could prevail. We understood each other, and left the Merrytons to their Moppens.
It did not require much argument to convice my Flora that henceforward there was but one course open to me, which was that of the Truly Independent Member. The Ionian question was coming on. I prepared a speech with great care, which certainly would have destroyed the administration, had it been delivered. Flora thought so too, so cogent were the arguments employed. I had determined to reserve it till after nine o’clock, and rehearse till the last moment. When I got down to the House I found that an hour previously the Speaker had proposed “that this question be now put?” and that this had been resolved in the negative. The Previous Question had killed my speech. The House was now sitting upon Russian Bristles.
A few days afterwards I put to Lord Merryton a question of which I had given notice; it certainly was of an offensive character, and bore reference to a recent appointment on which I will not enlarge, as I have no desire to rip up old sores. Lord M. tried to laugh the arrow off, but it would not do—it had hit the bull’s-eye.
Next day Mr. Lobby sent for me, and told me, with great regret, that the Sloth had informed him there was something in the story of the rat-catcher, and Mr. Dobbs. Bribingford was excluded from the usual compromise, and included in the fighting balance. Mr. L.’s confidence had been again betrayed.
A few days afterwards it was reported to the House that Bribingford had been the seat of awful corruption and bribery at the last election—which bribery and corruption were carried on by the agents of John Augustus Jones, Esq., with his full privity and cognisance.
A few days afterwards Flora and I were back at Marigold Lodge, rejoiced to escape from the turmoils of London, and the anxieties of public life. We believe that all real power has departed from the House of Commons, and that the members are the mere slaves of public opinion expressed elsewhere. I am engaged in writing a history of the Byzantine Empire.
It now appears to us that ladies ambitious for their husbands—and husbands ambitious for themselves—of seats in the House of Commons, should carefully consider beforehand if the worry and expense are repaid by the honours and emoluments of the position. That is the true—Previous Question.
Gamma.
THE LEPER.
In every age life has two leading phases. It has its busy phase, and it is with this phase that we are most intimately acquainted. Indeed this is the only form of life which we, for the most part, care to read about, or to think of. It comprehends all the great men of history, all those active natures that in some way or other acquire a wide and sensible influence in their day and generation. These were the most eminent spirits of their times. They won great battles, and arranged empires; they wrote great works, and changed the face of literature; they preached great sermons, and moulded the multitude to their will. In some substantial effect or another they impressed their names upon the history of their times. The other leading phase of life is very different from this one. It is the quiet phase; of it we know little or nothing. When we think of the past, we think only of its mighty men, its giants and demi-gods. They stand out in bold relief, and we forget to look at the lesser figures of the great tableau which the great sculptor Time has carved for us.
As in their own day these figures were of no high repute in the world at large, perhaps it is no great wonder that we take little account of them. Certainly the insignificance of them when they lived, reduced them below the historian’s notice. Unfortunately for their fame, they lived very ordinary lives; they performed, we may suppose, the ordinary functions of nature, drinking and eating, and rearing children, as heartily as any person of eminence; but they never distinguished themselves in war, or in literature, or as great reformers; and so nobody thought it worth his while to raise a lasting monument to them. It is a particular sample of this quiet life, which we now wish to place before our readers. A very curious sample: and, in its title at least, not specially attractive. In spite of that, however, it is a sample full of interest. We wish our readers to picture to themselves the life that lepers used to lead. Farewell for a while to busy towns and crowded thoroughfares. Our path conducts us outside of the city, to hamlets and to hospitals all alone by the roadside, or on the bank of the river. This is the quiet life, par excellence. As quiet as the monastery before the hour of Prime. This is the life of the shunned—of men whom society casts from her, lest she be tainted by contact with them—of men that are excluded from the enjoyments, and the ambitions, and the excitements that make up the sum of life, as we value it. This is death in life—civil death and legal death, with mere animal life surviving.
But, before we proceed to a more particular consideration of the life and the status of the leper in the Middle Ages, it may be as well to say something of the history of his disease. Leprosy is supposed,—whether on sufficient grounds or not, we do not take upon ourselves to pronounce,—to have had its origin in Egypt. From Egypt, it may be, it passed into Palestine, crossing the Red Sea perhaps in the company of the Israelites, that day the waters divided and formed bright solid walls on either side of the favoured host. We all remember how, at a later stage in that Exodus, it overshadowed for a brief space Miriam’s countenance, and how at the entreaty of Moses the hideous visitant was recalled. In Palestine, doubtless, it prevailed widely. Several allusions to it in the writings of the Old Testament occur at once to every mind. There is the story of Gehazi for instance. Reluctant to allow the restored Syrian to depart without paying his fee, he practised an ingenious imposition on him, and drew his master’s curse upon his own head. And then there is the story of those four lepers, desperate from their sufferings, stealing in the twilight towards Benhadad’s outposts, leaving behind them the beleaguered city, where famine had by that time vanquished maternal love even. They stood at