olite heartlessness. Thus,
Blackwood's Magazine,--which from the time that, with grace, judgment,
and tenderness peculiarly its own, it bid the dying Keats "back to his
gallipots,"[122] to that in which it partly arrested the last efforts,
and shortened the life of Turner, had with an infallible instinct for
the wrong, given what pain it could, and withered what strength it
could, in every great mind that was in anywise within its reach; and had
made itself, to the utmost of its power, frost and disease of the heart
to the most noble spirits of England,--took upon itself to be generously
offended at this triumphing over the death of England's enemy, because,
"by proving that he is obliged to undergo the common lot of all, his
brotherhood is at once reasserted."[123] He was not, then, a brother
while he was alive? or is our brother's blood in general not to be
acknowledged by us till it rushes up against us from the ground? I know
that this is a common creed, whether a peculiarly wise or Christian one
may be doubted. It may not, indeed, be well to triumph over the dead,
but perhaps it is less well that the world so often tries to triumph
over the living. And as for exultation over a fallen foe (though there
was _none_ in the mind of the man who drew that monarch dead), it may be
remembered that there have been worthy persons, before now, guilty of
this great wickedness,--nay, who have even fitted the words of their
exultation to timbrels, and gone forth to sing them in dances. There
have even been those--women, too,--who could make a mock at the agony of
a mother weeping over her lost son, when that son had been the enemy of
their country; and their mock has been preserved, as worthy to be read
by human eyes. "The mother of Sisera looked out at a window. 'Hath he
not sped?'" I do not say this was right, still less that it was wrong;
but only that it would be well for us if we could quit our habit of
thinking that what we say of the dead is of more weight than what we say
of the living. The dead either know nothing, or know enough to despise
both us and our insults, or adulation.

"Well, but," it is answered, "there will always be this weakness in our
human nature; we shall for ever, in spite of reason, take pleasure in
doing funereal honor to the corpse, and writing sacredness to memory
upon marble." Then, if you are to do this,--if you are to put off your
kindness until death,--why not, in God's name, put off also your e