Part 4

According to the old adage--

“My son is my son, ’till he gets him a wife; My daughter’s my daughter, the whole of her life.”

The pious excellent Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, convinced of the unlawfulness of the King’s marriage, resigned the Great Seal, and resolved to pass the remainder of his life amidst the charities of home and the consolations of religion.--Erasmus, speaking of his friend says, “there is not any man living so affectionate to his children; you would say there was in that place Plato’s academy,--I should rather call his house a school or university of Christian religion, for their special care is piety and virtue.” Upon his refusal to take the oath of supremacy, he was tried for high treason and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, and his head to be stuck on a pole on London bridge. He was executed July 5th, 1535. His body was begged by his daughter Margaret, and deposited in the church of Chelsea; where a monument, with an inscription written by himself had been erected some time before. She found means also to procure his head, after it had remained upon London bridge fourteen days: this she carefully preserved in a leaden chest, till she conveyed it to Canterbury, and placed it under a chapel adjoining to St. Dunstan’s church in that city; where, after having survived her father sixteen years, she according to her desire was buried in the same vault with her father’s head in her arms.

MOTHER.

Of the love of a mother it is scarcely possible to give any adequate description. All that can be said of Charity, is most true if it be said of a mother’s love, which hopeth, believeth, endureth all things. As the spirit of God brooded over the creation, while it was yet in the womb of the morning,--with such heavenly love does the pure spirit of the mother, cherish her infant yet unborn. With silent and thankful tears, she hears the first sound of its little voice, and straightway forgets all her pain and travail! When she looks upon it, no matter how homely in the eyes of another, she thinks that the world contains nothing fairer. Who can number her prayers for her infant, or her fond anticipations of his future advancement?--she remembers that the greatest men have once been helpless children, and trusts that her little helpless child will one day be a great man; she treasures his first words in her heart, and in all his little sayings discovers seeds of wisdom and goodness; and if after all, she is doomed to find him deformed in limb, or weak in intellect, she dwells upon the sweetness of his disposition, and the strength of his affections, and clings to him with a warmer love, because others think him crippled and unsightly. If her child grows up, in the fear and nurture of God, and is deserving of her love, life has no joy like her joy; and should all her care prove fruitless, and the misguided youth make her heart sad, and steep her bread in tears, though all desert him she clings to him to the last: in poverty, in sickness, in the punishment of his crimes--she, is there: the fond mother in the loathsome convict-ship,--in the cell of the condemned,--at the foot of the scaffold! All, all, have deserted him,--save He who died for him, and she who gave him birth.

Such is the nature, such the constancy of a mother’s love. It begins before birth, and continues after death:

“There are spun Around the heart such tender ties, That our own children, to our eyes, Are dearer than the sun.”

There are four forms in which this love is peculiarly conspicuous: when,

1st The child is criminal; 2nd The child is sick; 3rd The child is dying; 4th The child is dead.

This tenderness of a mother’s love when the child is criminal, is beautifully described by Hogarth, in his picture of “Industry and Idleness,” in that aged woman, who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished, to her brutal vice-hardened son, whom she is accompanying to the ship, which is to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy,--in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered; and feels it must belong to her while a pulse, by the vindictive laws of his country, shall be suffered to beat in it.

There is a melancholy instance in the love of a mother for her child, in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, for the year 1732, in the trial of John Waller. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more abandoned miscreant than Waller. He was at last detected and sentenced to the pillory; the mob seized him and beat him to death. His dead body was put into a coach and carried to Newgate. The prisoners refused to receive it; his mother who was in waiting, regardless of the infuriated mob, went into the coach, and placing his head in her lap, took away the dead body of her child.

At this very instant how many mothers are anxiously watching their sick children--unmindful of their own fatigue, or food, or rest!

In a storm in the Yarmouth Roads a vessel was wrecked, a young woman was seen clinging to a mast,--she was seen raising her child above the highest wave, in a wild and vain attempt to save it. On the next morning she was drifting to the shore,

“And like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair.”

A fire destroyed a house, in which several lives were lost, among which a woman and her infant perished. On digging out the ruins, the mother was found burnt to death, but on her knees, holding her infant in a pail of water.

A few days since when walking to my chambers, I saw a hearse moving slowly before me. It stopped at the door of a respectable house; all the windows were closed. A coffin, covered with blue cloth, apparently of a child about fourteen was raised into the hearse. I happened to look up; I saw one of the shutters slightly opened, and a female looking anxiously. The hearse moved on. As the procession turned the corner of the street, I had the curiosity, not an idle curiosity, to look back; I saw the same female; she had partly opened the window.

“The King took the two sons of Rizpath, and the five sons of Michael whom she brought up, and he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the hill before the Lord, and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days in the beginning of barley harvest.

“And Rizpath took sackcloth and spread it for herself upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven,--and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night. Nor did she cease to watch them, until David, touched by this depth of affection, gave them burial with the bones of their forefathers.”

So too we see in every picture of the Crucifixion, the mother standing with patience and resignation at the foot of the cross:

“She when Apostles shrank could danger brave, Last at his Cross, and earliest at his Grave.”

OLD MAIDS.

Such is the influence of female affection upon youth: but to youth it is not confined. It exists at all times of life wherever woman exists. It has been my good fortune to share the friendship of many of a very interesting class of persons, I mean old maids. They have their faults, who has not? But I know well, that most of them abound with kindness; which may be seen even by the animals by which they are surrounded, and by their many misdirected enthusiasms.

“The inclination to goodness,” says Lord Bacon, “is imprinted deeply in our nature, insomuch that if it issue not towards men, it will take unto other living creatures.”

Harriet Aspin was the youngest of four sisters, who in their childhood had all a prospect of passing through life with every advantage that beauty and fortune can bestow. But destiny ordained it otherwise. The extravagance of their father abridged the portion of each, and the little Harriet had the additional affliction of personal calamities. From a fall which her nurse occasioned, and concealed, she contracted a great degree of deformity; and the injuries that her frame had received from accident, were completed in what her countenance suffered from that cruel distemper, by which beauty was so frequently destroyed, before the happy introduction of innoculation. Her countenance and person were wretchedly disfigured; but her mind still possessed the most valuable of mental powers, and her heart was embellished by every generous affection. Her friends were many: but she had passed her fortieth year without once hearing the addresses of a single lover; yet the fancied whisper of this enchanting passion often vibrated in her ear; for, with a solid and brilliant understanding, she was deeply tinctured with this credulous foible. As she advanced towards fifty, finding her income very narrow, and her situation unpleasant, she took shelter in the family of her favourite sister, married to a good-natured man of easy fortune, who, though he had several children, very readily allowed his wife to afford an asylum, and administer all the comforts in her power to this unfortunate relation.

The good deeds of benevolence rarely pass unrewarded. The obliging temper of Harriet, united to infinite wit and vivacity, contributed to restore the declining health of her sister, and enlivened the house, into which she was so kindly admitted. She endeared herself to every branch of it; but her second nephew, whose name is Edward, became her principal favourite, and returned her partiality with more esteem and affection than nephews are used to feel for an old maiden aunt. Indeed, there was a striking similarity in their characters, for they both possessed a very uncommon portion of wit, with extreme generosity and good-nature. Harriet had the most perfect penetration into the foibles of every character but her own, and had the art of treating them with such tender and salutary mirth, that she preserved her nephew from a thousand follies, into which the giddiness of his passions would otherwise have betrayed him; and, when he was really fallen into some juvenile scrape, she never failed to assist him, both with secret advice, and the private aid of such little sums of money as she always contrived to save from her slender income, for the most generous of purposes.

It was almost impossible not to love a maiden aunt of so engaging a character; and Edward, whose affections were naturally ardent, loved her, indeed, most sincerely; but his penetration discovered her foible, and the vivacity of his spirit often tempted him to sport with it. Hitherto, however, he had done so in the most harmless manner; but a circumstance arose, which fully proved the danger of this ordinary diversion. Edward, being a younger brother, was designed for the profession of physic. He had studied at Edinburgh; and, returning from thence to London, had brought with him a medical friend, who was a native of Savoy, and was preparing to settle as a physician at Turin. In the gaiety of his heart, Edward informed his aunt Harriet, that he had provided her with a husband; and he enlarged on the excellent qualities of his friend. The Savoyard was extremely polite, and, either attracted by the pleasantry of her conversation, or touched with medical pity for the striking infelicity of her distorted frame, he had paid particular attention to Miss Aspin; for, being yet under fifty, she had not assumed the title of “Mrs.” This particular attention was fully sufficient to convince the credulous Harriet, that her nephew was serious; but she was unluckily confirmed in that illusion, by his saying to her one evening, “Well, my dear aunt, my friend is to leave England on Monday; consider, on your pillow, whether you will pass the Alps, to settle with him for life, and let me know your decision before the week expires.” The sportive Edward was very far from supposing, that these idle words could be productive of any fatal event; for the health of his aunt was such, that he considered his proposal of crossing the Alps full as extravagant as if he had proposed to her to settle in the moon: but let youth and vigour remember, that they seldom can form a just estimate of the wishes, the thoughts, and feelings of infirmity!--Poor Harriet had no sooner retired to her chamber, than she entered into a profound debate with a favourite maid, who used to sleep in her room, concerning the dangers of crossing the Alps, and the state of her health. In this debate both her heart and her fancy played the part of very able advocates, and defended a weak cause by an astonishing variety of arguments in its favour. They utterly overpowered her judgment; but they could not bias the sounder sentence of Molly, who was seated on the bench on this occasion. This honest girl, who happened to have a real lover in England, had many motives to dissuade her mistress from an extravagant project of settling in a foreign country; and she uttered as many reasons to poor Harriet against the passage of the Alps, as were urged to the son of Amilcar by his Carthaginian friends, when he first talked of traversing those tremendous mountains. The debate was very warm on both sides, and supported through the greatest part of the night. The spirited Harriet was horribly fatigued by the discourse, but utterly unconvinced by the forcible arguments of her opponent. She even believed that the journey would prove a remedy for her asthmatic complaints; her desire of a matrimonial establishment was full as efficacious as the vinegar of Hannibal, and the Alps melted before it. At the dawn of day she had positively determined to follow the fortunes of the amiable Savoyard. The peace of mind, which this decision produced, afforded her a short slumber; but on waking, she was very far from being refreshed, and found that her unhappy frame had suffered so much from the agitation of her spirit, and the want of her usual sleep, that she was unable to appear at breakfast. This, however, was a circumstance too common to alarm the family; for though her cheerfulness never forsook her, yet her little portion of strength was frequently exhausted, and her breath often seemed on the very point of departing from her diminutive body. Towards noon, her sister entered her chamber, to make a kind enquiry concerning her health. It was a warm day in spring; yet Harriet, who was extremely chilly, had seated herself in a little low chair, by the side of a large fire. Her feet were strangely twisted together; and, leaning forward to rest her elbow on her knee, she supported her head on her right hand. To the affectionate questions of her sister she made no reply; but, starting from her reverie, walked with apparent difficulty across the chamber, and, saying, with a feeble and broken voice, “I can never pass the Alps,” sunk down on the side of her bed,--and with one deep sigh, but without any convulsive struggle, expired. Whether the much-injured and defective organs of her life were completely worn out by time, or whether the conflict of different affections, which had harassed her spirit through the night, really shortened her existence, the all-seeing author of it can alone determine. It is certain, however, that her death, and the peculiar circumstances attending it, produced among her relations the most poignant affliction. As she died without one convulsive motion, her sister could hardly believe her to be dead; and as this good lady had not attended to the levities of her son Edward, she could not comprehend the last words of Harriet, till her faithful servant gave a full and honest account of the nightly conversation which had passed between herself and her departed mistress. As her nephew, Edward, was my intimate friend, and I well knew his regard for this singular little being, I hastened to him the first moment that I heard she was no more. I found him under the strongest impression of recent grief, and in the midst of that self-accusation so natural to a generous spirit upon such an occasion. I endeavoured to comfort him, by observing, that death, which ought, perhaps, never to be considered as an evil, might surely be esteemed a blessing to a person, whose unfortunate infirmities of body must undoubtedly have been a source of incessant suffering. “Alas! my dear friend,” he replied, “both my heart and my understanding refuse to subscribe to the ideas, by which you so kindly try to console me. I allow, indeed, that her frame was unhappy, and her health most delicate; but who had a keener relish of all the genuine pleasures which belong to a lively and a cultivated mind, and still more, of all those higher delights, which are at once the test and the reward of a benevolent heart? It is true, she had her foibles; but what right had I to sport with them?--to me they ought to have been particularly sacred; for she never looked upon mine, but with the most generous indulgence.” “Poor Harriet!” he would frequently exclaim,--“Poor aunt Harriet!” I have basely abridged thy very weak, but not unjoyous existence, by the most unthinking barbarity. I will, however, be tender to thy memory; and I wish that I could warn the world against the dangerous cruelty of jesting with the credulity of every being who may resemble thee.--Hayley.

THE WIDOW.

(FROM A VERY OLD TRANSLATION OF BOCCACCIO’S FALCON.)