A man who had been complaining because it had not rained for a good while, when the rain did come then grumbled because it did not come sooner.  The rich, however, rather than the poor, talk of the “wretched weather,” because they have fewer real sorrows to grumble at.  Indeed, the poor often set an example of cheerfulness and resignation in this matter which is very praiseworthy.  “What wretched weather we are having!” said a man to an old woman of his acquaintance whom he passed on the road.  “Well, sir,” she replied, “any weather is better than none.”  Fuller tells us of a gentleman travelling on a misty morning who asked a shepherd—­such men being generally skilled in the physiognomy of the heavens—­what weather it would be.  “It will be,” said the shepherd, “what weather shall please me.”  Being asked to explain his meaning, he said, “Sir, it shall be what weather pleaseth God; and what weather pleaseth God, pleaseth me.”

The people who are most satisfied with their climate are the Australians and New Zealanders.  I never met one of them who did not, in five minutes, begin to abuse the English climate and glorify his own.  They will not admit that it has a single fault, though we have all heard of the hot winds that make the Australian summer terribly oppressive.  The fact is that every country has a bad wind, or some other kind of supposed drawback, which is very trying to strangers, but which, whether they know it or not, suits the inhabitants.  God knows better than we do the sort of weather that each country should have.

What are we to say about the winter we have lately been enduring?  Well, it was very “trying” for us all, and an even stronger word might be used by the poor, the aged, and the delicate.  Still, let us remember that without omniscience it is impossible to say whether any given season is good or bad.  So infinitely complex are the relations of things that we are very bad judges as to what is best for us.  How do we know that our past winter of discontent may not be followed by a glorious summer, and that the two may not be merely antecedent and consequent, but in some degree cause and effect?

On no other subject are people so prone to become panegyrists of the past as in this matter of the weather.  “Ah,” they say, “we never now have the lovely summers we used to have.”  Reading the other day Walpole’s Letters, I discovered that so far from the summers in his day being “lovely,” they were not uniformly better than the winters:  “The way to ensure summer in England,” he writes, “is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.”  This remark was made of the summer of 1773; that of 1784 was not more balmy, judging from the same writer’s comment:  “The month of June, according to custom immemorial, is as cold as Christmas.  I had a fire last night, and all my rosebuds, I believe, would have been very glad to sit by it.”

Here is another weather grumble from the same quaint letter-writer:  “The deluge began here but on Monday last, and then rained nearly eight-and-forty hours without intermission.  My poor bag has not a dry thread to its back.  In short, every summer one lives in a state of mutiny and murmur, and I have found the reason:  it is because we will affect to have a summer, and have no title to any such thing.”