the duty-doing for which no one can feel warmly
grateful, and which can never be lovingly repaid
with compound interest stored up in the golden
granaries of the heart, as one repays grace and
generous goodness. The debt of duty paid to
the uttermost fraction with the rigid exactitude
of cold justice, is a hard and bitter gift,
paralysing the hand that gives and blistering
the hand that receives it; and among the worst
of the self-delusions that blind and bewilder us,
is the boast of having done our duty to the poor
starved soul hungering for the genial warmth
of love.

"I have done my duty." Just so; and
you have done no more. You have given
workhouse fare for the marriage-feast and the
mother's milk—for bread you have cast at his
feet a stone, and a serpent for a fish; for love
you have doled out duty; for sacrifice a carefully
adjusted balance; a painted fire for the bright
yule log; and weeds for wayside flowers. This
has been your theory of life; and you have
carried it out, not relenting, and never relaxing.
But if to this cold duty, on which you plume
yourself so much, you had added a little
warmth of love? if, instead of your serene self-
satisfaction, you had more largely measured
others' needs, and less generously your own
bestowings? if their rights, and not your gifts
had been uppermost in your mind? and if salt
junk, dry, white, and withered, and coarse blue
serge, stout and serviceable, had not seemed to
you all that man could rationally require? and,
if all that, dear madam, then you would not have
rubbed those lean white hands of yours over
each other with quite so much unction as at
present; you would not have set your lips so
square and tight, nor have said in such
monotonous and inflexible accents, when I pleaded
for his weaknesses and a tender handling of his
frailties: " I have done my duty by him, and I
can do no more." (As if we have ever done our
full duty to any one, or at any time!) You
would rather have remembered those gentle
words touching our brother's need, which mean
more than your version of doing one's duty, and
instead of a seat bespoke between the cherubim,
would have said something about the lowest
place and unprofitable service, which would
have been more to the purpose perhaps.

I know of no condition in life, and of no work
—not even the drill-work of a barrack-yard, or
the machine-work of a factory—in which doing
one's duty only, without a dash of something
more spontaneous and heartsome superadded, is
enough for a man's conscience. For, be it
remembered, duty, in the narrow sense in which I
am using the word now, does not include the
free grace of love, or sunny excursions into
pleasant by-paths anywhere; it is simply Duty
—that which the law imposes, and that which
society enjoins; but as unlike the free grace of
love as Judaism is unlike Christianity. Take a
sheaf of examples, selected at random. We do
our duty in a most undoubted manner when we
blow up our servants for their short-comings,
and give what nurses call " their whips" to our
children when naughty and disobedient: quite
our duty: unless we would be ridden over
roughshod by the one, and assist in the inevitable
ruin of the other. But is there nothing
beyond and beside this duty, necessary as it is?
is there no praise to be bestowed for small well-
doings? no indulgences outside the contract?
no kindly thoughts for the good and happiness
of the one? and are the others always to go
unkissed to bed, with a virtuous denial of
sweetmeats? Indulgences, praises, kisses, and
" goodies," do not come into the category of
our duties; nevertheless, the kitchen and the
nursery that are without them are only half
alive, and not half nourished. But Susan's
holidays, and Betty's new gown given her in
acknowledgment of the more than salaried service
she bestowed on our dear boy in his illness, and
Jane's young man allowed his supper on Sunday
nights because she has been faithful and loving,
and diligent in her calling—though duties
according to the higher law of love, scarcely
come under that head according to the lower
creed. So with our children. Kisses and
fondlings, and pretty stories told by the evening
firelight, and Christmas-trees according to
our means, and jaunts among the daisies and
buttercups in summer-time, and the thousand-
and-one gratuities of love, which are quite apart
from duties—are they not as needful for the
health and vigour of those young lives as " their
whips" duly administered in evil times, and
severe remonstrance when the traditional black
dog has crept inside the nursery door? I think
so; but you, my dear madam—of whom your
son once said he had never remembered your
lips on his since he was a child of ten, and sick
unto death—you would count all these things
follies, dissipating the sterner atmosphere, and
leading to spiritual waste and poverty.

We do our duty when we look sharply
after the relations between our butler and the
port bin; but is it no part of the same duty to
remark on the brightness of his plate, or to
thank him for his attention to old Rustyfusty,
our maternal uncle, during his visit to us of
formidable dimensions, and in a state of mind
which it would be flattery to call unendurable?

The small grocer round the corner, where
that good old Jones deals as much for charity
and neighbourly good feeling as for convenience,
often sends in packages of suspicious levity,
even with string and paper thrown in. And
the string is always large and the paper very
thick. Jones does his duty, and so does Mrs.
Jones, when they remonstrate with the
peccant grocer, pointing out the error of his
ways, and striving; to imprint on his heart the
truth that a certain nameless pavement belonging
nowhere is not made of good intentions,
but of light weights and heavy papers, of the
sand-box just to the side of the sugar-tin, of
sloe-leaves curled upon heated plates and mixed
in with Congou and Bohea, of sprats masquerading
in oil as sardines out of the Mediterranean,
of sealing-wax for cayenne pepper, of copper
pennies boiled among the pickles and greengage