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in the pages of this Magazine. Mr Story's volumes abound in suggestive passages of the kind. If Rome be an admirable residence for an artist (and for some of the reasons why it is so, see the 'Roba,' i. p. 66, 67), it ought also to be an excellent one for a writer, were it not that it is found by many unfavourable to mental exertion. This is said to be particularly exemplified in the case of diplomatists, many of whom, after a certain time passed in the Papal capital, are apt to conceive an intense dislike to despatch-writing, and to keep their Governments extremely uninformed concerning the state of the Holy City and the prospects of Pontifical politics. We remember to have been told, when in Rome, the names of more than one foreign minister who had been recalled, it was asserted, for no other reason but that nothing could induce him to write despatches. Rome is certainly one of the places where there is most temptation, at least for one half of the year, to neglect business for pleasure; but there is possibly also something in the climate which disinclines many people to headwork. It is much the fashion to abuse the Roman climate; and this has been done, especially of late, by persons desirous to show that Rome is an undesirable, because a highly insalubrious, capital for united Italy. It is to be feared the grapes are sour, and that the yellow flag now hoisted would be struck at the same time with the French tricolour. Our own experience and observations induce us very much to concur with those passages of Mr Story's book which relate to this question. "Rome has, with strangers, the reputation of being unhealthy; but this opinion I cannot think well founded-to the extent, at least, of the common belief." Many maladies, virulent and dangerous elsewhere, are very light in Rome; and for lung complaints it is well known that people repair thither. The "Roman fever," as it is commonly called (intermittent and perniciosa), is seldom suffered

from by the better classes of Romans; and Mr Story (who speaks with authority after his many years' residence in Rome) believes that, with a little prudence, it may easily be avoided. The peasants of the Campagna are, it is well known, those who chiefly suffer from it, and why? "Their food is poor, their habits careless, their labour exhausting and performed in the sun, and they sleep often on the bare ground or a little straw. And yet, despite the life they lead and their various exposures, they are, for the most part, a very strong and sturdy class." Mr Story gives it as a fact that the French soldiers who besieged Rome in '48, during the summer months, suffered very little from fever, although sleeping out on the Campagna; but they were better clothed and fed, and altogether more careful of themselves, than the native peasants. Generally speaking, the foreigners who visit Rome are less attentive than the Romans to certain common rules for the preservation of health. They eat and drink too much, and of the wrong things. They get hot, and then plunge into cold churches or galleries; whereas an Italian flies from a chill or current of air as from infection. Mr Story gives a few simple rules, by following which he declares you may live twenty years in Rome without a fever. He cautions Englishmen against copious dinners, sherry and brandy, and his own countrymen against the morning-dinner which they call a breakfast; and supplies other useful hints and practical remarks. The subject is one which interests many, and such are referred to the 'Roba,' i. p. 156161, and to the chapter on the Campagna,

in which high authorities and ingenious arguments are brought to prove that in old times it was not insalubrious, and that in our own it need not be so. Population and cultivation are perhaps all that are needed to render tracts healthy that

now

are pestilential, but which assuredly were not so in the time of the ancient Romans, since many

of them, we know, were their favourite sites for patrician villas. Much might be done by an intelligent and active government, and especially by a good sanitary commission. There was one clever gentleman who wrote that Rome was ill fitted to be the capital of Italy on account of its deficiency in buildings suitable for goverment offices! Where good reasons are

not to be found silly ones may be resorted to, but they of course only weaken the cause they are intended to prop. And if it were to be urged that all the worst plagues flesh is heir to, combine to render Rome for the present impossible as capital of Italy, the most we could admit, by way of compromise, and borrowing a well-known answer, would be, non tutti, ma Buona parte."

CAXTONIANA:

A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS. By the Author of The Caxton Family.'

PART XV.

NO. XX. -ON SELF-CONTROL.

"HE who desires to influence others must learn to command himself," is an old aphorism, on which, perhaps, something new may be said. In the ordinary ethics of the nursery, self-control means little more than a check upon temper. A wise restraint, no doubt; but as useful to the dissimulator as to the honest man. I do not necessarily conquer my anger because I do not show that I am angry. Anger vented often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.

A hasty temper is not the only horse that runs away with the charioteer on the Road of Life. Nor is it the most dangerous, for it seldom runs away far. It gives a jerk and a shake; but it does not take the bit between its teeth, and gallop blindly on, mile after mile, in one obstinate direction towards a precipice. A hasty temper is an infirmity disagreeable to others, undignified in ourselves-a fault so well known to every man who has it, that he will at once acknowledge it to be a fault which he ought to correct. He requires, therefore, no moralising essayist to prove to him

his failing, or teach him his duty. But still a hasty temper is a frank offender, and has seldom that injurious effect either on the welfare of others, or on our own natures, mental and moral, which results from the steady purpose of one of those vices which are never seen in a passion.

In social intercourse, if his character be generous and his heart sound, a man does not often lose a true friend from a quick word. And even in the practical business of life, wherein an imperturbable temper is certainly a priceless advantage, a man of honesty and talent may still make his way without it. Nay, he may inspire a greater trust in his probity and candour, from the heat he displays against trickiness and falsehood. Indeed there have been consummate masters in the wisdom of business who had as little command of temper as if Seneca and Epictetus had never proved the command of temper to be the first business of wisdom. Richelieu strode towards his public objects with a footstep unswervingly firm, though his servants found it the easiest thing in the world to

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put him into a passion. Sometimes they did so on purpose, pleased to be scolded unjustly, because sure of some handsome amends. And in treating of self-control, I am contented to take that same Richelieu, the Cardinal, as an illustration of the various and expansive meaning which I give to the phrase. Richelieu did not command his temper in the sphere of his private household he commanded it to perfection in his administration of a kingdom. He was cruel, but from policy, not from rage. Among all the victims of that policy, there was not one whose doom could be ascribed to his personal resentments. The life of no subject, and the success of no scheme, depended on the chance whether the irritable minister was in good or bad humour. If he permitted his temper free vent in his household, it was because there he was only a private individual. There, he could indulge in the luxury of ire without disturbing the mechanism of the state. There, generous as a noble and placable as a priest, he could own himself in the wrong, and beg his servants' forgiveness, without lowering the dignity of the minister, who, when he passed his threshold, could ask no pardon from others, and acknowledge no fault in himself. It was there where his emotions were most held in restraint, there where, before the world's audience, his mind swept by concealed in the folds of its craft, as, in Victor Hugo's great drama, L'Homme Rouge passes across the stage, curtained round in his litter, a veiled symbol of obscure, inexorable, majestic fate,—it was there where the dread human being seemed to have so mastered his thoughts and his feelings, that they served but as pulleys and wheels to the bloodless machine of his will,it was there that self-control was in truth the most feeble. And this apparent paradox brings me at once to the purpose for which my essay is written.

What is SELF? What is that many-sided Unity which is centred

in the single Ego of a man's being? I do not put the question metaphysically. Heaven forbid! The problem it involves provokes the conjectures of all schools, precisely because it has received no solution from any. The reader is welcome to whatever theory he may prefer to select from metaphysical definitions, provided that he will acknowledge in the word Self the representation of an integral individual human being-the organisation of a certain fabric of flesh and blood, biassed, perhaps, originally by the attributes and pecularities of the fabric itself-by hereditary predispositions, by nervous idiosyncrasies, by cerebral developments, by slow or quick action of the pulse, by all in which mind takes a shape from the mould of the body;-but still a Self which, in every sane constitution, can be changed or modified from the original bias, by circumstance, by culture, by reflection, by will, by conscience, through means of the unseen inhabitant of the fabric. Not a man has ever achieved a something good or great, but will own that, before he achieved it, his mind succeeded in conquering or changing some predisposition of body.

True self-control, therefore, is the control of that entire and complex unity, the individual Self. It necessitates an accurate perception of all that is suggested by the original bias, and a power to adapt and to regulate, or to oppose and divert, every course to which that bias inclines the thought and impels the action.

For Self, left to itself, only crystallises atoms homogeneous to its original monad. A nature constitutionally proud and pitiless, intuitively seeks, in all the culture it derives from intellectual labour, to find reasons to continue proud and pitiless-to extract from the lessons of knowledge arguments by which to justify its impulse, and rules by which the impulse can be drilled into method and refined into policy.

Among the marvels of psycho

logy, certainly not the least astounding is that facility with which the conscience, being really sincere in its desire of right, accommodates itself to the impulse which urges it to go wrong. It is thus that fanatics, whether in religion or in politics, hug as the virtue of saints and heroes the barbarity of the bigot, the baseness of the assassin. No one can suppose that Calvin did not deem that the angels smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured by selecting a few for a roast. Torquemada could have no personal interest in roasting a heretic; Torquemada did not eat him when roasted; Torquemada was not a cannibal.

Again: no one can suppose that when the German student, Sand, after long forethought, and with cool determination, murdered a writer whose lucubrations shocked his political opinions, he did not walk to the scaffold with a conscience as calm as that of the mildest young lady who ever slaughtered a wasp from her fear of its sting.

So when Armand Richelieu marched inflexibly to his public ends, the spy on his left side, the executioner on his right, Bayard could not have felt himself more free from stain and reproach. His conscience would have found in his intellect not an accusing monitor but a flattering parasite. It would have whispered in his ear-" Great Man-Hero, nay, rather Demigod * -to destroy is thy duty, because to reconstruct is thy mission. The evils which harass the land- for which Heaven, that gave thee so dauntless a heart and so scheming a brain, has made thee responsible

result from the turbulent ambition of nobles who menace the throne thou art deputed to guard, and the licence of pestilent schisms at war with the Church of which thou art the grace and the bulwark. Pure and indefatigable patriot, undeterred by the faults of the sovereign who hates thee, by the sins of the people who would dip their hands in thy blood, thou toilest on in thy grand work serenely, compelling the elements vainly conflicting against thee into the unity of thine own firm design-unity secular, unity spiritual-one throne safe from rebels, one church free from schisms; in the peace of that unity, the land of thy birth will collect and mature and concentrate its forces, now wasted and waning, till it rise to the rank of the one state of Europe-the brain and the heart of the civilised world! No mythical Hercules thou! Complete thy magnificent labours. Purge the land of the Lion and Hydra-of the throne - shaking Baron- the church-splitting Huguenot!"

Armand Richelieu, by nature not vindictive nor mean, thus motions without remorse to the headsman, listens without shame to the spy, and, when asked on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, replies, conscientiously ignorant of his many offences against the brotherhood between man and man, "I owe no forgiveness to enemies; I never had any except those of the State."

For human governments, the best statesman is he who carries a keen perception of the common interests of humanity into all his projects, howsoever intellectually subtle. But that policy is not for the interests of humanity which cannot be achieved without the spy and the headsman. And those projects cannot serve humanity which sanction persecution as the instrument of truth, and subject the fate of a

An author dedicated a work to Richelieu. In the dedication, referring to the 'Siege of Rochelle,' he complimented the Cardinal with the word Hero. When the dedication was submitted to Richelieu for approval, he scratched out "Hèros," and substituted "Demi-Dieu!"

community to the accident of a constitutional vice is often drilled benevolent despot. into a virtue.

In Richelieu there was no genuine self-control, because he had made his whole self the puppet of certain fixed and tyrannical ideas. Now, in this the humblest and obscurest individual amongst us is too often but a Richelieu in miniature. Every man has in his own temperament peculiar propellers to the movement of his thoughts and the choice of his actions. Every man has his own favourite ideas rising out of his constitutional bias. At the onset of life this bias is clearly revealed to each. No youth ever leaves college but what he is perfectly aware of the leading motiveproperties of his own mind. He knows whether he is disposed by temperament to be timid or rash, proud or meek, covetous of approbation or indifferent to opinion, thrifty or extravagant, stern in his justice or weak in his indulgence. It is while his step is yet on the threshold of life that man can best commence the grand task of selfcontrol; for then he best adjusts that equilibrium of character by which he is saved from the despotism of one ruling passion or the monomania of one cherished train of ideas. Later in life our introvision is sure to be obscured-the intellect has familiarised itself to its own errors, the conscience is deafened to its own first alarms; and the more we cultivate the intellect in its favourite tracks, the more we question the conscience in its own prejudiced creed, so much the more will the intellect find skilful excuses to justify its errors, so much the more will the conscience devise ingenious replies to every doubt we submit to the casuistry of which we have made it the adept. Nor is it our favourite vices alone that lead us into danger-noble natures are as liable to be led astray by their favourite virtues; for it is the proverbial tendency of a virtue to fuse itself insensibly into its neighbouring vice; and, on the other hand, in noble natures, a

But few men can attain that complete subjugation of self to the harmony of moral law, which was the aim of the Stoics. A mind so admirably balanced that each attribute of character has its just weight and no more, is rather a type of ideal perfection, than an example placed before our eyes in the actual commerce of life. I must narrow the scope of my homily, and suggest to the practical a few practical hints for the ready control of their faculties.

It seems to me that a man will best gain command over those intellectual faculties which he knows are his strongest, by cultivating the faculties that somewhat tend to counterbalance them. He in whom imagination is opulent and fervid will regulate and discipline its exercise by forcing himself to occupations or studies that require plain common sense. He who feels that the bias of his judgment or the tendency of his avocations is overmuch towards the positive and anti-poetic forms of life, will best guard against the narrowness of scope and feebleness of grasp which characterise the intellect that seeks common sense only in commonplace, by warming his faculties in the glow of imaginative genius; he should not forget that where heat enters it expands. And, indeed, the rule I thus lay down, eminent men have discovered for themselves. Men of really great imagination will be found to have generally cultivated some branch of knowledge that requires critical or severe reasoning. Men of really great capacities for practical business will generally be found to indulge in a predilection for works of fancy. The favourite reading of poets or fictionists of high order will seldom be poetry or fiction. Poetry or fiction is to them a study, not a relaxation. Their favourite reading will be generally in works called abstruse or dry-antiquities, metaphysics, subtle problems of criticism, or delicate niceties of

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