James E Hartley

The Praise of Folly

“If someone should attempt to take off the masks and costumes of the actors in a play and show to the audience their real appearances, would he not ruin the whole play?… For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage.” (The Praise of Folly, Dolan translation)

Published in 1511, The Praise of Folly is the best known book written by Erasmus, a priest from Rotterdam. Saying it is his most famous book is no small praise; he was one of the best-selling authors of his day.

No stranger to controversy, he could not escape the ferment caused by the Protestant Reformation. In a letter, Erasmus expressed his concerns: “I was sorry that Luther’s books were published, and when some or other of his writings first came into view, I made every effort to prevent their publication, chiefly because I feared a disturbance might result from them.” His fears were well-founded.

A well-known Catholic priest who engaged in the Reformation battles on the side of Rome, Erasmus sure seems like the sort of person whose books would be loved at the Vatican. Yet, The Praise of Folly was put on the index of forbidden books by the Church in 1559. Why?

Read the rest at the Online Library of Liberty’s Reading Room

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Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

If you are looking for a gift for a baseball fan in your life, look no further.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, by John Updike.

It was originally an essay in The New Yorker, but the Library of America has republished it in a beautiful little volume, complete with the footnotes Updike later added and an essay he later wrote.

The topic? Updike went to the last game Ted Williams ever played. What emerged was this beautiful paean to everything that is beautiful about baseball. I cannot even hope to explain how achingly gorgeous this essay is. You can read the essay online, but then you will be truly missing out on the full aesthetic experience of reading it in this volume. I’m not kidding—if you know someone who enjoys baseball, they will love this book. If you love baseball, just buy it now.

Indeed, if you don’t like baseball, you should still enjoy this book. This is not a prediction; it is an imperative. You should enjoy this book. The tale told here is larger than a report on a game. It is an evocation of an era, a city, and a country, and the people who built that land. This is the story of the time when Giants strode the earth. It is a fairy tale about a knight wearing a baseball uniform. A knight who hit .406 in 1941.

A note on the title: It is, when you first encounter it, a rather odd affair. For example, where is the verb in Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu? “Fans,” “Bid,” and “Kid” are all both verbs and nouns. Parsing it, “Bid” is the verb, “Adieu” is what is being bid. “Kid,” as we learn in the essay, was a common nickname for Ted Williams. So far, so good.

But what are “Hub Fans”? People who really like Hub, apparently. Perhaps you know to what “Hub” refers. I had no idea. The essay never says. If you Google “hub fans,” you get references to this essay. Not helpful. Wikipedia has a list of all the ways “Hub” can be used; none of them are relevant to this essay.

At last, I found it. “The Hub” is an old nickname for Boston. As a typical New Englander, writing in The New Yorker, Updike and the editor just assumed the whole world knows about nicknames for East Coast cities.

Why is Boston “The Hub”? Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.” Of course. Bostonians really do believe they are the hub of the universe.

Here we have the tale of those Boston fans bidding the Kid Adieu. By the time the game starts in the essay, Updike has crafted an epic tale of those who belonged at the Round Table. The crowd at the game is deftly described.

Williams gets up to bat. And walks. Eventually, he rounds the bases, slides into home, narrowly beating the throw.

“Boy, he was really loafing, wasn’t he?” one of the collegiate voices behind me said.
“It’s cold,” the other explained. “He doesn’t play well when it’s cold. He likes heat. He’s a hedonist.”

That college boy, by the way, was presumably one of the “Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a sufficient quantity of insouciance is saturated with enough insecurity.” A “hedonist” indeed.

After that walk, the next two times Williams came to bat, he flied out.

Then Williams comes to the plate in the 8th inning. Williams was retiring at the end of the season. He would never bat again in the city in which he had built his legend. This was it. The Big Good-Bye. Never again would the crowd be able to cheer their hero. Updike: “I had never before heard pure applause in a ballpark. No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand.”

Williams hit a home run.

You should buy this book.

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Reading as a Spiritual Practice

“Until very recent years, civilized folk took it for granted that literature exists to form the normative consciousness: that is, to teach human beings their true nature, their dignity, and their rightful place in the scheme of things. Such has been the end of poetry—in the larger sense of that word—ever since Job and Homer.”

Since Russell Kirk wrote these words in 1977, matters have drifted further from this ideal.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is disturbed by the state of reading, particularly among Christians. Why? Because, she argues in Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice, God is disturbed by the lack of attention to books.

The problem is not illiteracy; the people for whom Wilson writes obviously know how to read. The problem is that people do not know how to read well. “Why and how we read matters as much as what we read. If we are poor readers, an encounter with the Word will not do much to make us his people.” It is more than just poor reading of the Bible, though. Christians don’t know how to read books outside the Bible; they lack appreciation for the Great Literature she so clearly loves.

Read the Rest at The University Bookman

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Should We Bow to The Golden Bough?

“The influence of Frazer on our generation cannot yet be accurately estimated, but it is comparable to that of Renan, and perhaps more enduring than that of Sigmund Freud.”

That was T.S. Eliot talking about James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

I think it is safe to say that Eliot was wrong; Freud was more enduring. (On the other hand, as for Renan…ever heard of him?)

But that doesn’t mean that The Golden Bough was an insignificant achievement. Eliot mentions it as one of the influences that gave birth to “The Waste Land,” so that alone makes the book immortal. Yeats and other literary types were also deeply influenced. But, curiously for a book that was so influential among the artists of the day, anthropologists never took the book seriously.

The curiosity increases when you look at the publication history of The Golden Bough. The first edition was two volumes published in 1890. The second edition added a third volume. The third edition was twelve (twelve!!) volumes published between 1911 and 1915. Since the twelve-volume edition was far too long for the intended audience, the author and his wife hacked it down to a single abridged edition, which, not coincidentally, took out all the controversial parts. There is now a newer abridged version of the twelve-volume work put out by Oxford, which has all the parts the editor thinks anyone reading it today would want to read.

After reading it, I perfectly understood the very different reactions to the book. The book is interesting from a literary perspective and not very good from a social science perspective. It is a much faster read than I was expecting. Quick, easy theory, followed by a ton of examples and pseudo-examples. There are parts that are pure poetry. I see why Eliot, Yeats, et al were enraptured by the book. It is a portrait of this amazingly fantastical world where all these rituals are pointing to some mystical greater truth about the human mind. It’s like a giant Just So story. I loved Kipling’s Just So Stories when I was young (still do). The Golden Bough is an extended version of “How the Rhinoceros got its Skin.”

In one way, this book reminds me of reading Jules Verne. I remember reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and thinking it was massively dull. The problem—a huge part of the book is describing what they saw in a submarine under the ocean. I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau movies when I was in school; I had seen a ton of videos of what it looked like under the sea. So why did I want to read Verne’s speculations about what it looked like? But, at the time Verne’s book was published, if I imagine someone who had no idea what it looked like under the sea, then his book would be exciting. Similarly, if I imagine a time when nobody really had any idea about tribal practices, then Frazer’s descriptions would be way more interesting.

The book falls into the category of a theory that explains every tribal practice in every society throughout all of history. As a work of anthropology, it is such an obvious mess that it is no wonder that nobody would take the book seriously at that level. So, why is it so long? I can just imagine how people would roll their eyes every time he was in a room and started to explain his theory. And so he kept adding to it, thinking, “With just four dozen more examples, they will all believe!” I really do wonder if Frazer ever heard of a cultural custom and thought, “I don’t need to include that one in my book.”

The thing that I would love to ask him is why all these cultures all over the world have exactly the same historical path. So much of his argument hinges on the idea that some tribe in India and some tribe in Africa and some tribe in northern Germany are all fundamentally doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. Why should this be? Why would every culture develop in exactly the same way? At one point, he explains how he knows an aspect of his theory is true: “That theory, in the absence of direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar customs practiced elsewhere.” There is a nice circularity there. “We don’t have any way of figuring out why Tribe A has a certain practice, but we can understand why Tribe A has this practice by comparing it to a very different practice in Tribe B because Frazer knows that all tribal practices are equivalent, and then the fact that Tribes A and B are the same proves that all tribal practices are equivalent.”

For example, the idea of magic came first in human history, then died out as people realized it didn’t work. After a while, people invented religion and then they kept believing in religion until Frazer can come along and show them that religion is fake. It’s a very cute theory; if this was a work of fantasy about some other planet, I would thoroughly enjoy the story. But I have a hard time taking it seriously as an accurate historical discussion. Beliefs in religion and magic seem to coincide all over the place, and he has to waffle a lot in his chronological history by later arguing that it is just smart people who have figured it all out (“a mind of more than common acuteness”—I love that phrase), while stupid people still are fooled (“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas”—this is the kind of arrogance that is just a pleasure to read). I am also amused by how he simply asserts every cultural practice is an example of his theory—it reminds me a lot of Freud, who is also fun to read for exactly the same reason.

Returning to the question above: why are there enough similarities in all these traditions that Frazer can torture them all into his grand narrative? I get the idea that all these traditions came from a unitary earlier source, but that means that they all had to start back when there was just one tribe. That seems improbable. Even so, why would all these traditions evolve in such a similar fashion? This isn’t a problem if they are all just separately originating traditions that are not all identical to one another. I guess the question is: are there bonfires all over the place simply because bonfires are cool or because there is some similar mythical idea about bonfires.

But, a great many of the traditions are truly fun to read. Take the Corn traditions. At reaping time, there was a tradition of passing around an old corn doll to whomever hasn’t finished reaping yet — the goal was to not finish last so you don’t get stuck with the Old Wife corn doll. But then everyone wants to keep their Maiden corn dolls, because the Maiden corn dolls are in the “buxom form of her daughter.” Primitive Barbie dolls! I also love that they make fun of the person who was the slowest at harvesting. All this sounds fun, but Frazer thinks it is all a deep and disturbing example of social ostracism. What I really wonder, though, is whether the ridicule was serious social shame or just playful. You can’t tell from The Golden Bough.

There are also innumerable great lines like this: “The rule that the king must be put to death either on the appearance of any symptom of bodily decay or at the end of a fixed period is certainly one which, sooner or later, the kings would seek to abolish or modify.” Sooner or later? Ya think?

But my absolute favorite story: the marriage ceremony for trees! I need to try to convince The Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator (TLSWOYHN) that some of the trees in our yard would be a lot happier if we had a marriage ceremony for them. Interestingly, this relates to a new theory TLSWOYHN has been reading a lot about that trees are actually carrying on extensive conversations and trade with each other via the fungal underground network. Science meet Frazer!

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Christmas All Year Round

“The angel called for joy, and I ask for it too, on this ground, that the birth of this child was to bring glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men. The birth of Christ has given such glory to God as I know not that he could have ever had by any other means.”

Charles Spurgeon thought Christmas should bring you joy. Not just in December, but all the time.

He wasn’t wrong.

What was the most important day in human history? I think it is safe to say that there are three candidates: Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. But, the latter two could never happen without the first. By any measure, the Incarnation is an extraordinary event. As Augustine says:

That infirmity might be made strong, strength has been made weak. Let us, therefore, admire the more His human birth instead of looking down upon it; and let us in his presence try to realize the abasement that He in all His majesty accepted for our sakes. And then let us be kindled with love, that we may come to His eternity.

Or, if you like your description in a poetic vein, here is Milton:

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
      And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav’n’s high council-table,
      To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
      He laid aside, and here with us to be,
            Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
            And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

But, of course, there are also the more well-known songs, like:

Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the new-born king
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled”
Joyful all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With angelic host proclaim
“Christ is born in Bethlehem”
Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the new-born king”

The Incarnation has generated a wealth of fascinating and exciting and deep-moving expressions. This prompted Leland Ryken to put together a book for you to enjoy: Journey to Bethlehem: A Treasury of Classic Christmas Devotionals. All of the above passages are in this book

You will be forgiven for thinking he edited this book so that you would have something to read in December. Ryken doesn’t mind you reading it then (of course), but “I hope that the readers of this anthology will reread it many times and do so year-round.”

As Ryken explains in a strikingly sharp tone at the outset of the Editor’s Introduction:

This book is an anthology of classic Christmas devotionals. As I did the research for this book, it quickly became obvious that the Christian world needs an alternative to the lightweight Christmas books that flood the market. The classic texts that I’ve brought together in this volume have stood the test of time and for discernible reasons.

Now far be it from me to disparage all those lightweight Christmas books; I have a soft spot for the sappy reminders of the most important day in the history of the world. But, Ryken is correct that there is a virtue in the weightier reflections as well, that if your entire consumption of Christmas ephemera is the cheesy and garish trappings of the Season, then you really should also spend a bit of time with Athanasius and Calvin and Charles Wesley and T.S. Eliot.

That being said, the book has an odd structure. There are 30 selections, divided into three sections: Songs, Prose, and Poems. Billed as a “Treasury of Classic Christmas Devotionals,” there are indeed 30 classic bits. But, following each song, poem, or excerpt from a prose work, Ryken provides a discussion of the passage, which is longer than the excerpt being discussed. As a result, if you pick up the book to read the classics, you get a whole lot of Ryken tossed in.

The book thus succeeds or not depending on how much you like the Ryken commentary. That’s a mixed bag, and I think deliberately so. Ryken has pitched his commentary for a very wide audience, so I cannot imagine a reader who will find it all equally interesting. If you are not familiar at all with Athanasius or find reading Milton to be rough going, Ryken has commentary for you. If you are familiar with such things, much of the commentary will seem obvious, but then Ryken suddenly tosses in an interesting observation, and you are glad you read it.

The observation that surprised me the most:

There is no scarcity of Christmas poems, nor anthologies of them. But there is a scarcity of Christmas poems of sufficient quality and depth to make a significant impact on us. The majority of Christmas poems belong to the “bits and pieces” variety—brief and fleeting observations about a tiny aspect of the nativity or incarnation. The need for the entries in this anthology to yield a five-hundred-word analysis served as a sieve in which the inferior candidates fell through and the really good Christmas poems—the classic ones—remained.

Surely, I thought, Ryken is wrong about this. Obviously, there is a wealth of great poetry about Christmas. Then…I had a hard time thinking of a wealth of examples by poets who aren’t in this volume. There is lots of great Christmas poetry set to music; but poems which you read and don’t sing? Eliot, Milton, Donne, Chesterton, Rossetti are obvious. Then add in Ben Jonson, Richard Wilbur (in a wonderful poem I had never seen before), Edward Markham, and the rather prolific Anonymous. (The Magnificat is the 10th poem in the book, but honestly that feels like cheating. The rest of Luke and Matthew don’t get an entry in the prose section.) So, Dear Reader, can you think of another great Christmas poem? In casting about, I’ve discovered less than a dozen other authors which could be easily added to this list; I am genuinely surprised that it is so few.

The important lesson from this book: you don’t think about Christmas often enough. None of us do. If Ryken is right, and I think he is, spending more time thinking about Christmas will bring us great joy. It is, after all, an event that can cause one to burst out in song, “Joy to the World! The Lord is come!”

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[The Mandatory Note: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Washington that all the world should declare when a publisher sends a reviewer a book to be reviewed, the reviewer is obligated to note that fact. And so this reviewer is adding this Note to fulfill Said Obligation.]

Live Like Charles Primrose

One of my (many) fascinations is books which were once upon a time extremely popular but are rarely mentioned, let alone read, in the modern age.

The puzzle is in the pair of questions:
1. Why was the book so popular?
2. Why has nobody heard of it today?

Consider, for example, a novel from 1766 which (according to the ever helpful Wikipedia) is mentioned in all of the following works:
Alcott, Little Women
Austen, Emma
Bronte, The Professor
Bronte, Villette
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens, David Copperfield
Eliot, Middlemarch
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Schopenhauer, “The Art of Being Right”
Shelley, Frankenstein
Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard

That is a rather impressive list of books and authors, all of whom mention this novel, presumably assuming the reader will recognize the tale.

The novel is The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith. Its publication history is odd. Samuel Johnson (yes, that Samuel Johnson) helped Goldsmith avoid being arrested for the failure to pay rent by discovering the manuscript in the author’s room and selling it to a publisher on Goldsmith’s behalf.

The novel itself is the story of Charles Primrose, the titular vicar, and his family. The plot is easily related. Primrose begins the novel in a great position with a happy family and wonderful prospects. Then chapter by chapter his life gets worse and worse. It’s all just one depressing occurrence after another. Before long, you start a chapter thinking “What fresh horror is about to happen?” And then the horror comes. Primrose is Job, watching his world crash around him.

Until the end of the novel, which can only be described as Dickensian. It has a happy ending (just like the story of Job), but the circumstances bringing about the happy ending are so insanely improbable and the happiness is so over-the-top, it really does feel like Dickens at his best when he marginally makes everything better for our oppressed hero.

So, you don’t read the story for its plot. You read it because of the way Primrose deals with his misfortune. The world is crashing around him, but Primrose jus refuse to lose heart. You can’t help but smile about this guy who just refuses to acknowledge how terrible his life has been. You root for him, even knowing that the next chapter will bring more misfortune. He is just so cluelessly living in his own world.

Ah, but that world he lives in has something to teach us. We know about the real world full of misfortune and misery. But what is it like to live in Primrose’s world? What does Primrose want to tell us?

There is a chapter near the end, shortly before things suddenly turn around for the better, when Primrose speaks to those around him. I was going to just put in the highlights of his talk, but it isn’t that long, and since you, Dear Reader, will probably not pick up the book anyway, here is the entirety of the punchline:

My friends, my children, and fellow sufferers, when I reflect on the distribution of good and evil here below, I find that much has been given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer. Though we should examine the whole world, we shall not find one man so happy as to have nothing left to wish for; but we daily see thousands who by suicide shew us they have nothing left to hope. In this life then it appears that we cannot be entirely blest; but yet we may be completely miserable!

Why man should thus feel pain, why our wretchedness should be requisite in the formation of universal felicity, why, when all other systems are made perfect by the perfection of their subordinate parts, the great system should require for its perfection, parts that are not only subordinate to others, but imperfect in themselves? These are questions that never can be explained, and might be useless if known. On this subject providence has thought fit to elude our curiosity, satisfied with granting us motives to consolation.

In this situation, man has called in the friendly assistance of philosophy, and heaven seeing the incapacity of that to console him, has given him the aid of religion. The consolations of philosophy are very amusing, but often fallacious. It tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; and on the other hand, that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted. Thus philosophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain. Man is here, it tells us, fitting up his mind, and preparing it for another abode. When the good man leaves the body and is all a glorious mind, he will find he has been making himself a heaven of happiness here, while the wretch that has been maimed and contaminated by his vices, shrinks from his body with terror, and finds that he has anticipated the vengeance of heaven. To religion then we must hold in every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if already we are happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make that happiness unending, and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain.

But though religion is very kind to all men, it has promised peculiar rewards to the unhappy; the sick, the naked, the houseless, the heavy-laden, and the prisoner, have ever most frequent promises in our sacred law. The author of our religion every where professes himself the wretch’s friend, and unlike the false ones of this world, bestows all his caresses upon the forlorn. The unthinking have censured this as partiality, as a preference without merit to deserve it. But they never reflect that it is not in the power even of heaven itself to make the offer of unceasing felicity as great a gift to the happy as to the miserable. To the first eternity is but a single blessing, since at most it but encreases what they already possess. To the latter it is a double advantage; for it diminishes their pain here, and rewards them with heavenly bliss hereafter.

But providence is in another respect kinder to the poor than the rich; for as it thus makes the life after death more desirable, so it smooths the passage there. The wretched have had a long familiarity with every face of terror. The man of sorrow lays himself quietly down, without possessions to regret, and but few ties to stop his departure: he feels only nature’s pang in the final separation, and this is no way greater than he has often fainted under before; for after a certain degree of pain, every new breach that death opens in the constitution, nature kindly covers with insensibility.

Thus providence has given the wretched two advantages over the happy, in this life, greater felicity in dying, and in heaven all that superiority of pleasure which arises from contrasted enjoyment. And this superiority, my friends, is no small advantage, and seems to be one of the pleasures of the poor man in the parable; for though he was already in heaven, and felt all the raptures it could give, yet it was mentioned as an addition to his happiness, that he had once been wretched and now was comforted, that he had known what it was to be miserable, and now felt what it was to be happy.

Thus, my friends, you see religion does what philosophy could never do: it shews the equal dealings of heaven to the happy and the unhappy, and levels all human enjoyments to nearly the same standard. It gives to both rich and poor the same happiness hereafter, and equal hopes to aspire after it; but if the rich have the advantage of enjoying pleasure here, the poor have the endless satisfaction of knowing what it was once to be miserable, when crowned with endless felicity hereafter; and even though this should be called a small advantage, yet being an eternal one, it must make up by duration what the temporal happiness of the great may have exceeded by intenseness.

These are therefore the consolations which the wretched have peculiar to themselves, and in which they are above the rest of mankind; in other respects they are below them. They who would know the miseries of the poor must see life and endure it. To declaim on the temporal advantages they enjoy, is only repeating what none either believe or practise. The men who have the necessaries of living are not poor, and they who want them must be miserable. Yes, my friends, we must be miserable. No vain efforts of a refined imagination can sooth the wants of nature, can give elastic sweetness to the dank vapour of a dungeon, or ease to the throbbings of a broken heart. Let the philosopher from his couch of softness tell us that we can resist all these. Alas! the effort by which we resist them is still the greatest pain! Death is slight, and any man may sustain it; but torments are dreadful, and these no man can endure.

To us then, my friends, the promises of happiness in heaven should be peculiarly dear; for if our reward be in this life alone, we are then indeed of all men the most miserable. When I look round these gloomy walls, made to terrify, as well as to confine us; this light that only serves to shew the horrors of the place, those shackles that tyranny has imposed, or crime made necessary; when I survey these emaciated looks, and hear those groans, O my friends, what a glorious exchange would heaven be for these. To fly through regions unconfined as air, to bask in the sunshine of eternal bliss, to carrol over endless hymns of praise, to have no master to threaten or insult us, but the form of goodness himself for ever in our eyes, when I think of these things, death becomes the messenger of very glad tidings; when I think of these things, his sharpest arrow becomes the staff of my support; when I think of these things, what is there in life worth having; when I think of these things, what is there that should not be spurned away: kings in their palaces should groan for such advantages; but we, humbled as we are, should yearn for them.

And shall these things be ours? Ours they will certainly be if we but try for them; and what is a comfort, we are shut out from many temptations that would retard our pursuit. Only let us try for them, and they will certainly be ours, and what is still a comfort, shortly too; for if we look back on past life, it appears but a very short span, and whatever we may think of the rest of life, it will yet be found of less duration; as we grow older, the days seem to grow shorter, and our intimacy with time, ever lessens the perception of his stay. Then let us take comfort now, for we shall soon be at our journey’s end; we shall soon lay down the heavy burthen laid by heaven upon us, and though death, the only friend of the wretched, for a little while mocks the weary traveller with the view, and like his horizon, still flies before him; yet the time will certainly and shortly come, when we shall cease from our toil; when the luxurious great ones of the world shall no more tread us to the earth; when we shall think with pleasure on our sufferings below; when we shall be surrounded with all our friends, or such as deserved our friendship; when our bliss shall be unutterable, and still, to crown all, unending.

Not a bad message, that. When misfortune hits, live like Charles Primrose!

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