together two souls with links stronger than
death; I see two lives gently passed in love
and good works two lives softly blent into
one great bond of truth and peace, making an
exemplar of wedded bliss for future generations
to quote and live by: I see all this in those
dreamy words, "What might have been!"— but
the visions pass, the dreams fade, the stern
truth smites down those pleasant phantoms of
the possible, and I see, instead, two suffering
human hearts ruled over by desolation and
despair. What might have been! what might
have been!

And again: if that poor mother had not been
struck with death when her friend went down
on an ordinary friendly visit— if that illness
had been deferred but a week or hastened but
a week— what then? Then there might have
been a motherless family abandoned and left
to go down to ruin, and one lesson of
human duty and God's loving-kindness to
the desolate the fewer for the world to read.
If Gustavus, too, had not come to Rosalinda's
wedding, or if, coming, he had not fallen sick,
and so been kept beyond his term, Rosalinda's
sister would not have been Mrs. Gustavus, and
a certain pair of soft gazelle-like eyes would not
now be gazing curiously at life, with all too
probable sorrow to many future beholders. And
if Rosalinda herself had not gone to pay that
Brighton visit, Edward, or George, or Frederick,
or Charles, might have won the flower of price
instead of Jacobus, and the world have seen
another line and generation. If Jessie had
put on her bonnet but half an hour earlier when
she went one day, mournfully enough, to walk
by the sea-shore, she would have met young
Willie alone; they would have stopped and
spoken, and the misunderstanding which had
somehow sprung up like a sudden spectre
between them, and which reached its culmination
last night at the ball, would have been
explained, and ultimately would have been lost
in the traditional orange-blossoms and white
veil. But Jessie sat and played idly with Fido
instead; and the half-hour, lost, saw Willie
packing his portmanteau for London, determined
not to be fooled again. She would have been
happier with him than she has been with that
long Scotchman of hers; and Willie would not
have gone to India to fall a victim to alcohol
and caloric. What has crippled my poor young
sister, and doomed her to a couch of pain
and years of lonely suffering, but that one
single pic-nic, arranged by chance, and by
chance joined by her, when she over-walked
herself, got heated, and then had the chill which
all but killed her, and left her what she is now!
What might not her fate have been, had she
gone down into Kent before that third of July,
as she intended, and so never rambled through
the Loughton Woods and lost herself so far
away from all the rest? Sadly those words
stand now written up against her shattered
life— " What might have been!" What a full
harvest of love, and happiness, and health ruined
for ever, lies like blighted grain in every letter!

If young Horatius had taken his beloved
manuscript to the publishers on any day but the day
on which the publisher's Reader had had a quarrel
with his wife at home— that quarrel brought
about, if one goes down to the origin of things,
because he had supped on pork-chops the night
before— very likely his verdict on the youth's first
efforts would have been favourable, and the
publisher would have taken his poem and paid for
it like a man. The poetry was good, and Horatio
had in him the potentiality of fame and riches;
but under the malign influence of chance,
embodied in pork-chops, he came to the actuality
of poverty, despair, and suicide! Again: if
he had called on his friend Atticus by the
way home, and if he had heard his cheery
voice ring out its " Never Despair," like a
trumpet-call to manhood, and if he had drunk
half a dozen glasses of his fine old port,
do you think he would have bought that
beggarly twopennyworth of laudanum to quench
the fire of a masterly brain, and to still the
throbbings of a noble, if too sensitive, heart?
Not he! Had he turned aside for one brief
half-hour, he might have been alive to this
day, and in the foremost ranks of fame. The
Might Have Been of his life was no ignoble
theme— what was, was a lesson of hopelessness,
cowardice, unmanly despair, and childish
impatience— all because a certain man had a
surcharged liver. Poor young Horatius!

If Tardius had asked for that consulship in
Spain, a day sooner, my lord's secretary would
not have pledged his interest to Prudentius just
twelve hours in advance; and if my reverend
cousin had preached that other sermon of his
before my lord bishop, at the visitation, he
would have got the vacant living he had applied
for. But he chose the discourse on good works,
which cut against my lord bishop's private
views concerning the dignity of the order, and
so lost six hundred a year for want of that
natural clairvoyance which goes by the name of
tact. I was sorry for my clerical cousin, and
that pretty little girl down in Lincolnshire
waiting to be married; but you cannot give
a man natural clairvoyance when he is as blind
as a beetle, and as obstinate as a mule: so
the six hundred a year, with the pleasant
parsonage among the roses, went into the pocket of
a red-haired Welshman, who told my lord bishop
that he held all right reverend fathers to be so
many little popes, and gloried in forming
one of the consistory of cardinals appertaining.
The Might Have Been of my cousin's
life was a very sweet and touching idyl, but
the reality ended drearily somewhere down
among the Essex marshes, with the pretty little
Lincolnshire girl married to a captain of artillery,
because papa and mamma disliked long
engagements, and because my reverend cousin's
clerical preferment seemed a thing not of this
century.

In that kind of biography which is rather a
leaf out of general history than the writing of one
life, the Might Have Been of chances lies very
thick. If Mr. Wortley, grave, fastidious, and