stairs, and we have one lodging room with two single beds, a sort of lumber room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which I have papered with newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an old woman of 60 years of age, whom we took partly out of charity.” Here Miss Wordsworth and her brother, the great poet, lived on the simplest fare and drank cold water, and hence issued those noble poems which more than any others teach us the higher life.

CONTENTS

p. 48“Blush, grandeur, blush; proud courts, withdraw your blaze; Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays.”

p. 48

“I turned schoolmaster,” says Sydney Smith, “to educate my son, as I could not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned schoolmistress to educate my girls as I could not afford a governess. I turned farmer as I could not let my land. A man servant was too expensive, so I caught up a little garden girl, made like a milestone, christened her Bunch, put a napkin in her hand, and made her my butler. The girls taught her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her morals. Bunch became the best butler in the country. I had little furniture, so I bought a cartload of deals; took a carpenter (who came to me for parish relief) called Jack Robinson, with a face like a full moon, into my service, established him in a barn, and said, ‘Jack, furnish my house.’ You see the result.”

Then what shall I say of the luxury of endless daily papers, leading articles, short paragraphs, reviews, illustrated papers,—are not these luxuries? Are they not inventions for making thought easy, or rather for the purpose of relieving us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves. May I also, without raising a religious controversy, observe that in religious worship we are prone to relieve ourselves from the trouble of deep and consecutive thought by surrounding our minds with a sort of mist of feeling and sentiment; by providing beautiful music, pictures, and ornaments, and so resting satisfied in a somewhat indolent feeling of goodness, and not troubling ourselves with too much effort of reason. A love of the beautiful undoubtedly tends to elevate and refine the mind, but the follies of the false p. 49love and the dangers of an inordinate love are numerous and deadly. It is absurd that a man should either be or pretend to be absolutely absorbed in the worship of a dado or a China tea cup so as to care for nothing else, and to be unable to do anything else but stare at it with his head on one side. With most people the whole thing is the mere affectation of affected people, who, if 

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