The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-07-12 00:00:00

CHAPTER V

It is a sad and yet an instructive office to contemplate
such objects of fallen humanity as my poor friend Melton,
in their mental struggles ; and yet how seldom are we per-
mitted to do more than gaze upon the outside wreck—how
little do we understand of the jarring chords, the tuneless
and broken wires, which fill the hollowness of that shell
which, to the ordinary observer, is man in his perfectness !
There stands the once noble form, shattered, yet still the
best work of the God who made him. The ample forehead
still displays the power of a mind formed to comprehend all
nature ; the eyes still gleam with intellectual fire ; the lip
still retains its proud curve ; the very tread is still that of a
being destined from the beginning to walk with angels " the
star-paved courts of heaven." And yet all within is weak-
ness—all is discord—all is wretchedness. The spirit which
inhabits the majestic or graceful external mocks itself—
spurns at its own grovelling sympathy with mere earthly
passions—laughs in bitterness at its own conscious and
crawling prostration. In such a state of fallen power, the
spirit of poor Melton was laid bare before me in bursts of
passionate reminiscences. The path to such a state he per-
mitted me, as I sate daily by his bedside, to contemplate
step by step. I was enabled to trace, with almost microsco-
pic distinctness, the wearing of his once noble mind as he
sunk from stage to stage of feeling—from the condition of
one hoping and trusting in a happy future, to that of a being
living only the dull and passionless life of one without hope
or fear or love to animate him in his contact with the world,
until he became a mere living automaton, a thing of mere
animal wants, a creature sentient yet scarcely reflective,
with less of heaven in its composition than of the mere
earthy nature of the worm whose food is human corruption
and decay.

To such degradation the spirit of man does occasionally
sink, and the most sentient spirit the most readily. To such
degradation the spirit of Henry Melton—revelling in the con-
sciousness of its eclipse, clutching the evidences, hugging
the bitter reality of its sad change, gloating upon its isolation
from sympathy, rejoicing in its absolute abandonment to
shame—had at one time fallen ; and oh, how painful must
have been the task, to one who had known and loved him in
his better days, to contemplate the obscuration of a soul
once so bright, so full of radiant hope, so replete with con-

fident assurances of happiness and solid wortl

And yet his had been no voluntary fall. He had not em-
braced dissipation and moral abandonment from a love of
the sensual gratifications which they afford. He had not

sunk down into the embrace of vice with the love and the

beauty of virtue (which had once dwelt within him) banished
and forgotten things. No : he had striven, from the first
hour of that shock which reft him of the brighest dream of
his boyhood, to be something nobler and better than the
reckless being he had nevertheless become. When impelled
to yield up the thought of entering that sacred office for
which he had been designed from his very childhood, he bad
still looked forward to a career in which the mental powers,
of which he could not but be conscious, might enable him to
shine. " I will still achieve something worthy of me," was
his constant mental resolve. " They shall not yet be per-
mitted to despise or to mourn for me ; "—and imagination
would picture to him the fond looks of a revered parent, the
exulting smiles of an affectionate sister, and can we doubt
that, in such moments, would shoot upon his dreamy vision
the admiring, perhaps also the still loving, gaze of another
fair being—of her who had cast him from her heart, and was
now the bride of another? Such a dream did come ; it clung
to him through years of alternate struggle and self-abandon-
ment; it never left him until it was reft from him by the
relentless hand of death itself, and the world became to him
a very desert !

On resigning the thoughts of the church as a profession,
Melton had turned his attention to the bar, and entered
himself at one of the inns of court. For nearly four years
he had read, at times, with incontrollable ardour ; but his
was not naturally the mind or the temperament suited for
that profession, and time, though it bad skinned over the
wound inflicted upon his spirit in his earlier years, had failed

in restoring its even poise. "My hours," he remarked of

happy man, the mitten and cheerful bclng

who ha: no

spectral and chiding memories to haunt him—to whose eye
all nature in her loveliness is undimmed by the shadow of
guilt or grief—to whose ear the whispering of the breezes in
the meadow or the hedgerows, the musical flow of the
streamlets, the roll of the rapid river or the dash of the
torrent, come unmingled with the funereal tread and the dirge-
like tones of departed peace and wrecked happiness—may win
from the troubled joys and even the pains of such a career
delight indescribable and measureless. The mourner, even,
may forget in it for a time his grief; and the wretched, for a
time, lose in it the consciousness of his wretchedness. But
to some spirits—and no insignificant number—the brightest
and most entrancing forgetfulness which it affords is but the
delirious madness of the opium eater, which plunges them,
when its passion is exhausted, into a still deeper and darker
hell than that from which its seducing intoxication first
dragged them.

Such a career, however, Henry Melton had now embraced ;
and for success in such a one he had talents which eminently
fitted him. His mind was in itself deeply poetical. He
possessed fancy, imagination, and taste ; and, withal, a
memory stored with the purest gems of antiquity, and en-
riched, as well, with the fruits of an extensive reading of
our best modern writers. But to what particular branch of
literature must his varied powers be applied ? He was, to
one of his habits of viewing the world, little above the
pressure of want, about a hundred pounds being all that was
left him of his once fair, though not glittering, expectations
of fortune. Something, therefore, must be done which
afforded a prospect of immediate remuneration ; and be
turned his attention at once, as a temporary resource, to the
field which was open to him in our periodical literature.
He made his first attempt, and it was unsuccessful,—as we

venture to say would be the first and many an after attempt

of the loftiest talent which our Universities could furnish.
The classical and pure style, the cultivated taste, the chaste
feeling, and refined fancy of the first-class man were not
those qualities best calculated to win favour with the super-
cilious editorship of the fashionable authors, the obscure
philosophers, or the threadbare jesters, who rule absolutely
in the literary cathedra of New Bond-street or Paternoster-
row. They were not, either, the qualities which an ener-
vated public mind looks upon with approbation as the
characteristics of successful magazine literature
Melton could neither furnish a dawdling detail of drawing
room frippery, modelled upon the sayings and doings of the
Housekeeper's Coterie, or the Ladies' Maid's Levee ; a

brilliant passage in the career of some sentimental cut-
throat ; the interesting memoranda of a trip to Margate, or
a pic-nic excursion to Hampton Court; or a record of a
birthday party of some amiable Miss Higgs or Popkins, the
daughter of some eminent tallow chandler in the City, at
which the tender heart of some Mr. Augustus Tornkins was
blown into an undying flame, and the foundation was laid for
a union between the two houses of Higgs and Tomkins—the
glory of Cripplegate Within, and Bow-lane or Hounsditch.
Such productions as these, which furnish the every-day
materials of a certain class of our monthly periodicals, were
as far beyond the reach of Melton as a dozen consecutive
pages, containing sound reasoning, healthy and pure fancy,
or correct English feeling, conveyed in grammatically con-
structed language, would be above the powers of the male or
female triflers from whose literary workshop they are issued

to the world. Another class of periodicals, distinguished by
a higher order of literature, was tried, but with little greater
success. Here my poor friend was doomed to experience
" how hard it is to climb," even into the favour of men,—
who ought to be able to discern and appreciate talent,—when
the ascent is not smoothed and assisted by the breath of
popular approbation and a previously acquired name. He
imagined, and half the world has imagined before him, that
to an honored place in the columns of —, and —, and
—, the only key required, and the surest warrant for ad-
mission, was the power to amuse, to instruct, to gladden
mankind ; that genius never sought for admission within
those portals in vain; that the bright imaginings of the poet,
the wisdom of the statesman, the knowledge of the econo-
mist, the taste and learning of the critic, were ever welcomed
there

HARVEST PROSPECTS

(From the Manchester Chronicle.)

On the authority of the Mark Lane Express, our contem-
porary the Guardian presumed to take Sir James Graham to
task, on Wednes, for anticipating a good harvest. The
Express is a very slippery authority to rely on—quite as
much as the Guardian itself—and when the judgment of such
a man as Sir James Graham, with his means of information,
is called in question, it is necessary to he very sure of the
grounds on which one goes. Now, the Mark Lane Express
has very often a double game to play. In its first page it
gives a circular on the corn trade, carefully adapted to the
views of the corn dealers, and about this period of the year
it is always the cue of those gentlemen to hold a desponding
tone as to the coming harvest—to push prices up and duties
down—and to land their supplies advantageously in the mar-
ket before the truth becomes known and abundance has
swamped their profits. And to serve these purposes is the
first article of the Express devoted.
But, in the body of the same paper is to be found its
agricultural report—a document not emanating from the
corn market, nor adjusted to that meridian ; but coming fresh
from the farms and fields, and compelled to use language
which the eyes and experience of the practical agriculturists
will ratify. Let us, therefore, compare these two reports as
given in the last Express
Corn Dealers' Report

Farmers' Report

We have no hesitation in All the accounts we meet
affirming, that there is scarce- with confirm the general state-
ly a possibility, even with a ments of the great improve-
continuance of the most pro- ment in the crops throughout
pitious weather, of an average the United Kingdom. Some
yield being secured. We do mention the thinness of the
not adopt this opinion without autumn-sown wheat ; we re-
mature consideration, and peat, that in a few low situa-
carefully comparing all the tions, where the flood of win-
agricultural reports we have ter remained long on the
been able to collect, from no surface, and was renewed by
one quarter do we hear of a the unfortunate recurrence of
prospect of a large yield, and wet in March, wheat lost
three out of every four. letters plant, but the crops which we
anticipate a deficiency. observe—AND THEY ARE IN
VAST BREADTH—are strong,
thick on the ground, and of
fully average height.
Look on this picture and on that—both extracts are from
the Mark Lane Express of Monday last—and this double-
faced journal is designated " a much more trustworthy
authority " than Sir James Graham ! The Home Secretary
of State is fully borne out in his view by the personal ob-
servations of the agricultural reporter for the Express, but
the gentleman who sits in the counting-house at Mark Lane
and receives or manufactures letters, is of quite a different
opinion, and on his sleeve the Guardian, in its infallibility,
chooses rather to pin its faith !