ordered to be taught in all schools in the kingdom,
and well instilled into the minds of
candidates for orders. Throughout it denounces
the liberals, most of whom would, in this
country, be called liberal conservatives, and
says plainly, that they and theirs are in the
direct road to eternal perdition. In a democracy
it declares there can be no obligation to
obey the laws, for otherwise the governing
power would reside in the governed, a state
of things directly opposed to the will of God;
but which argument we may add directly
begs the question, denies the existence of a
sovereign power in a country like the United
States, and encourages anarchy in the name
of religion. The gist of the book, however,
is such a definition of royal authority as to
excuse, or even to praise, the perfidy and
oppression of the King. His power is pronounced
unlimited in right as well as in fact, and the
people have but to obey it, as a revelation
from Heaven.

MY BROTHER ROBERT.

I

HIS was a disappointed life, I have heard
people say; but I, who lived with him from
the beginning to the end of it, can assert
that it was not a disappointed life nor an
unhappy one. Certainly not. What can a
man want to see more in this world than the
accomplishment of his plans, for which he
has toiled early and late, expending on them
all his youth, hope, health, and energy?
That others profited by his inventions, and
grew rich on them, while he remained poor,
neglected, and obscure, is a mere secondary
consideration. It was his work that he
looked to, and not any possible rewards that
it might bring him; and as he brought his
work to a fair completion, and did his share
of good in his day and generation, he had
no right to be dissatisfied; and he was not
dissatisfied. I know it for a fact—he has told
me so many a time. He would say: "Don't
complain, Mary. You might complain if I
had failed altogether, but I have done my
work, and that is enough. I declare I feel a
proud man sometimes when I see what grand
things my invention is helping others to do."
I was less easily satisfied for him than he
was for himself; but when I saw that
murmuring really troubled him, I tried to keep
my tongue quiet.

People come now and look at his grave
under the yew-tree, and go away and say
they have seen it; and that is all the honour
and profit my brother, Robert Janson, ever
reaped from his life's labour. A year or two
back some strangers came and proposed to
put up a monument over his grave; but I
warned them not to meddle with it as long
as I lived. He would have been an old
man now; but he died at thirty-seven: young,
certainly—I grant that, and poor; because
in his last broken-down years I had to support
him—but not disappointed. He would
never allow it living, and I will not allow
it since he is dead. His was not a
disappointed life. It will do no one any harm to
tell his story now; and it will give no one any
pain. I am the only person left in the world
who ever had any interest in him.

II.

WE were a large family altogether, living
in the farmhouse at Alster Priors: my
grandfather and grandmother, my father and
mother, Aunt Anna, and five children.
This period, of course, dates as far back as I
can remember. I was the eldest and Robert
was the youngest. The others were Charles,
who succeeded to the farm—Mark, who
enlisted for a soldier, and was we believed,
but were never sure, killed in Spain, fighting
with the French—and John, who died a boy.
We got our first schooling in the village:
reading, writing, and cyphering, and nothing
more that I can call to mind. It was thought
learning enough in those days amongst the
yeoman class of farmers to which we
belonged. From quite a little one, Robert
seemed different from the rest of us, who
were homely, contented folks, and everybody
but my mother and me—Aunt Anna
especially—made a point of discouraging his
studious ways and ridiculing his fancies.
Perhaps there was no greater trial in his
much-tried life than the consciousness that his
own family had no faith in him. Nobody but
we two had patience with him. His
grandfather, father, and brothers, regarded him as
a fool and idle ne'er-do-well.

I very well remember his asking my
grandfather one night, "Have you ever been to
London, grandfather, or seen any of the
great steam-ships and manufactories?" And
"No, thank God!" was the fervent answer.
This emphatic thanksgiving might be
regarded as an epitome of the family sentiments:
the gratitude of our elders for similar
blessings was hourly expressed. They were
strongholds of prejudice, and it was as
difficult to effect a change or introduce an
improvement amongst them as it is to overturn
the fixed idea of a monomaniac. They had
all, except my mother, been born in Alsterdale,
and had vegetated there contentedly
in unimpeachable respectability, never
travelling more than a dozen miles from home:
there they would die, and there be buried in
a good old age. They were proud, too, and
that with the most impracticable pride; for
they gloried in their ignorant prejudices, and
would not have exchanged them for the
wisdom of Solomon. Living from generation to
generation on their own farm-lands of Alster
Priors, in the midst of a scanty and illiterate
population of labourers, above the small
farmers and beneath the great gentry—on a
sort of debateable ground between both—
they were isolated almost entirely from
society, and secluded in a dignified insignificance,