re to be found in the
Bible--possibly in that lost book the Second Epistle to the Ephesians,
which Dickens must have had in his mind when he wrote in _Dombey and
Son_ of the First Epistle to that Church. "In the midst of life we are
in death" is a favourite quotation from this imaginary Scripture. "His
end was peace" holds its place on many a tomb in virtue of a similar
belief. "He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is, I believe, commonly
attributed to Solomon; and a charming song which was popular in my youth
declared that, though the loss of friends was sad, it would have been
much sadder,

"Had we ne'er heard that Scripture word,
'Not lost, but gone before.'"

Mrs. Gamp, with some hazy recollections of the New Testament floating in
her mind, invented the admirable aphorism that "Rich folks may ride on
camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye." And
a lady of my acquaintance, soliloquizing on the afflictions of life and
the serenity of her own temper, exclaimed, "How true it is what Solomon
says, 'A contented spirit is like a perpetual dropping on a rainy day'!"

A Dissenting minister, winding up a week's mission, is reported to have
said, "And if any spark of grace has been kindled by these exercises,
oh, we pray Thee, water that spark." A watered spark is good, but what
of a harnessed volcano? When that eminent Civil servant, Sir Hugh Owen,
retired from the Local Government Board, a gentleman wrote to the _Daily
Chronicle_ in favour of "harnessing this by no means extinct volcano to
the great task" of codifying the Poor Law. An old peasant-woman in
Buckinghamshire, extolling the merits of her favourite curate, said to
the rector, "I do say that Mr. Woods is quite an angel in sheep's
clothing;" and Dr. Liddon told me of a Presbyterian minister who was
called on at short notice to officiate at the parish church of Crathie
in the presence of the Queen, and, transported by this tremendous
experience, burst forth in rhetorical supplication--"Grant that as she
grows to be an old woman she may be made a new man; and that in all
righteous causes she may go forth before her people like a he-goat on
the mountains."

Undergraduates, whose wretched existence for a week before each
examination is spent in the hasty acquisition of much ill-assorted and
indigestible knowledge, are not seldom the victims of similar
confusions. At Oxford--and, for all I know, at Cambridge too--a hideous
cus