MILTON AND THE SWEDISH LORD. BY THOMAS HUGHES. WHEN England's ancient sceptre great Cromwell's sway obey'd, But when the council-chamber met, and the Swedish Lord was there, For Milton on his sick bed lay; nor could any other man, "That man," quoth Cromwell, "stands alone in England's brightest page, Though blind, in wisdom's darkest paths he clearly sees his way; Much marvell'd then that Swedish Lord, when thus he heard him say, In the chasten'd light of that silent room a solemn awe came o'er him, He stood before that blind, sick man, who in solemn silence sate, "And ah!" he said; "what pity 'tis, that such a man should know Thou hast learning, wisdom, poesy-all, all that knowledge can "Pity me not," the blind man said-" I feel no loss of sight; And the thoughts from earthly objects free, are freer of control. "What though no more for me the sun darts forth his gladdening ray, "The Lord, who gave the gift himself, that gift hath ta'en away- SORROW moves people in many ways. Young ladies have but a single resource, yet a most effectual one; it is always-that of running up stairs, shutting themselves in, and having a good cry. Man is more apt to take down his meerschaum, or fly to the cognac, or to his club. Now, Mr. Dix the younger, when disturbed in his mind, adopts neither of these plans. He flies for relief to that magic agent, the pen. It is a feather that shews which way the wind of his sighs is blowing. His tears trickle darkly like ink-drops, and he writes his "Confessions" to a sympathizing friend. How many of his blotted sheets are now lying before us-sheets gloomy as night-yet night when the heavens are starry, for they are sprinkled all over with From the tangled threads of his fitful and desultory correspondence we weave the simple narrative of a Father's sorrows. Dix the younger and his present biographer were schoolfellows; and when we parted outside the hall-door, at the close of our academic career, he looked just boy enough to go back and be taught his first alphabetic lesson. Such an excess of juvenility never before arrived unaltered at years of maturity. At twenty-two, you might have offered him half-a-crown to buy marbles, and packed him off with a raspberry-tart in his hand to eat as he went along. Five years later, you could not have seen him smoking a cigar without a feeling of disgust at the precocious taste for tobacco evinced by the rising generation. Yet at that very time the youthful Dix was not only in full legal possession of a fine stag-eyed, stately wife, as large as life, but three full-length, domestic cherubim. This trio has since been doubled, and the age of our young friend is now thirty-nine. But his looks do not acknowledge even that small number. A mere boy in point of years (for thirty-nine are but three-dozen-and-three), his cheek has still the fresh glow, and his step the lively spring of twenty-five. Hinc ille lachryma. It seems that where nature bestows the appearance of youth, she plants the desire to retain the reputation of the reality. Dix-Juvenis Dix, as he is called by his acquaintances-has always entertained a horror of two things-first, of looking old; and next, of being old. Time, instead of making him pay as the tribute fell due, has given him long credit, and in return for such tenderness, he is, like some other debtors, reluctant to pay at all. His spirit pants that its moderate stock of flesh may flourish in immortal youth. He modestly desires that it may continue morning all the day through. He craves, for his own special enjoyment, perpetual spring; and could sit contentedly in the April sunshine, "piping as though he should never grow old." He is ambitious of eclipsing the renown of "The Marvellous Boy who perished in his pride," simply by not perishing in the pride of marvellous boyhood. To lose youth is, to him, like losing all. He fancies that at Time's feast nothing comes after the soup. His idea of the half-way-house of life is that of a living tomb, next door to the actual sepulchre. He shudders at the thought of looking forward-it quite turns his head, the other way. Tell him that the income-tax will be taken off in three years, and he feels no sensation of pleasure-but mentally ejaculates, with a deep sigh, "I shall then be forty-two!" To turn that terrible corner, forty, is, in his view of things, but to walk onward as chief mourner at the funeral of youth and happiness. The dreary image which he most frequently conjures up presents a vision of himself, standing shivering upon the verge of the wide, blank, desolate level of Middle-Age, on which he must necessarily enterwalking by the side of Time, but on the wrong side-with the old Traveller's figure evermore between him and the sun, throwing its broad shadow over and around him. He sees himself clad in the livery of mid-life-brown locks, turned up with gray, a tinge of red upon the nose, an enlargement of some inches in the waist, and an ominous stoop in the shoulders. Dangers are terrible in proportion to their proximity; and as a chimney on fire next door is more alarming than a conflagration at a distance, the image of Middle-Age at noon-day is more appalling to him than the spectral figure of Second-Childishness in the deep midnight of time. Indeed, of aught that may lie beyond the first fatal turn out of the paradise of youth he has little dread, or none. To be very old is scarcely so bad as to be elderly; and even the elderly period has less to daunt him than the intermediate season which forms the approach to it. He dreams of wigs, spectacles, and flannel; the crutch and the cushion; the uneasy chair and the deaf, self-willed nurse, with the "Whole Duty of Man," read aloud by a good charity-boy, in consideration of an annual guinea subscribed to the parish school;-yet he wakes up from the prophetic vision without affright. Not so, when, with eyes wide open, he surveys the thing into which he is soon to be transformed; and sees the laughing, buoyant, airy Juvenis Dix settling down into a solidity; the very eye-glass which was only ornamental yesterday being useful to-day; the waistcoat widening, the Hoby shrinking into a drab gaiter, the whisker exhibiting symptoms of the coming frost; and that hand, which the conscious kid, deserting its dam, might have exultingly approached, saying, "Skin me !" buried gloveless in the breechespocket, jingling a bunch of keys. To avoid the most vague suspicion of his being within a good ten years of such a declension, and to vindicate his really youthful appearance, what desperate course was he to take? The first that occurred to him, seeing these breakers a-head, was to throw some of his domestic cargo overboard. With those six children grouped around him, all pretension to juvenility must be a joke. To affect the young man" any longer, with that awful union of the ladies' boardingschool and Eton College at his heels, was clearly ridiculous. His great girls and boys were living witnesses of the hypocrisy of his young looks, and by the aid of such spectacles, everybody could see the lie in his face. He might as well carry his age, as a cabman his number, upon a badge suspended from his neck. Nay, worse-much worse! Who would believe his number to be the true one? Who on earth would be so absurdly credulous as to take his word for thirty-nine only? It so happens, most unfortunately, that the flock of the Dixes is an uncommonly "fine" one. The girls are astonishingly tall of their age, and the boys are prodigiously big lads for their years. In fact, a progeny so truly Patagonian is seldom seen. Nobody could guess the father of the youngest to be much short of forty; and as for the eldest, that majestic and magnificent Juno of eighteen, who would dream of asking after her dear papa but with reference to "the old gentleman's health"-adding, that "at his years" these winds must be very trying! To look at her, you must say she was "Married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three." How her father idolized her-when she was very little! How fondly he watched her dawning graces, and rejoiced when elderly ladies cried, "Why, she has grown since Tuesday last!" She was his fairest as well as his first-" her mother's image in her face;" but, alas! he little reflected how soon she was to emulate her mother's figure also. As she grew, his paternal joy diminished; as she began to realize all his hopes, he began to be disappointed. He saw in her rising splendour his own sunset. He took vast pride in her-but felt that it was at his own expense. Still she grew apace, with the most undutiful consistency; still, without the smallest regard to her father's feelings, she shot up faster than the years could travel. People would now remark that she really began to make him look quite elderly. If anybody humanely observed that he seemed young to be the father of that finegrown girl, somebody else would be sure to insinuate-"Yes, at this distance; but see him closer, he looks his age;-forty-five, if he's a day.” This was more than young flesh and blood could bear; and at last, since nothing could restore to that stately nymph the little-girlish appearance which would have charmed her sire, a whisper went forthat least, it was allowed to be supposed in some quarters-that an elder brother of Dix's had died in India. Juvenis was, of course, the best fellow in the world, and had brought up his niece nobly-quite like one of his own. "And it's the more kind of him, for she's tall enough for two of them," urged a malignant friend, who was in the paternal secret. The eldest thus disposed of, not parentally, but, in a manner, parenthetically, Dix the younger turned with double fondness and joy to his second daughter. At thirteen she was a mere child, and his soul was wrapped up in her infantine simplicity. She, indeed, who was "ever fair" would be 66 ever young" also. That affectionate little thing was in no hurry to make her papa look prematurely middleaged, not she; and he felt that had he as many daughters as Danaus, he could love them all passionately, so that they never grew any taller. But at length, to his consternation, the Patagonian principle began again to develop itself; and on his return after a six months' tour on the Continent, he found his diminutive darling lengthened into a gawky of the first class. In fact, Miss Regan Dix had acted as treacherously as Miss Goneril had done before her, and if there had been a Cordelia, she would have done the same. Forgetful of her fond father's wishes, his reasonings, his caresses, the second girl shot up as fast as she could ; and people again began to say, in that considerate tone which is more exasperating than the depreciatory one-" Ah!-well!-he bears his years very tolerably, and might almost be taken for a young man-by candle-light!" Of course, if an elder brother can be put to death in India, a middleaged uncle can as readily be despatched in China; and it was not difficult, therefore, in quarters where people knew no better, to whisper off Miss Regan into a convenient cousinship in the background. But then there were the boys! Now, if the young ladies were resolute in their growth, the young gentlemen were still more obstinate;-grow they would; and each in turn, as he arrived at the term of fourteen years, elicited the same exclamation from every visitor,-" Well, I declare if Master Sampson hasn't grown quite a man!" So they rose, one above the other-incipient life-guardsmen, even in their round jackets. All that he could do, as a father, to check them in their unfilial design of superannuating him, failed. It was in vain that he offered them frequent sips of his evening toddy, in the superstitious hope that it might stop the growth of the young giants; they sipped, and flourished the more; he only hastened on the day when each six-feet of a son would ring the bell for another glass, and mix a tumbler for himself. How often has he sat contemplating the phenomena of their daily growth; sighing to observe the lamentable shortness of their trowsers, and the surprising length of their straps; wondering as well as grieving at the rapidity with which the cuffs of their jackets continually crept up to their elbows. It was a hopeless case; they were remorselessly bent on making a Methusaleh of him. Already had he been proclaimed, at a little party of young people, "quite the father of a family;" and when he danced, a lady (turned fifty) was charmed to see him so agile-" it was hardly to be expected," she said, "at our time of life." But what could he do? Master Sampson, lighting his cigar at the lamp-post, might fairly pass for his brother at night; but then poor Juvenis could not go on disowning all his children, providing for each in succession, in a distant part of the world, a deceased parent who never existed. Still, if any simple person chose to mistake them all for his sisters and nephews-or even if the supposition were hazarded that he had married a widow with a prodigiously fine family-he had not the heart to contradict it! How happy he considered Partridge, in not being the real father of that strapping fellow, Tom Jones! Even now when he looks at the boys, his heart sinks within him. He cannot help thinking that they have stolen a march upon him. He married so very early in life,-and they seem to have taken such an ungenerous advantage of it! To conspire against him at thirty-nine, and try, by a display of physical force, to make him out fifty-two! Degenerate children! Other curious considerations, moreover, arise out of the largeness of scale on which the youngsters spring up. They have grown too big for correction. He remembers various pleasing experiments of his, with cane and whip, which took place only the other day; and nowhe is left to meditate mournfully on the strange possibility of a man whipping his own boy, and getting the worst of it! When he hears the grandmammas of society admiring his boys, crying,-"What splendid fellows!" he sighs to think that he shall cane them no more, and ejaculates," Who would be a father!" Nor does he fail to shudder at the number of daring spirits-the kind of "young France"-he has been bringing about his domestic throne. There is such a want of the venerable in him, that he lacks due authority in his house. He foresees that, one by one, all his privileges will be snatched from him by the ferocious affection of his dutiful young tyrants; who invite their friends, lend his books, ransack his writing-desk, carry off his snuff-box, and break his favourite mare's knees, one and all, just as it may suit their wayward pleasure. And he feels all the time, that if he were destined to mount spectacles tomorrow, no boy of his would shed a tear; that if he were doomed to wear a wig, not one of them would break his heart! Thus have rolled away his recent years; but the calendar never runs round without some half dozen days especially marked out in black-letter. These are the birthdays. "The sky is overcast, the morning lowers," as often as a birthday may arrive. It tells him that the witnesses against him have come into court with stronger evidence than ever. It tells him that an archer has taken fresh aim at his peace, and that a festival must be held in celebration of the event. And then the reck |