depends on the evidence, uncle!”
“No, sir; like all noble truths, it depends upon faith. Men, nowadays,” continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust, “actually require that truths should be proved.”
“It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle; but till a truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?”
I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually caught my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.
“Sir,” said he, “whatever in Truth makes a man’s heart warmer and his soul purer, is a belief, not a knowledge. Proof, sir, is a handcuff; belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign of King Richard? Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a logician that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man does not want to reason about his religion; religion is not mathematics. Religion is to be felt, not proved. There are a great many things in the religion of a good man which are not in the catechism. Proof!” continued my uncle, growing violent—“Proof, sir, is a low, vulgar, levelling, rascally Jacobin; Belief is a loyal, generous, chivalrous gentleman! No, no; prove what you please, you shall never rob me of one belief that has made me—”
“The finest-hearted creature that ever talked nonsense,” said my father, who came up, like Horace’s deity, at the right moment. “What is it you must believe in, brother, no matter what the proof against you?”
My uncle was silent, and with great energy dug the point of his cane into the gravel.
“He will not believe in our great ancestor the printer,” said I, maliciously.
My father’s calm brow was overcast in a moment. “Brother,” said the Captain, loftily, “you have a right to your own ideas; but you should take care how they contaminate your child.”
“Contaminate!” said my father, and for the first time I saw an angry sparkle flash from his eyes; but he checked himself on the instant. “Change the word, my dear brother.”
“No, sir, I will not change it! To belie the records of the family!”
“Records! A brass plate in a village church against all the books of the College of Arms!”
“To renounce your ancestor, a knight who died in the field!”
“For the worst cause that man ever fought for!”
“On behalf of his king!”
“Who had murdered his nephews!”
“A knight! with our crest on his helmet.”
“And no brains underneath it, or he would never have had them knocked out for so bloody a villain!”
“A rascally, drudging, money-making printer!”
“The wise and glorious introducer of the art that has enlightened a world. Prefer for an ancestor, to one whom scholar and sage never name but in homage, a worthless, obscure, jolter-headed booby in mail, whose only record to men is a brass plate in a church in a village!”
My uncle turned round perfectly livid. “Enough, sir! enough! I am insulted sufficiently. I ought to have expected it. I wish you and your son a very good day.”
My father stood aghast. The Captain was hobbling off to the iron gate; in another moment he would have been out of our precincts. I ran up and hung upon him. “Uncle, it is all my fault. Between you and me, I am quite of your side; pray forgive us both. What could I have been thinking of, to vex you so? And my father, whom your visit has made so happy!” My uncle paused, feeling for the latch of the gate. My father had now come up, and caught his hand. “What are all the printers that ever lived, and all the books they ever printed, to one wrong to thy fine heart, brother Roland? Shame on me! A bookman’s weak point, you know! It is very true, I should never have taught the boy one thing to give you pain, brother Roland,—though I don’t remember,” continued my father, with a perplexed look, “that I ever did teach it him, either! Pisistratus, as you value my blessing, respect as your ancestor Sir William de Caxton, the hero of Bosworth. Come, come, brother!”
“I am an old fool,” said Uncle Roland, “whichever way we look at it. Ah, you young dog, you are laughing at us both!”
“I have ordered breakfast on the lawn,” said my mother, coming out from the porch, with her cheerful smile on her lips; “and I think the devil will be done to your liking to-day, brother Roland.”
“We have had enough of the devil already, my love,” said my father, wiping his forehead.
So, while the birds sang overhead or hopped familiarly across the sward for the crumbs thrown forth to them, while the sun was still cool in the east, and the leaves yet rustled with the sweet air of morning, we all sat down to our table, with hearts as reconciled to each other, and as peaceably disposed to thank God for the fair world around us, as if the river had never run red through the field of Bosworth, and that excellent Mr. Caxton had never set all mankind by the ears with an irritating invention a thousand times more provocative of our combative tendencies than the blast of the trumpet and the gleam of the banner!
CHAPTER V
“Brother,” said Mr. Caxton, “I will walk with you to the Roman encampment.”
The Captain felt that this proposal was meant as the greatest peace-offering my father could think of; for, first, it was a very long walk, and my father detested long walks; secondly, it was the sacrifice of a whole day’s labor at the Great Work. And yet, with that quick sensibility which only the generous possess, Uncle Roland accepted at once the proposal. If he had not done so, my father would have had a heavier heart for a month to come. And how could the Great Work have got on while the author was every now and then disturbed by a twinge of remorse?
Half an hour after breakfast, the brothers set off arm-in-arm; and I followed, a little apart, admiring how sturdily the old soldier got over the ground, in spite of the cork leg. It was pleasant enough to listen to their conversation, and notice the contrasts between these two eccentric stamps from Dame Nature’s ever-variable mould,—Nature, who casts nothing in stereotype; for I do believe that not even two fleas can be found identically the same.
My father was not a quick or minute observer of rural beauties. He had so little of the organ of locality that I suspect he could have lost his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to external impressions,—not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the hill-top his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its delight. My father, with all his learning, and though his study had been in the stores of all language, was very rarely eloquent. The Captain had a glow and a passion in his words which, what with his deep, tremulous voice and animated gestures, gave something poetic to half of what he uttered. In every sentence of Roland’s, in every tone of his voice and every play of his face, there was some outbreak of pride; but unless you set him on his hobby of that great ancestor the printer, my father had not as much pride as a homeopathist could have put into a globule. He was not proud even of not being proud. Chafe all his feathers, and still you could rouse but the dove. My father was slow and mild, my uncle quick and fiery; my father reasoned, my uncle imagined; my father was very seldom
