talented, versatile, helpless Vernon more severely than he deserves, and that implies no light sentence. His profession he had, of course, abandoned, but he had always delighted to dabble in literature, and in the days of his prosperity his essays were thought to have a sparkle, and his poems a passion, which it is charitable to suppose had disappeared from them in the days of his adversity, when he found it so difficult to get those merits recognised by paymasters. Still, he did something, and the least motion of a stream long retards its freezing. The small, slight, occasional efforts he made in literature preserved his mind from utter stagnation, and he obtained some, but infrequent remuneration, which aided him in maintaining a certain self-respect, and which confirmed him in the belief that circumstances only, and not his own weakness, had prevented his being one of the recognised leaders of the public mind. Let it be added in his favour, that even amid the daily grievances of his lot—as he termed it—the troubles outside his dwelling, and the troubles within, these last painfully increased by the want of help from a disappointed wife, whose good looks and good temper were deserting her, and who now played Mozart only on lodging-house pianos, and chiefly at times when he would have desired quiet—Archibald Vernon did not seek comfort at the hands of the Bottle Imp. His children never saw him in a condition in which—if he had a laugh to spare—it was not as true and fresh as their own.
I feel that perhaps I am treating him too indulgently, and in the interests of morality and society one ought to use stronger words against a man who was an idle and dishonest citizen, and who was the father of children to whom he did not do his duty. But as Lord North said when he, aware of his being about to resign, had his carriage ready at the House, while the Opposition had sent their vehicles away, “See what it is to be in the secret.” If it had been my melancholy duty to finish Archibald Vernon’s history by saying that he died in the Bench, or emigrated, a broken-hearted man, to Australia (and was poisoned on the voyage by the ignorant surgeon of an emigrant vessel), I would have given him the full benefit of appropriate indignation. But, happening to know that his fortune was going to be re-established, I deem harsh language uncalled for. It is well to be quite sure that a man is quite ruined, before you stamp upon him.
But, not to be too civil to the indiscreet, be it said that there was another phase in Archibald Vernon’s character. Unable to succeed in the world, he naturally made up his mind that the world was all wrong. And, weaving into something which it would only be trifling with words to call a system, a mixture of the practical warp and the sentimental web, he clothed himself with a garment which thenceforth became coat-of-mail to him against the shafts of vulgar common sense. He coupled the fact that John Brown is starving with cold, and the fact that Lady Clara Vere de Vere’s Italian greyhound has a warm jacket, and with perfect ease deduced the conclusion that we want a revolution. He placed the splendid receipts of the Attorney-General (whom he explained to be the minister of a false and corrupt institution) on one side, and the paltry earnings of a curate (“who, apart from his creed,” said Archibald, a sentimental unbeliever, “was labouring to do good, so far as he knew”) on the other, and made the portentous balance on the lawyer’s side prove incontestibly that pikes were the things to reduce that balance. And it is hardly needful to say, that when in the newspaper which announced the decision of the committee that there was no evidence to connect Sir Lionel Squandercash with the proved bribery at the St. Brelade’s election, there also appeared the Bow Street sentence which consigned the squalid Joe Nipps to prison for picking a pocket, Vernon wrote a song with more notes of exclamation than orthodox typography permits, and beginning “Ha! ermined Fiend!” poetically regardless of the circumstance that the police magistrates do not attire themselves in the spotless fur. All this sort of thing is done by many respectable men; some, I am happy to say, would be very much offended, if you thought them weak enough to do it for other than mercantile purposes; but Vernon, so far as he could be said to have a real conviction, believed that the world was a compound of sham, cruelty, and hypocrisy—and he told his children so.
Which paternal instruction might have been less deleterious, had it been accompanied with that teaching by which religious parents make it clear to their offspring that, howevever bad the world may be, it is decidedly none of our business to make it worse. But Archibald Vernon, like millions of other feeble persons, confounded priests with shrines, and rejected both; and as for poor Mrs. Vernon, her religious views were originally something to the effect that she always felt good in a cathedral when the organ was playing,—and the unfortunate lady, having been rather out of the way of cathedrals during her troubles, had not had much chance of cultivating her piety. She once bought two prayer-books with gilt corners and clasps, for the eldest girls, but a landlady detained one of them, in very small part of a claim for a broken loo-table, and in the other poor Mrs. Vernon put two sovereigns to send over to Archibald when in prison, as she thought the messenger was less likely to steal a parcel than an envelope with money, and the sacred volume was left in 7 in B. No other attempt, beyond an occasional impatient wonder why the girls could not go to church, instead of lying in their beds half Sunday reading novels, was made by Mrs. Vernon in a theological direction. Nor were the poor children more fortunate in a secular point of view. For among Archibald Vernon’s sentimentalising was one to this effect (I think he had stolen it from some German gentleman who was famous for demoralising the minds of his young lady correspondents), namely, that a child’s heart was Heaven’s flower-garden, and it was blasphemy for man to seek to lay it out his own way. This delightful aphorism Vernon was fond of quoting, especially when asked whether Beatrice, and Bertha, and Laura did not go to school. But I do not believe that he was entirely sincere in this matter, or that if he had been richer he would not have bad good instruction for those three handsome, intelli-