第53章 COURAGE.(11)

For more than twenty years this good and truehearted woman pursued her noble course, with little encouragement, and not much help;almost her only means of subsistence consisting in an annual income of ten or twelve pounds left by her grandmother, eked out by her little earnings at dressmaking. During the last two years of her ministrations, the borough magistrates of Yarmouth, knowing that her self-imposed labours saved them the expense of a schoolmaster and chaplain (which they had become bound by law to appoint), made a proposal to her of an annual salary of ?12 a year; but they did it in so indelicate a manner as greatly to wound her sensitive feelings. She shrank from becoming the salaried official of the corporation, and bartering for money those serviced which had throughout been labours of love. But the Gaol Committee coarsely informed her, "that if they permitted her to visit the prison she must submit to their terms, or be excluded." For two years, therefore, she received the salary of ?12 a year--the acknowledgment of the Yarmouth corporation for her services as gaol chaplain and schoolmistress! She was now, however, becoming old and infirm, and the unhealthy atmosphere of the gaol did much towards finally disabling her. While she lay on her deathbed, she resumed the exercise of a talent she had occasionally practised before in her moments of leisure--the composition of sacred poetry. As works of art, they may not excite admiration; yet never were verses written truer in spirit, or fuller of Christian love. But her own life was a nobler poem than any she ever wrote--full of true courage, perseverance, charity, and wisdom. It was indeed a commentary upon her own words:

"The high desire that others may be blest Savours of heaven."NOTES

(1) James Russell Lowell.

(2) Yet Bacon himself had written, "I would rather believe all the faiths in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind."(3) Aubrey, in his 'Natural History of Wiltshire,' alluding to Harvey, says: "He told me himself that upon publishing that book he fell in his practice extremely."(4) Sir Thomas More's first wife, Jane Colt, was originally a young country girl, whom he himself instructed in letters, and moulded to his own tastes and manners. She died young, leaving a son and three daughters, of whom the noble Margaret Roper most resembled More himself. His second wife was Alice Middleton, a widow, some seven years older than More, not beautiful--for he characterized her as "NEC BELLA, NEC PUELLA"--but a shrewd worldly woman, not by any means disposed to sacrifice comfort and good cheer for considerations such as those which so powerfully influenced the mind of her husband.

(5)Before being beheaded, Eliot said, "Death is but a little word;but ''tis a great work to die.'" In his 'Prison Thoughts' before his execution, he wrote: "He that fears not to die, fears nothing.... There is a time to live, and a time to die. A good death is far better and more eligible than an ill life. A wise man lives but so long as his life is worth more than his death.

The longer life is not always the better."(6) Mr. J. S. Mill, in his book 'On Liberty,' describes "the masses,"as "collective mediocrity." "The initiation of all wise or noble things," he says, "comes, and must come, from individuals--generally at first from some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that imitation; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.... In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."--Pp. 120-1.