Peter was a great intelligent barbarian of immense muscular strength and rude cerebral energy; Alexis was of the material from which civilisation makes priests and students, or quiet conventional kings; but he was even more unlike Peter than gentle Richard Cromwell was unlike authoritative Oliver. The disappointment to Peter, firmly convinced, as all rude natures are, of the perfection of his own personality, and probably quite unable to appreciate a personality of another type, must have been the more bitter that his great plans for the future required a vigorous, practically-minded innovator like himself. At length the difference of nature so exasperated the autocrat that he had his son three times tortured, the third time in his own presence, and with a fatal result. This terrible incident is the strongest expression known to us of a father's vexation because his son was not of his own kind.

Another painful case that will be long remembered, though the character of the father is less known to us, is that of the poet Shelley and Sir Timothy. The little that we do know amounts to this, that there was a total absence of sympathy. Sir Timothy committed the very greatest of paternal mistakes in depriving himself of the means of direct influence over his son by excluding him from his own home. Considering that the supreme grief of unhappy fathers is the feebleness of their influence over their sons, they can but confirm and complete their sorrow by annihilating that influence utterly, and depriving themselves of all chance of recovering and increasing it in the future. This Sir Timothy did after the expulsion from Oxford. In his position a father possessing some skill and tact in the management of young men at the

most difficult and wayward period of their lives, would have determined above all things to keep his son as much as possible in the range of his own control. Although Shelley afterwards returned to Field Place for a short time, the scission had been made; there was an end of real intercourse between father and son; the poet went his own way, married Harriet Westbrook, and lived through the rest of his short unsatisfactory existence as a homeless wandering déclassé.

This essay has hitherto run upon the discouraging side of the subject, so that it ought not to end without the happier and more hopeful considerations.

Every personality is separate from others, and expects its separateness to be acknowledged. When a son avoids his father it is because he fears that the rights of his own personality will be disregarded. There are fathers who habitually treat their sons with sneering contempt. I have myself seen a young man of fair common abilities treated with constant and undisguised contempt by a clever, sardonic father, who went so far. as to make brutal allusions to the shape of the young man's skull ! He bore this treatment with admirable patience and unfailing gentleness, but suffered from it silently. Another used to laugh at his son and call him "Don Quixote" whenever the lad gave expression to some sentiment above the low Philistine level. A third, whom I knew well, had a disagreeable way of putting down his son because he was young, telling him that up to the age of forty a man "might have impressions, but could not possibly have opinions." "My father," said a kind-hearted English gentleman to me, "was the most thoroughly unbearable person I ever met with in my life."

There

The frank recognition of separate personality, with all its rights, would stop this brutality at once. still remains the legitimate power of the father which he ought not to abdicate, and which is of itself enough to prevent the freedom and equality necessary to perfect friendship. This reason, and the difference of age and habits, make it impossible that young men and their fathers should be comrades, but a relation may be established between them which, if rightly understood, is one of the most agreeable in human existence.

To be satisfactory it must be founded, on the father's side, on the idea that he is repaying to posterity what he has received from his own parents, and not on any selfish hope that the descending stream of benefit will flow upwards again to him. Then he must not count upon affection, nor lay himself out to win it, nor be timidly afraid of losing it; but found his influence upon the firmer ground of respect, and be determined to deserve and have that, along with as much unforced. affection as the son is able naturally and easily to give. It is not desirable that the affection between father and son should be so tender, on either side, as to make separation a constant pain, for such is human destiny that the two are generally fated to see but little of each other.

The best satisfaction for a father is to deserve and receive loyal and unfailing respect from his son.

No, this is not quite the best, not quite the supreme satisfaction of paternity. Shall I reveal the secret that lies in silence at the very bottom of the hearts of all worthy and honourable fathers? Their profoundest happiness is to be able themselves to respect their sons.

ESSAY VII.

THE RIGHTS OF THE GUEST.

IF hospitality were always perfectly practised it would be the strongest of all influences in favour of rational liberty, because the host would learn to respect it in the persons of his guests, and thence, by extension of habit, amongst others who could never be his guests.

Hospitality educates us in respect for the rights of others. This is the substantial benefit that the host ought to derive from his trouble and his outlay, but the instincts of uncivilised human nature are so powerful that this education has usually been partial and incomplete. The best part of it has been systematically evaded in this way. People were aware that tolerance and forbearance ought to be exercised towards guests; and so to avoid the hard necessity of exercising these qualities when they were really difficult virtues, they practised what is called exclusiveness. In other words, they accepted, as guests, only those who agreed with their own opinions and belonged to their own class. By this arrangement they could be both hospitable and intolerant. at the same time.

If, in our day, the barrier of exclusiveness has been in many places broken down, there is all the greater need for us to remember the true principle of hospitality.

It might be forgotten with little inconvenience in a very exclusive society, but if it were forgotten in a society that is not exclusive, the consequences would be exactly the opposite of what every friend of civilisation most earnestly desires. Social intercourse, in that case, so far from being an education in respect for the rights of others, would be an opportunity for violating them. The violation might become habitual, and if it were so, this strange result would follow, that society would not be a softening and civilising influence, but the contrary. It would accustom people to treat each other with disregard, so that men would be hardened and brutalised by it, as schoolboys are made ruder by the rough habits of the playground, and urbanity would not be cultivated in cities, but preserved, if at all, in solitude.

The two views concerning the rights of the guest may be stated briefly as follows:

1. The guest is bound to conform in all things to the tastes and customs of his host. He ought to find or feign enjoyment in everything that his host imposes upon him; and if he is unwilling to do this in every particular, it is a breach of good manners on his part, and he must be made to suffer for it.

2. The guest should be left to be happy in his own way, and the business of the host is to arrange things in such a manner that each guest may enjoy as much as possible his own peculiar kind of happiness.

When the first principle was applied in all its rigour, as it often used to be applied, and as I have myself seen it applied, the sensation experienced by the guest on going to stay in certain houses was that of entirely losing the direction of himself. He was not even