Guy Livingstone | Page 3

honors very calmly, though every week some fresh feat of bodily strength or daring kept adding to his popularity. It was no slight temptation to his vanity; for, as some one has said truly, no successful adventurer in after-life ever wins such undivided admiration and hearty partisans as a school hero. The prestige of the liberator among the Irish peasantry comes nearest to it, I think; or the feeling of a clan, a hundred years ago, toward their chief. It must be very pleasant to be quoted so incessantly and believed in so implicitly, and to know that your decisions are so absolutely without appeal. From that first day when he interfered in my favor, Guy never ceased to accord me the ?gis of his protection, and it served me well; for, then as now, I was strong neither in body nor nerve. Yet our tastes, save in one respect, were as dissimilar as can be imagined. The solitary conformity was, that we were both, in a desultory way, fond of reading, and our favorite books were the same. Neither would do more school-work than was absolutely necessary, but at light literature of a certain class we read hard.
I don't think Guy's was what is usually called a poetical temperament, for his taste in this line was quite one-sided. He was no admirer of the picturesque, certainly. I have heard him say that his idea of a country to live in was where there was no hill steep enough to wind a horse in good condition, and no wood that hounds could not run through in fifteen minutes; therein following the fancy of that eminent French philosopher, who, being invited to climb Ben Lomond to enjoy the most magnificent of views, responded meekly, "_Aimez-vous les beaut��s de la Nature? Pour moi, je les abhorre_." Can you not fancy the strident emphasis on the last syllable, revealing how often the poor materialist had been victimized before he made a stand at last?
All through Livingstone's life the real was to predominate over the ideal; and so it was at this period of it. He had a great dislike to purely sentimental or descriptive poetry, preferring to all others those battle-ballads, like the Lays of Rome, which stir the blood like a trumpet, or those love-songs which heat it like rough strong wine.
He was very fond of Homer, too. He liked the diapason of those sonorous hexameters, that roll on, sinking and swelling with the ebb and flow of a stormy sea. I hear his voice--deep-toned and powerful even at that early age--finishing the story of Poseidon and his beautiful prize--their bridal-bed laid in the hollow of a curling wave--
_"Porphureon d' ara kuma peristath��, oure? ison, Kurt?then, krupsen de Theon thn��t��n te gunaika."_
And yet they say that the glorious old Sciote was a myth, and the Odyssey a magazine worked out by clever contributors. They might as well assert that all his marshals would have made up one Napoleon.
I remember how we used to pass in review the beauties of old time, for whom "many drew swords and died," whose charms convulsed kingdoms and ruined cities, who called the stars after their own names.
Ah! Gyneth and Ida, peerless queens of beauty, it was exciting, doubtless, to gaze down from your velveted gallery on the mad tilting below, to see ever and anon through the yellow dust a kind, handsome face looking up at you, pale but scarcely reproachful, just before the horse-hoofs trod it down; ah! fairest Ninons and Dianas--prizes that, like the Whip at Newmarket, were always to be challenged for--you were proud when your reckless lover came to woo, with the blood of last night's favorite not dry on his blade; but what were your fatal honors compared to those of a reigning toast in the rough, ancient days? The demigods and heroes that were suitors did not stand upon trifles, and the contest often ended in the extermination of all the lady's male relatives to the third and fourth generation. People then took it quite as a matter of course--rather a credit to the family than otherwise.
Guy and I discussed, often and gravely, the relative merits of Evadne the violet-haired, Helen, Cleopatra, and a hundred others, just as, on the steps of White's, or in the smoking-room at the "Rag," men compare the points of the _d��butantes_ of the season.
His knowledge of feminine psychology--it must have been theoretical, for he was not seventeen--implied a study and depth of research that was quite surprising; but I am bound to state that his estimate of the strength of character and principle inherent in the weaker sex was any thing but high; nearly, indeed, identical with that formed by the learned lady who, to the question, "Did she think the virtue of any