The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Brontè declare, in reference to the “exact punctuality and obedience to the laws of time and place” enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could tell the value of this control in after life: “with their impulsive natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external laws.” In the last of her own fictions—and, though unfinished, the ripest and best—Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who, when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that “such decisions _ab extra_ are sometimes a wonderful relief to those whose habit has been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else;” and that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de Vigny, in one of his highly finished _historiettes_, speculates on the nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility in other hands; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience, which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for performing their military service; and licence or inactivity, however acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. “I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” says Wamba to himself, when suddenly freed from sharing the captivity of his master; “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” So Elia, in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long holiday has no holiday henceforth; where he expatiates on the sight of “busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing by—the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from it.” Many an individual experience can put its own private interpretation on the averment of one of Rousseau’s correspondents—_Ce lien si redouté me delivre d’une servitude beaucoup plus redoubtable_.