gaskell's old Alice Wilson spends a whole day at a time in the fields, gathering wild herbs for drinks and medicine. George Eliot's Silas Marner, the weaver of Raveloe, had inherited from his mother some acquaintance with medicinal herbs and their preparation, and with it a delight in roaming the fields in quest of foxglove and dandelion and coltsfoot. Hawthorne's Roger Chillingworth in his Indian captivity had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating. Though there can be little doubt that a considerable amount of poisoning was mixed up with the witch

Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought."

Every one, according to Mr. Trollope, has some quiet, old, family, confidential friend; a man given to silence, but of undoubted knowledge of the world, whose experience is vast, and who, though he has not risen in the world himself, is always the man to help others to do so. Sometimes one man, and none the less if he has risen in the world, plays this part of guide, philosopher, and friend to numerous clients, and is in large request as umpire, arbiter, and judicious if not judicial referee. He then approximates to the position of a Bishop Sanderson, whose "poor but contented privacy of life, his casuistical learning, peaceful moderation, and sincerity," as Izaak Walton words it, attracted so many applicants for counsel and consolation,

cases of old, it is, on the other hand, says Mr. Lecky, equally certain that the witches constantly employed their knowledge of the property of herbs for the purpose of curing disease, and that they attained, in this respect, a skill which was hardly equalled by the regular practitioners. They had Friar Laurence's acquaintance

"With baleful weeds, and precious-juicèd flowers. . .

Many for many virtues excellent,

None but for some, and yet all different."

Chiron, in the second part of Goethe's Faust, professes to have long since resigned his leech-craft "to simple-culling beldames and to friars;”—and Fuller observes that, "in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches, old women, and impostors have had a competition with physicians.” Holy George Herbert accounted the Parson's Completeness incomplete unless a knowledge of simples were mastered and put to use-"to know what herbes may be used instead of drugs of the same nature, and to make the garden the shop. . . . For salves, his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her garden and fields before all outlandish gums. And surely nyssope, valerian, mercury, adder's tongue, yerrow, melilot, and Saint. John's wort, made into a salve; and elder, camomile, mallowes, comphrey, and smallage, made into a poultice, have done great and rare cures." It is the honest boast of Cooper's old Leatherstocking, to the prejudice of a more regular practitioner,-" I have yarbs that will heal the wound quicker than all his foreign 'intments." One glance will suffice at the Costanza of Mrs. Hemans:

"Midst leaves and flowers

She dwelt, and knew all secrets of their powers,
All nature's balms, wherewith her gliding tread

for direction and instruction in righteousness-the way to go right, or to get back into the right path again. George Eliot submits that the middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half-passionate, and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of selfdespair. "Most of us, at some period in our young lives, would have welcomed a priest of that natural order in any sort of canonicals or uncanonicals."* Such an uncanonical priest Mr. Disraeli's Armine family have in Adrian Glastonbury, whose patience, and vigilant care, and ever-ready sympathy are to them of such inestimable service. Loved as a father, he exercises over disquieted youth an almost

To the sick peasant on his lowly bed
Came and brought hope."

Half a glance will be enough at a reverend figure in a dramatic fragment of Coleridge's,—enough at least to recall our Laurentian type :

"A Friar, who gathered simples in the wood,

A gray-haired man,"

who took as much interest in the fortunes of a young favourite, as did Shakspeare's Franciscan in those of the Veronese lovers.

Taking Friar Laurence for the representative of a class, Charles Knight, in his rather too conjectural biography of Shakspeare, reminds us that the Infirmarist of a monastic house, who had charge of the sick brethren, was often in the early days of medical science their sole physician; and as the book-knowledge and the experience of such a valuable member of a conventual body would still allow him to exercise useful functions when thrust into the world, it is suggested that the young Shakspeare may have known some kindly old man, full of axiomatic wisdom, and sufficiently confident in his own management, like the well-meaning Friar Laurence.

Maggie Tulliver is described as having, "like most of us," had to scramble upwards into all the difficulties of nineteen, without such aid. But, later in her history, Maggie has her Dr. Kenn to turn to; and to him, as Juliet to the Friar, she resorts accordingly, with a look of childlike directness, saying, "I want to tell you everything." "Do tell me everything," Dr. Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his grave firm voice: "Think of me as one to whom a long experience has been granted, which may enable him to help you."-The Mill on the Floss, Book vi., chap. ix. ; and Book vii., chap. ii.

irresistible influence. There is something more to remind us of Friar Laurence in what we read of his becoming the depository of painful family secrets, and placed "in a position which made equivocation on his part almost a necessity." Of another mould is that Dr. Paulus whose curiosity in other people's affairs made him so ready a mediator in them,— any new experience, any unusual incident, being to him so much raw material of sociological speculation; who enjoyed a puzzle—especially a puzzle involving strange mental and moral conditions; and who, understanding life thoroughly, knew how much that is mysterious, oblique, and inconsistent is mixed up with the ordinary course of existence. Coleridge's old friend, Mr. Poole, of Nether Stowey, is a good specimen of the plain, straightforward, practical, friendly referce, as described by De Quincey, who signalizes his entire self-dedication to the service of his humble fellow-countrymen, the hewers of wood and drawers of water in that southern part of Somersetshire; he being for many miles round the general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their difficulties-like William of Deloraine, good at need,like George Eliot's ideal, that very present help in time of trouble, a natural priest, without canonicals,-like the Doctor Aston of another novelist, who had become the confidential friend of all his patients, and was sent for by them as often to allay family irritation as to heal recognized bodily ailments. Sir Arthur Helps describes his Thurston as one of those men in whom all people are prone to confidewho go through life, listening to innumerable secretsindeed for whom there are no secrets; who are confided in, not so much from the expectation of sympathy, as from the certainty of whatever you tell them being understood and appreciated-though perhaps there is little difference between understanding and sympathizing. To our motley gathering of confidants, casuists, family arbiters, and the like, may be added such representative men as Herr Professor Gellert, who had sheaves of letters daily, about affairs of the conscience, of the household, of the heart; and Monsieur Diderot père, as Carlyle depicts him, of great

humanity, of great insight and discretion, “so that he was
often chosen as umpire and adviser;" and George Washing-
ton too, who, long before he had made a name, "assumed
trusts at the solicitation of friends, and was in much request
as an arbitrator"-even at school George had been that.
And do we not read of Njal, the Burnt Njal of the Icelandic
Saga, that he was "of good counsel and ready to give it;
gentle and generous, he unravelled every man's knotty
points who came to see him about them"? Not wider than
deep and lasting is the influence of such an authority as
Wordsworth has pictured, among the hill folk of the lakes:
"To him appeal was made as to a judge;
Who, with an understanding heart allay'd
The perturbation, listening to the plea ;

Resolved the dubious point; and sentence gave
So grounded, so applied, that it was heard

With soften'd spirit, even when it condemn'd."

There is something to remind us of Friar Laurence in the Father Clement of Scott's historical romance,-that "best and kindest man in the world," so Simon Glover characterizes him, "with a comfort for every man's grief, a counsel for every man's difficulty, the rich man's surest guide, and the poor man's trustiest friend." Coleridge, in his seventh lecture, made Friar Laurence his text for a homily on the different manner in which Shakspeare has treated the priestly character, as compared with other writers, with Beaumont and Fletcher, for instance, in whose plays "priests are represented as a vulgar mockery," the errors of the few being mistaken for the habit of the many; while in Shakspeare they always carry with them our love and respect.

made no injurious abstracts; he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature; and, like the rest, his characters of priests are truthfully drawn from the general body." Sound critics are in the main agreed that his religion was as catholic as his genius; for a mind so august was never yet tenanted by the sour spirit of sectarianism. Macaulay has expatiated on the remarkable manner in which the