All this endears Mr. Sandow to his people; they say, ‘He is so very human and not the least like a clergyman.’ He would not be pleased with this expression if it came to his ears, though if he was told he was not in the least like most other clergymen there would be no complaint. For he thinks that the office of a priest is to enter into the joys and pleasures of those he ministers to, not only to exact their attendance at church, and, as he modestly says of himself, ‘bore them stiff’ with his interminable sermons, and who shall say he is wrong? Indeed to see him at a ball, it is more the other guests that enter into his pleasures than he into theirs, for he is one of the best dancers that ever stepped, and there is a queue of ladies, as at the booking-office of Victoria Station on a Bank Holiday, waiting to have a turn with the Terpsichorean vicar. But, like some modified Cinderella, he keeps early hours, and vanishes on the stroke of one, in order to be up in good time in the morning, and at his work. For in addition to all his parties, his interviews, his dances, his Sunday services, his games of racquets, he has a further life of his own, being a voluminous and widely-read author.
This literary profession of his is no mere matter of a parish-magazine, or of letters to the _Guardian_ about the Eastward position, or the _Spectator_ about early buttercups, but he publishes on his own account at least two volumes every year. Usually those take the form of essays, written in the second or pair-of-wooden-shoes manner, and probably each of them contains a greater number of true and edifying reflections than have ever before appeared between the covers of a single volume. It is no disparagement of them to say that they seem to go on for ever, for so do the waters of a spring, except in times of such severe drought as is unknown to the pen of this ready writer. They all begin in an enticing manner, for Mr. Sandow tells you how he was walking across the Park one morning, when he observed two sparrows quarrelling over a piece of bread that some kind bystander had thrown them. This naturally gives rise to reflections as to the distressing manner in which ill-temper spoils our day. The kind bystander is, of course, Providence, who throws quantities of bread, and Mr. Sandow tells us that it is the truer wisdom not to behave like silly sparrows and all wrangle over one piece, but hop cheerfully away, with a blessing, in the certainty of finding plenty more. Or again Mr. Sandow describes how he was hurrying to the station to catch a train, fussing himself with the thought that he would not be in time for it, and not noticing the limpid blue of the sky and the white clouds that floated across it. When he came to the station he found he had still five minutes to spare and so need not have hurried at all, but drunk in the gladness of God’s spring. From this lesson, he humbly hopes, he will be less disposed to fuss in the future, but trust to the wise hand that guides him. We are not told what would have been the moral if Mr. Sandow had missed his train, but then, after all he did not write about that, and one can only conjecture that it would have been a lesson to him as to how to wait patiently (picking up edifying crumbs at the station) for the next train. Or he sees a house in process of being pulled down, with gaping wall showing the internal decoration, and tenderly wonders what sweet private converse took place in front of the denuded fire-place. His vivid imagination pictures charming scenes: on one wall on the third storey was a paper with repeated images of Jack and Jill and Red Riding Hood and Little Miss Muffit, and he conjectures that here was the nursery, and the paper looked down on children at play. But the children are grown up now; they have outlived their nursery, as we all do, but instead of regretting days that are no more we must go on from strength to strength, till we reach the imperishable house of many mansions which nobody will ever pull down. At the end of each of these musings written in the pair-of-wooden-shoes mode comes a passage of this kind in the second manner, a sudden purple patch about imperishable houses, or the towers of Beulah, or the dawning of the everlasting day.