s us that, even when he was in
good health, if a thought occurred to him during a walk he jotted it
down at once for fear he might be dead before he could reach home and
write it down at leisure. He made himself as familiar with death as he
was with the sun or his neighbours. He explains what a happiness it
would have been to him to write a history of the way in which
different great men had died, and his essays are in great part an
expression of interest in the caprices of death among the heroes of
the human race. History was to him a procession of
disasters--disasters, however, seen against a background of faith in
the benevolence of the scheme of things--and he made his account with
life as something to be enjoyed as a privilege rather than a right.

"If a man could by any means avoid it," he said of death, "though by
creeping under a calf's skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of
the shift." Somehow, one hardly believes him. He seems here to be
speaking for our reassurance rather than historically. On the other
hand, he is right a thousand times in summoning even the most
timid-kneed to go out and shake hands with disaster as with a friend.
To hide from it is only a kind of watered-down atheism. It is a
distrust of life. It is easy, of course, to compose sentences on the
subject: it is quite another thing to compose ourselves. Matthew
Arnold relates in one of his prefaces how he once failed to bring any
consolation to the occupants of a railway carriage at a time when a
panic about murder in railway trains was running its course by bidding
them reflect that, even if any of them died suddenly by violent hands,
the gravel-walks of their villas would still be rolled, and there
would still be a crowd at the corner of Fenchurch Street. It is a very
rational mind that can get comfort out of a thought like that. Even
when we are not troubled by thinking of our work or our family, we
cannot but cry out against the corruption of this flesh of our bodies,
and many of us quake at the thought of the enforced adventure of the
soul into a secret world. Marked down for disaster, we may add to our
income, or win a place in the Cabinet, or make a reputation for
singing comic songs, but death will steal upon us in our security, and
strip us bare of everything save the courage we have learned from
philosophy and the faith that has been given us by religion. We spend
our hours shirking that fact. Cowardice and pessimism will avail