Historical Lectures and Essays Part 4

And all because they have forgot What 'tis to be a man--to curb and spurn.

The tyrant in us: the ign.o.bler self Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute; And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, No purpose, save its share in that wild war In which, through countless ages, living things Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving G.o.d, Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?

That we are brutes, great G.o.d, we know too well; Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step; Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs; Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel, Instead of teeth and claws:--all these we are.

Are we no more than these, save in degree?

Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong l.u.s.ts, Taking the sword, to perish by the sword Upon the universal battle-field, Even as the things upon the moor outside?

The heath eats up green gra.s.s and delicate herbs; The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine; The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch; And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak; The many eat the few; great nations, small; And he who cometh in the name of all Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.

While ever out of the eternal heavens Looks patient down the great magnanimous G.o.d, Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all; Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, What 'tis to be a man--to give, not take; To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour; To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.

"He that cometh in the name of all"--the popular military despot--the "saviour of his country"--he is our internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, whenever he rises--the inaugurator of that Imperialism, that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of her--the sink into which all wicked States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by _panem et circenses_--bread and games--or, if need be, Pilgrimages; that the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last.

That, let it ape as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as another Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead freedom, really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money-bag, by the divine sanction of the bayonet.

That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last.

Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's spear of truth and fact. And--

"Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth them down. Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city."

Have we not seen that too, though, thank G.o.d, neither in England nor in the United States?

And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.

The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold, by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will they revive?

Under the genial influences of free inst.i.tutions will the good seed which is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them all what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in past years--a joy and an inspiration to all the nations round? Shall it be thus? G.o.d grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only stand by, watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working out of a tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of the whole civilised world.

For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what can befall? What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed, as fail it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?

That last dread mood Of sated l.u.s.t, and dull decrepitude.

No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no G.o.d.

When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, Crouched on the bare-worn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save, The toothless nations shiver to their grave.

And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. Let us accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom, and remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy is the same as the one condition of a true aristocracy, namely, virtue. Let us teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 300 years ago--"It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the subject a king, the lowborn n.o.ble, the deformed beautiful. These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish."

Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic. For if they--which G.o.d forbid--should grow corrupt and weak by their own sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were brought by bitter shame and woe. And all that is before them and the whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the world has not seen for ages--a true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very G.o.ds, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old Voluspa.

When brethren shall be Each other's bane, And sisters' sons rend The ties of kin.

Hard will be that age, An age of bad women, An axe-age, a sword-age, Shields oft cleft in twain, A storm-age, a wolf-age, Ere earth meet its doom.

So sang, 2000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess, of our own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our own calling and election.

G.o.d grant that day may never come. But G.o.d grant, also, that if that day does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala sang, of the day when G.o.ds, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire.

When slaked Surtur's flame is, Still the man and the maiden, Hight Valour and Life, Shall keep themselves hid In the wood of remembrance.

The dew of the dawning For food it shall serve them: From them spring new peoples.

New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human society is democracy.

A nation--and, were it even possible, a whole world--of free men, lifting free foreheads to G.o.d and Nature; calling no man master--for one is their master, even G.o.d; knowing and obeying their duties towards the Maker of the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but because they loved and liked it, and had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and peace; because the law of G.o.d was in their hearts, and needing at last, it may be, neither king nor priest, for each man and each woman, in their place, were kings and priests to G.o.d. Such a nation--such a society--what n.o.bler conception of mortal existence can we form? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of G.o.d come on earth?

And tell me not that that is impossible--too fair a dream to be ever realised. All that makes it impossible is the selfishness, pa.s.sions, weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters of themselves, and therefore of circ.u.mstances; who are miserable because, not being masters of themselves, they try to master circ.u.mstance, to pull down iron walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, self.

But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful that it must be true. If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still hereafter. G.o.d would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagination had He not meant to translate, some day, that imagination into fact.

The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation can grasp, will ensure failure on failure--follies, fanaticisms, disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children baulked of their holiday.

But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not perhaps here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on earth: but in some future civilisation--it may be in far lands beyond the sea--when all that you and we have made and done shall be as the forest-grown mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the Mississippi valley.

RONDELET, {7} THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST {8}

"Apollo, G.o.d of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was straying once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his abode there.

Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he wandered through all the towns of the province in search of a place propitious for him and for his disciples. At last he perceived a new city, constructed from the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion. He contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of Montpellier a temple for himself and his priests. All smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by the character of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of letters, and above all of medicine. What site is more delicious and more lovely? A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men born for all the labours of the intellect. All around vast horizons and enchanting sites--meadows, vines, olives, green champaigns; mountains and hills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriant vegetation--everywhere the richest production of the land and the water.

Hail to thee sweet and dear city! Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest afar the light of the glory of thy name!"

"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming book on the "Doctors of the Time of Moliere" I quote--"is not, as one might think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most ill.u.s.trious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in the seventeenth century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the faculty' of Montpellier had made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of the sacred and the profane. The theses which were sustained there began by an invocation to G.o.d, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these words: 'This thesis will be sustained in the sacred Temple of Apollo.'"

But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native city may seem, they are really not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, or Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France. In the far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west the white Pyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of the Cevennes on the north-west, the Herault slopes gently down towards the "Etangs," or great salt-water lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue, the field of Caius Marius, where still run herds of half-wild horses, descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the blue Mediterranean. The great almond orchards, each one sheet of rose- colour in spring; the mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards, cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the rugged and arid downs are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the bees extract the famous white honey of Narbonne. The native flowers and shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have made the "Flora Montpeliensis," and with it the names of Rondelet and his disciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and sh.e.l.ls upon its sh.o.r.es afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the "Animals of the Sea." The innumerable wild fowl of the Benches du Rhone; the innumerable songsters and other birds of pa.s.sage, many of them unknown in these islands, and even in the north of France itself, which haunt every copse of willow and aspen along the brook-sides; the gaudy and curious insects which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, and yet bracing sunlight; all these have made the district of Montpellier a home prepared by Nature for those who study and revere her.

Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said the pleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the labours of the intellect. They are a very mixed race, and, like most mixed races, quick-witted, and handsome also. There is probably much Roman blood among them, especially in the towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman than Rome itself. The Roman remains are more perfect and more interesting--so the late Dr. Whewell used to say--than any to be seen now in Italy; and the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city upon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V. There must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc: for the Visigothic Kings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that they were crushed by the invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise, there may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age by those descendants of Eudes of Aquitaine who established themselves as kings of Majorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not become entirely French till 1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those potentates. The Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. They held the country from about A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelled by Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their towers of meagre stonework, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One may see, too--so tradition holds--upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy that one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch of the old Mahommedan race, which pa.s.sed like a flood over that Christian land.

Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they left behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university of Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the Middle Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived their parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the Moors were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing with them traditions of that primaeval science which had been revealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, the mother of all the universities in Europe. Nay, some went farther still, and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charlemagne, and of Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and even--if a letter of St. Bernard's was to be believed--of a certain bishop who went as early as the second century to consult the doctors of Montpellier; and it would have been in vain to reply to them that in those days, and long after them, Montpellier was not yet built. The facts are said to be: that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century Montpellier had its schools of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into a university by Pope Nicholas IV. in 1289.

The university of Montpellier, like--I believe--most foreign ones, resembled more a Scotch than an English university. The students lived, for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, and const.i.tuted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A terror they were often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carry arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords, were generally all the property they possessed. If, moreover, anyone set up a noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars could compel the town authorities to turn him out. They were most of them, probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, living poorly, working hard, and--those at least of them who were in the colleges--cruelly beaten daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to have comforted themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life out of school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous _patelinage_" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer--the three trades were then combined--in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel--a job of nepotism which was common enough in those days. But his heart was in science and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to Paris to study there; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to study again.

The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed procurator of the scholars--a post which brought him in a small fee on each matriculation--and that year he took a fee, among others, from one of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, Francois Rabelais himself.

And what shall I say of him?--who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in his generation; possessed of colossal learning--of all science which could be gathered in his days--of practical and statesmanlike wisdom--of knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all his compeers--of eloquence, which when he speaks of pure and n.o.ble things becomes heroic, and, as it were, inspired--of scorn for meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance--of esteem, genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate of the Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,--and all this great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demiG.o.d and the satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious life; to die--says the legend--saying, "I go to seek a great perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of Pantagruelists--careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh at everything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five senses like the brutes which perish. There are those who read his books to make them laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined to weep. Let any young man who may see these words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy; and think of Tennyson's words--

Arise, and fly The reeling faun, the sensual feast; Strive upwards, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.

But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530. He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, and he had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise. This Louis de Berquin, a man well known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman and scholar, holding a place in the court of Francis I., who had translated into French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, and had a.s.serted that it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the Holy Spirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, which t.i.tles--Berquin averred--belonged alone to G.o.d. Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne, with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poor Berquin, and tried to burn his books and him; twice had that angel in human form, Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I., saved him from their clutches; but when Francis--taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia--at last returned from his captivity in Spain, the suppression of heresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his mother, Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to G.o.d, that Louis Berquin--who would not, in spite of the entreaties of Erasmus, purchase his life by silence--was burnt at last on the Place de Greve, being first strangled, because he was of gentle blood.

Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was now forty- two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused him his three years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once with the red gown of the bachelors. That red gown--or, rather, the ragged phantom of it--is still shown at Montpellier, and must be worn by each bachelor when he takes his degree. Unfortunately, antiquarians a.s.sure us that the precious garment has been renewed again and again--the students having clipped bits of it away for relics, and clipped as earnestly from the new gowns as their predecessors had done from the authentic original.

Doubtless, the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latin translations then in use, but from original Greek texts, with comments and corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the minds of the Montpellier students; and still more influence--and that not altogether a good one--must Rabelais's lighter talk have had, as he lounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig f.a.ggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superst.i.tion around them, which is notable in that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that day. Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling-player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat, little man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynical enough, and too cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if he laughs at him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it, nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who has done that, neither will he be the last.

Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received, on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearest friends, according to the ancient custom of the University of Montpellier. He then went off to practise medicine in a village at the foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children. Then he found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and alleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taught anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to dissect. We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wild volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those days; for students then had to wander from place to place, generally on foot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes it wonderful that all of them did not--as some of them doubtless did--die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses for the paternal shop or plough.

Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with and married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to have been as poor as he.

But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron; and the patronage of the great was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage of the public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne--or rather then of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. to transfer the ancient see--was a model of the literary gentleman of the sixteenth century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and ma.n.u.scripts, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of the present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved to wander with Rondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired from public life to peace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master, Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry II., and Diana of Poitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy way of atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and feasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments.

Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with some justice. He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of a celibate churchman, a fault which--if it really existed--was, in those days, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose orthodoxy was suspected. And for awhile Pellicier was in prison. After his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet and the school of disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered together the Garum, that cla.s.sic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so child-like, superst.i.tious if you will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for cla.s.sic antiquity, that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from the fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin Gerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet and Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of the sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised the Scordium of the ancients. "The discovery," says Professor Planchon, "made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at that moment of naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to re-discover a plant of Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event."

I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of bra.s.s, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo himself.

For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, _Linaria Domini Pellicerii_--"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;" and that name it will keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.

But to return. To this good Patron--who was the Amba.s.sador at Venice--the newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; and to Venice he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women's shape. Jeanne Sandre had an elder sister, Catharine, who had brought her up. She was married to a wealthy man, but she had no children of her own. For four years she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and now she was a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear.

She carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe out of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her fortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole condition that she should live with him and her sister. For years afterwards she watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys--the three boys, alas! all died young--and over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and was to them all a mother--advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet with genuine grat.i.tude as his guardian angel.