(1) Works, vi. 514.
(2) IB. iii. 338.
(3) IB. iii. 352, 353.
(4) Works, iii. 350.
(5) IB. iii. 390, 391.
(6) Works, iii.  142.

Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out
of a desire to bind the much-loved evangelist nearer to her
in the only manner possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme
of marrying him to her fifth daughter, Marjorie; and the
Reformer seems to have fallen in with it readily enough.  It
seems to have been believed in the family that the whole
matter had been originally made up between these two, with no
very spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride. (1)
Knox's idea of marriage, as I have said, was not the same for
all men; but on the whole, it was not lofty.  We have a
curious letter of his, written at the request of Queen Mary,
to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household matters;
which, as he tells us, "was not well accepted of the said
Earl." (2)  We may suppose, however, that his own home was
regulated in a similar spirit.  I can fancy that for such a
man, emotional, and with a need, now and again, to exercise
parsimony in emotions not strictly needful, something a
little mechanical, something hard and fast and clearly
understood, would enter into his ideal of a home.  There were
storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at
the fireside even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures.  So,
from a wife, of all women, he would not ask much.  One letter
to her which has come down to us is, I had almost said,
conspicuous for coldness. (3)  He calls her, as he called
other female correspondents, "dearly beloved sister;" the
epistle is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not
upon her own case, but upon that of her mother.  However, we
know what Heine wrote in his wife's album; and there is,
after all, one passage that may be held to intimate some
tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly
opposite construction.  "I think," he says, "I THINK this be
the first letter I ever wrote to you."  This, if we are to
take it literally, may pair off with the "two OR THREE
children" whom Montaigne mentions having lost at nurse; the
one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in a parent.
Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his
troubled wooing than might have been expected.  The whole
Bowes family, angry enough already at the influence he had
obtained over the mother, set their faces obdurately against
the match.  And I daresay the opposition quickened his
inclination.  I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes that she need
no further trouble herself about the marriage; it should now
be his business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his
life "for the comfort of his own flesh, both fear and
friendship of all earthly creature laid aside." (4)  This is
a wonderfully chivalrous utterance for a Reformer forty-eight
years old; and it compares well with the leaden coquetries of
Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this and that into
consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting
what M. Bungener calls "an honourable and Christian
difficulty" of choice, in frigid indecisions and insincere
proposals.  But Knox's next letter is in a humbler tone; he
has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied; he
despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
England, - regards not "what country consumes his wicked
carcass."  "You shall understand," he says, "that this sixth
of November, I spoke with Sir Robert Bowes" (the head of the
family, his bride's uncle) "in the matter you know, according
to your request; whose disdainful, yea, despiteful, words
hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.  I
bear a good countenance with a sore troubled heart, because
he that ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is
become not only a despiser, but also a taunter of God's
messengers - God be merciful unto him!  Amongst others his
most unpleasing words, while that I was about to have
declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, `Away with
your rhetorical reasons! for I will not be persuaded with
them.'  God knows I did use no rhetoric nor coloured speech;
but would have spoken the truth, and that in most simple
manner.  I am not a good orator in my own cause; but what he
would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare to him
one day to his displeasure, unless he repent." (5)  Poor
Knox, you see, is quite commoved.  It has been a very
unpleasant interview.  And as it is the only sample that we
have of how things went with him during his courtship, we may
infer that the period was not as agreeable for Knox as it has
been for some others.

(1) IB. iii. 378.
(2) LB. ii. 379.
(3) Works, iii. 394.
(4) Works, iii. 376.
(5) Works, iii. 378.

However, when once they were married, I imagine he and
Marjorie Bowes hit it off together comfortably enough.  The
little we know of it may be brought together in a very short
space.  She bore him two sons.  He seems to have kept her
pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his work;
so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into
disorder. (1)  Certainly she sometimes wrote to his
dictation; and, in this capacity, he calls her "his left
hand." (2)  In June 1559, at the headiest moment of the
Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the absence of
his helpful colleague, Goodman, "whose presence" (this is the
not very grammatical form of his lament) "whose presence I
more thirst, than she that is my own flesh." (3)  And this,
considering the source and the circumstances, may be held as
evidence of a very tender sentiment.  He tells us himself in
his history, on the occasion of a certain meeting at the Kirk
of Field, that "he was in no small heaviness by reason of the
late death of his dear bed-fellow, Marjorie Bowes." (4)
Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as "a wife whose
like is not to be found everywhere" (that is very like
Calvin), and again, as "the most delightful of wives."  We
know what Calvin thought desirable in a wife, "good humour,
chastity, thrift, patience, and solicitude for her husband's
health," and so we may suppose that the first Mrs. Knox fell
not far short of this ideal.

(1) Works, vi. 104.
(2) IB. v. 5.
(3) IB. vi. 27.
(4) IB. ii. 138.

The actual date of the marriage is uncertain but by September
1566, at the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with
his wife.  There is no fear either that he will be dull; even
if the chaste, thrifty, patient Marjorie should not
altogether occupy his mind, he need not go out of the house
to seek more female sympathy; for behold!  Mrs. Bowes is duly
domesticated with the young couple.  Dr. M'Crie imagined that
Richard Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free
to live where she would; and where could she go more
naturally than to the house of a married daughter?  This,
however, is not the case.  Richard Bowes did not die till at
least two years later.  It is impossible to believe that he
approved of his wife's desertion, after so many years of
marriage, after twelve children had been born to them; and
accordingly we find in his will, dated 1558, no mention
either of her or of Knox's wife. (1)  This is plain sailing.
It is easy enough to understand the anger of Bowes against
this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married
the daughter in spite of the father's opposition, alienated
the wife from the husband and the husband's religion,
supported her in a long course of resistance and rebellion,
and, after years of intimacy, already too close and tender
for any jealous spirit to behold without resentment, carried
her away with him at last into a foreign land.  But it is not
quite easy to understand how, except out of sheer weariness
and disgust, he was ever brought to agree to the arrangement.
Nor is it easy to square the Reformer's conduct with his
public teaching.  We have, for instance, a letter by him,
Craig, and Spottiswood, to the Archbishops of Canterbury and
York, anent "a wicked and rebellious woman," one Anne Good,
spouse to "John Barron, a minister of Christ Jesus his
evangel," who, "after great rebellion shown unto him, and
divers admonitions given, as well by himself as by others in
his name, that she should in no wise depart from this realm,
nor from his house without his license, hath not the less
stubbornly and rebelliously departed, separated herself from
his society, left his house, and withdrawn herself from this
realm." (2)  Perhaps some sort of license was extorted, as I
have said, from Richard Bowes, weary with years of domestic
dissension; but setting that aside, the words employed with
so much righteous indignation by Knox, Craig, and
Spottiswood, to describe the conduct of that wicked and
rebellious woman, Mrs. Barron, would describe nearly as
exactly the conduct of the religious Mrs. Bowes.  It is a
little bewildering, until we recollect the distinction
between faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was "a
minister of Christ Jesus his evangel," while Richard Bowes,
besides being own brother to a despiser and taunter of God's
messengers, is shrewdly suspected to have been "a bigoted
adherent of the Roman Catholic faith," or, as Know himself
would have expressed it, "a rotten Papist."

(1) Mr. Laing's preface to the sixth volume of Knox's Works,
p. lxii.
(2) Works. vi. 534.

You would have thought that Know was now pretty well supplied
with female society.  But we are not yet at the end of the
roll.  The last year of his sojourn in England had been spent
principally in London, where he was resident as one of the
chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he boasts, although a
stranger, he had, by God's grace, found favour before many.
(1)  The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once
he writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him
closeted with three, and he and the three women were all in
tears. (2)  Out of all, however, he had chosen two. "GOD," he
writes to them, "BROUGHT US IN SUCH FAMILIAR ACQUAINTANCE,
THAT YOUR HEARTS WERE INCENSED AND KINDLED WITH A SPECIAL
CARE OVER ME, AS A MOTHER USETH TO BE OVER HER NATURAL CHILD;
and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be
more plain than ever I was to any." (3)  And out of the two
even he had chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry
Locke, merchant, nigh to Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as
the address runs.  If one may venture to judge upon such
imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.  I have
a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her
character.  She may have been one of the three tearful
visitors before alluded to; she may even have been that one
of them who was so profoundly moved by some passages of Mrs.
Bowes's letter, which the Reformer opened, and read aloud to
them before they went.  "O would to God," cried this
impressionable matron, "would to God that I might speak with
that person, for I perceive there are more tempted than I."
(4)  This may have been Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it
were, we must not conclude from this one fact that she was
such another as Mrs. Bowes.  All the evidence tends the other
way.  She was a woman of understanding, plainly, who followed
political events with interest, and to whom Knox thought it
worth while to write, in detail, the history of his trials
and successes.  She was religious, but without that morbid
perversity of spirit that made religion so heavy a burden for
the poor-hearted Mrs. Bowes.  More of her I do not find, save
testimony to the profound affection that united her to the
Reformer.  So we find him writing to her from Geneva, in such
terms as these:- "You write that your desire is earnest to
see me.  DEAR SISTER, IF I SHOULD EXPRESS THE THIRST AND
LANGUOR WHICH I HAVE HAD FOR YOUR PRESENCE, I SHOULD APPEAR
TO PASS MEASURE. . . YEA, I WEEP AND REJOICE IN REMEMBRANCE
OF YOU; but that would evanish by the comfort of your
presence, which I assure you is so dear to me, that if the
charge of this little flock here, gathered together in
Christ's name, did not impede me, my coming should prevent my
letter." (5)  I say that this was written from Geneva; and
yet you will observe that it is no consideration for his wife
or mother-in-law, only the charge of his little flock, that
keeps him from setting out forthwith for London, to comfort
himself with the dear presence of Mrs. Locke.  Remember that
was a certain plausible enough pretext for Mrs. Locke to come
to Geneva - "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was
on earth since the days of the Apostles" - for we are now
under the reign of that "horrible monster Jezebel of
England," when a lady of good orthodox sentiments was better
out of London.  It was doubtful, however, whether this was to
be.  She was detained in England, partly by circumstances
unknown, "partly by empire of her head," Mr. Harry Locke, the
Cheapside merchant.  It is somewhat humorous to see Knox
struggling for resignation, now that he has to do with a
faithful husband (for Mr. Harry Locke was faithful).  Had it
been otherwise, "in my heart," he says, "I could have wished
- yea," here he breaks out, "yea, and cannot cease to wish -
that God would guide you to this place." (6)  And after all,
he had not long to wait, for, whether Mr. Harry Locke died in
the interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving permission,
five months after the date of the letter last quoted, "Mrs.
Anne Locke, Harry her son, and Anne her daughter, and
Katherine her maid," arrived in that perfect school of
Christ, the Presbyterian paradise, Geneva.  So now, and for
the next two years, the cup of Knox's happiness was surely
full.  Of an afternoon, when the bells rang out for the
sermon, the shops closed, and the good folk gathered to the
churches, psalm-book in hand, we can imagine him drawing near
to the English chapel in quite patriarchal fashion, with Mrs.
Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke, James his servant,
Patrick his pupil, and a due following of children and maids.
He might be alone at work all morning in his study, for he
wrote much during these two years; but at night, you may be
sure there was a circle of admiring women, eager to hear the
new paragraph, and not sparing of applause.  And what work,
among others, was he elaborating at this time, but the
notorious "First Blast"?  So that he may have rolled out in
his big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail, impatient,
feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the
spirit of counsel, and how men were above them, even as God
is above the angels, in the ears of his own wife, and the two
dearest friends he had on earth.  But he had lost the sense
of incongruity, and continued to despise in theory the sex he
honoured so much in practice, of whom he chose his most
intimate associates, and whose courage he was compelled to
wonder at, when his own heart was faint.

(1) Works, iv. 220.
(2) IB. iii. 380.
(3) IB. iv. 220.
(4) Works, iii. 380.
(5) Works, iv. 238.
(6) Works, iv. 240.

We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and
so, as he would not learn, he was taken away from that
agreeable school, and his fellowship of women was broken up,
not to be reunited.  Called into Scotland to take at last
that strange position in history which is his best claim to
commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
mother-in-law.  The wife soon died.  The death of her
daughter did not altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox,
but she seems to have come and gone between his house and
England.  In 1562, however, we find him characterised as "a
sole man by reason of the absence of his mother-in-law, Mrs.
Bowes," and a passport is got for her, her man, a maid, and
"three horses, whereof two shall return," as well as liberty
to take all her own money with her into Scotland.  This looks
like a definite arrangement; but whether she died at
Edinburgh, or went back to England yet again, I cannot find.

With that great family of hers, unless in leaving her husband
she had quarrelled with them all, there must have been
frequent occasion for her presence, one would think.  Knox at
least survived her; and we possess his epigraph to their long
intimacy, given to the world by him in an appendix to his
latest publication.  I have said in a former paper that Knox
was not shy of personal revelations in his published works.
And the trick seems to have grown on him.  To this last
tract, a controversial onslaught on a Scottish Jesuit, he
prefixed a prayer, not very pertinent to the matter in hand,
and containing references to his family which were the
occasion of some wit in his adversary's answer; and appended
what seems equally irrelevant, one of his devout letters to
Mrs. Bowes, with an explanatory preface.  To say truth, I
believe he had always felt uneasily that the circumstances of
this intimacy were very capable of misconstruction; and now,
when he was an old man, taking "his good night of all the
faithful in both realms," and only desirous "that without any
notable sclander to the evangel of Jesus Christ, he might end
his battle; for as the world was weary of him, so was he of
it;" - in such a spirit it was not, perhaps, unnatural that
he should return to this old story, and seek to put it right
in the eyes of all men, ere he died.  "Because that God," he
says, "because that God now in His mercy hath put an end to
the battle of my dear mother, Mistress Elizabeth Bowes,
before that He put an end to my wretched life, I could not
cease but declare to the world what was the cause of our
great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was neither
flesh nor blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part,
which never suffered her to rest but when she was in the
company of the faithful, of whom (from the first hearing of
the word at my mouth) she judged me to be one. . . . Her
company to me was comfortable (yea, honourable and
profitable, for she was to me and mine a mother), but yet it
was not without some cross; for besides trouble and fashery
of body sustained for her, my mind was seldom quiet, for
doing somewhat for the comfort of her troubled conscience."
(1)  He had written to her years before, from his first exile
in Dieppe, that "only God's hand" could withhold him from
once more speaking with her face to face; and now, when God's
hand has indeed interposed, when there lies between them,
instead of the voyageable straits, that great gulf over which
no man can pass, this is the spirit in which he can look back
upon their long acquaintance.  She was a religious
hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not without some cross and
fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to tend.  He
might have given a truer character of their friendship, had
he thought less of his own standing in public estimation, and
more of the dead woman.  But he was in all things, as Burke
said of his son in that ever memorable passage, a public
creature.  He wished that even into this private place of his
affections posterity should follow him with a complete
approval; and he was willing, in order that this might be so,
to exhibit the defects of his lost friend, and tell the world
what weariness he had sustained through her unhappy
disposition.  There is something here that reminds one of
Rousseau.

(1) Works, vi. 513, 514.

I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left Geneva;
but his correspondence with her continued for three years.
It may have continued longer, of course, but I think the last
letters we possess read like the last that would be written.
Perhaps Mrs. Locke was then remarried, for there is much
obscurity over her subsequent history.  For as long as their
intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in
the Reformer's life.  Here is one passage, for example, the
most likable utterance of Knox's that I can quote:- Mrs Locke
has been upbraiding him as a bad correspondent.  "My
remembrance of you," he answers, "is not so dead, but I trust
it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by no outward
token for one year.  OF NATURE, I AM CHURLISH; YET ONE THING
I ASHAME NOT TO AFFIRM, THAT FAMILIARITY ONCE THOROUGHLY
CONTRACTED WAS NEVER YET BROKEN ON MY DEFAULT.  THE CAUSE MAY
BE THAT I HAVE RATHER NEED OF ALL, THAN THAT ANY HAVE NEED OF
ME.  However it (THAT) be, it cannot be, as I say, the
corporal absence of one year or two that can quench in my
heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which half
a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and
confirm.  And therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly
persuaded that I have you in such memory as becometh the
faithful to have of the faithful." (1)  This is the truest
touch of personal humility that I can remember to have seen
in all the five volumes of the Reformer's collected works: it
is no small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection for her
should have brought home to him this unwonted feeling of
dependence upon others.  Everything else in the course of the
correspondence testifies to a good, sound, down-right sort of
friendship between the two, less ecstatic than it was at
first, perhaps, but serviceable and very equal.  He gives her
ample details is to the progress of the work of reformation;
sends her the sheets of the CONFESSION OF FAITH, "in quairs,"
as he calls it; asks her to assist him with her prayers, to
collect money for the good cause in Scotland, and to send him
books for himself - books by Calvin especially, one on
Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the "Institutes."  "I
must be bold on your liberality," he writes, "not only in
that, but in greater things as I shall need." (2)  On her
part she applies to him for spiritual advice, not after the
manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more positive
spirit, - advice as to practical points, advice as to the
Church of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as
a "mingle-mangle." (3)  Just at the end she ceases to write,
sends him "a token, without writing."  "I understand your
impediment," he answers, "and therefore I cannot complain.
Yet if you understood the variety of my temptations, I doubt
not but you would have written somewhat." (4)  One letter
more, and then silence.

(1) Works, vi. ii.
(2) Works, vi. pp. 21. 101, 108, 130.
(3) IB. vi. 83.
(4) IB. vi. 129.

And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that
correspondence.  It is after this, of course, that he wrote
that ungenerous description of his intercourse with Mrs.
Bowes.  It is after this, also, that we come to the unlovely
episode of his second marriage.  He had been left a widower
at the age of fifty-five.  Three years after, it occurred
apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child
upon the altar of his respect for the Reformer.  In January
1563, Randolph writes to Cecil: "Your Honour will take it for
a great wonder when I shall write unto you that Mr. Knox
shall marry a very near kinswoman of the Duke's, a Lord's
daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of age." (1)
He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
mad a story.  And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564,
Margaret Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of
Ochiltree, aged seventeen, was duly united to John Knox,
Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh, aged fifty-nine, -
to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride, and I
would fain hope of many others for more humane
considerations.  "In this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had
done otherwise."  The Consistory of Geneva, "that most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the
days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
ground of too great a disproportion in age.  I cannot help
wondering whether the old Reformer's conscience did not
uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good custom of
his religious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and-forty
years that separated him from his poor bride.  Fitly enough,
we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she appears at
her husband's deathbed, eight years after.  She bore him
three daughters in the interval; and I suppose the poor
child's martyrdom was made as easy for her as might be.  She
was extremely attentive to him "at the end, we read and he
seems to have spoken to her with some confidence.  Moreover,
and this is very characteristic, he had copied out for her
use a little volume of his own devotional letters to other
women.

(1) Works, vi. 532.

This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs.
Adamson, who had delighted much in his company "by reason
that she had a troubled conscience," and whose deathbed is
commemorated at some length in the pages of his history. (1)

(1) Works, i. 246.

And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox's
intercourse with women was quite of the highest sort.  It is
characteristic that we find him more alarmed for his own
reputation than for the reputation of the women with whom he
was familiar.  There was a fatal preponderance of self in all
his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he
never condescended to become a learner in his turn.  And so
there is not anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and
they were never so renovating to his spirit as they might
have been.  But I believe they were good enough for the
women.  I fancy the women knew what they were about when so
many of them followed after Knox.  It is not simply because a
man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from
the wrong and sees his way plainly through the maze of life,
great qualities as these are, that people will love and
follow him, and write him letters full of their "earnest
desire for him" when he is absent.  It is not over a man,
whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special
care," as it were over their natural children.  In the strong
quiet patience of all his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes,
we may perhaps see one cause of the fascination he possessed
for these religious women.  Here was one whom you could
besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were
so elated it was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again
on Friday that you were so depressed it was plain God had
cast you off for ever; and he would read all this patiently
and sympathetically, and give you an answer in the most
reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into heads - who
knows? - like a treatise on divinity.  And then, those easy
tears of his.  There are some women who like to see men
crying; and here was this great-voiced, bearded man of God,
who might be seen beating the solid pulpit every Sunday, and
casting abroad his clamorous denunciations to the terror of
all, and who on the Monday would sit in their parlours by the
hour, and weep with them over their manifold trials and
temptations.  Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea
with all these penitents. . . . It sounds a little vulgar, as
the past will do, if we look into it too closely.  We could
not let these great folk of old into our drawing-rooms.
Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a
housemaid.  The old manners and the old customs go sinking
from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited
the glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his
way of thinking, any one he could strike hands with and talk
to freely and without offence, save perhaps the porter at the
end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who
loafs all day before the public-house.  So that this little
note of vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it is to
be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old
intimacies; so that we may only remember Knox as one who was
very long-suffering with women, kind to them in his own way,
loving them in his own way - and that not the worst way, if
it was not the best - and once at least, if not twice, moved
to his heart of hearts by a woman, and giving expression to
the yearning he had for her society in words that none of us
need be ashamed to borrow.

And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone
over in this essay begins when the Reformer was already
beyond the middle age, and already broken in bodily health:
it has been the story of an old man's friendships.  This it
is that makes Knox enviable.  Unknown until past forty, he
had then before him five-and-thirty years of splendid and
influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an
uncommon degree of power, lived in his own country as a sort
of king, and did what he would with the sound of his voice
out of the pulpit.  And besides all this, such a following of
faithful women!  One would take the first forty years gladly,
if one could be sure of the last thirty.  Most of us, even
if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of gray
hairs, we retain some degree of public respect in the latter
days of our existence, will find a falling away of friends,
and a solitude making itself round about us day by day, until
we are left alone with the hired sick-nurse.  For the
attraction of a man's character is apt to be outlived, like
the attraction of his body; and the power to love grows
feeble in its turn, as well as the power to inspire love in
others.  It is only with a few rare natures that friendship
is added to friendship, love to love, and the man keeps
growing richer in affection - richer, I mean, as a bank may
be said to grow richer, both giving and receiving more -
after his head is white and his back weary, and he prepares
to go down into the dust of death.