Chambers Edinburgh Journal, Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. | Page 8

taking into due
account the fire-office of that name, have been found upon the earth in
not unsimilar abundance." I flatter myself that "not unsimilar
abundance" is eminently Milvertonian.
'_Mil._ Now observe, Dunsford, you were speaking sometime ago
about the joking of intimates being frequently unkind. This is just an
instance to the contrary. Ellesmere, who is not a bad fellow--at least not
so bad as he seems--knows that he can say anything he pleases about
my style of writing without much annoying me. I am not very
vulnerable on these points; but all the while there is a titillating
pleasure to him in being all but impertinent and vexatious to a friend.
And he enjoys that. So do I.'
This certainly reads like free and natural conversation, besides being
noteworthy for the suggestions it contains.
Mr Helps is strictly an original writer, in the sense of thinking for
himself; but at the same time, one of his excellences consists in an

adroit and novel use of commonplaces. There is, indeed, as much
originality in putting a new face upon old verities, as in producing new
ones from the mint of one's invention. As Emerson has remarked,
valuable originality does not consist in mere novelty or unlikeness to
other men, but in range and extent of grasp and insight. This is a fact,
too, which Mr Helps has noted. 'A suggestion,' says he, 'may be ever so
old; but it is not exhausted until it is acted upon, or rejected on
sufficient reason.' He has, therefore, no fastidious dread of saying
anything which has been said before, but readily welcomes wise
thoughts from all directions, often reproducing them with such felicity
of expression, as to give them new effect. Thus, in all the elements of a
profitable originality, he is rich and generous; and from few books of
modern times could so large a store of aphorisms, fine sayings, and
admirable observations be selected. We have marked a great many
more than can be incorporated in the present paper; but some few may
be, nevertheless, presented. Here, for instance, is a fine remark on
time--next to love, the most hackneyed subject in the world:--'Men
seldom feel as if they were bounded as to time: they think they can
afford to throw away a great deal of that commodity; thus shewing
unconsciously in their trifling the sense that they have of their
immortality.' On another familiar topic--human progress--he writes
thus:--'The progress of mankind is like the incoming of the tide, which,
from any given moment, is almost as much of a retreat as an advance,
but still the tide moves on.' Emerson has used the same figure, but in a
passage which ought not to be regarded as impairing our author's
originality.
On the vexed and perplexing question of _Evil_, Mr Helps has said
many acute and consolatory things, from among which we have culled
the following sentences:--'The man who is satisfied with any given
state of things that we are likely to see on earth, must have a creeping
imagination: on the other hand, he who is oppressed by the evils around
him so as to stand gaping at them in horror, has a feeble will and a want
of practical power, and allows his fancy to come in, like too much
wavering light upon his work, so that he does not see to go on with it.
A man of sagacity, while he apprehends a great deal of the evil around
him, resolves what part of it he will be blind to for the present, in order
to deal best with what he has in hand; and as to men of any genius, they

are not imprisoned or rendered partial even by their own experience of
evil, much less are their attacks upon it paralysed by their full
consciousness of its large presence.' Here, in the next place, is an
aphorism worth pondering and remembrance:--'Vague injurious reports
are no men's lies, but all men's carelessness.' And by the side of it we
may place a pleasant sarcasm attributed to Ellesmere, and apparently
intended as a reminder for stump-orators: 'How exactly proportioned to
a man's ignorance of the subject is the noise he makes about it at a
public meeting.' Not altogether out of connection here may be this brief
sentence:--'Next to the folly of doing a bad thing, is that of fearing to
undo it.' In the following, we have a brief sufficient argument against
the indulgence of unavailing sorrow or anxiety:--'It has always
appeared to me, that there is so much to be done in this world, that all
self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for
others, is a loss--a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world.'
There is plain truth, too, in