While in supercilious mood
They his rhymes did view,
Trembling and bare-headed stood
Cardinal Richelieu.

FETTERS.

Is there such a thing as freedom? We make
a great cry (and righteously) against the
material chains of the slave, but what is there
for any of us but fetters? Are we not all
slaves, spiritually if nothing more. Take any
social position you like to name, and you cannot
find in one true liberty as the necessary
consequence: all are mortised and clamped to slavery
with iron clamps more or less severe according
to the tenon, often jagged, at the edges to make
it fit the tighter. Of the three grand divisions of
property — wealth, competence, and poverty—it
is a toss up which has fewest liberties, and
where the strain is tightest.

There is no freedom assuredly in great
wealth; indeed, golden fetters are heavier in
the main than iron ones, and money scrawls out
a long list of prohibitions, with gilded flourishes
to set off the letters. What liberty can there
be for a man whose perpetual motto is
Noblesse Oblige? noblesse translated by guineas
or quarterings, as the case may be. His
noblesse is always obliging him to something: and
that something is sure to be a diminution of
his personal freedom, and a curtailment of his
private pleasures. He cannot make simplicity
or unconventionality the rule of his life, be his
desires never so inartificial and his tastes
never so savage, and he must live hand in
glove with the pomps and vanities, however
much he may despise them. He must have
big houses, and many of them; though he
can live in only one at a time; and, out of
his half-dozen estates, five give him the ague,
and the sixth has a patent for neuralgia;
he must have an army of tall powdered footmen,
against whom, perhaps, his soul revolts
in favour of neat-handed Phyllises in clean
gowns and white muslin aprons, according to
the waiting-maid ideal; he must have carriages
and horses, when he would rather walk for the
sake of his health, or see life from the top
of an omnibus, which he finds more amusing
than a stately drawl along the Serpentine, half
smothered in my lady's crinoline, and crawled
over by my lady's Skye terrier; he is fond of
gardening — likes digging celery trenches, hoeing
potatoes, or even hacking out stones from the
"leck" — doesn't mind what kind of work it is,
if he can but have a spade or a pickaxe in his
hand. But fancy a man with a hundred
thousand a year among his cabbages, with his
gentlemanlike head gardener in kid gloves standing
by, calculating his own future when my lord
shall be taken to a lunatic asylum like any other
unseemly growth plucked up from the place it
deforms and carted off to the great rubbish-heap
outside the yard gates!

What freedom is there in middle-class
competence got by work? whether as a strictly
graduated government employé, who knows his
income and expectations to a fraction, or as one
of the Bashi-Bazouks of professional life, able
to calculate only by average, with a margin for
contingencies? The first is surely not his own
master, with an eight o'clock breakfast winter
and summer, and only a month's holiday at an
inconvenient time. Not very like true liberty
that, I think! And is the Bashi-Bazouk his
own master either, with the necessity of writing
so many pages per week? Of painting so many
yards of canvas? Of visiting so many diseased
bodies? Of pleading so many unsavoury causes,
if he would find his children in bread and boots?
Is a man his own master while the butcher and
the baker stand at the corner of the street with a
fiery facias as a potentiality if the bills be not
paid when demanded? The Bashi-Bazouk may
wear no livery, not even the Queen's, but he is
not a free man for all that, and his chain and
bullet gall him like the rest.

As for poverty, there is no question of freedom
here. When a man's fetters must needs be
padlocked with a private lock and key — and
when he belongs to any one who chooses to keep
that key in his waistcoat-pocket — he has not
much liberty to play at bowls with! Well for
him too, poor fellow, if he be padlocked at all,
and his chains be numbered and hung up in the
great Blue-Beard chamber of Work; for, what
we choose to call real liberty would bring but a
cold cupboard to him, and would be rather the
liberty of starvation. The personal freedom of
poverty is a shadowy chimera, and cannot hold
its own in the face of facts.

But beside the mere framework of a man's
being — his income—how many other things are
fetters to him! Chains that are sometimes
hugged as the most precious things in life, and
gilded over till they shine in the sun like cables
of pure gold; chains that are wreathed with
flowers, and decked with evergreens so thickly
strung you cannot see the metal beneath, and
know nothing of the sores engendered; chains
that are sometimes sadly wept over, till all
the bright polish has become dimmed and
dulled, and the rust has eaten into the steel, and
the comeliness and glory of the metal has
departed, leaving only tear-stained, time-worn,
cankered fetters, swinging and clanking round
the bleeding limbs. What is love itself but
slavery? — a better slavery than loveless freedom,
but slavery none the less; fetters forged out of
as unsubstantial materials as you will, but binding
down the soul with stronger force than ever
did iron manacle of slave or convict. No living
heart that loves, can sing lo pæans to freedom:
unless in mockery of itself, or in the bitterness
of an illusion fled.

And if love be slavery, what is marriage?
Slavery, too, in quite as large proportion, and
often times without the love as a makeweight
on the side of happiness. In its ideal, marriage
is the perfect harmony of two full-toned chords;
the stately moving, each in its own orbit, of
two smooth spheres, tending ever to the same
end, but without interference or domination