spirit, difficult as a wild bird to catch; once arrested and fixed, faithful to immortality. Think of such a fine, delicate, yet enduring thing, like the nervous tissue resisting to the point of dissolution, unstrengthened, unhardened by early training, accustomed always to feed upon itself as she sat at her loom, or strayed across the wilds, thus snatched and wrung, filled with sights of horror, sounds of anguish, and then in the madness of ignorance, expected and required to be charmed (half-coaxed, half-cowed), into speedy inconstancy, contentment, cheer.
And like the nervous tissue Dovach was goaded into false activity; the quiet, pale girl learnt to oppose and disobey the conqueror; the cool, deep eyes flamed, the mild tongue bit and stung until the white child seemed fiend-possessed.
It was only to Sir Raoul that the unhappy lady thus broke forth; to the followers over whom her evil fortune had made her mistress she was passive and gentle; and of her own accord she would have woven and read her missal, and paced the battlements, pondering morbidly her misery and sin as mechanically as any nun within her cloisters.
But Sir Raoul could not let Lady Dovach alone. Sometimes he abased himself, and prayed and vowed at her feet; sometimes he raged, and threatened, and oppressed, and abused her; but surely it was grievous retribution to him to love her as he continued to do, for different as light and darkness, the iron was to the full indestructible as the gossamer—loving her, devoured with love for her, grasping her, he could no more possess her spirit, subdue her will, receive one fond look, thrill to one kind touch, hearken to one gracious word, drink and have his thirst slaked, eat and find his hunger appeased, than if she were a saint enthroned in the unattainable skies, or a demon plunged into the fathomless deeps. Baikie with its high turrets, its vigilantly guarded haughs, its store-houses, its droves of cattle, its merry men, its Isla gliding gaily to its own sweet song, its bower in the centre of the castle where pale Dovach sat undreaming of escape save by slow death, was a place of torment to Sir Raoul.
REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
THE MISSIONARIES—MARTYN, HUC, LIVINGSTONE, SELWYN.
At the opening of this century, there was a certain youth, somewhat meagre in form and delicate in face, and of an anxious cast of countenance, who might often be seen walking in summer evenings on a heath in Cornwall. He was not alone. Somebody was with him who made the barren heath blossom to his heart, like a garden of roses. She had been his playfellow; and he hoped—as did she also—that she would be his companion through life. His mother said they must not think of it; for they had nothing to marry upon; and, learned and diligent as Henry might be, there would not be the less hunger at home for the wealth of Henry’s mind. His father had been a labourer in a mine at Gwennap; he had raised himself to a clerkship, and to the ability to send Henry to the grammar-school at Truro: but this was no reason why his son should venture upon an early marriage. So said the mother. If she had been a little less hard, it would have made more difference to the world than she or her son dreamed of.
With his love in his heart to urge him on, Henry Martyn had tried for a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; but had failed. He then entered at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he soon saw, humble as he was, that he could achieve distinction in mathematics, or perhaps any branch of study to which he applied himself. In fact, he came out Senior Wrangler in 1801. It might seem that his love might now run a smooth course; but a new obstacle had arisen. A man of his proved quality was sure of an honourable maintenance; but a prohibition had arisen within, from which he suffered more than from his mother’s opposition.
At Cambridge he had been deeply impressed by the preaching of Mr. Simeon, and won over by Mr. Simeon’s encouragement and friendship to a life of religious self-sacrifice. He might now be seen in summer evenings walking on another common, with a companion very different from her who was far away. She was far away; but still, as he thought, too dear to him; for his love for her embarrassed the great purpose to which he was girding himself up. It was on Clapham Common, winding in and out among the gorse, that Henry Martyn might be seen, when paying an occasional visit to Mr. Henry Thornton. His companion was perhaps the greatest man-of-business of his time—the man who, in fact, governed India with the fewest words, the quietest style of despotism, and the least possible self-seeking. He was Mr. Grant, the chief of India Directors, the father of Lord Glenelg and his twin-brother Robert. Mr. Grant was a silent worshipper in the Clapham sanctuary; but he was one of the devoutest: and the heathenism of Asia lay heavy at his heart. Wilberforce and his coterie were busy about African slavery; and Mr. Grant sympathised with them: the horrors of Asiatic superstition came vividly before him in the discharge of his daily business; and it became the supreme interest with him. Henry Martyn’s sympathetic character made a coadjutor of him at once. Mr. Grant’s grave and strong words burned in upon his heart and brain the project of devoting himself as a missionary.
I need not say that missionary work was nothing new. The early Christians believed the pagan gods to be demons, and warred against them as against treason and blasphemy in one. From the time of Theodosius to the present century, a horror of idolatry, as the work of the devil, has at intervals renovated the missionary work among all denominations of the Catholic and Protestant world. But the most remarkable perhaps of modern awakenings in the missionary cause was that which ensued upon the revival of religion by the Wesleys. The alarm about the terms of salvation which agitated the old religious world, and created a new one, towards the close of the last century, turned men’s minds to the heathen, with a zeal unsurpassed in the records of Catholic missions. Henry Martyn is the representative of this modern movement at its outset.
