conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mili. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many

other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbas's whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letterpaper covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half-an-hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality

of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favor is conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set everyone he passed into a good humor; one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the fortyseventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remain ing idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but, thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused, and, within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous

system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle. And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though

Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their

So.

farces was the bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.—Cornhill Magazine.

BECKET was now forty-four years old. The king was thirty. The ascendency which Becket had hitherto exercised over his sovereign through the advantage of age was necessarily diminishing as the king came to maturity, and the two great antagonists, as they were henceforth to be, were more fairly matched than Becket perhaps expected to find them. The archbishop was past the time of life at which the character can be seriously changed. After forty men may alter their opinions, their policy, and their conduct; but they rarely alter their dispositions; and Becket remained as violent, as overbearing, as ambitious, as unscrupulous, as he had shown himself when chancellor, though the objects at which he was henceforth to aim were entirely different. It would be well for his memory were it possible to credit him with a desire to reform the Church of which he was the head, to purge away the corruption of it, to punish himself the moral disorders of the clergy, while he denied the right to punish them to the State. We seek in vain, however, for the slightest symptom of any such desire. Throughout his letters there is not the faintest consciousness that anything was amiss. He had been himself amongst the grossest of pluralists; so far from being ashamed of it, he still aimed at retaining the most lucrative of his benefices. The idea with which his mind was filled was not the purity of the Church, but the privilege and supremacy of the Church. As chancellor he had been at the head of the State under the king. As archbishop, in the name of the Church, he intended to be head both of

State and king; to place the pope, and himself as the pope's legate, in the position of God's vicegerents. When he found it written that by me kings reign and princes decree judgment,' he appropriated the language to himself, and his single aim was to convert the words thus construed into reality.

The first public intimation which Becket gave of his intentions was his resignation of the chancellorship. He had been made archbishop that the offices might be combined; he was no sooner consecrated than he informed the king that the duties of his sacred calling left him no leisure for secular business. He did not even wait for Henry's return from Normandy. He placed the great seal in the hands of the chief justice, the young prince, and the barons of the Exchequer, demanding and receiving from them a hurried discharge of his responsibilities. The accounts, for all that appears, were never examined. Grim, perhaps, when accusing him of rapine and murder, was referring to a suppression of a disturbance in Aquitaine, not to any special act of which he was guilty in England; but the unsparing ruthlessness which he displayed on that occasion was an indication of the disposition which was displayed in all that he did, and he was wise in anticipating inquiry.

The king had not recovered from his surprise at such unwelcome news when he learned that his splendid minister had laid aside his magnificence and had assumed the habit of a monk, that he was always in tears-tears which flowed from him with such miraculous abundance as to evidence the working in him of some

*

special grace, or else of some special purpose. His general conduct at Canterbury was equally startling. One act of charity, indeed, he had overlooked which neither in conscience nor prudence should have been forgotten. The mother of, Pope Adrian the Fourth was living somewhere in his province in extreme poverty, starving, it was said, of cold and hunger. The see of Canterbury, as well as England, owed much to Pope Adrian, and Becket's neglect of a person who was at least entitled to honorable maintenance was not unobserved at Rome. Otherwise his generosity was profuse. Archbishop Theobald had doubled the charities of his predecessor, Becket doubled Theobald's. Mendicants swarmed about the gates of the palace; thirteen of them were, taken in daily to have their dinners, to have their feet washed by the archiepiscopal hands, and to be dismissed each with a silver penny in his pocket. The tears and the benevolent humiliations were familiar in aspirants after high church offices; but Becket had nothing more to gain. What could be the meaning of so sudden and so startling a transformation? Was it penitence for his crimes as chancellor? The tears looked like penitence; but there were other symptoms of a more aggressive kind. He was no sooner in his seat than he demanded the restoration of estates that his predecessors had alienated. He gave judgment in his own court in his own favor, and enforced his own decrees. Knights holding their lands from the Church on military tenure had hitherto done homage for them to the Crown. The new archbishop demanded the homage for himself. He required the Earl of Clare to swear fealty to him for Tunbridge Castle. The Earl of Clare refused and appealed to the king, and the archbishop dared not at once strike so large a quarry. But he showed his teeth with a smaller offender. Sir William Eyensford, one of the king's knights, was patron of a benefice in Kent. The archbishop presented priest to it. The knight ejected the archbishop's nominee, and the archbishop excommunicated the knight.

a

Such

* Ut putaretur possessor irrigui superioris et inferioris.' The 'superior' fountain of tears was the love of God; the 'inferior' was the fear of hell.

peremptory sentences, pronounced without notice, had a special inconvenience when directed against persons immediately about the king. Excommunication was like the plague; whoever came near the infected body himself caught the contagion, and the king might be poisoned without his knowledge. It had been usual in these cases to pay the king the courtesy of consulting him. Becket, least of all men, could have pleaded ignorance of such a custom. It seemed. that he did not choose to observe it.* While courting the populace, and gaining a reputation as a saint among the clergy, the archbishop was asserting his secular authority, and using the spiritual sword to enforce it. Again, what did it mean, this interference with the rights of the laity, this ambition for a personal following of armed knights? Becket was not a dreamer who had emerged into high place from the cloister or the library. He was a man of the world intimately acquainted with the practical problems of the day, the most unlikely of all persons to have adopted a course so marked without some ulterior purpose. Henry discovered too late that his mother's eyes had been keener than his own. He returned to England in the beginning of 1163. Becket met him at his landing, but was coldly received.

In the summer of the same year, Pope Alexander held a council at Tours. The English prelates attended. The question of precedence was not this time raised. The Archbishop of Canterbury and his suffragans sat on the pope's right hand, the Archbishop of York and his suffragans sat on the pope's left. Whether anything of consequence passed on this occasion between the pope and Becket is not known probably not; it is certain, however, that they met. On the archbishop's return to England the disputes between the secular and spiritual authorities broke into open conflict.

* 'Quod, quia rege minime certiorato archiepiscopus fecisset, maximam ejus indignationem incurrit. Asserit enim rex juxta dignitatem regni sui, quod nullus qui de rege teneat in capite vel minister ejus citra ipsius conscientiam sit excommunicandus ab aliquo, ne si hoc regem lateat lapsus ignorantiâ communicet excommunicato; comitem vel baronem ad se venientem in osculo vel consilio admittat.'-Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. ii. p. 222.

The Church principles of Gregory the Seventh were making their way through Europe, but were making their way with extreme slowness. Though the celibacy ⚫ of the clergy had been decreed by law, clerical concubinage was still the rule in England. A focaria and a family were still to be found in most country parsonages. In theory the priesthood was a caste. In practice priests and their flocks were united by common interests, common pursuits, common virtues, and common crimes. The common law of England during the reigns of the Conqueror's sons had refused to distinguish between them. Clerks guilty of robbery or murder had been tried like other felons in the ordinary courts, and if found guilty had suffered the same punishments. The new pretension was that they were a peculiar order, set apart for God's service, not amenable to secular jurisdiction, and liable to trial only in the spiritual courts. Under the loose administration of Stephen, the judges had begun to recognise their immunity, and the conduct of the lower class of clergy was in consequence growing daily more intolerable. Clergy, indeed, a great many of them had no title to be called. They had received only some minor form of orders, of which no sign was visible in their appearance or conduct. They were clerks only so far as they held benefices and claimed special privileges; for the rest, they hunted, fought, drank, and gambled like other idle gentlemen.

In the autumn of 1163 a specially gross case of clerical offence brought the question to a crisis.

Philip de Broi, a young nobleman who held a canonry at Bedford, had killed some one in a quarrel. He was brought before the court of the Bishop of Lincoln, where he made his purgation ecclesiastico jure that is to say, he paid the usual fees and perhaps a small fine. The relations of the dead man declared themselves satisfied, and Philip de Broi was acquitted. The Church and the relations might be satisfied; public justice was not satisfied. The Sheriff of Bedfordshire declined to recognise the decision, and summoned the canon a second time. The canon insulted the sheriff in open court, and refused to plead before him. The sheriff referred the matter to the king. The king sent for Philip de

Broi, and cross-questioned him in Becket's presence. It was not denied that he had killed a man. The king inquired what Becket was prepared to do. Becket's answer, for the present and all similar cases, was that a clerk in orders accused of felony must be tried in the first instance in an ecclesiastical court, and punished according to ecclesiastical law. If the crime was found to be of peculiarly dark kind, the accused might be deprived of his orders, and, if he again offended, should lose his privilege. But for the offence for which he was deprived, he was not to be again tried or again punished; the deprivation itself was to suffice.

The king, always moderate, was unwilling to press the question to extremity. He condemned the judgment of the bishop of Lincoln's court. He insisted that the murderer should have a real trial. But he appointed a mixed commission of bishops and laymen to try him, the bishops having the preponderating voice.

Philip de Broi pleaded that he had made his purgation in the regular manner, that he had made his peace with the family of the man that he had killed, and that the matter was thus ended. He apologised for having insulted the sheriff, and professed himself willing to make reasonable reparation. The sentence of the commission was that his benefices should be sequestered for two years, and that, if the sheriff insisted upon it, he should be flogged.

So weak a judgment showed Henry the real value of Becket's theory. The criminal clerk was to be amenable to the law as soon as he had been degraded, not before; and it was perfectly plain that clerks never would be degraded. They might commit murder upon murder, robbery upon robbery, and the law would be unable to touch them. It could not be. The king insisted that a sacred profession should not be used as a screen for the protection of felony. He summoned the whole body of the bishops to meet him in a council at Westminster in October.

The council met. The archbishop was resolute. He replied for the other bishops in an absolute refusal to make any concession. The judges and the laity generally were growing excited. Had the