IMPERTURBABLE STUPIDITY.

355

le sot, de quoi rougir." There is what a Scottish divine
calls a
"beautiful equanimity" about the thorough
dunce he is so completely stupid, that he never for an
instant suspects that he is stupid at all. The clever man
is apt to have misgivings about the extent of his powers,
but "your entire booby knows no such fear." Bottom
the weaver goes through his part in the play with un-
ruffled composure and confidence. Neither the wit of
the courtiers nor the presence of the Duke, as Dr.
Maginn remarks, has any effect upon his nerves. He
replies to the jest of Demetrius (which he does not
understand) with the "self-command of ignorant in-
difference." It is true that Oberon designates him as a
"hateful fool;" that Puck stigmatizes him as the greatest
blockhead of the set; and that the audience vote him to
be an ass;
"but what matter is that?" Let the galled
jade wince; his withers are unwrung. Let the thin-
skinned writhe and wriggle; he is rhinoceros-hided, and
no satirist knows where to have him. What feeling
mind, exclaims Peter Pindar, would be a bull at stake?

"Pinched by this mongrel, by that mastiff torn;
Who'd make a feast to treat the public scorn?
Who'd be a bear that grasps his club with pride,
With which his dancing-master drubs his hide ?"

None, submits Peter, but the arrantest fool turns butt to catch the shafts of ridicule; and when the object of his derision retorts, "With mere contempt the grinning world I see, and always laugh at those who laugh at me," the rejoinder is, then "may I never thrive, but you must be the merriest man alive." And again in Dr. Wolcot's Epistle to Sylvanus Urban the reflection occurs,—

"How blest the fool! he thinks he all things knows ;
With joy he wakes, with joy his eyelids close :
Pleased through the world to spread his own renown,
With calm contempt he looks on others down;

356

SELF-COMPLACENT STOLIDITY.

Thrice envied being, whom no tongue can wound,

In pride's impenetrable armour bound!"

That wonderful self-complacency with which the fools of this earth are endowed, points the moral of one of Fitzboodle's tales. And wonderful indeed is what Molière's Clitandre admires in his Trissotin,

"Cette intrépidité de bonne opinion,

Cet indolent état de confiance extrême

Qui le rend en tout temps si content de soi-même."

Mr. Wyndham's defence of bull-baiting, partly on the ground that it was a real pleasure to the animal chiefly concerned, affording him in fact an agreeable excitement, has been generally discredited in the case of the bull; but there are some human beings to whom it has been thought difficult not to apply it,—this being the only amusement that can be got out of them ; and great is the self-command required in one who has to do with a thoroughly stolid and withal self-complacent companion, not to try what "sticking moral pins into him" will effect by way of diversion. Lord Macaulay got hold of a paradox after his own heart when he argued of Boswell, that if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer; since he never could have produced so excellent a book had it not been for the qualities which made him the butt of his associates,among which qualities, "insensibility to all reproof" stands nearly foremost,-"a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself." "Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted that all others were equally callous." And yet in a variety of essential particulars Boswell was certainly no fool. Nor were the conquests he made in life of a kind to draw upon him such terms of concession as Talbot expresses in Schiller's Fungfrau

NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL.

"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain."

357

Especially is this contention in vain against stupidity

Not to all men do years
Not to all do they bring

when well stricken in years.
bring the philosophic mind.
that which should accompany old age, in the way of
wisdom and reflective power. To the Venerable Bede
is ascribed the popular saying, that there is no fool like
an old fool; and everyday experience proves that there
is no matter-of-fact incompatibility between irrationality
and old age, and that to many a modern senior might
the warning in Sophocles apply, Μὴ 'φευρεθῇς ἄνους τε
kaì yέpwv åμa. The subject of Canning's satire appears
to have been far from deserving so sharp an expression
of it as in the stanzas parodying Moore's familiar lines,
"Believe me, if all those ridiculous airs
Which you practise so pretty to-day

Should vanish by age, and your well-twisted hairs,
Like my own, be both scanty and grey :

"Thou would'st still be a goose, as a goose thou hast been,
Though a fop and a fribble no more,

And the world that has laughed at the fool of eighteen,

Would laugh at the fool of threescore.

Oh, the fool that is truly so, never forgets,
But as truly fools on to the close," etc.

Novelists of some note are taxed with ignoring the fact that some of us have the capacity to learn-for however slow we may be to receive benefit from stripes, and dull scholars as experience may find us, still we generally manage, it is hoped, to get a few lessons by heart, and to avoid this year the patent mistakes we had made and suffered for last year. But the writers in question seem to think differently of mankind; and in their gallery of illustration men and women are but a

358 shade removed from moral idiocy, and prove themselves incapable of learning, however strenuously they may be taught, and however bitterly they may suffer for previous failures,—all of them pursuing for a second, third, and fourth time exactly the same path as that by which they have come to grief before. Self-conceit often strengthens as one grows older; and moralists depict for us an "obstinate old fool" around whom self-love has thrown a magic veil, which blinds him to the sneers of others and the strong contempt so openly exhibited; for "selflove has always something comfortable to retire upon." It seems to be a fancy with some folks that a man grows wise by growing old, without taking any particular pains about it. But "the older the crab-tree the more crabs it bears," says the proverb. Taking note-half amused, half distressed-of the follies to which men are seen to commit themselves when going down the hill of life, a great French pensée-writer is moved to exclaim, "C'est la jeunesse encore qui, malgré ses fougues et ses promptitudes, est sérieuse et sensée; c'est la seconde partie de la vie qui se fait égarée ou légère.”

NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL.

Hawthorn descries a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a venerable rose-bush; and applies the remark by analogy to human life-persons who can only be graceful and ornamental, who can give the world nothing but flowers, should die young, he contends, and never be seen with grey hairs and wrinkles. How much more persons who can only be foolish and frivolous! One recalls the late Mr. Charles Buxton's humorous deprecation of old people as such, and his wish to have them decently disposed of off-hand-say, to have them shot by the bishop of the diocese. Not always le temps remédie aux torts de la jeunesse, as one of Gresset's elderly people says of a junior, about whose future another veteran is less hopeful:

PASSING FAIR.

"Non; il peut rester fat: n'en voit-on pas sans cesse
Qui jusqu'à cinquante ans gardent l'air éventé,

Et sont les vétérans de la fatuité ?"

359

Do you suppose fools' caps do not cover grey hair, as well as jet or auburn? a later satirist inquires. This he knows, that there are late crops of wild oats, as well as early harvests of them; and from observation he is convinced that the avena fatua grows up to the very last days of the year.

"What weakness see not children in their sires !

Grand-climacterical absurdities!"

exclaims Dr. Young; adding that

"It makes folly thrice a fool;

And our first childhood might our last despise."

TH

XXXIII.

PASSING FAIR.

PROVERBS XXXI. 30.

HE words of King Lemuel, after the teaching that his mother taught him, are never more emphatic, never more fervid and impressive, than when asserting the excellence of the virtuous woman, and her priceless worth-priceless, for it is far above rubies. Having expatiated with vigorous enthusiasm on her simply invaluable qualities, he finishes with the maxim, saw, or pensée: "Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised." "Beauty's sweet, but beauty's frail," is one of Carew's texts, metrically and musically applied and enforced : ""Tis sooner past, 'tis sooner done,

Than summer's rain or winter's sun;
Most fleeting when it is most dear;
'Tis gone while but we say-'tis here.