king his park, paper and pencil in
hand, so let him ramble. If Robert Hall thinks easiest when lying flat on
his back, let him be prostrate. If Lamasius writes best surrounded by
children, let loose on him the whole nursery. Don't criticise Charles
Dickens because he threw all his study windows wide open and the shades up.
It may fade the carpet, but it will pour sunshine into the hearts of a
million readers. If Thomas Carlyle chose to call around an ink-spattered
table Goethe, and Schiller, and Jean Paul Frederick Richter, and dissect
the shams of the world with a plain goose-quill, so be it. The horns of an
ox's head are not more certainly a part of the ox than Thomas Carlyle's
study and all its appointments are a part of Thomas Carlyle.

The gazelle will have soft fur, and the lion a shaggy hide, and the sanctum
sanctorum is the student's cuticle.

CHAPTER XXX.

BEHAVIOR AT CHURCH.

Around the door of country meeting-houses it has always been the custom for
the people to gather before and after church for social intercourse and the
shaking of hands. Perhaps because we, ourselves, were born in the country
and had never got over it, the custom pleases us. In the cities we arrive
the last moment before service and go away the first moment after. We act
as though the church were a rail-car, into which we go when the time for
starting arrives, and we get out again as soon as the depot of the Doxology
is reached. We protest against this business way of doing things. Shake
hands when the benediction is pronounced with those who sat before and
those who sat behind you. Meet the people in the aisle, and give them
Christian salutation. Postponement of the dining hour for fifteen minutes
will damage neither you nor the dinner. That is the moment to say a
comforting word to the man or woman in trouble. The sermon was preached to
the people in general; it is your place to apply it to the individual
heart.

The church aisle may be made the road to heaven. Many a man who was
unaffected by what the minister said has been captured for God by the
Christian word of an unpretending layman on the way out.

You may call it personal magnetism, or natural cordiality, but there are
some Christians who have such an ardent way of shaking hands after meeting
that it amounts to a benediction. Such greeting is not made with the left
hand. The left hand is good for a great many things, for instance to hold a
fork or twist a curl, but