20 PEDDLING AND MEDDLING IN THEOLOGY.

He wields, beyond most other men,
His awl, his razor, and his pen ;
My beard he shaves, repairs my shoe,
And writes my panegyric too;

He, with one brandish of his quill,
Can knock down Toplady and Hill;
With equal ease, whene'er there's need,
Can darn my stockings and my creed;
Can drive a nail, or ply the needle,
Hem handkerchiefs, and scrape the fiddle;
Chop logic as an ass chews thistle,
More skilfully than you can whistle;
And then when he philosophizes,

No son of Crispin half so wise is.

Of all my ragged regiment,

This cobbler gives me most content :

My forgeries and faith's defender,

My barber, champion, and shoe-mender."

In private, however, Toplady is said to have done justice to this antagonist; and we find him telling a correspondent, that had Mr. Olivers' understanding been cultivated by a liberal education, he would probably have made some figure in life. Not a whit, nevertheless, would better acquaintance have availed to abate Mr. Toplady's loyalty to the adage Ne sutor. If he ever read-which, as the elaborate Preface to Dr. Johnson's Dictionary contained the poem as a whole, he probably did the advice of a sometime High Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, he most likely relished it keenly, and adopted it entirely :

“Wise men alwaye

Affirme and saye

That 'tis best for a man
Diligently

For to apply

To the business he can,
And in no wyse

To enterprise

Another facultie.

A symple hatter
Should not go smatter
En philosophie;
Nor ought a peddlar
Become a meddlar

En theologie."

DAVID'S APPLICATION OF "THe proverb of THE ANCIENTS."

I SAMUEL Xxiv. 13.

N the day that King Saul was in the hands of David

persecuted fugitive should take the life of his persecutor, and so avenge him of his adversary. But the son of Jesse repudiated all vindictive counsels against the Lord's anointed. Hard pressed he was by the implacable king of Israel, who degraded his majesty by pursuit of so unpretending a fugitive,--for after whom was the king come out? "After a dead dog, after a flea?" And with proof positive and palpable of his having but now had the king's life in his hand, to that king he appealed and he protested, "The Lord judge between me and thee, and the Lord avenge me of thee; but mine hand shall not be upon thee. As saith the proverb of the ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked but mine hand shall not be upon thee." Had he meant wickedly, David would have done wickedly that day. But his heart was in this matter pure from wickedness. It was right in the sight of God. It was loyal to the king. A good tree bringeth forth good fruit. Wickedness is of the wicked. It is an abomination for kings to commit wickedness, and so is it for the heirs to kingdoms; for the throne is established by righteousness. A man that is royal must bear himself royally. Noblesse oblige. It was not for David to avenge himself—least of all by a stab in the dark.

Vain is the pleading of Shakspeare's Clarence, "If

22

VINDICTIVE PROVERBS.

God will be avenged for the deed" whose guilt the doomed man owns,—

"Take not the quarrel from His powerful arm,

He needs no indirect or lawless course

To cut off those that have offended Him."

Let thy arrows of revenge fly short, counsels the quaint old author of Christian Morals; "or be aimed like those of Jonathan, to fall beside the mark. Too many there be to whom a dead enemy smells well, and who find musk and amber in revenge. The ferity of such minds holds no rule in retaliations, requiring too often a head for a tooth, and the supreme revenge for trespasses which a night's rest should obliterate." But the sweetness of revenge is intoxicating with some natures, evil-natured. Sternly speaks Bothwellhaugh in Scott's ballad,

"Tis sweet to hear,

In good greenwood, the bugle blown ;
But sweeter to Revenge's ear,

To drink a tyrant's dying groan."

Archbishop Trench professes to know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of horror than the series which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs in glorification of revenge-especially when we take them with the commentary which Italian history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, but the deepest utterances of the nation's heart. "There is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining so deadly a guest in the bosom; on the contrary, one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, Revenge is a morsel for God.'" Vendetta, boccon di Dio. Nor is there in them anything (far better if there were) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood. run cold." Thus, of others quoted by Dr. Trench, one

'REVENGE IS SWEET?

23

gives this advice: "Wait time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry;" while another proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken : "Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth" (ha ancor i lattaiuoli).

Among all warlike barbarians, Lord Macaulay has remarked, revenge is esteemed the most sacred of duties and the most exquisite of pleasures.

The spirit of revenge, says Izaak Walton, is so pleasing to mankind, that it is never conquered but by a supernatural grace, being indeed so deeply rooted in human nature, that to prevent the excess of it (for men would never know moderation), Almighty God allows not any degree of it to man, but says, "Vengeance is mine" and although this be said by God Himself, yet is revenge so pleasing, that "man is hardly persuaded to submit the manage of it to the time, and justice, and wisdom of His Creator, but would hasten to be his own executioner of it." Dead Sea fruit, or worse, though it be, revenge is often and often too pleasant to the eye, and, at first, too sweet in the mouth, to be foregone.

It was in witnessing the execution of sixty-three retainers of the Lord of Balm, the accomplice of John of Hapsburg in the murder of the Emperor Albert, that the Empress Agnes exclaimed, as she watched the blood flow, "Now I bathe in honey-dew." What though she founded that magnificent convent of Königstein, of which fine ruins still remain? the rebuke of the hermit overtook the vengeful Empress: "God is not served by shedding innocent blood, and by building convents from the plunder of families, but by confession and forgiveness of sins." Vengeance was His, not hers. But the vindictive widow was in the mood to reply much as the Doge of Venice in Byron's tragedy, to the reminder,

24

BITTER SWEETNESS OF REVENGE.

"Heaven bids us to forgive our enemies," as Heaven will forgive them. "Amen. May Heaven forgive them." "And will you?" "Yes, when they are in heaven." "And not till then?"-At vindicta bonum vitâ jucundius ipså, urges one voice of two in Juvenal; but the other exclaims, Who talks this language? the illiterate fool, whose brutal passions are his only rule, Nempe hoc indocti, etc. "For, sure, revenge can never find a place but in a petty spirit, weak and base": Quippe minuti Semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas. Talk of voluptas!—the relief and satisfaction found in that indulgence is no other, contends Shaftesbury, than the assuaging of the most torturous pain, and the alleviating the most weighty and pressing sensation of misery: the sensation of relief he asserts to be, in truth, no better than that from the rack itself. When Ripert wants to know what attrait brûlant, what overmastering bonheur, Laurent (in one of Soulié's historical fictions) can find in la vengeance, the latter breaks out, "Un attrait! un bonheur ! C'est un effroi de toutes les heures et une torture de toutes les parties du cœur, et pourtant c'est une soif irrésistible, c'est la soif des damnés; c'est la soif de l'ivresse quand la poitrine brûle et demande, au lieu d'une eau pure, quelque vin qui la brûle davantage." As with the vindictive Annabella in Miss Baillie's Witchcraft, with her iterations (that deserve the Shakspearian epithet often conjoined with that word), “Revenge is sweet, revenge is noble, revenge is natural, what price is too dear for revenge ?"-or again, that likeminded tamperer with the black art in Scott's Rokeby,—

"Here stood a wretch prepared to change

His soul's redemption for revenge."

Not much better is the man described in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall,