divided life, or none that is visible and sensible.  Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with every nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them of old that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone, unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life.  It is as though a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely painted with the blank—blank, not simple—generalities of a vulgar hand.  Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a wholesale fashion, not “turning the hours to moments,” which joy can do to the full as perfectly as pain.

The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language confused.  When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, and her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not a boot.  Yet Amarantha’s foot is as lovely as her hand.  It, too, has a “tender inward”; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything but delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night of dances; it does, in fact, but balance her.  It is fit to cling to the ground, but rather for springing than for rest.

And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.  It is a part of vital design and has a history; and man does not go erect but at a price of weariness and pain.  How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

Tender, too, is the silence of human feet.  You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow.  Woman, who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow.  The vintager is not heard among the vines, nor the harvester on his threshing-floor of stone.  There is a kind of simple stealth in their coming and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out of the rows of harvest when you thought yourself alone.  The lack of noise in their movement sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter floats.

But we shall not praise the “simple, sweet” and “earth-confiding feet” enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time of song.  If Poetry was first divided by the march, and next varied by the dance, then to the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought, the instruction, and the dream that could not speak by prose.  Out of that little physical law, then, grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things we know; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate test of the thinker: “Is it accepted of Song?”

The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial rules of time and exactitude, not to be broken, laws that are made secure against the restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificant liberties—trivial laws to restrain from a trivial freedom.  And within the gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world of mystic virtue.  They enclose, they imply, they lock, they answer for it.  Lesser virtues may flower in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; but infinite virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry, and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell.  It is no wonder that every poet worthy the name has had a passion for metre, for the very verse.  To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior range immeasurable.

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication with a beggar.  Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle; there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office; a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or sign, nothing whatever of intercourse.  If a dog or a cat accosts you, or a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it.  But the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in his direction, and never a word to excuse you.

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to nothing else.  Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the beggar’s remark than to leave a shop without “Good morning.”  When complaint is made of the modern social manner—that it has no merit but what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires—the habit of manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of.  To the simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible act of giving.  We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example.  An elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral palazzo to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally translated, “Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil,” and the last word she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local dialect—a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as nothing else can do it.  Would it were possible to present the phrase to English readers in all its own helpless good-humour.  The excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.  It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot recall it without a smile.  To a mind having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all speakers—a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached, and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect “familiar, but by no means vulgar.”  Besides, even if our Englishwoman could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, “Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil,” she would still not have the opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal.  And everywhere in the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to beg from you when you least expected it, calls you “my daughter,” you can hardly reply without kindness.  Where the tourist is thoroughly well known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the rich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be some dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by travellers.

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put