The Last Man
entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of
the world call “life,”—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual
torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only
observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of
action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of
description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud
must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us;
sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity
and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us.
Who that knows what “life” is, would pine for this feverish species of
existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I
have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the
door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from
the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each
other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the
inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the
beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us
leave “life,” that we may live.
Idris was well content with this resolve of mine. Her native
sprightliness needed no undue excitement, and her placid heart reposed
contented on my love, the well-being of her children, and the beauty of
surrounding nature. Her pride and blameless ambition was to create
smiles in all around her, and to shed repose on the fragile existence
of her brother. In spite of her tender nursing, the health of Adrian
perceptibly declined. Walking, riding, the common occupations of life,
overcame him: he felt no pain, but seemed to tremble for ever on the
verge of annihilation. Yet, as he had lived on for months nearly in the
same state, he did not inspire us with any immediate fear; and, though
he talked of death as an event most familiar to his thoughts, he did
not cease to exert himself to render others happy, or to cultivate his
own astonishing powers of mind. Winter passed away; and spring, led by
the months, awakened life in all nature. The forest was dressed in
green; the young calves frisked on the new-sprung grass; the
wind-winged shadows of light clouds sped over the green cornfields; the
hermit cuckoo repeated his monotonous all-hail to the season; the
nightingale, bird of love and minion of the evening star, filled the
woods with song; while Venus lingered in the warm sunset, and the young
green of the trees lay in gentle relief along the clear horizon.
Delight awoke in every heart, delight and exultation; for there was
peace through all the world; the temple of Universal Janus was shut,
and man died not that year by the hand of man.
“Let this last but twelve months,” said Adrian; “and earth will become
a Paradise. The energies of man were before directed to the destruction
of his species: they now aim at its liberation and preservation. Man
cannot repose, and his restless aspirations will now bring forth good
instead of evil. The favoured countries of the south will throw off the
iron yoke of servitude; poverty will quit us, and with that, sickness.
What may not the forces, never before united, of liberty and peace
achieve in this dwelling of man?”
“Dreaming, for ever dreaming, Windsor!” said Ryland, the old adversary
of Raymond, and candidate for the Protectorate at the ensuing election.
“Be assured that earth is not, nor ever can be heaven, while the seeds
of hell are natives of her soil. When the seasons have become equal,
when the air breeds no disorders, when its surface is no longer liable
to blights and droughts, then sickness will cease; when men’s passions
are dead, poverty will depart. When love is no longer akin to hate,
then brotherhood will exist: we are very far from that state at
present.”
“Not so far as you may suppose,” observed a little old astronomer, by
name Merrival, “the poles precede slowly, but securely; in an hundred
thousand years—”
“We shall all be underground,” said Ryland.
“The pole of the earth will coincide with the pole of the ecliptic,”
continued the astronomer, “an universal spring will be produced, and
earth become a paradise.”
“And we shall of course enjoy the benefit of the change,” said Ryland,
contemptuously.
“We have strange news here,” I observed. I had the newspaper in my
hand, and, as usual, had turned to the intelligence from Greece. “It
seems that the total destruction of Constantinople, and the supposition
that winter had purified the air of the fallen city, gave the Greeks
courage to visit its site, and begin to rebuild it. But they tell us
that the curse of God is on the place, for every one who has ventured
within the walls has been tainted by the plague; that this disease has
spread in Thrace and Macedonia; and now, fearing the virulence of
infection during the coming heats, a cordon has been drawn on the
frontiers of Thessaly, and a strict quarantine exacted.” This
intelligence brought us back from the prospect of paradise, held out
after the lapse of an hundred thousand years, to the pain and misery at
present existent upon earth. We talked of the ravages made last year by
pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of the dreadful
consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best means of
preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a large
city thus afflicted—London, for instance. Merrival did not join in this
conversation; drawing near Idris, he proceeded to assure her that the
joyful prospect of an earthly paradise after an hundred thousand years,
was clouded to him by the knowledge that in a certain period of time
after, an earthly hell or purgatory, would occur, when the ecliptic and
equator would be at right angles.[4] Our party at length broke up; “We
are all dreaming this morning,” said Ryland, “it is as wise to discuss
the probability of a visitation of the plague in our well-governed
metropolis, as to calculate the centuries which must escape before we
can grow pine-apples here in the open air.”
But, though it seemed absurd to calculate upon the arrival of the
plague in London, I could not reflect without extreme pain on the
desolation this evil would cause in Greece. The English for the most
part talked of Thrace and Macedonia, as they would of a lunar
territory, which, unknown to them, presented no distinct idea or
interest to the minds. I had trod the soil. The faces of many of the
inhabitants were familiar to me; in the towns, plains, hills, and
defiles of these countries, I had enjoyed unspeakable delight, as I
journied through them the year before. Some romantic village, some
cottage, or elegant abode there situated, inhabited by the lovely and
the good, rose before my mental sight, and the question haunted me, is
the plague there also?—That same invincible monster, which hovered over
and devoured Constantinople—that fiend more cruel than tempest, less
tame than fire, is, alas, unchained in that beautiful country—these
reflections would not allow me to rest.
The political state of England became agitated as the time drew near
when the new Protector was to be elected. This event excited the more
interest, since it was the current report, that if the popular
candidate (Ryland) should be chosen, the question of the abolition of
hereditary rank, and other feudal relics, would come under the
consideration of parliament. Not a word had been spoken during the
present session on any of these topics. Every thing would depend upon
the choice of a Protector, and the elections of the ensuing year. Yet
this very silence was awful, shewing the deep weight attributed to the
question; the fear of either party to hazard an ill-timed attack, and
the expectation of a furious contention when it should begin.
But although St. Stephen’s did not echo with the voice which filled
each heart, the newspapers teemed with nothing else; and in private
companies the conversation however remotely begun, soon verged towards
this central point, while voices were lowered and chairs drawn closer.
The nobles did not hesitate to express their fear; the other party
endeavoured to treat the matter lightly. “Shame on the country,” said
Ryland, “to lay so much stress upon words and frippery; it is a
question of nothing; of the new painting of carriage-pannels and the
embroidery of footmen’s coats.”
Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with
the democratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the
patrician spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid
attributes of rank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would
not be the case; that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation
easily duped by words, ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow
honour on the dust. This spirit we could never lose; and it was to
diffuse this concentrated spirit of birth, that the new law was to be
brought forward. We were assured that, when the name and title of
Englishman was the sole patent of nobility, we should all be noble;
that when no man born under English sway, felt another his superior in
rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-right of all our
countrymen. Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have it imagined
that it can be without nobles, nature’s true nobility, who bear their
patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the rest
of their species, because they are better than the rest. Among a race
of independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where
the imagination is empress of men’s minds, there needs be no fear that
we should want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly. That
party, however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the
kingdom, who extolled the ornament of the column, “the Corinthian
capital of polished society;” they appealed to prejudices without
number, to old attachments and young hopes; to the expectation of
thousands who might one day become peers; they set up as a scarecrow,
the spectre of all that was sordid, mechanic and base in the commercial
republics.
The plague had come to Athens. Hundreds of English residents returned
to their own country. Raymond’s beloved Athenians, the free, the noble
people of the divinest town in Greece, fell like ripe corn before the
merciless sickle of the adversary. Its pleasant places were deserted;
its temples and palaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent
before towards the highest objects of human ambition, were now forced
to converge to one point, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of
the plague.
At any other time this disaster would have excited extreme compassion
among us; but it was now passed over, while each mind was engaged by
the coming controversy. It was not so with me; and the question of rank
and right dwindled to insignificance in my eyes, when I pictured the
scene of suffering Athens. I heard of the death of only sons; of wives
and husbands most devoted; of the rending of ties twisted with the
heart’s fibres, of friend losing friend, and young mothers mourning for
their first born; and these moving incidents were grouped and painted
in my mind by the knowledge of the persons, by my esteem and affection
for the sufferers. It was the admirers, friends, fellow soldiers of
Raymond, families that had welcomed Perdita to Greece, and lamented
with her the loss of her lord, that were swept away, and went to dwell
with them in the undistinguishing tomb.
The plague at Athens had been preceded and caused by the contagion from
the East; and the scene of havoc and death continued to be acted there,
on a scale of fearful magnitude. A hope that the visitation of the