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of home. The Lakes have their own laureate, and this is his apostrophe to them, in the Latin poet's spirit of dulcet reminiscence in articulo mortis :

"Dear native Regions, wheresoe'er shall close
My mortal course, there will I think on you;
Dying, will cast on you a backward look ;
Even as this setting sun (albeit the Vale
Is nowhere touched by one memorial gleam)
Doth with the fond remains of his last power

Still linger, and a farewell lustre sheds

On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose.”

The testamentary codicil that Columbus is said to have written on the blank page of his little breviary (the gift of Pope Alexander VI.), has stirred biographers to admire its evidence of the affection with which his last thoughts were bent on his native city. The elder Disraeli is touched with Racine's death-bed desire to be buried in the solitudes of Port Royal, where he was bred; and on the same beloved retreat did Arnauld, persecuted, and dying in a foreign country, still cast his lingering, longing looks, and to it he bequeathed his heart, to be there inurned.

66

When Sir Walter Scott, during his last and fruitless sojourn

Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares of war, finance, and legislation, still pointed to Daylesford; and that when his long public life, so singularly chequered with good and evil, had at length closed for ever, it was to Daylesford that he retired to die. Edmund Waller's purchase of a small property at Coleshill was just too late for securing the fulfilment of his wish, to die like the stag, where he was roused"-for death overtook him at Beaconsfield; a spot now associated with the name of one English statesman, and with the home-life of two. Bolingbroke had long wished to fetch his last breath at Battersea, where he was born; and fortune, that had through life, says one of his biographers, "seemed to traverse all his aims, at last indulged him in this." Not so was it to be with that first of the four Georges whose accession dealt a heavy blow and great discouragement to accomplished St. John and his party. The heart of Georgius Rex was ever away in Hanover; and to many is familiar the picture of him when taken ill on his last journey, as he was passing through Holland, thrusting his livid head out of the coach-window, and gasping out, "Osnaburg! Osnaburg!"

An English traveller in Russia speaks of the people of that country in

on the Continent, heard news of the death of Goethe,―to be followed within a few months by his own,-" Alas for Goethe!" he exclaimed; "but he at least died at home. Let us to Abbotsford." Grata quies patria was then a quotation that trembled more than once on his paralysed lips and pen. Hame, hame, hame wad he be. And when home was almost reached, and the sight of Gala Water revived him, and of Buckholm, and of Torwoodlee, when the hill at Ladhope was rounded, and the outline of the Eildons burst on him, and at length his own towers, at the distance of a mile, his gradually advancing excitement was wellnigh too much for him, if not for his companions, especially when at that first glimpse of Abbotsford he sprang up with a cry of delight. For he, after all, like Goethe, beatus ille, was to die at home. Numerous and varied are the incidental illustrations of the general subject that might be cited from his pages. In the Talisman, the Scottish esquire who lies sick in the crusaders' camp near Ascalon, is overheard murmuring how cold and refreshing taste the waters of the Clyde, after the brackish springs of Palestine. He dreams of his native land, and is happy in his slumbers. Again, there is Quentin Durward on French soil, in the hands of Petit-André and TroisEschelles, bethinking him of the little rude and unroofed chapel which now held almost all his race but himself: "Our

general as an exception to the rule which makes most men yearn to return home to die. According to him, it very rarely happens that moujiks who from serfs have become merchants of the second guild, and amassed large fortunes, ever think in their declining days of retiring to the village which gave them birth; and soldiers too, when discharged from service, scarcely ever retrace their steps to their native hamlet. At any rate they have no credit such as the Cornish miner enjoys, of always, however far he may become, returning home to die :

"Should he get rich in other zones,

To Cornwall he brings back his bones,'

rhymes the author of Rhymes from Cornwall, who is glad withal to remind us that "Australian, Californian gold, Tells where a Cornishman takes hold." But the sentiment is pure and potent as in the more refined instance of Lamartine's wistful wanderer:

"Il a voulu revoir ce ciel de son enfance,
Revenir et mourir au lieu de sa naissance."

feudal enemies gave my kindred graves in our own land,” he thought, "but I must feed the ravens and kites of a foreign land, like an excommunicated felon." And there is the convicted and condemned chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, hoping the gaol authorities will set his head on the Scotch gate of Carlisle Castle, that he may look, even after death, to the blue hills of his own country, by him loved so dearly.

The Alexander Oldworthy of one of Mr. Charles Reade's most charmingly told historiettes, reverts in affection and longing to his native Warwickshire, at the close of his long life in the greatest of cities,—and his thoughts are on the pleasant fields where he had played among the lambs and the buttercups in the morning of his days. Fain would he see once more those pleasant fields, and sit in the sun a little while, and then lie beside his father in the old churchyard. And humbly he lies there, as he wished, beneath the shadow of Coventry's great old loftiest spire. It is of his own neighbouring cathedral town that Dickens is writing when he refers to those who, in their dying hours afar off, have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together. So with De Quincey's Spanish Military Nun, when, her brain wandering, now that her feet were not, she said to herself, "It is evening; and the hour is come for the Angelus to be sounding through St. Sebastian,"-her memories reverting to cathedral choirs, and to St. Sebastian's chapel, with its silvery bells that carried the echoing Angelus far into mountain

recesses.

On the plains of Troy, and amid Ida's spreading woods -"fair Ida, watered with descending floods "the forlorn Achilles feeds his fancy on memories of a far-away stream,— "Sperchius, whose waves in mazy errors lost, Delightful roll along my native coast." No distant charge or dignity availed to efface from Cicero's very present remembrance the endeared aspect of Arpinum. "I do and must love my country," wrote

expatriated Atterbury: "My last wish shall be like that of Father Paul, Esto perpetua! and when I die at a distance from it, it will be in the same manner as Virgil describes the expiring Peloponnesian,” who, in the act of expiring, reminiscitur Argos. Of le Maréchal Marmont (Duc de Raguse) we read that, "par un sentiment précurseur, et comme il arrive à ceux qui, loin du ciel natal, se sentent décliner et approcher du terme, il nourrissait depuis quelque temps un vif et secret désir de revoir la France;" a yearning not destined to be gratified. "Le mal du pays le gagna; ce cœur si fort fut brisé." The French and the Scotch might perhaps divide honours on the score of patriotic attachment. Dr. James Hamilton somewhere expatiates on the instinct that seems to bring back the exile, perhaps after the interval of a generation, to his Highland glen, whether it be from luxury in a soft Bermudan life, or from that Canadian clearing in which a rosy household has sprung up, and in proud affection clings around him: towards the haunts of his childhood there is a strange deep-hidden yearning, which often sends absent looks towards northern stars, and ends at last in the actual pilgrimage. As in Grahame's lines:

"Yes! I may love the music of strange tongues,
And mould my heart anew, to take the stamp

Of foreign friendships in a foreign land;

But to my parchèd mouth's roof cleave this tongue,

My fancy fade into the yellow leaf,

And this oft-pausing heart forget to throb,

If, Scotland! thee and thine it e'er forget."

Verstigan tells how a traveller in Palestine was once startled by hearing a captive Scotswoman singing as she dandled her baby at the door of one of the Arab tents, "Oh, Bothwell bank, thou bloomest fair!" John Leyden, in the delirium of a mortal fever in Java, was heard repeating snatches of old Border songs. Happier was Sir James Mackintosh, in that his lot was not far-away exile, when, in his dying moments, the image of the woods of Aldourie and the banks of Loch Ness, every object seeming to be imprinted indelibly on his memory, haunted him to the very last.

THE

was.

XXII.

FLATTERING LIPS.

PROVERBS XXix. 5.

HE words of wisdom warn us that a man who flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.

Surely the net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird? Not always in vain. Witness the Nonne Prest His Tale in Chaucer of the cock and the fox, and again the crow that warbled a hoarse croak to charm Reynard, and so was caught,—at least his cheese "A flattering mouth worketh ruin," another proverb has it. And another runs: "He that rebuketh a man shall afterwards find more favour than he that flattereth with the tongue.” It was Elihu's pride, so to speak, that he knew not to give flattering titles unto men. The Psalmist couples flattering lips with a double heart. And St. Paul exulted in the consciousness of not having at any time used flattering words, as the Thessalonians knew, and as he called God to witness.

Especially to them of high degree is there need of warning:

"Allas! ye lordlynges, many a false flatour

Is in your house, and many a lozengour,
That pleasen yow wel more, by my faith,
Than he that sothfastnesse unto you saith.
Redith Ecclesiast of flaterie ;

Bethwar, ye lordes, of her trecherie."

Clarendon traces a considerable measure of Edmund Waller's success in high circles, and where it craved wary walking, to his exercise of "servile flattery to the height the vainest and most imperious nature could be contented with it." We have South's word for it, that if ever you find an ignoramus in place and power, and can have so little conscience, and so much confidence, as to tell him to his face that he has a wit and an understanding above all the world beside,—“as fulsome a dose as you give him, he shall readily take it down, and admit the commendation, though he cannot believe the thing." Blanditiæ,

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