did we become purchasers of it in the right market. Pay for it we cannot in the current coin of any realm; it is a commodity not exposed for sale in the streets or bazaars of any city or land; but if we tender for it honest lives and pure sympathies, it is rarely denied us. It comes unexpectedly enough when our expenditure seemed but slight; and though we dare not make it the object of our quest, yet in the endeavour to procure it for another, or when we are resolved to sacrifice its possibility for ourselves, it slips unlooked for back to dwell with us, and there is no loss of it felt by another. Happiness consists in the realisation of the soulἐνέργεια ψυχῆς—it is the accompaniment of action. As Kant pointed out, it is impossible to determine with certainty what would make any man happy; the empirical constituents of happiness can never be welded together into a whole; the search for the idea of action which would make a rational being happy is futile, and no 'imperative,' therefore, commanding a pursuit of happiness exists. The imperative which calls to duty, to rightness of life, to the work that lies nearest our hands, is of quite another order from the empirical counsels to seek pleasure; it makes no promises and holds out no illusive hopes. It is peremptory because divine, and divine for man because rational.

Take, then, that view of things which holds that the worth of the world lies in its moral and spiritual result, and our speculative troubles are, if not at an end, a surprisingly lighter burden.

Looked at from the point of view of physiology, or any kindred science, pain is an evil and nothing but an evil, a more or less serious derangement of a sensitive organism, tending towards its destruction. We are not concerned here with the pain endured by the lower animals during life through want, or at death, nor are the data respecting them sufficiently determinable to permit of any addition by their use to the argument of Pessimism. So far, however, as the penetrating sagacity of the materialist carries him, he can discover nothing in the suffering endured by humanity but that its existence is in itself convincing proof of the absence of any moral governor of the universe. of the universe. The idealist scholar alone, who closes his eyes to the real truth, or the priest who tries to keep his spiritual flock in ecclesiastical leading-strings, can any longer tell the fable of the "moral ordering of the world." It exists neither in nature nor in human life, neither in natural history nor the history of civilization.' '

and wiser than either the Egoistic or the Universalistic Hedonists. But it is not at any time, we fear, his meaning.

1

Haeckel, Evolution of Man.

We need not look to the

This is clear and explicit. Evolutionist to help us to a philosophy which recognizes in pain a disguised good, or will 'see some soul of goodness even in things evil.' And yet is such inconceivable? We cannot but think that the pains of life are no heavy price to pay for its privileges.

'Ease and prosperity may supply a sufficient school for the respectable commoners in character, but without suffering is no man ennobled.'1

The more highly constituted the organism, say the Pessimists, the more sensitive to pain: but they omit to add, the more capable of achievement. Under the economy of earthly existence (and for finite intelligences to set about the framing of other and better may fairly be regarded as audacious fatuity) through the whole range of organic life we may judge with accuracy of the capacity and nobility of the organism by its less or greater sensitiveness. The vegetable kingdom suffers not, neither does it enjoy. In the animal kingdom the joys and sorrows are those of sense, and the brute creation is relieved of all the suffering due to reflection, but it is also without the higher hopes and consolations that wisdom brings. Standing upon a height commanding a vastly wider field of vision, the child of a psychical no less than of a physical development,3 whose thoughts travel through eternity, 'still searching after knowledge infinite,' ready, had he but the wings, with which we believe death will equip him, to make far journeys into the unknown, man suffers that he may achieve.

ART. VII.-THE VERNEY PAPERS.

Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War, compiled from the Letters and illustrated by the Portraits at Claydon House. By FRANCES PARTHENOPE VERNEY. In two volumes. (London, 1892.)

THERE is no more fascinating study than that of the private records of bygone generations, especially when, as in these recently published papers of the Verney family, they belong to one of the most eventful periods of our national history.

1 Rothe's 'Stille Stunden,' quoted by Martineau in Study of Religion, vol. ii. p. 101.

2 The cabbage may fairly be said to enjoy Nirvana. 3 Fiske, Man's Destiny.

We like to hear what commonplace people were thinking and feeling in those stormy days, to know what kind of lives they led while the great struggle was going on, tearing families and friends asunder, and bringing strife and misery to the quiet fields and peaceful homes of England. Every passing allusion to public events, every mention of the different actors in the scene, is of value, since it enables us to realize the atmosphere in which these men and women lived, and the force of that public opinion which their words and thoughts, their feelings and convictions, were helping to form.

The great houses of England are richer, perhaps, in these precious records than any others in Europe. They have for the most part escaped the ravages of foreign invaders and the fury of armed mobs, which have swept over France and Germany, Italy and Spain. But while the treasures stored up in our ancestral homes have in most cases been preserved from these perils, they have been exposed to others of a scarcely less disastrous kind. Neglect and ignorance have done their worst. Manuscripts of the most priceless value have been turned to the basest uses. At Wroxton the letters of a chancellor of Henry VIII.'s time were thrown away as waste paper; and fragments of his writing were recognized in a carpenter's paper cap. In another house, where some cupboards were cleared to make room for some jam and soap, the parchment of a Knight of the Garter three centuries ago dropped out. 'Oh! that's only a bit of the old paper which the housemaids have to light the fires,' was the housekeeper's remark.

At Claydon, the Buckinghamshire home of the Verneys, pictures, papers, and books were treated much in a similar fashion after the ruin of the owner in the last century. When the present baronet, Sir Harry Verney, came to live there, he found the family portraits, painted by the hands of Vandyke, of Jansen, of Walker, and of Lely, stacked in outhouses. One of them had been fastened over a hole in the wall of the apple-room to keep out the rats, another was found in a loft over the pigstye, and several papers had been gnawed by rats or destroyed by damp. Fortunately the great mass of family records had been carefully preserved. There was at the top of the house a wainscoted gallery forty feet long, full of boxes on trestles containing literally acres of parchment, charters and pardons, terriers and rent-rolls, dating from Henry VII.'s time, Mercuries' of the Civil Wars, early editions of plays and poems, and literally thousands of letters relating to the private affairs of the Verneys from the days of Sir Ralph, Lord

Mayor of London, in 1465, down to those of Mary Verney, Baroness Fermanagh, who died unmarried in 1810.

Before long the extraordinary interest of the collection was discovered, and in 1845 Mr. Bruce edited Sir Ralph Verney's 'Notes of Proceedings in the Long Parliament,' and in 1853 another volume of ' Letters and Papers of the Verney Family,' for the Camden Society. The publication of any more documents was interrupted by Mr. Bruce's death, and at the time of her marriage, in 1858, Lady Verney found the great mass of papers still in disorder. She soon began to read and set them in chronological order, and in spite of years of suffering and ill health, as well as frequent interruptions, persevered steadily with her task. When she died, the first volume of the present work was almost finished, and the preparation of the second was sufficiently advanced to be completed by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Verney, assisted by the Honourable Frederica and Catherine Spring Rice. The result of these combined labours has proved thoroughly satisfactory. Lady Verney's well-known literary abilities and experience naturally fitted her for the work which has, we feel, been a labour of love from first to last. These men and women of the seventeenth century live again in her vivid and picturesque narrative. The gallant-hearted Sir Edmund, who fell at Edge Hill clasping the royal standard in his dying hands, the serious and high-minded Sir Ralph, his good mother Dame Margaret, and his noble wife Mary Verney, are personages in whose welfare we take the keenest interest. The joys and sorrows of their troubled lives have become as real to us as if we had seen and spoken with them ourselves. We follow their fortunes through these anxious years and become familiar with all their thoughts and ways. We understand their perplexities and share the cruel pangs which death and separation so often cost them. We realize the strength of the convictions which parted father and son, brother and sister, in the great struggle, and own the might of the love which could sweeten the bitterest trials.

Lady Verney devotes her first chapters to a description of Claydon House, and of the four separate villages bearing this name and belonging to the Verney estate. Steppul or Steeple Claydon, the largest of the four, was reckoned a populous town in the Conqueror's day; Botolph Claydon, a corruption of Botyl, a hamlet or inclosed place, and Est or East Claydon, have each of them an old manor-house standing in the midst of black and white timbered cottages and tall elm trees. But Middle or, as it is called in ancient deeds,

Middel Claydon is by far the most important of the group. For here in the heart of the rich Buckinghamshire grasscountry stands the great house which has been the home of fourteen generations of the Verney family. Claydon House was rebuilt on a splendid scale by Ralph Lord Verney in the last century, but the form of the ancient manorhouse may still be traced in the present building, and a pencil sketch of the seventeenth century gives us a good idea of the gabled front and tall chimneys, which were at that time its most conspicuous features. The 'fine gardens,' in which Sir Ralph took such delight, where he planted vines and fig-trees, Persian tulips and melon-seeds, on his return from exile, and grew the 'quickenberry trees' which he presented to Charles II., are still remarkable for their beauty and extent. The family portraits, by the hands of Vandyke and Jansen, which were rolled up for safety or carried abroad during the Civil Wars, once more adorn the walls, and have been carefully identified by Lady Verney, with the help of old lists and descriptions. Close by, within a few yards of the house, stands the little fourteenth-century church dedicated to St. Michael and All Angels, which has been during centuries the burial-place of the Verneys. The priests' door, at the top of a flight of stone steps shaded by yew trees, is close to the library windows. Within are brasses and monuments to Verneys of every age on the south side of the chancel; the busts of the Standardbearer and his spouse, and of their son Sir Ralph, the parliamentarian member, and his sweet-faced wife Lady Mary,' as she is called, look down from the imposing tomb which Sir Ralph caused to be executed in Rome as a lasting memorial of his love and sorrow.

The first Verney connected with Claydon was an older Sir Ralph, a wealthy merchant of London and stout Yorkist, · who was Lord Mayor in 1465, and received grants of various forfeited lands in Buckinghamshire from King Edward IV. He bought the manor of Middle Claydon but never lived there, and let the house on a lease of a hundred years to the Giffard family. Several of his descendants occupied posts at Court under our Tudor sovereigns; and young Edmund Verney, who became the head of the family in James I.'s reign, was attached to the person of Prince Henry at an early age. A fine picture of this prince, ascribed to Mireveldt, is still at Claydon House, and bears witness to the affection which Edmund Verney bore to his master, of whose death he spoke twenty-seven years afterwards as the greatest sorrow he had ever known. In 1611, a year before this melancholy