and many
an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue
Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"--a
favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,--is growing more and more to be the
formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice
is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion
is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all
events, is no longer demanded of us--the wholesale sacrifice of our own
opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a
hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one
of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the
world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the
modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many
"rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy
in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of
nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal
vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us
amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency
of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of
October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach
of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned
moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer
suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we
prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business
but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with
Landor:

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.

Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have
been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found
it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the
years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he
laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of
the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was
always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount
Cithaeron, and the mad _Evoe! Evoe!_ rang through the moonstruck woods,
be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying
tresses. Ah! the vine