which is the portion of Rochester on the farther side of the Medway from the Castle and Cathedral. By-and-by, here is Rochester Bridge: a new one, which has taken the place of that over which Mr. Pickwick looked on a sunshiny morning many years ago. Alongside it is a great and ugly viaduct, by which the railway, coming from London, makes for Canterbury and Dover. Cross the Bridge: and to right and left everything you see makes you feel that you are indeed in Cloisterham.

It is reward for the privation of very much, that the capacity of vivid wonder at finding one's self in a strange place abides even in one who has grown old.

Standing in the corner of the dining-room at Gadshill in which Charles Dickens died, one recalled the touching lines written by his daughter :

'As during his life Charles Dickens's fondness for air, light, and gay colours amounted almost to a passion, so when he lay dead in the home he had so dearly loved, these things were not forgotten.

'The pretty room opening into the conservatory (from which he had never been removed since his seizure) was kept bright with the most beautiful of all kinds of flowers, and flooded with the summer sun.'

And going back just a page, one reads:

'Charles Dickens remained in the same unconscious state until the evening of this day, when, at ten minutes past six, the watchers saw a shudder pass over him, heard him give a deep sigh, saw one tear roll down his cheek, and he was gone from them. And as they saw the dark shadow steal across his calm, beautiful face, not one among them-could they have been given such a power-would have recalled his sweet spirit back to earth.'

One is deeply touched by these last words. They were written, one knows, not without a tear: and the eyes moisten in reading them. But I am not sure at all what is meant: possibly the writer could not exactly tell. Is this just the pathetic Better as It Is: said times without number with no reason at all, because it would break the heart if one did not make believe that it is so? Is it that one is so sure that the friend who has gone, has gone to things infinitely better (but not to be spoken of unless by those professionally accredited), that one would not wish him back to worldly troubles? Or is it that things have come to such a pass here, that one is best away from them? I do not suggest at all the anywhere, anywhere, out of the world: there must be shame as well as sorrow before it comes to that. And though the last days were days of special love and honour, one recalls how a good man, telling that he had stood over the open grave of a great evangelist of later days, said, I did not feel sorrowful: for he was weary, weary in the work.' And though the daughter of the lovable genius gone thus said of her father that he was Better Away, this was not the unlamented departure of the old Jewish story. I find not many know that the Bible

contains the words He departed without being desired: died, that is, and nobody missed him: nobody cared. You don't like exactly to say that you are glad that any one is dead: the utmost length permitted is that you are not sorry. And a whole nation did at least once say just that of an unbeloved King. But here, the paradoxical thing is, that speaking of one greatly beloved and bitterly lamented, taken while he was still enjoying life keenly, even to little things like the lamps he had hung up in his conservatory (he is gone twelve years and he would only have been seventy now), a daughter who was a pattern of affection and duty should say she did not want her father back again. I am perfectly aware that we have all said exactly the same thing in like circumstances. One's heart goes entirely with the good daughter in her touching declaration: but the head is perplexed. It is not as when one has felt, in the first bitter grief, that the lost friend was so weary, so broken, life had become so ravelled, so incapable of coming to anything satisfactory now, that it was best to go. Still less as when one has felt that the lost friend had got upon a perilous slope whence the tendency was to unnamed sin and shame and one was thankful he was dead without some awful exposure. Even there, though far less than thinking merely of hollow cheek and wasted eye,' the curious dualism of inconsistent feeling is well known by most of us. 'Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live: Ask me no more.' I suppose the inconsistency has always been, and will be to the last. All the same, I am going to look into it. A commonplace (I suppose) is something which a very great number of human beings have felt, and which a considerable number have said. So, at this stage in the world's history, anything that is true is likely to be a commonplace: human experience has been pretty well exhausted. And thinking of the Better Away, let us begin with simple things, which we can all understand. One sits down in an easy chair on a winter night beside the warm and cheerful fire, in the room where one has gone through much work. Your books are all around you, gleaming pleasantly in firelight and lamplight. There is not one of them but cost you some thought whether you could afford it before you bought it: though I do not think you ever repented buying a book. And then one thinks, specially when the years behind have grown many, one must go away from all these things go away and never come back to them. When one is carried out from one's door, it is perfectly certain, whatever may happen elsewhere, that you never will enter it any more. This cannot be said too strongly, or too often: in any case, Shakspere thought so. 'Thou 'It come no more. Never, never, never, never, never! One is not enthusiastically attached to this life: but one has got very much accustomed to it. All the familiar things must be left. You may remember the awful description Mrs. Oliphant gives of an æsthetic idler dying: 'I have not the least idea what I am going to: I am not sure of the words, but that was the idea. What many people have a clearer thought of is, as Fielding put it, that

'this little chamber will be exchanged for a worse-furnished box:' and the rain will fall heavy and the wind howl strangely on a dark winter night over one's grave. Very great and good folk have thought of just that, and in any case not said they were looking farther on; yet declared they were attracted by the prospect. It may suffice to recall one of the grandest passages in all poetry, which relates the wish of a certain Job: and which some people would admire more and read oftener if it did not occur in the particular Volume which contains it. Yet one remembers, too, how Charles Lamb, though he never had much of this life, yet clung to the little he had, and put away the thought of leaving it.

There are cases in which, for the purposes of art, there is but the one way. Little Nell had to die. So had little Paul Dombey. They were too good for this world. It was impossible even to admit the idea of letting them down from that elevation to a prosaic living happily ever after. And you may find strong proof how deep-set in human nature is the conviction of the more ethereal altitude of a celibate life, in the fact that to have made Nell grow strong, and get married, and have twelve children, would have cast a certain absurdity over the angelic and supernal grace of her childish days. It may here be said, too, that as one grows old, the making all stories which end happily end in marriage, seems to found on as childish an illusion as the belief in pixies and fairy-rings. Cannot some bold romancer strike out some other ending which shall satisfy the heart, yet deliver us from as unreal a conventionality as the two or three notes with which operatic songs almost always end, or the three awful bangs which conclude an overture?

One shrinks, it was said, with an instinctive shrinking, from the first-meeting idea of exchanging the warmth and light of the pleasant fireside for a locality which must needs be very cold and dark: never fully realising that what of us will be in that locality will not care at all about cold and darkness. But one has sometimes thought that the human shrinking from the suggestion that one is Better Away is yet more emphatic, looking forward to the day when one shall have been gone ten years and is practically forgot. I fear we are all so selfish that it would be a pang to go back after a little while, and find how very seldom we are missed. Ah, you who went from bitter tears and hearts broken at parting, stay where you are (wherever it be) and remember these things: Do not go back! Apparently it is not possible you should: and the arrangement is wise and considerate. I have passed through the loveliest scenery on a magnificent summer evening with one I know. The glowing green, the sapphire sky, the flood of sunshine, how we both enjoyed them: and how beautiful, with a heavenly beauty, all the world seemed! But I thought of one, gone for years from his home: never forgotten: yet somehow seeming but a poor faded shadow in that hour of miraculous gleam and glow and I was very sorry for her. No doubt, if one could have seen her in that moment, it would have appeared that she was not

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sorry for herself. And in a keener degree, when one has beheld a handsome young widow singing with vehemence a sentimental song, not a trace of the weeds of bereavement left about her, and surrounded by the flatteries and assiduities of men not unaware of the fortune attached to her attractive personality, one has felt a profound sympathy for the poor husband who is so completely blotted out, and been aware that one would not by any means like to be in his place. So is our feeling ruled by illusions.

Better Away, is the thought of this page. Is it better for one's self? or better for other people? There are homely ways of putting this latter alternative. There comes back to me, just in this moment, with a startling distinctness, a sentence said in my hearing when I was a little boy: of course it was not said to me. I behold a very shrewd old Scotch face. I hear a loud voice that speaks with a strong Scotch accent. The subject of conversation is a family of pretty girls, now in wealthy circumstances and well-educated, struggling for greater social consideration in a certain community, but not struggling with entire success. If they could get old John under the moulds it would be better for them:' such were the words. The poor old father, through whose industry the wealth and the culture came, must be got rid of. I daresay he often thought as much himself, with a sorrowful heart: and in any case, he speedily departed. If you or I, my reader, had been old John, the judgment, though sound, would have been painful to hear. It is a sad thing to be aware that one is an encumbrance, a hindrance, to those for whom you have done everything and practised stern self-denial. We should probably think, might not a corner be spared in the handsome mansion we paid for, if not a chair among the fashionable folk for whom we are no fit company? To be bluntly told one is not wanted, however true it may be, is a trial. But cases may be supposed in which it would be a heart-break.

We have been thinking of instances in which it is the parent that must be got rid of. We have known instances in which it was the child. And in a sorrowful world, there is not a sadder possibility. Just two days since, walking with a friend by a very gloomy summer sea, on a very dark June evening, I listened to an awful story of the incorrigible badness of a young man who was dragging an honoured name through the mire. I said, 'But what will they do with him?' The answer was, 'Oh, he'll have to be Shipped.' Though the phrase was new, the imagery was expressive, and one was aware what was meant. Ah, get the black sheep out of sight, somewhere beyond the great sea! My friend went on to say, speaking of a certain great city, When you go there, you will hear people saying, Mr. Smith has two sons Shipped, and the like, just as a matter of course.' Too much pocket-money, and young lads getting their own way, result in this. And the poor father and mother sometimes, though not by any 'means always, go about broken-hearted to their life's end. Some take it quite easily, out of sight being with them out of mind. Or, as the

schoolmen said, De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio. Some folk merely think of getting the trouble away from here. They are able to forget that the Shipped one lives on still, though far away. Out of sight, with them, is tantamount to having ceased to be. I suppose we have all some vague feeling that when a human being goes out of your door, or turns the corner of the street and passes out of sight, he disappears wholly in any case that there is a marked break in his life. Ah, to the man that lives, life is continuous: whatever it may be to those that look at him and think of him your brother is your brother still, though starving on the streets of Frisco. And to say it serves him exactly right, is not much comfort. All that can be said is, that the Shipped black sheep goes to destruction where it does not so conspicuously disgrace those at home. Likewise, that when there is a dinner-party at home, it is not quite so real that he is cold and hungry in Colorado as if he were so in the street before your windows, and in hearing of your hospitalities. All the same, I used to wonder how some fathers and sisters manage to live at all, knowing the facts I know. I wonder yet. Has it come to this, that the best you can desire is quite to forget the bright little boy whose childish ways bring the tears to your eyes when you remember them who is dead, dead utterly, in the sodden hulking scamp, liar and cheat, whom you dare not hope to see again in this world or in any other? It is a bitter world to many: but one might find heart to bear nearly anything but that.

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Let such thoughts be put away. Let us go rather to the less painful prospect of getting away one's self. There are moods in which that prospect is continually before us: and it is best to look straight at it. One knows some little of the weariness of the old pauper woman who, being set before the guardians of the poor, and asked if she was indeed a hundred years old, burst out, God knows whether I am or not, gentlemen, but I feel a thousand!' Everybody who has passed middle age and had to work hard sometimes feels even more. John Knox was a very strong man, and anything but fanciful or sentimental. Neither did he live to be very old. Yet on a certain summer day he departed from this place where I write to another where he hoped quietly to die, and in fact did so; desiring that I may end my battel: for as the world is wearie of me, so am I of it.' The time comes, at which, in all good faith and in perfect calmness, you feel you have had enough of it. You are satiated. I suppose you may be aware that you have had enough of life, just as you are aware you have had enough of dinner. It is not a matter of reasoning. Simply you feel it so.

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My friend, tell me the truth. The daughter of Charles Dickens spoke of the one who had gone: and though the loss to her was unspeakable, and he too was still brightly enjoying this life, she said he was Better Away. A good many people I have known, looking from the other point of view, thinking not of another but of themselves, have thought they would be even so. The vulgar notion, I suppose, even