1st Gent. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws.
Carry no weight, no force.
2d Gent. But levity
Is causal too, and makes the sum of weight.
For power finds its place in lack of power;
Advance is cession, and the driven ship
May run aground because the helmsman's thought
Lacked force to balance opposites."
It was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried. In the
prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny,
and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms
from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds of Lowick
churchyard. Swiftly moving clouds only now and then allowed a gleam to
light up any object, whether ugly or beautiful, that happened to stand
within its golden shower. In the churchyard the objects were
remarkably various, for there was a little country crowd waiting to see
the funeral. The news had spread that it was to be a "big burying;"
the old gentleman had left written directions about everything and
meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters." This was true; for old
Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been
devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who
would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money,
but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and
perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his
power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend that
there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not
presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest
nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early
life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that
it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old
gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments
based on his personal acquaintance. In any case, he had been bent on
having a handsome funeral, and on having persons "bid" to it who would
rather have stayed at home. He had even desired that female relatives
should follow him to the grave, and poor sister Martha had taken a
difficult journey for this purpose from the Chalky Flats. She and Jane
would have been altogether cheered (in a tearful manner) by this sign
that a brother who disliked seeing them while he was living had been
prospectively fond of their presence when he should have become a
testator, if the sign had not been made equivocal by being extended to
Mrs. Vincy, whose expense in handsome crape seemed to imply the most
presumptuous hopes, aggravated by a bloom of complexion which told
pretty plainly that she was not a blood-relation, but of that generally
objectionable class called wife's kin.