'Why, bless me,' I heard a man exclaim yesterday in the course of an animated discussion at the street corner, 'if things go on like this, I shan't have a soul to call my own!' As though any man had! No man living has a soul to call his own, or a stomach to call his own. The preacher at Port Molyneux assumed, as he sat at breakfast, that his digestive organs were his own property, and poor John Broadbanks and I, as well as all the other members of the school-house congregation, were penalized in consequence. Carlyle used to argue, more or less seriously, that the whole course of human history has been repeatedly deflected by blunders of this kind. The world has never known a more decisive battle than the battle of Waterloo; but why did the Duke of Wellington win it? All authorities agree that Napoleon was the greater general. Lord Roberts declares that the schemes of Napoleon were more comprehensive, his genius more dazzling, and his imagination more vivid than Wellington's. Yet on that fateful day that decided the destinies of Europe, Napoleon descended to absolute mediocrity while Wellington rose to surpassing brilliance. The Emperor was never so agitated; the Duke was never so calm. Napoleon, with all the chances in his favor, perpetrated blunder after blunder; the Duke seemed omniscient and infallible. Why? Carlyle used to say that Napoleon threw his brain out of action by eating a hearty breakfast of fried potatoes. In one respect, at any rate, Carlyle knew what he was talking about. 'As a student,' he says, 'I discovered that I was the owner of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach; and I have never been free from the knowledge from that hour to this; and I suppose I never shall until I am laid away in my grave.' Warned, however, by the melancholy fate which he believed Napoleon to have suffered, he guarded against any overflow of his distress. His readers rarely suffer from the after-effects of his indiscreet breakfasts. We read Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero-worship, and Past and Present, and never once think of piecrust or of fried potatoes.

It is true, I dare say, that all the people in the school-house were not affected as John Broadbanks was. Indeed, I heard next day of one lady who thought the sermon very affecting. It nearly made her cry, she said; and she felt sure that the preacher was not long for this world. I would not on any consideration deprive this excellent creature of her lachrymal felicity; but if her well-meant encomiums reached the preacher's ears, I hope he did not take them too seriously. Lots of people are fond of piecrust, but it does not follow that it is good for them. The sort of sermon that would have stimulated the faith of John Broadbanks might not have brought tears to the eyes of the lady who was moved to such a compassionate ecstasy, but it might have been better for her in the long run. John Broadbanks found the piecrust sermon depressing; yet, to a certain type of mind, few things are more attractive than sadness. We all remember Macaulay's observations on the inordinate popularity of Byron. 'It is,' he says, 'without a parallel in history. To people who are unacquainted with real calamity, nothing is so dainty and sweet as lovely melancholy.' And he goes on to apply this to the pessimism of Byron. 'People bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by heart; they did their best to write like him and to look like him. Many of them practised in the glass in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip and the scowl of the brow which appear in his portraits. The number of hopeful undergraduates and medical students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the heart ceased to fall like dew, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation.' Clearly, this is the lady with the tears—indefinitely multiplied.

Now, by way of contrast, turn for a moment from Byron to Browning. Professor Phelps of Yale says that Browning was too healthy to be popular. He was robust and vigorous, and therefore optimistic. But he is slowly winning his way. His star waxes as Byron's wanes. People find sooner or later that they cannot live for ever on piecrust. Mr. Chesterton says that the bravest thing about Robert Louis Stevenson is that he never allowed his manuscripts to smell of his medicines. The tortures that racked his frame never passed down his pen to the paper spread out before him. You read his sprightly and stirring romances; you live for the time being among pirates and smugglers and corsairs; you catch the breath of the hills and the tang of the sea; and it never occurs to you that you are the guest of a man who is terribly ill. You hear him laugh; you never hear him cough. You do not see his sunken eyes, his hectic cheek, his spectral form supported by a pile of pillows. You reflect with astonishment when you lay aside the book that the story was written by a creature so pitifully frail that, on all the earth's broad surface, he could only find one outlandish spot—a lonely hilltop in the Pacific—in which he could contrive to breathe. By this time we may hope that our preacher at Port Molyneux has read the Life of Stevenson. And, as he did so, he must have resolved that, however excruciating his dyspepsia, his congregation, at least, shall never be infected by it.

I regret now that I did not ask the preacher's name. If only I knew his address, I should find pleasure in posting him a copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. For the autocrat knew something about piecrust. The pie at the boarding-house looked one day particularly attractive, and things happened in consequence. 'I took more of it than was good for me,' says the Autocrat, 'and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better, I labelled them all Piecrust, and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages—Doctors of Divinity, some of them—it wouldn't do!' I should have been tempted to mark this passage before posting the book to Port Molyneux.