re nature of our feelings does prevent
us from extending our sympathies to those whom we have not seen
in the flesh. It should not be so, and would not with one who had
nurtured his heart with the proper care. And we are prone to permit
an evil worse than that to canker our regards and to foster and to
mar our solicitudes. Those who are in high station strike us more by
their joys and sorrows than do the poor and lowly. Were some young
duke's wife, wedded but the other day, to die, all England would put
on some show of mourning,--nay, would feel some true gleam of pity;
but nobody cares for the widowed brickmaker seated with his starving
infant on his cold hearth."

"Of course we hear more of the big people," said Robarts.

"Ay; and think more of them. But do not suppose, sir, that I complain
of this man or that woman because his sympathies, or hers, run out of
that course which my reason tells me they should hold. The man with
whom it would not be so would simply be a god among men. It is in
his perfection as a man that we recognise the divinity of Christ. It
is in the imperfection of men that we recognise our necessity for a
Christ. Yes, sir, the death of the poor lady at Barchester was very
sudden. I hope that my lord the bishop bears with becoming fortitude
the heavy misfortune. They say that he was a man much beholden to his
wife,--prone to lean upon her in his goings out and comings in. For
such a man such a loss is more dreadful perhaps than for another."

"They say she led him a terrible life, you know."

"I am not prone, sir, to believe much of what I hear about the
domesticities of other men, knowing how little any other man can know
of my own. And I have, methinks, observed a proneness in the world to
ridicule that dependence on a woman which every married man should
acknowledge in regard to the wife of his bosom, if he can trust her
as well as love her. When I hear jocose proverbs spoken as to men,
such as that in this house the grey mare is the better horse, or that
in that house the wife wears that garment which is supposed to denote
virile command, knowing that the joke is easy, and that meekness in
a man is more truly noble than a habit of stern authority, I do not
allow them to go far with me in influencing my judgment."

So spoke Mr. Crawley, who never permitted the slightest interference
with his own word in his own family, and who had himself been a
witness of one of those scenes between the bis