[figure description] Page 210.[end figure description]

Mr. Allison was as quiet a subject as Peter Hopkins,
but he was not like him a political quietist from indifference,
for he had a warm sense of loyalty, and a well-rooted
attachment to the constitution of his country in church and
state. His ancestors had suffered in the Great Rebellion,
and much the greater part of their never large estates had
been alienated to raise the fines imposed upon them as delinquents.
The uncle, whom he succeeded in Bishopsgate
Street, had, in his early apprenticeship, assisted at burning
the Rump, and in maturer years had joined as heartily in
the rejoicings when the Seven Bishops were released from
the Tower: he subscribed to Walker's “Account of the
Sufferings of the Clergy,” and had heard sermons preached
by the famous Dr. Scott (which were afterwards incorporated
in his great work upon the Christian Life) in the
church of St. Peter-le-Poor (oddly so called, seeing that
there are few districts within the City of London so rich,
insomuch that the last historian of the metropolis believed
the parish to have scarcely a poor family in it), — and in
All-hallows, Lombard Street, where, during the reign of
the Godly, the puritanical vestry passed a resolution, that
if any persons should come to the church “on the day
called Christ's birthday,” they should be compelled to
leave it.

In these principles Mr. Allison had grown up; and without
any profession of extra religion, or ever wearing a

[figure description] Page 211.[end figure description]

sanctified face, he had in the evening of his life attained
“the end of the commandment, which is charity, proceeding
from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a faith unfeigned.”
London in his days was a better school for young
men in trade than it ever was before, or has been since.
The civic power had quietly and imperceptibly put an end
to that club-law which once made the apprentices a turbulent
and formidable body, at any moment armed as well
as ready for a riot; and masters exercised a sort of parental
control over the youth intrusted to them, which in later
times it may be feared has not been so conscientiously exerted,
because it is not likely to be so patiently endured.
Trade itself had not then been corrupted by that ruinous
spirit of competition, which, more than any other of the
evils now pressing upon us, deserves to be called the curse
of England in the present age. At all times men have
been to be found, who engaged in hazardous speculations,
gamester like, according to their opportunities, or who, mistaking
the means for the end, devoted themselves with
miserable fidelity to the service of Mammon. But “Live
and let live,” had not yet become a maxim of obsolete morality.
We had our monarchy, or hierarchy, and our aristocracy, —
God be praised for the benefits which have been
derived from all three, and God in his mercy continue them
to us! but we had no plutarchy, no millionnaires, no great
capitalists to break down the honest and industrious trader
with the weight of their overbearing and overwhelming
wealth. They who had enriched themselves in the course
of regular and honorable commerce withdrew from business,
and left the field to others. Feudal tyranny had passed
away, and moneyed tyranny had not yet arisen in its stead,—
a tyranny baser in its origin, not more merciful in its
operations, and with less in its appendages to redeem it.

Trade, in Mr. Allison's days, was a school of thrift and
probity, as much as of profit and loss; such his shop had

[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]

been when he succeeded to it upon his uncle's decease, and
such it continued to be when he transmitted it to his son.
Old Mr. Strahan the printer (the founder of his typarchical
dynasty) said to Dr. Johnson, that “there are few ways in
which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting
money”; and he added, that “the more one thinks of
this the juster it will appear.” Johnson agreed with him;
and though it was a money-maker's observation, and though
the more it is considered now, the more fallacious it will be
found, the general system of trade might have justified it
at that time. The entrance of an exciseman never occasioned
any alarm or apprehension at No. 113 Bishopsgate
Street Within, nor any uncomfortable feeling, unless the
officer happened to be one who, by giving unnecessary
trouble, and by gratuitous incivility in the exercise of
authority, made an equitable law odious in its execution.
They never there mixed weeds with their tobacco, nor
adulterated it in any worse way; and their snuff was never
rendered more pungent by stirring into it a certain proportion
of pounded glass. The duties were honestly paid, with
a clear perception that the impost fell lightly upon all whom
it affected, and affected those only who chose to indulge
themselves in a pleasure which was still cheap, and which,
without any injurious privation, they might forego. Nay,
when our good man expatiated upon the uses of tobacco,
which Mr. Bacon demurred at, and the Doctor sometimes
playfully disputed, he ventured an opinion, that among the
final causes for which so excellent an herb had been created,
the facilities afforded by it towards raising the revenue
in a well-governed country like our own, might be one.

There was a strong family likeness between him and his
sister, both in countenance and disposition. Elizabeth Allison
was a person for whom the best and wisest man might
have thanked Providence if she had been allotted to him for
helpmate. But though she had, in Shakespeare's language,

[figure description] Page 213.[end figure description]

“withered on the virgin thorn,” hers had not been a life of
single blessedness: she had been a blessing first to her parents;
then to her brother and her brother's family, where she
relieved an amiable but sickly sister-in-law from those domestic
offices which require activity and forethought; lastly,
after the dispersion of his sons, the transfer of the business
to the eldest, and the breaking-up of his old establishment,
to the widower and his daughter, the only child who cleaved
to him, — not like Ruth to Naomi, by a meritorious act of
duty, for in her case it was in the ordinary course of things,
without either sacrifice or choice; but the effect in endearing
her to him was the same.

In advanced stages of society, and nowhere more than in
England at this time, the tendency of all things is to weaken
the relations between parent and child, and frequently to destroy
them, reducing human nature in this respect nearer to
the level of animal life. Perhaps the greater number of
male children who are “born into the world,” in our part
of it, are put out at as early an age, proportionately, as the
young bird is driven from its nest, or the young beast turned
off by its dam as being capable of feeding and protecting
itself; and in many instances they are as totally lost to the
parent, though not in like manner forgotten. Mr. Allison
never saw all his children together after his removal from
London. The only time when his three sons met at the
Grange was when they came there to attend their father's
funeral; nor would they then have been assembled, if the
Captain's ship had not happened to have recently arrived in
port.

This is a state of things more favorable to the wealth
than to the happiness of nations. It was a natural and pious
custom in patriarchal times that the dead should be gathered
unto their people. “Bury me,” said Jacob, when he
gave his dying charge to his sons, — “bury me with my
fathers in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which

[figure description] Page 214.[end figure description]

is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham
bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession
of a burying-place. There they buried Abraham and
Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebecca his
wife; and there I buried Leah.” Had such a passage
occurred in Homer, or in Dante, all critics would have concurred
in admiring the truth and beauty of the sentiment.
He had buried his beloved Rachel by the way where she
died; but, although he remembered this at his death, the
orders which he gave were, that his own remains should be
laid in the sepulchre of his fathers. The same feeling prevails
among many, or most of those savage tribes who are
not utterly degraded. With them the tree is not left to lie
where it falls. The body of one who dies on an expedition
is interred on the spot, if distance or other circumstances
render it inconvenient to transport the corpse; but, however
long the journey, it is considered as a sacred duty that
the bones should at some time or other be brought home.
In Scotland, where the common rites of sepulture are
performed with less decency than in any other Christian
country, the care with which family burial-grounds in the
remoter parts are preserved, may be referred as much to
natural feeling as to hereditary pride.

But as indigenous flowers are eradicated by the spade and
plough, so this feeling is destroyed in the stirring and bustling
intercourse of commercial life. No room is left for it;
as little of it at this time remains in wide America as in
thickly-peopled England. That to which soldiers and sailors
are reconciled by the spirit of their profession, and the
chances of war and of the seas, the love of adventure and
the desire of advancement cause others to regard with the
same indifference; and these motives are so prevalent, that
the dispersion of families and the consequent disruption of
natural ties, if not occasioned by necessity, would now
in most instances be the effect of choice. Even those

[figure description] Page 215.[end figure description]

to whom it is an inevitable evil, and who feel it deeply as
such, look upon it as something in the appointed course of
things, as much as infirmity and age and death.

It is well for us that in early life we never think of the
vicissitudes which lie before us; or look to them only with
pleasurable anticipations as they approach.


Youth
Knows naught of changes: Age hath traced them oft,
Expects and can interpret them.*
The thought of them, when it comes across us in middle
life, brings with it only a transient sadness, like the shadow
of a passing cloud. We turn our eyes from them while
they are in prospect; but when they are in retrospect
many a longing, lingering look is cast behind. So long as
Mr. Allison was in business, he looked to Thaxted Grange
as the place where he hoped one day to enjoy the blessings
of retirement, — that otium cum dignitate, which in a certain
sense the prudent citizen is more likely to attain than the
successful statesman. It was the pleasure of recollection
that gave this hope its zest and its strength. But after the
object which during so many years he had held in view had
been obtained, his day-dreams, if he had allowed them to
take their course, would have recurred more frequently to
Bishopsgate Street than they had ever wandered from
thence to the scenes of his boyhood. They recurred
thither oftener than he wished, although few men have
been more masters of themselves; and then the remembrance
of his wife, whom he had lost by a lingering disease
in middle age; and of the children, those who had died
during their childhood, and those who in reality were almost
as much lost to him in the ways of the world, made him
always turn for comfort to the prospect of that better state
of existence in which they should once more all be gathered

[figure description] Page 216.[end figure description]

together, and where there would be neither change nor parting.
His thoughts often fell into this train, when on summer
evenings he was taking a solitary pipe in his arbor,
with the church in sight, and the churchyard wherein, at no
distant time, he was to be laid in his last abode. Such
musings induced a sense of sober piety, — of thankfulness
for former blessings, contentment with the present, and
humble yet sure and certain hope for futurity, which might
vainly have been sought at prayer-meetings or evening lectures,
where indeed little good can ever be obtained without
some deleterious admixture, or alloy of baser feelings.

The happiness which he had found in retirement was of
a different kind from what he had contemplated; for the
shades of evening were gathering when he reached the
place of his long wished for rest, and the picture of it which
had imprinted itself on his imagination was a morning
view. But he had been prepared for this by that slow
change, of which we are not aware during its progress till
we see it reflected in others, and are thus made conscious
of it in ourselves; and he found a satisfaction in the station
which he occupied there, too worthy in its nature to be
called pride, and which had not entered into his anticipations.
It is said to have been a saying of George the
Third, that the happiest condition in which an Englishman
could be placed, was just below that wherein it would
have been necessary for him to act as a Justice of the Peace,
and above that which would have rendered him liable to
parochial duties. This was just Mr. Allison's position;
there was nothing which brought him into rivalry or competition
with the surrounding Squirarchy, and the yeomen
and peasantry respected him for his own character, as well
as for his name's sake. He gave employment to more persons
than when he was engaged in trade, and his indirect
influence over them was greater; that of his sister was still
more. The elders of the village remembered her in her

[figure description] Page 217.[end figure description]

youth, and loved her for what she then had been, as well as
for what she now was; the young looked up to her as the
Lady Bountiful, to whom no one that needed advice or
assistance ever applied in vain. She it was who provided
those much approved plum-cakes, not the less savory for
being both homely and wholesome, the thought of which
induced the children to look on to their Lent examination
with hope, and prepare for it with alacrity. Those offices in
a parish which are the province of the Clergyman's wife,
when he has made choice of one who knows her duty, and
has both will and ability to discharge it, Miss Allison performed;
and she rendered Mr. Bacon the farther, and to him
individually the greater, service of imparting to his daughter
those instructions which she had no mother to impart.
Deborah could not have had a better teacher; but as the
present chapter has extended to a sufficient length,