"I

ON DAWDLING.

BY THE PRESENT WRITER.

WAS always one to do things quickly if I did them at all—

I was never a dawdle." So speaks of her phthisie galopante the very peculiar heroine of a well-known story, which I do not think it right to name, for it belongs to a doubtful class and my acquaintance with it was only made by turning over its last leaves while waiting in a circulating library for something much less spicy but more wholesome, and, I think, in the long run, much more pleasant.

To those who are unable to adopt Lenore's words, who cannot boast that they are in the habit of doing things quickly but on the contrary are obliged to confess that they are greatly inclined to dawdle, the present paper is addressed. The writer has himself dawdled over it so long that he will not now delay to do anything more than pile, one upon the other, the loose stones he has collected, and will use neither chisel nor trowel.

A good deal of indefiniteness and inaccuracy would be avoided by writers if they bound themselves down to a certain extent to the dictionary meanings of the principal words employed in their discussions. "To dawdle," it seems, is akin to the Scotch term to daidle or walk unsteadily, like a child; and hence it comes to mean doing a thing in a purposeless manner, trifling and wasting time. Dawdling, then, is not pure do-nothingness, but the habit of doing something listlessly, in the wrong way and at the wrong time. It is to behave in direct opposition to the admonition, age quod agis.

Dawdling is one of the most dangerous forms of sloth, which in all its forms is one of the worst enemies of all that is best and noblest in human life. When Mr. Gurney asked an intelligent foreigner, who had travelled over the greater part of the world, whether he had observed any one quality which more than another could be regarded as the characteristic of our species ?—his answer was in broken English: "Me tink dat all men love lazy "-agreeing herein with the brilliant writer, Count Joseph de Maistre. "Quel est le veritable pèchè héréditaire du genre humain ?" he asks; and he answers that this real hereditary sin of mankind is

"He who can

not pride, or ambition, or selfishness, but sloth. triumph over his natural indolence," he adds, "can triumph over everything."

It has been said already that the dawdler is not necessarily an idler. Only a very brainless ninny can set himself out for doing nothing; but very many who imagine themselves to be very busy would, if they were as clear-sighted as Seneca, confess with him that they had spent most of their time operosè nihil agendo, "doing nothing very laboriously."

The dawdler begins his hard day's work of dawdling the first thing in the morning. That branch of the subject has been handled so often already, that the present writer may pass it by without any other enforcement than the words of Lord Chatham to his son. "I would have inscribed on the curtains of your bed and the walls of your chamber: if you do not rise early, you can make progress in nothing.' If you do not set apart your hours of reading, if you suffer yourself or anyone else to break in upon them, your days will slip through your hands unprofitable and frivolous, and unenjoyed by yourself."

Lord Chatham's words go beyond early rising. If we were discussing that department of dawdling, we should denounce all dawdling in going to bed. There can be sloth shown there as well as at the other end of our night's rest. It is often impossible for people to remedy something that is wrong in their habits, at the very moment the bad habit comes into play. They must begin higher up; they must trace the evil to its source. Go to bed betimes if you are in earnest in wishing to get up early, and to discharge the early duties of the next day in good time and in due order. An ingenious writer in The Cornhill Magazine, in its earliest and best days, bestowed merited praise on the servant-maid who said one night, "I must go now and get my sleeping done". considering that as much a part of her duty as her sweeping or her cooking.

There is a great deal of dawdling in reading books. The present writer used to pride himself in reading the prefaces to books, whereas it would often have been wiser to try and get at the pith of the book so as to qualify one's self (for instance) to give an intelligent and accurate account of the book to a friend who might not be able to read it for himself. For the want of this and other devices one may dawdle over books very studiously in appearance, but really in a very profitless manner. For there is a sort of drowsy dawdling which deceives the dawdler himself,

and still more onlookers into the notion that he is doing much, while in reality he is doing worse than nothing. To keep on doggedly at a certain study is not always the way to make progress. There are different degrees of sleepiness in study. Some sorts can be shaken off by an honest effort-others we may as well yield to, or at most, combat them indirectly. The mere fatigue of a day's work may make us sleepy: those who have the misfortune to be smokers or drinkers of spirits, even in the most moderate and legitimate form and measure, are more liable to sleepiness. But the sleep that steals on us in study is often a form of dawdling. Shake it off somehow. "A common cause of drowsiness," says some one whose name I should give if I knew it, "is the directing of the mind constantly to the same subject in the same manner : this is the mistake of diligent students who forget that the mind, like the stomach, requires a mixed diet and loses its appetite and power of digestion, unless the nutriment is varied at least in form. The effort to study continuously, where the brain declares itself unable to receive more excitation in that particular manner is decidedly injurious, and should not be persisted in. If it is necessary to pursue the subject, the manner of study should be varied. A friend may be requested to question the student, or he may test his knowledge by contriving questions and looking out the answers in his books of reference which should be read aloud. A man of my acquaintance, of moderate abilities, attributes his great success partly to a habit of extempore speaking in his room to an imaginary audience when reading had become wearisome."

There can be dawdling in more important matters than reading and study. Promptitude is seldom mentioned in any catalogue of virtues; but Father Coleridge, in the seventh chapter of his "Prisoners of the King," has some useful remarks about "that very beautiful virtue of promptitude which is so dear to God." Like other graces (he adds), it has a natural representative and image in the natural quickness in which some persons excel others so much. He takes care to warn us that this promptitude has nothing of impetuosity, or hurry, or fussiness about it; and the very same caution has to be given where there is question of the activity and promptitude which we wish to take the place of dawdling. Father Coleridge's disparaging allusion to fussiness may be emphasised by quoting Josh Billings' denunciation of fuss. His absurd spelling need not be followed, for it adds little to the fun and takes something from the sense. "Fuss is like an old setting hen when she comes off from her nest. Fuss is like cold

water dropped into hot grease-it sputters and sputters and then sputters again. Fuss is half-sister to hurry, and neither can't do anything without getting in their own way and stepping on themselves. There is more fuss in this world than there is hurry, and there is a thousand times more of either of them than there is of despatch. Fuss works hard all day and don't do anything, goes to bed tired at night, then gets up next morning, and begins again where she left off."

To begin again where we left off-a very powerful incentive to struggle against the natural tendency to dawdle is to reflect how much can be made out of time when we use it with earnestness, when we act in direct opposition to the policy which the first Lord Holland was wont playfully to recommend to his more famous son, Charles James Fox: "Never do to-day what you can possibly put off till to-morrow, and never do yourself what you can get anyone else to do for you." The exact opposite of the doctrine preached so well by "a marvellous boy" of Thomas Davis's time, in a poem which Spencer Walpole, in the new volume of his solid "History of England," quotes as the most impressive and most inspiriting of the poems of The Nation:

*

The work that should to-day be wrought

Defer not till to-morrow;

The help that should within be sought
Scorn from without to borrow.
Old maxims these, but stout and true,
They speak in trumpet-tone :
To do at once what is to do

And trust ourselves alone.

There is in Moore's "Life of Sheridan "

a passage which is worth quoting for its own sake, and which is sufficiently relevant to be quoted here. After citing Buffon's famous saying "Genius is Patience," and that of another Frenchman, "La patience cherche et le génie trouve," he goes on to say (Vol. I., page 210): "There is little doubt that to the coöperation of these two

*Father Faber (Growth in Holiness, chapter 14, page 226), quotes this as "the Frencn statesman's maxim, admirable for the prudent discharge of worldly duties." He adopts it in a certain sense along with its apparent contradictory; never put off and never anticipate, but do each thing in its own time, not later, and not sooner either.

+ See IRISH MONTHLY, Vol. II., p. 626, for the same thought expressed also by Helvetius, Cuvier, Lord Chesterfield, Lord Derby, and others.

powers all the brightest inventions of this world are owing; that Patience inust first explore the depths where the pearl lies hid before Genius boldly dives and brings it up full into light. There are, it is true, some striking exceptions to this rule. But the records of Immortality furnish few such instances, and all we know of the works that she has hitherto marked with her seal, sufficiently authorises the general position-that nothing great or durable has ever been produced with ease, and that Labour is the parent of all the lasting wonders of this world. whether in verse or stone, whether poetry or pyramids."

Father Faber-not blessed Peter, but fascinating Frederickdevotes the fourteenth chapter of his treatise on "Growth in Holiness" to the treatment of the spiritual bearings of this subject. No doubt he treated it more fully in the sermons of which the mere headings are given in the second volume of his posthumous "Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjects," at pages 230, 232, and 279. One would like to know his views on frittering as distinguished from idleness, from procrastination, and from actual dawdling. This distinction is one of the heads he sets down.

But the present writer would feel himself guilty of this dawdling if he were to linger much longer just now over the subject. Let his young reader fix in his memory these lines of Adelaide Procter's, and act them out :

One by one thy duties wait thee

Let thy whole strength go to each.
Let no future dreams elate thee,

Learn thou first what these can teach.

Better still Dr. Samuel Johnson's favourite ejaculation: "Lord, make me remember that the night comes when no one can work,”alluding of course, to that saying of our divine Redeemer (John, ix. 4), "Me oportet operari opera ejus qui misit me, donec dies est; venit nox quando nemo potest operari." How many, reading it here, will fix this in their memories as one of the habitual watchwords of their lives? "I must work the works of Him, that sent me, while it is day; the night comes when no one can work." While it is day. We realise our Lord's meaning better if we shut out the ideas of factories and gas, and the artificial life of cities, and think of the darkness stealing on for those who are at work out in the fields. For them, all possibility of work is over when daylight Venit nox! Not only did Dr. Johnston use this ejacula

is gone.