The gruffness of Ursa Major should never be likened to that of the Sage of Chelsea. Carlyle vented his spleen on the nearest object, as irate gentlemen sometimes kick at the cat; but Johnson merely sparred for points. When Miss Monckton undertook to refute his statements as to the shallowness of Sterne by declaring that "Tristram Shandy" affected her to tears, Johnson rolled himself into contortions, made an exasperating grimace, and replied, "Why, dearest, that is because you are a dunce!" Afterward, when reproached for the remark, he replied, "Madam, if I had thought so, I surely would not have said it."

Once, at the house of Garrick, to the terror of every one, Burke contradicted Johnson flatly, but Johnson's good sense revealed itself by his making no show of resentment. Burke's experience was, it must be said, exceptional. An equally exciting, but harmless occasion, was the only time that the author of "Rasselas" met the man who wrote the "Wealth of Nations," Johnson called Adam Smith a liar, and Smith promptly handed back an epithet not in the Dictionary. Nevertheless, old Ursa spoke in an affectionate praise of "Adam," as he called him thereafter, thus recognizing the right of the other man to be frank if he cared to be. Johnson wanted no privilege that he was not willing to grant to others—except perhaps that of dictator of opinions.

When Blair asked Johnson if he thought any modern man could have written "Ossian," Johnson replied, "Yes, sir—many men, many women, and many children." And if Blair took umbrage at the remark, so much the worse for Blair.

We have recently heard of the Boston lady who died and went to Heaven, and on being questioned by an archangel as to how she liked it, replied languidly, "Very, very beautiful it all is!" And then sighed and added, "But it is not Boston!" This story seems to illustrate that all tales have their prototype, for Boswell tells of taking Doctor Johnson out to Greenwich Park, and saying, "Now, now, isn't this fine!" But Johnson would not enthuse; he only grunted, "All very fine—but it's not Fleet Street."

On another occasion when a Scotchman was dilating on the noble prospects to be enjoyed among the hills of Scotland, Johnson called a halt by saying, "Sir, let me tell you that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever sees is the highroad that leads him to England."

This seems to evince a strong prejudice toward Scotland, and several Scots, with their usual plentiful lack of wit, have so solemnly written it down. But the more sensible way is to conclude that the situation simply afforded opportunity for a little harmless banter.

Another equally indisputable proof of prejudice is shown when Boswell tells Johnson of the wonderful preaching of a Quaker woman. Johnson listened in grim, cold silence and then exclaimed: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

One of the leading encyclopedias, I see, says, "Doctor Johnson was one of the greatest conversationalists of all time." The writer evidently does not distinguish between talk, conversation and harangue. Johnson could talk and he often harangued; but he was not a conversationalist. Neither could he address a public assembly, and I do not find that he ever attempted it. Good talkers are seldom orators. One reads with amusement tinged with pity, of Carlyle's sleepless nights and cold, terror-fraught anticipations of his Lord Rector's speech. In deliberative gatherings a very small man could apply the snuffers to the great Dictator of Letters.

"Sir," said Doctor Johnson to a talkative politician, at a dinner-party, "I perceive you are a vile Whig," and then he proceeded to demolish him. Yet Johnson himself was a Whig, although he never knew it; just as he was a liberal in religion, and yet was boastful of being a stanch Churchman.

Johnson's irritability never vented itself against the helpless. His charity knew no limit—not even the bottom of his purse. When he had no money to give, he borrowed it. And when his pension was three hundred pounds a year, the Thrales could not figure out that he spent more than seventy or eighty on himself. The rest went to his dependents. In his latter days his home was a regular museum of waifs and strays. There was Miss Williams, the ancient aristocratic spinster who came to London to have an operation performed on one of her eyes. She came to Johnson's home and remained ten years, because she had been a friend of his wife. This claim was enough, and she slid into the head place in Johnson's household. Her peevishness used to drive the old man, at times, into the street; but that tongue of his, with its crushing retorts, was ever silent and tender towards her. The poor creature became blind, and used to shock the finicky Boswell by testing the fulness of the teacups with her finger.

Then there was a Mrs. Desmoulins and her daughter, who drifted down from Lichfield and came to Johnson, because forty years before, he, too, had lived in Lichfield. He gave them house-room, treated them as guests, and each week left a half-guinea on the mantel of their room.

Then there was the broken-down Levett, and Francis Barber, who, coming as a servant, remained as one of the family, because he was too old to work. A Miss Carmichael, in green spectacles and bombazine, carrying a cane, completed what the Doctor called his "seraglio." Writing to Mrs. Thrale in playful mood, telling of his household troubles, he says, "Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them." And he, the great, gruff and mighty Ursa Major, listened to all their woes, caring for them in sickness, wiping the death-dew from their foreheads, wearing crape upon his sleeve for them when dead.

* * * * *

This man tasted all the fame that is one man's due; he had all the money he needed, or knew how to use; the coveted LL.D. came from his Alma Mater; and the patronage from Lord Chesterfield, for which he craved, only that he might fling it back. He was the friend and confidant of the great and proud, deferred to by the King and sought out by those who prized the far-reaching mind and subtle imagination—the things that link us with the Infinite. The fear of hell and dread of death that haunted him in youth and middle age, finally gave way to faith and trust. When partial paralysis came to him at midnight, his sanity did not fail him, and knowing the worst, he yet hesitated to disturb the other members of the household, but went to sleep, philosophizing on the phenomena of the case—alert for more knowledge, as was his wont. Morning came and being speechless, he wrote on his ever-ready pad of paper and handing the sheet to his servant, watched with amused glances the perplexity and terror of the man. He next wrote to his friend, Mrs. Thrale, that letter, a classic of wit and resignation, wherein he explains his condition and excuses himself for not calling upon her and explaining the matter by word of mouth.

Such willingness to accept the inevitable is curative. He grew better and recovered his speech. But old age is a disease that has no cure save death. Johnson accepted the issue as a brave man should—thankful for the gift of conscious life that had been his. When the last hour was nigh he sent loving messages to his nearest friends, repeating their names over one by one. His last recorded words were directed to a young woman who called upon him, "God bless you, my dear."

And so he passed painlessly and quietly into the sleep that knows no waking; pleased at last to know that his dust would rest in Westminster Abbey.

Thus ended, as the day dies out of the western sky, this life, seemingly so full of tempest and contradiction. The autumn of his life was full of enjoyment, and no day passed but that some one, weak, weary and worn, arose and called him blessed. Most of his wild imprecations and blustering contradictions were reserved for those who fattened on such things, and who came to be tossed and gored. In his spirit Socrates and Falstaff joined hands. In his life there was a deal of gladness—far, far more than of misery and unrest; which fact I believe is true of every life.

The Universe seems planned for good.

A world made up of such men as Samuel Johnson would be a wild chaos of tasks undone. But since Nature has never sent but one such man, and more than a century has passed since his death and we know not yet with whom to compare him, we need have no fears. The world is held in place through the opposition of forces: and the body of every healthy man is the battle-ground of animal organisms that match strength against strength. So, too, a healthy society always has these active and sturdy organisms, which set in play other forces that hold in check their seeming excess. That the Divine Energy should incarnate itself and find expression in the form of a man, and that this man should inspire others to think and write, to do and dare, is a subject the contemplation of which should make us stand uncovered. The companionship of Johnson inspired Reynolds to better painting, Garrick to stronger acting, Burke to more profound thinking—and hundreds of others, too, quenched their thirst at the rock which he smote whenever he discoursed or wrote.

Sympathy is the first essential to insight. So with sympathy, I pray, behold this blundering giant, and you will see that the basis of his character was a great Sincerity. He was honest—doggedly honest—and saw with flashing vision the thing that was; and thither he followed, crowding, pushing, knocking down whatsoever opinion or prejudice was in the way. And so he ever struggled forward. But hate him not, for he is thy brother—yea! he is brother to all who strive and reach forward toward the Ideal. Shining through dust and disorder, now victorious, now eclipsed in deepest gloom, in him is the light of genius; and this is never base, but at the worst is admirable, lovable with pity. There was pride in his heart, but no vanity; and he should be loved for this if for no other reason: he had the courage to make an enemy. In his great heart were wild burstings of affection, and a hunger for love that only the grave requited. There, too, were fierce flashes of wrath, smothered in an hour by the soft dew of pity. His faults and follies were manifold, as he often lamented with tears; but the soul of the man was sublime in its qualities—worldwide in its influence.



THOMAS B. MACAULAY

The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of the age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. But by judicious selection, rejection and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. —Essay on History



Success is in the blood.

There are men whom Fate can never keep down—they march jauntily forward, and take by divine right the best of everything that earth affords. But their success is not attained by the Doctor Samuel Smiles Connecticut policy. They do not lie in wait, nor scheme, nor fawn, nor seek to adapt their sails to catch the breeze of popular favor. Still, they are ever alert and alive to any good that may come their way, and when it comes they simply appropriate it, and tarrying not, move steadily forward.

Good health! Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of your head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every hand-clasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and never waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do, and then without violence of direction you will move straight to the goal.

Fear is the rock on which we split, and hate is the shoal on which many a bark is stranded. When we are fearful, the judgment is as unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if we stop to meditate on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to befoul the screw.

Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfilment of your desire, just as the coral-insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual. Thought is supreme, and to think is often better than to do.

Preserve a right mental attitude—the attitude of courage, frankness and good-cheer.

To think rightly is to create.

Darwin and Spencer have told us that this is the method of Creation. Each animal has evolved the parts it needed and desired. The horse is fleet because it wishes to be; the bird flies because it desires to; the duck has a web-foot because it wants to swim. All things come through desire, and every sincere prayer is answered. Many people know this, but they do not believe it thoroughly enough so that it shapes their lives.

We want friends, so we scheme and chase 'cross lots after strong people, and lie in wait for good folks—or alleged good folks—hoping to attach ourselves to them. The only way to secure friends is to be one.

And before you are fit for friendship you must be able to do without it. That is to say, you must have sufficient self-reliance to take care of yourself, and then out of the surplus of your energy you can do for others. The man who craves friendship, and yet desires a self-centered spirit more, will never lack for friends.

If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, "I am a part of all my eyes behold!" And the feeling will surely come to you that you are no mere interloper between earth and sky; but that you are a necessary particle of the Whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if you shall go down, it can only be amid a wreck of worlds.

Thus by laying hold on the forces of the Universe, you are strong with them. And when you realize this, all else is easy, for in your arteries course red corpuscles, and in your heart there is the will to do and be. Carry your chin in, and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis.

* * * * *

Thomas B. Macauley was small in stature; but he always carried his chin well in and the crown of his head high.

It was said of Rubens that throughout his lifetime he kept success tied to the leg of his easel with a blue ribbon. If ever a writing man had success tied to the leg of his easy chair, that man was Macaulay. In the characters and careers of Rubens and Macaulay there is a marked resemblance.

When Macaulay was twenty-two he was at Cambridge, and the tidings arrived that a dire financial storm had wrecked the family fortune. The young man had ever been led to suppose that his father was rich—rich beyond all danger from loss—and that he himself would never have a concern beyond amusing himself, and the cultivation of his intellect. And so in practical affairs his education had been sadly neglected. But when the news of calamity came, instead of being depressed, he was elated to think that now he could make himself positively useful.

Responsibility gravitates to the man who can shoulder it. Strong men who can wisely direct the efforts of others are always needed—they were needed in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two, when Tom Macaulay received word of his father's trouble—they are needed today more than then—men who meet calamity with a smile and are pleased at sight of obstacles, knowing they can overcome them. Augustine Birrell has written, "Macaulay always went his sublime way rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, knowing full well that he could give anybody five yards in fifty and win easily."

Macaulay took up the burden that his father was not able to bear, mastered every detail of the business, studied out the weak points, and then explained to the creditors just what they had better do.

And they did it.

We always trust the man who has courage plus, enthusiasm to spare, and who shows by his manner that he is master of the situation.

In a few years Macaulay saved from the wreck enough to secure his father, mother and sisters against want for the rest of their days, and eventually he paid every creditor in full with interest. Had he run away from the difficulty, as his father was on the point of doing, the family would have been turned homeless into the streets.

Moral—Things are never so bad as they seem; and all difficulties sneak away when you look them squarely in the eye.

At this time the family, consisting of the father, mother, three sisters and a brother, lived at Fifty Great Ormond Street, not far from the British Museum. The house is still standing, but I recently discovered that the occupants know nothing, and care less, about Thomas Macaulay.

Tom was the child of his mother. In temperament, disposition and physique he was as much unlike his father as two men can well be. Old Zachary Macaulay was a strong, earnest man who took himself seriously. In latter years he grew morose, puritanic and was full of dread of the Unseen. He preached long sermons to his family, cautioned them against frivolity, forbade music, tabued games, and constantly spoke of the tongue as "the unruly member."

He, of course, was not aware of it, but he was teaching his children by antithesis.

"When I meet Macaulay I always imagine I am in Holland," once said Sydney Smith.

"Why so!" asked a friend.

"Because he is such a windmill," was the reply.

But then we must remember that Sydney Smith never much liked Macaulay—they were too near alike. Whenever they met there was usually a wordy duel. "He is so overflowing with learning that it runs over and he stands in the slop," said Smith.

Tom talked a great deal, he was fond of music and games, and was never so pleased as when engaging in some wild frolic with his sisters and any chance youngster that happened to stray in. His sister, Lady Trevelyan, has recorded that during those days of gloom which followed her father's failure, matters were made worse by the stricken man moping at home and tightening the domestic discipline.

Tom never resented this, but on the instant the father would leave the house, it was the signal of a wild pandemonium of disorder. Tom would play he was a tiger, and crawling under the sofa would emit fearful growls that would cause the children to scream with pretended fright. Next they would play fire, and pile all the furniture in the center of the room, heaping books, clothing, rugs on top. Then Tom would "rescue" his mother if she appeared on the scene, and seizing her in his arms carry her to a place of safety, and then engage in a pillow-fight if she came back.

This wild frolic was always a delight to the children, and Tom's homecoming was ever watched with eager anticipation. His visits shot the gloom through with sunshine, and when he went away even the neighbors' children were in tears. His health and enthusiasm infected everybody he met.

In the course of looking after his father's business Macaulay unlearned most of the previous lessons of his life, and taught himself that to do for others and sink self was the manly method. But so lightly did he bear the burden that it is doubtful if he ever considered he was making any sacrifice.

When his father died, Macaulay put entirely out of his mind the question of a household separate and apart from that of his mother and sisters. He devoted himself entirely to them; he wanted no other love than theirs.

Unlike so many men of decided talent, the best and most loving side of Macaulay's nature was made manifest at home. His bubbling wit, brilliant conversation, and good-cheer were for his own fireside, first; and all that cutting, critical, scathing flood of invective was for the public that wore a rhinoceros-hide.

* * * * *

Macaulay's article on Milton, published during his twenty-fifth year, in the "Edinburgh Review," is generally regarded as a most wonderful achievement. "Just think!" the critics cry—"the first article printed to be of a quality that electrified the world!" But we must remember that this youth had been getting ready to write that article for ten years.

At college Macaulay shirked mathematics and philosophy, spending his time and attention on things he liked better. The only study in which he excelled was composition. Even in babyhood his command of language had been a wonder to the neighborhood in which he lived. Hannah More had for a time taken him under her immediate charge and prophesied great things of his literary faculty; and his mother was not slow in seconding the opinion.

At Cambridge he already had more than a local reputation as a writer, and it was this reputation that secured him the commission to write for the "Review." The terrible Jeffrey was getting old and his regular staff had pretty nearly worked out their vein. Jeffrey wrote up to London (being south) to a friend telling him that the "Review" must have new blood, and imploring him to be on the lookout for some young man who had ideas in his ink-bottle.

This friend knew the vigor and incisiveness of Macaulay's style, and as he read the letter from Jeffrey he exclaimed, "Macaulay!"

It was a great compliment to a mere youth to be asked to contribute to the "Edinburgh Review." Edinburgh was a literary center, and you could not throw a stone in Princess Street, any more than you can in Tremont Street, Boston, without hitting a poet and caroming on two novel-writers and an essayist.

Thomas Carlyle, five years older than Macaulay, and who was to live and write for twenty-five years after Macaulay's passing, had not yet struck twelve. London, too, like Edinburgh, was full of writing men, standing in the market-places of Grub Street with no man to hire.

And yet Fate sought out Tom Macaulay, five feet four, who had plenty of other work on hand; and through that single "Essay on Milton" he sprang at once into the front rank of British writers—and at the same time there was thrust into his hands a bonus of fifty pounds for the work.

As a study of a thing that made the reputation of a writer, the "Milton" is worth a careful reading. It is very sure that in America today there are a hundred men who could write just as good an article, but whether these men are Macaulays or not is quite another question. But it is not at all probable that a writer will ever again leap into place and power on so small a feat.

Yet the article surely shows all the dash and vigor that mark Macaulay's literary style. There is personality in it; it reveals the red corpuscle; and tells without question that there is a man behind the guns. It was opportune; for literature at that particular time had reached a point where the sciolist was in full possession, and the dead husks of learning were being palmed off for the living thoughts of living men.

Periodicity reveals itself in all Nature, and even in the world of thought there are years of famine and years of plenty. Dry rot gets into letters; things are ripe for a revolution; the tinder is dry, and along comes some Martin Luther and applies the torch.

Macaulay simply expressed himself boldly, frankly, and without thought of favor—writing as he felt.

The article made a great stir—the first edition of the magazine was quickly exhausted, and Macaulay awoke one morning, like Byron, and found himself famous. All there was about it, the "Milton" revealed a man, a strong, vivid-thinking, vigorous man, who, seeing things clearly, wrote from his heart. Art is born of feeling: it is heart, not head, that carries conviction home; but if you have both, as Macaulay had, it is no special disadvantage.

From the publication of Macaulay's first article the "Review" took on a new lease of life. Prosperity came that way and for the rest of his life the "Review" was not long without contributions from his pen; and the numbers that contained his articles were always in great demand. Writers who possess a piercing insight into the heart of things, and who have the courage to express themselves, regardless of the views of others, are well feared by men in power.

The man who knows, who can think, and who can write, holds a sword of Damocles over every politician.

Governments are honeycombed with vulnerable spots; and to secure the ready writer on your side is the part of wisdom.

Macaulay's article on Milton proved that there was a thinker loose, and that on occasion he could strike. The politicians began to court him, and we find him writing articles of a very Junius-like quality on contemporary issues.

When he was twenty-six years old we are told he was "called to the Bar," which means that he was given permission to practise law—the expression, "called," being a mild form of fiction that still obtains in England in legal matters, while in America the word applies only in theology.

The practise of law, however, was not at all to the taste of Macaulay, and after a few short terms on the circuit he relinquished it entirely.

In the meantime we find he read continually. Indeed, about the only bad habit this man had was reading. He read to excess—he read everything and read all the time. He read novels, history, poetry, and dived deeply into the dead languages, reading Plutarch's Lives twice in a year, and Euripides, Thucydides, Homer, Cicero, Caesar—all without special aim or end. Such a restless appetite for reading is apt to produce mental dyspepsia, and is not at all to be advised for average people; and the probabilities are that even in Macaulay's case his time might often have been better spent in meditation.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-seven appeared in the "Review" the "Essay on Mill." Like all of Macaulay's articles it reveals a wealth of learning and bristles with information on many themes. It often seems as if Macaulay took a subject simply to execute a learned war-dance around it. The article on Mill is a good example of merely touching the central theme and then going off into by-lanes of economics, history and civil government, with endless allusions to literature, poetry, art and philosophy. It is all intensely interesting, closely woven, often gorgeous in its coloring; and "style" runs like a thread of gold through it all.

Shortly after this article appeared, Lord Lansdowne intimated to the young writer that he would like the honor of introducing him into public life, and if agreeable he could arrange for him to stand for Parliament in the vacant seat of Calne.

Calne was one of those vest-pocket boroughs, owned by a single man, of which England has so many. The people think they choose their representative, but they do not, any more than we do in America. The government by the Boss and for the Boss is no new institution. Macaulay presented himself and was elected without opposition. And so before his thirtieth year he found himself on the flood-tide of national politics.

Fifteen years before, if any one had expressed himself as plainly as Macaulay did on entering Parliament, he would have had a taste of jail, the hulks, or the pillory. So alert had the Government agents been for sedition that to stick one's tongue in his cheek at a member of the Cabinet was considered fully as bad as poaching, both being heinous offenses before God and man. Persecution was in the air and tyranny stalked abroad.

But tyranny is self-limiting. If laws are too severe, there will surely come a time when they will not be observed, and history shows that the men who have introduced the guillotine ended their careers in its embrace.

A change had come in England. The Tories were being jostled from their seats, and the Whigs were just coming into power. Liberalism was abroad in the land, and surely the time had come when a strong man might speak his mind.

Macaulay was by nature a protester; he was "agin 'em"; and when he chose a subject for his maiden speech he was not only sincere, but exceeding politic. He guessed the lay of the land, and knew the direction of the wind. Heresy was popular.

His address was in favor of an act removing the legal disabilities of Jews. It was a plea for liberty, and such was the vigor, power and vivid personality he threw into the address that he astonished the House and brought in the loungers from the cloakrooms.

It was his only speech during the session. Efforts were made to get him on his feet again, but he was too wise to lend the battery of his mind to any commonplace theme. Only a subject such as might stir men's souls could tempt him.

Wise Thomas Macaulay!

He had made a reputation as a writer by his first article, and after his maiden speech all London chanted his praises as an orator. He practised self-restraint and knew better than to dilute his fame by holding argument with small men on little topics.

His first speech at the next session of Parliament only served to fix his place as an orator more firmly. The immediate excuse was the "Reform Bill"; but the subject was liberty, and literature and history were called upon to furnish fire and supply the fuel for pyrotechnics. After its delivery the Speaker sent for Macaulay and personally congratulated him on making the most effective address to which he had listened for twenty-five years. The House of Commons, ever willing and anxious to appropriate a genius, being glutted by the dull and commonplace, sought in many ways from this time forward to do honor to Macaulay.

The elder members grew reminiscent and said the good old times were coming back, and talked of Burke, Fox, Canning and Lord Plunket.

Jeffrey, feeling a sense of guardianship over Macaulay, having launched him, as he rightfully claimed, was on hand to hear the speech, and made haste to embrace his ward, kissing him on both cheeks.

Judging from this distance, there was nothing especially peculiar or distinctive about Macaulay's oratory, save his intense personality and vivid earnestness. An educated man, thoroughly alive on any one theme, is always interesting. And it was Macaulay's policy never to speak in public on a theme that did not bring out his entire armament, and yet with it all he was wise enough to cultivate a feeling of restraint and leave the impression that he had much more in reserve. So it was in his literary work: he never wrote when tired, nor attempted to express when he was not thoroughly alive to the subject in hand. He watched his mood. And thus in all Macaulay's "Essays" we feel the systole and diastole, and the hot, strong, impatient movement of ruddy life. There is "go" in every sentence. This is what constitutes his marvelous style—life, life, life!

To very few men, indeed, is it given to be at once a brilliant talker, a strong writer and an effective orator. Clever talkers are seldom orators, and the great writers usually ebulliate only in the silence of their studies.

The fame of Macaulay went abroad, and he became the social lion of London—he was courted, feted, petted—and in drawing-rooms when he attended, people stood on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of him, and remained breathless that they might hear him speak. No doubt the fact that he was a bachelor helped fan the social flame. His sister has recorded that every morning cards and letters of invitation were piled high on his breakfast-table.

With it all, though, the handsome little man preserved his poise, and his modesty and becoming dignity in public never failed him.

Such was Macaulay's popularity that, after having served two terms for the borough of Calne, the way was opened for him to stand for Leeds. Indeed, it is probable that a dozen districts would have been glad to elect him as their representative.

After the passing of the "Reform Bill," to which his efforts had been so valuable, he was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control. This Board represented the King in the Government's relations with the East India Company. Macaulay, being the strongest man on the Board, was naturally chosen its secretary, just as the best man in a jury is chosen foreman. Here was a man who was not content to be a mere figurehead in office, trusting to paid clerks and underlings to secure him information and do the work—not he. Macaulay set himself the task of thoroughly acquainting himself with Indian affairs. He read every book of importance bearing on the subject; and studied the record and history of every man of consequence who was or had been connected with India. His intensely practical, businesslike mind sifted every detail, intuitively separating the relevant from the inconsequential, so that within a few months older heads were going to him for information, just as in a store or shop there is always one man who knows where things are, and in times of doubt he is the man who is sought out. To the many it is so much easier to ask some one else than to find out for themselves; and it also shifts the responsibility, and gives one a chance, if necessary, to prove a halibi—goodness gracious!

One feature of the Reform Bill provided that one of the members of the Supreme Council of India should be chosen from among persons not connected in any way with the East India Company.

This membership of the Supreme Council was a most important office, and carried with it the modest salary of ten thousand pounds a year—fifty thousand dollars—double what the President of the United States then received.

Macaulay had had no hand in creating this office, and indeed, at the time the Reform Bill was being gotten into shape, his interest in Indian affairs had only been casual. But now he was recognized as the one man for the new office, and the office sought the man.

Comparatively, Macaulay was a poor man, and the acceptance of the office for the term of six years would place him for the rest of his life beyond the reach of want. He could live royally and retire at forty years of age, with at least thirty thousand pounds to his credit. And yet he hesitated about accepting the office. His far-reaching eye told him that an exile for six years from England would place him out of touch with things at home, and that the greater office to which he aspired would be beyond his grasp. Besides that, the fact would always be brought up that his reward for well-doing had been enough, just as we have an unwritten law in America that there shall be no "third term."

Macaulay saw all this and hesitated.

He advised with Lord Lansdowne, and with his sister Hannah, his nearest and best friend; and if it had been possible his mother would have been given the casting vote; but two years before, she had passed out, yet not until she realized that her son was one of the foremost men in England. Hannah Macaulay (named in honor of Hannah More) advised the acceptance of the office, and upon his earnest request agreed to share her brother's exile.

* * * * *

Hannah Macaulay, gracious in every way, was the sister of her brother. Her mind was fit companion for his, and whenever he had a difficult problem on hand he would clarify it by explaining it to her; and be it known, you can never talk well to a dullard.

And so Hannah the loyal resigned her position as governess, and brother and sister packed up and sailed away in the good ship "Asia" for India. Among their belongings was a modest library of three thousand volumes, all of which, a wit has said, were read twice through by Macaulay on the outward voyage. India was safely reached, and Macaulay set himself with his accustomed vigor to learning the language and informing himself as to the actual status of things, in order that he might provide for their betterment. On account of his grasp on legal matters he was elected Legal Adviser of the Supreme Council.

Everything went well for a year, and then a terrible calamity overtook Macaulay.

His sister was in love.

This seems a good place to explain that Thomas Babington Macaulay himself was never in love. He had no time for that—his days were too full of books and practical business to ever waste any time on soft sentiment.

But now he was confronted by a condition, not a theory: Lord Trevelyan was in love with his sister, and his sister was in love with Lord Trevelyan. Macaulay might have discovered the fact for himself and saved the lovers the embarrassment of making a confession, had he not been so terribly busy with his books, but Macaulay, like love, was blind—to some things.

He heard the confession, and wept.

Then he gave the pair his blessing—there was nothing else to do.

It was not long after the wedding that he discovered he had found a brother instead of having lost a sister; and the sister being very happy, Macaulay was happy, too. He insisted that they move their effects into his house, and they did so, all living as one happy family. So the years passed; and when children came Macaulay's joy was complete. His heart went out to his sister's children as though they were his own. Occasionally the good mother complained that the Legal Adviser of the Supreme Council undid her discipline by indulging the youngsters in things that she had forbidden. To all of which the Legal Adviser would only laugh, and crawling under the settle would emit many tigerish growls, and the children would scream with terror and delight, and other children, brown-legged, wearing no clothes to speak of, would come trooping in, and together they would manage, after an awful struggle, to capture the tiger, and with some in front and others behind and two or three on his back, would carry him away captive.

One of these children, grown to manhood, Sir George Trevelyan, was destined to write, with the help of his mother, the best life of Macaulay that has ever been written.

The exile did not prove quite so severe as was anticipated; but when in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-eight it was necessary for Lord Trevelyan to return to England, Macaulay, sick at the thought of being left behind, resigned his office and sailed back with the family.

We are told that officeholders seldom die and never resign. This may be true in the main; but surely there can not be found another instance in history of a man throwing up an office with a fifty-thousand-dollar salary attachment, simply because he could not bear the thought of being separated from his sister's children.

* * * * *

Soon after his return to England Macaulay was elected to a seat in Parliament from Edinburgh, a city that he had scarcely so much as visited, but to whose interest he had been loyal in that, up to this time, nine-tenths of all he had written had been printed there.

To represent Edinburgh in the House of Commons was no small matter, and we know that Macaulay was not unmindful of the honor.

His next preferment was his appointment as Secretary of War, and a seat in the Cabinet.

During all these busy years he ever had on hand some piece of literary work. In fact, all of the "Essays" on which his literary fame so largely rests, were composed on "stolen time" in the lull seized from the official and social whirl in which he lived.

If you want a piece of work well and thoroughly done, pick a busy man. The man of leisure postpones and procrastinates, and is ever making preparations and "getting things in shape"; but the ability to focus on a thing and do it is the talent of the man seemingly o'erwhelmed with work. Women in point lace and diamonds, club habitues and "remittance men"—those with all the time there is—can never be entrusted to carry the message to Gomez.

Pin your faith to the busy person.

Macaulay's first and only political rebuff came with his defeat the second time he stood for election in Edinburgh. His conscientious opposition to a measure in which the Scottish people were especially interested caused the tide to turn against him.

No doubt, though, the failure of re-election was a good thing for Macaulay—and for the world. He at once began serious work on his "History of England"—that project which had been in his head and heart for a score of years. All of his literary labors so far had been merely ephemeral—at least he so regarded them. The Essays he regarded only as so many newspaper articles, not worth the collecting. It was America that first guessed their true value as literature, and it was not until the American editions were pouring into England that Macaulay allowed his scattered work to be collected, corrected and put into authorized book form.

This history was to be the thesis that would admit his name to the Roster of Fame. But, alas, the history was destined to be only a fragment. It covers scarce fifteen years, and is like that other splendid fragment, the work of Henry Thomas Buckle, a preface; Buckle's preface is the greatest ever penned, with its author dead at forty. The projected work of both of these men was too great for any one man to accomplish in a single lifetime. A hundred years of unremitting toil could not have completed Macaulay's task.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; and at his speech of installation he took occasion to take formal leave of political life. He would devote the remainder of his days to literature and abstract thought.

Men are continually "retiring" from business and active life, all unaware of the grim humor of the proceedings. It was not so very long before Edinburgh, in an endeavor to undo the slight she had put upon Macaulay, again elected him to Parliament, without his being near, or raising his hand either for or against the measure.

And again his voice was heard in the House of Commons.

Macaulay was a modest man, and yet he knew his power.

The Premiership dangled just beyond his reach. Many claim that if he had not gone to India he would have moved by strong, steady strides straight to the highest office that England could bestow. And others aver that when he was created a Peer in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven it was a move toward the Premiership, and that if his health had not failed he would surely have won the goal. But how futile it is to speculate on what might have happened had not this or the other occurred!

Yet certainly the daring caution of Macaulay's mind, his dignity and luring presence, his patience, self-command, good temper, and all those manifold graces of his heart, would have made him an almost ideal Premier, one who might rank with Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli or Gladstone.

But the highest office was not for him.

We die by heart-beats; and Macaulay at fifty-nine had lived as much as most strong men do if they exist a hundred years.

It is easy to show where Lord Macaulay could have been greater. His life lies open to us as the ether. We complain because he did not read less and meditate more; we sigh at his lack of religion and mention the fact that he never loved a woman, seemingly waiving tautology and the fact that men who do not love are never religious.

We forget that it takes a good many men to make the Ideal Man.

If Macaulay had been different he would have been some one else. He was a brave, tender-hearted man who lived one day at a time, packing the moments with good-cheer, good work and an earnest wish to do better tomorrow than he had done today. That Nature occasionally produces such a man should be a cause for gratitude in the hearts of all the rest of us little folk who jig, mince, mouth, amble, run, peek about and criticize our betters.



LORD BYRON

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles! —Childe Harold



Man! I wonder what a man really is! Starting from a single cell, this seized upon by another, and out of the Eternal comes a particle of the Divine Energy that makes these cells its home. Growth follows, cell is added to cell, and there develops a man—a man whose body, two-thirds water, can be emptied by a single dagger-thrust and the spirit given back to its Maker.

This being, which we call man, does not last long.

Fifty-seven generations have come and gone since Caesar trod the Roman Forum. The pillars against which he often leaned still stand, the thresholds over which he passed are there, the pavements ring beneath your tread as they once rang beneath his. Three generations and more have come and gone since Napoleon trod the streets of Toulon contemplating suicide.

Babes in arms were carried by fond mothers to see Lincoln, the candidate for President. These babes have grown into men, are grandfathers possibly, with whitened hair, furrowed faces, looking calmly forward to the end, having tasted all that life holds in store for them.

And yet Lincoln lived but yesterday! You can reach back into the past and grasp his hand, and look into his sad and weary eyes.

A man! weighted with the sins of his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, who fade off into dim spectral shapes in the dark and dreamlike past; no word of choice has he in the selection of his father and mother, no voice in the choosing of environment—brought into life without his consent and thrust out of it against his will—battling, striving, hoping, cursing, waiting, loving, praying; burned by fever, torn by passion, checked by fear, reaching for friendship, longing for sympathy, clutching—nothing.

* * * * *

Doctors and priests attend us at both ends of the route. We can not be born, neither can we die, without consulting the tax-collector, and interviewing those who look after us for a consideration.

The doctor who sought to assist George Gordon Byron into the world dislocated the bones of his left foot in the operation. Forsooth, this baby would not be born as others—-he selected a way of his own and paid the penalty. "It is a malformation—take these powders—I'll be back tomorrow," quoth the busy doctor.

The autopsy proved it was not a malformation, but a displacement.

"Doctor, now please tell me just what is the matter with me," once asked an anxious patient.

"Tut, tut!" replied the absent-minded physician; "can't you wait? The post-mortem will reveal all that."

The critics did not wait for Byron's death—it was vivisection. And after his death the dissection was zealously continued. Byron's life lies open to us in many books. Scarcely a month in the entire life of the man is unaccounted for, and if a hiatus of a few weeks is found, the men of imagination fill in and make him a pirate on the Mediterranean coast, or give him a seraglio in some gloomy old Moorish palace in Venice.

In his lifetime Byron was overpraised and overcensured, and since his death the dust has been allowed to gather over his matchless books. Between the two extremes lies the truth; and the true Byron is just now being discovered. Byron in literature will not die. He is the brightest comet that has darted into our ken since Shakespeare's time; and as comets have no orbit, but are vagrants of the heavens, so was he. Tragedy was in his train, and his destiny was disgrace and death.

And yet as we review the life of this man, "the lame brat" of his mother, as this mother called him, and behold the whirlwind of passion that swept him on, the fulsome praise, the shrill outcry of hypocritical prudes and pedants, the torrent of abuse, and the piling up of sins that he never committed (and God knows he committed enough!); and yet behold his craving for tenderness, the reaching out for truth, and hear his earnest and unquenchable prayer to be understood and loved, we blot out the record of his sins with our tears. To know the life of Byron and not be moved to profoundest pity marks one as alien to his kind.

"God is on the side of the most sensitive," said Thoreau. And did there ever tread the earth a man more sensitive than Byron?—such capacity for suffering, such exaltation, such heights, such depths! Music made him tremble and weep, and in the presence of kindness he was powerless. He lived life to its fullest, and paid the penalty with shortened years. He expressed himself without reserve—being emancipated from superstition and precedent. And the man who is not dominated by the fetish of custom is marked for contumely by the many. Custom makes law, and the one who violates custom is "bad." Yet all respectable people are not good; and all good people are not respectable. If you do not know this you are ignorant of life.

So imagine this handsome, headstrong, restless young man, in whose lexicon there was no such word as prudence, with time and money at his command, defying the state, society and religion, and listen to the anathemas that fill the air at mention of his name.

That a world full of such men would not be at all desirable is stern truth; but that one such man lived is a cause for congratulation. His life holds for us both warning and example.

Beneath the strain of the stuff and the onward swirl of his verse we see that this man stood for truth and justice as against hypocrisy and oppression. Folly and freedom are better far than smugness and persecution. Byron stood for the rights of the individual, for the right of free speech and free thought: and he stood for political and physical freedom, long before abolition societies became popular. He sided with the people; his heart went out to the oppressed; and all of his fruitless gropings and stumblings were a reaching out for tenderness and truth, for life and love—for the Ideal.

* * * * *

The father of Byron, the poet, was a captain in the army—a man of small mental ability, whose recklessness won him the sobriquet of "Mad Jack Byron." When twenty-three years of age he eloped to France with the Baroness Conyers, wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen. Happiness, in a foreign country, for a woman who has exchanged one love for another is outside the pale of possibilities. Love is much—but love is not all. Life is too short to break family-ties and adjust one's self to a new language and a new country. The change means death.

Two years and the woman died, leaving a daughter, Augusta by name, afterward Mrs. Augusta Leigh.

Back to England went Mad Jack Byron, broken-hearted, bearing in his arms the baby girl. Kind kinsmen, ready to forgive, cared for the child. Mad Jack didn't remain broken-hearted long—what would you expect from a man? He sought sympathy among several discreet dames, and in two years we find him safely and legally married to Catherine Gordon. Scotch, and heiress to twenty-five thousand pounds. On the occasion of the wedding, Jack informed a friend that the fact of the lady's being Scotch was forgiven in view of the dowry. Most of this fortune went into a rat-hole to help pay the debts of the Mad Jack.

One child was born to this ill-assorted pair—a boy who was destined to write his name large on history's page. But such a pedigree! No wonder the youth once wrote to Augusta, his half-sister, expressing a covetous appreciation of her parentage, even with its bar sinister. In passing, it is well to note the sunshine of this love of brother and sister, which continued during life—confidential, earnest, tender, frank. In their best moods they were both lofty souls, and their mutuality was cemented in a contempt for the man who was their sire. This fine brotherly and sisterly affection comes close to us when we remember that it was our own Harriet Beecher Stowe, with sympathies worn to the quick through much brooding over the wrongs of a race in bondage, who rushed into print with a scandalous accusation concerning this same sweet affection of brother for sister. The charge was brought on no better foundation than some old-woman gossip held over the hyson when it was red, and moved itself aright—all vouchsafed to Mrs. Stowe by the widow of Byron in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six. If a woman as good at heart as Harriet Beecher Stowe was deceived, why should we blame humanity for biting at a hook that is not baited?

No sane dentist will administer an anesthetic to a woman, without a witness: not that women as a class are dangerous, but because some women can not be trusted to distinguish between their dreams and the facts. Every practising lawyer of insight also knows that a wronged woman's reasons are plentiful as blackberries, and must always be taken with large pinches of the Syracuse product.

Mad Jack followed his regiment here and there, dodging his creditors, and finally in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one induced his wife to borrow a hundred pounds for him, with which he started to Paris intent on retrieving fortune with pasteboard.

He died on the way, and the money was used to bury him. The lame boy was then three years old, but a few dark memories, no doubt retouched by hearsay, were retained by him of Mad Jack, who in his most sober moments never guessed that he would be known to the ages as the father of the greatest poet of his time.

Mad Jack was neither literary nor psychic.

The widowed mother remained at Aberdeen with her boy, living on the hundred and fifty pounds a year that had been settled on her in a way that she could not squander the principal—all the rest had gone.

The child was shy, sensitive, proud and headstrong.

The mother used to reprove him by throwing things at him, and by chasing him with the tongs. At other times she diverted herself by imitating his limp. And yet again she would smother him with caresses, beseech his pardon for abusing him, and praise the beauty of his matchless eyes.

Children are usually better judges of grown-ups than grown-ups are of children. This boy at five years of age had estimated his mother's character correctly. He knew that she was not his steadfast friend, and that she was unworthy of his confidence and whole heart's love. He grew moody, secretive, wilful. Once, being wrongly accused and punished, he seized a knife from the table and was about to apply it to his throat when he was disarmed. The child longed for tenderness and love, and being denied these, was already taking on that proud and haughty temper which was to serve as a mask to hide the tenderness of his nature.

We are told that seven brothers Byron fought at Edgehill, but when we get down to the time of Mad Jack there was danger of the name being snuffed out entirely. Nature is not anxious to perpetuate the idle and dissipated.

When little George Gordon was ten years old, his mother one day ran to him, seized him in her arms, wept and laughed, then laughed and wept, kissing him violently, addressing him as "My Lord!"

His great-uncle, William, Lord Byron of Rochdale and Newstead Abbey, had died, and the big-eyed, lame boy was the nearest heir—in fact, the only living male who bore the family-name. The next day at school, when the master called the roll and mentioned his name with the prefix "Dominus," the lad did not reply "Adsum"—he only stood up, gazed helplessly at the teacher, and burst into tears.

Even at this time he had given promise of the quality of his nature, by his firm affection for Mary Duff, his cousin. All the intensity of his childish nature was centered in this young woman, several years his senior. To call it a passion would be too much, but this child, denied of love at home, clung to Mary Duff, to whom he went in confession with all his childish tales of woe. When his mother proposed to leave Aberdeen, now that fortune had smiled, the anguish of the boy at thought of leaving his "first love" nearly caused him a fit of sickness.

And all this wealth of love was met with jeers and loud laughter, save by Mary Duff. The vibrating sensitiveness of such a child, with such a mother, must have caused a misery we can only guess.

"Your mother is a fool," said a boy to Byron at college some years later.

"I know it," was the melancholy answer, as the brown eyes filled with tears.

When money came, Mrs. Byron's first move was to take the lad to Nottingham and place him in charge of a surgical quack, who proposed, for a price, to make the lame foot just as good as the other, if not better. To this effect wooden clamps were placed on the foot and screwed down by thumbscrews, causing a torture that would have been unbearable to many.

No benefit was experienced from the treatment, although it was continued by another physician at London soon after. A schoolfellow of Byron's visited him in his room when his foot was encased in a wooden compress. The visitor noted the white face, and the beads of anguish on the boy's forehead, and at last said, "I know you are suffering awfully!"

"You will never hear me say so," was the grim reply.

The emphasis placed on Byron's lameness has been altogether overdone. In fact, as he grew to manhood, it was nothing more than a stiffness that would never have been noticed in a drawing-room. We have this on the testimony of the Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington and others. Byron himself made the mistake of referring to it several times in his verse, and doubtless all the torture he had suffered through ill-considered medical counsel, and his mother's taunts, caused the matter to take a place in his sensitive mind quite out of its due proportion. Sir Walter Scott was lame, too, but whoever heard of his discussing it, either by word of mouth or in print?

Of Byron's life at Harrow we have many tales as to his defending his juniors, volunteering to take punishment for them—and of lessons unlearned. He could not be driven nor forced, and pedagogics a hundred years ago, it seemed, was largely a science of coercion. Mary Gray, a nurse and early teacher of Byron's, has told us that kindness was the unfailing touchstone with this boy; no other plan would work. But Harrow knew nothing of Froebel methods, and does not yet.

* * * * *

Byron's first genuine love-affair occurred when he was sixteen. The object of this affection, as all the world knows, was Miss Chaworth, whose estate adjoined Newstead. The lady was two years older than Byron, and being of a lively nature found a pleasant diversion in leading the youth a merry chase. So severe was his attack that he was alternately oppressed by chills of fear and fevers of ecstasy. He lost appetite, and the family began to fear for his sanity. Such a love must find expression some way, and so the daily stealthy notes to the young woman took the form of rhyme. The lovesick youth was revealing considerable facility in this way. It pleased him, and did the buxom young woman no harm.

Beyond the mere prettiness and pinky whiteness of a healthy country lass, Miss Chaworth evidently had no beauties of character, save those conjured forth from the inner consciousness of the poet—a not wholly original condition.

Byron loved the Ideal. And this love-affair with Miss Chaworth is only valuable as showing the evolution of imagination in the poet. The woman hadn't the slightest idea that she was giving wings to a soul—to her the affair was simply funny.

The fact that Byron's great-uncle, from whom he had inherited his title, had killed the grandfather of Miss Chaworth in a duel, lent a romantic tinge to the matter—the boy was doing a sort of penance, and in one of his poems hints at the undoing of the sin of his kinsman by the lifelong devotion that he will bestow. This calling up the past, and incautious revealing of the fact that the ancestor Chaworth could not hold his own with a Byron, but allowed himself to be run through the body by the Byron cold steel, was not pleasing to Miss Chaworth.

"Don't imagine I am such a fool as to love that lame boy," cried Miss Chaworth to her maid one day.

Unluckily, "the lame boy" was in the next room and heard the remark.

He rushed from the house with a something gripping at his heart. Straightway he would go back to Harrow, which he had left in wrath only a few months before.

So he went to Harrow.

When he next returned home, his mother met him with the remark, "I have news for you; get out your handkerchief—Miss Chaworth is married."

In just another year Byron was home again, and was invited to dine with the Chaworths. He accepted the invitation, and when he was introduced to a baby girl, a month old, the child of his old sweetheart, his emotions got the better of him and he had to leave the room. And to ease his woe he indited a poem to the baby.

Miss Chaworth was not happy with her fox-hunting squire. Her mind became clouded, and after some years she passed out, in poverty and alone. And if there ever came to her mind any appreciation of the greatness of the man who had given her name immortality, we do not know it.

The years from Eighteen Hundred Five to Eighteen Hundred Eight Byron spent at Cambridge. The arts in which he perfected himself there were shooting, swimming, fencing, drinking and gambling.

During vacations, and off and on, he lived at Southwell, a village halfway between Mansfield and Newark. Southwell was sleepy, gossipy, dull—and exerted a wholesome restraint on our restless youth. It was simply a question of economy that took Byron and his mother to Southwell. The run-down estate of Newstead was yielding a meager income, but at Southwell one could be shabby and yet respectable.

At Southwell Byron met John Pigot and his sister—cultured people of a refined and quiet sort. Byron took to them at once, and they liked him.

In a country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other man who thinks—granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he had written. He had gotten into the habit—he wrote whenever his pulse ran up above eighty—he wrote because he could not help it; and he read his productions to his friends for the same reason. Every one who writes longs to read his work to some sympathetic soul. A thought is not ours until we repeat it to another, and this crying need of expression marks every poetic soul. All art is born of feeling, high, intense, holy feeling, and the creative faculty is largely a matter of temperature. We feel, and not to impart our feelings is stagnation—death. People who do not feel deeply never have anything to impart, either to individuals or to the world. They have no message.

The young man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields and recline on the soft turf under a great spreading tree, reading aloud by turn from some good book. Such meetings always ended by Byron's reading to his friends any chance rhymes he had written since they last met.

John Morley dates the birth of Byron's poetic genius from his meeting with Miss Chaworth, while Taine names Southwell as the pivotal point. Probably both are right.

But this we know, that it was the Pigots who induced Byron to collect his rhymes and have them printed. This was done at the neighboring town of Newark, when Byron was nineteen years old. Possibly you have a few of these thin, poorly printed, crudely bound little books entitled "Juvenilia" around in the garret somewhere, and, if so, it might be well enough to take care of them. Quaritch says they are worth a hundred pounds apiece, although in the poet's lifetime they were dear at sixpence.

Byron sent copies to all the leading literary men whom he knew, including Mackenzie, the man of feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron's book, but we know that his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman—she inwardly congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and may not, but the logic holds when applied to fledgling authors. When it comes to praise he is quite willing to take your word for it.

Byron's spirits arose to an ecstacy—he would be a poet.

About this time we find Hydra, as Byron pleasantly called his mother, rushing to the village apothecary and warning that worthy not to sell poison to the poet; and a few moments after her leaving, the astonished apothecary was visited by the poet, who begged that no poison should be sold to his mother. Each thought the other was going to turn Lucretia Borgia, or play the last act of Romeo and Juliet, at least.

There were wild bursts of rage on the mother's part, stubborn mockery on the other, followed up once by a poker flung with almost fatal precision at the poet's curly head.

Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as "Dear Madam," and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash in his letters, as when he said, "Dear Mother—you know you are a vixen, but save me some champagne." If Byron's mother had been of the stuff of which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London, economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis at Cambridge. When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms, took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as "my corporeal pastor"), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy's clothes, thus supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his "Quest of the Golden Girl."

But all this time his brain was active, and another book of poetry had been printed, entitled "Hours of Idleness." This book was gotten out, at his own expense, by the same country printer as the first.

Surely the verse must have had merit, or why should Lord Brougham, in the great "Edinburgh Review," go after it with a slashing, crashing, damning criticism?

When Byron read the review, a bystander has told us he turned red, then livid green. He straightway ordered and drank two bottles of claret, said nothing, but looked like a man who had sent a challenge.

A challenge! that was exactly what Byron proposed. He would fight Jeffrey first, and then take up in turn every man who had ever contributed to the magazine—he would kill them all. And to that end he called for his pistols and went out to practise firing at ten paces. Wiser counsel prevailed, and he decided to attack the enemy in their own citadel, and with their own weapons. He ordered ink, and began "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

It took time to get this enormous siege-gun into position and find the range. Finally, it was loaded with more kinds of missiles, in the way of what Augustine Birrell has called literary stinkpots, than were ever before rammed home in a single charge.

It was an audacious move—to reverse the initiative and go after a whole race of critics, scribblers and reviewers, who had been badgering honest folks, and blow 'em into kingdom come.

But at the last moment Byron's heart failed him, his wrath gave way to caution, and "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" appeared anonymously.

The edition was soon exhausted—the shot had at least raised a mighty dust.

The author got his nerve back, fathered the book, made corrections; and this edition, too, sold with a rush. Byron returned to Newstead, invited a score of his Cambridge cronies, who came down, entering the mansion between the bear and the wolf, and were received with salvos of pistol-shots. Here they played games over the spacious grounds, wrestled, boxed, swam, and at night feasted and drank deep damnation out of a skull to all Scotch reviewers.

Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily decamped and left the rogues to do their own cooking.

This brought them to their senses, sanity came back, and the company disbanded. Then the servants, who had watched the orgies from afar, returned and found a week's pile of dishes unwashed and a horse stabled in the library.

* * * * *

Then Byron had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm. His titles and pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching a dunciad in their direction. His good nature was especially ruffled by Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor. The chief cause of the old Lord's prejudice against the young one lay in the fact that the young 'un had ridiculed the old 'un's literary pretensions.

They were rivals in letters, with a very beautiful, natural and mutual disdain for each other.

Lord Byron was not welcomed into the House of Lords: he simply pushed in the door because he had a right to. He thirsted for approbation, for distinction, for notoriety. His sensitive soul hung upon newspaper clippings with feverish expectations; and about all the attention he received was in the line of being damned by faint praise, or smothered with silence. Patriotism, as far as England was concerned, was not a part of Byron's composition.

When all Great Britain was execrating Napoleon, picturing him as a devil with horns and hoofs, Byron looked upon him as the world's hero.

In this frame of mind he went forth and borrowed a goodly sum, and started cut to view the world. He was accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, and his valet, Fletcher.

It was a two years' trip, this jolly trio made—down along the coast of France, Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, lingering in queer old cities, mousing over historic spots, alternately living like princes or vagabonds. They frolicked, drank, made love to married women, courted maidens, fought, feasted and did all the foolish things that sophomores usually do when they have money and opportunity.

These months of travel supplied Byron enough in way of suggestion to keep him writing many moons. His active imagination seized upon everything picturesque, peculiar, romantic, sentimental or tragic, and stored it up in those wondrous brain-cells, to be used when the time was ripe.

The disciples of Munchausen, who delight in showing Byron's verse to be only biography, have found a rich field in that two years' travel. One man really did a brilliant thing—in three volumes—recounting the conquering march of the poet, whom he depicts as a combination of Don Juan and Rob Roy.

The probabilities are that the real facts, not illumined by fancy, would be a tale with which to conjure sleep. Foreign travel is hard work. It constitutes the final test of friendship, and to make the tour of Europe with a man and not hate him marks one or both of the parties as seraphic in quality. The best of travel is in looking back upon it from the dreamy quiet and rest of home—laughing at the things that once rasped your nerves, and enjoying, through recollection, the scenes you only glanced at wearily.

Two instances of that trip—when Hobhouse threatened to desert the party and was dared to do so, and Byron slapped Fletcher's face and got himself well kicked in return—will suffice to show how Byron had the faculty of seizing trivial incidents, and by lifting them up and separating them from the mass, made them live as Art.

At Athens the trio made a sudden resolve to be respectable, and practise economy. To this end they hired rooms of a worthy widow, who accommodated travelers with a transient home for a moderate stipend. This widow had three daughters: the eldest, Theresa by name, lives in letters as the Maid of Athens, and the glory that came to her was achieved without any special danger to either her heart or the poet's. The young woman, we know, assisted in the household affairs; and probably often dusted the mantel in the poet's room while he sat smoking with one foot on the table, making irrelevant remarks to her about this or that.

Suddenly he wrote a poem, "Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, O give me back my heart." * * *

With the genuine literary thrift that marked all of Byron's career, he preserved a copy of the lines, and some years after recast them, touched them up a bit, included the stuff in a book—and there you are.

The other incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after he wrote thus:

"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall, Hold o'er the dead their carnival; Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb, They were too busy to bark at him. From a Tartar's skull they stripped the flesh, As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh; And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull, As it slipped through their jaws when the edge grew dull."

And this only proves that Hobhouse was not a poet and Byron was. The poet is never content to state the mere facts—facts are only valuable as suggestions for poetry.

Travel often excites the spirit to the point of expression. Good travelers carry pads and pencils. Byron reached England with fragments of marbles, skulls, pictures, shells, spears, guns, curios beyond count, and many manuscripts in process.

Upon arriving on the English coast the first news that reached him was that his mother had just died. He hastened to Newstead and reached there in time to attend the funeral, but refrained from following the cortege to the grave because he could not master his emotions. Their quarrels were at last ended.

A diversion to his feelings came soon after, in the way of a blunt letter from Tom Moore demanding if Lord Byron was the author of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

Byron replied very stiffly that he was, but he really had intended no insult to Mr. Moore, with whom he had not the honor of being acquainted. Furthermore, if Mr. Moore felt himself aggrieved, why, the author of "English Bards" was at his service to supply him such satisfaction as he required.

The irate Irishman accepted "the apology," a genial reply followed, and soon the poets met at the house of a friend, and there began that lifelong friendship, with the result that Moore wrote Byron's "Life" and used much needless whitewash.

While abroad Byron had gotten into shape for publication one piece of manuscript. This was "Hints From Horace," and the matter was placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas, his businessman, very soon after his arrival. Dallas read the poem and did not like it.

"Haven't you anything else?" asked Dallas.

"Oh, nothing but a few stanzas of Spenserian stuff," was the answer.

Dallas asked to see it, and there were placed in his hands rough drafts of the first and second cantos of "Childe Harold." This time Dallas was better suited, and to corroborate his judgment the matter was submitted to Murray, the publisher.

Murray thought the matter had more or less merit, and arrangements were at once made for its publication. And so it came out, hammered into shape while in the printer's hands.

"Childe Harold" was an instantaneous, brilliant success—a success beyond the publisher's or author's expectations. The book ran through seven editions in four weeks, and Lord Byron "became famous in a night."

London society became Byron-mad. The poet was feted, courted, petted.

He indulged in much innocent and costly dissipation, and some not so innocent.

Finally all this began to pall upon him. When twenty-six we find him making a bold stand for reform: he would get married and live a staid, sober, respectable life. His finances were reduced—all the money he had made out of his books had been given away, prompted by a foolish whim that no man should take pay for the product of his mind.

Now he would marry and "settle down"; and to marry a woman with an income would be no special disadvantage. To sell one's thoughts was abhorrent to the young man, but to marry for money was quite another thing. Morality depends upon your point of view.

The paradox of things found expression when Byron the impressionable, Byron the irresistible, sat himself down and after chewing the end of his penholder, wrote a letter to Miss Milbanke, with whom he was only slightly acquainted, proposing marriage. The lady very properly declined. To be courted with a fresh-nibbed pen, and paper cut sonnet-size, instead of by a live man, deserves rebuke. Men who propose by mail to a woman in the next town are either insincere, self-deceived, or else are of the sort whose pulse never goes above sixty-five, and therefore should be avoided.

Byron was both insincere and self-deceived. He had grown to distrust the emotions of his heart, and so selected a wife with his head. He chose a woman with income, one who was strong, cool-headed, safe and sensible. Miss Milbanke was the antithesis of his mother.

The lady declined—but that is nothing.

They were married within a year.

In another year the wife left her husband and went back to her mother, carrying in her arms a girl baby, only a few weeks old.

She never returned to her husband.

What the trouble was no one ever knew, although the gossips named a hundred and one reasons—running from drunkenness to homicide. But Byron, the world now knows, was no drunkard—he was at times convivial, but he had no fixed taste for strong drink. He was, however, peevish, impulsive, impetuous and often very unreasonable.

Byron, be it said to his credit, brought no recriminating charges against his wife. He only said their differences were inexplicable and unexplainable.

The simple facts were that they breathed a different atmosphere—their heads were in a different stratum. His normal pulse was eighty; hers, sixty-five.

What do you think of a spiritual companionship where the wife demands, "How much longer are you going to follow this foolish habit of writing verses?"

They did not understand each other. Byron uttered words that no man should voice to a woman, and his outbursts were met with a forced calmness that was exasperating. The lady sat down, yawned wearily, and when there came a lull in the gentleman's verbal pyrotechnics, she would ask him if he had anything more to say.

One day she varied the program by packing up her effects and leaving him.

Of course, it is easy to say that had this woman been wise she would have stood the childish outbursts and endured the peevish tantrums, for the sake of the hours of tenderness and love that were sure to follow. By right treatment he would have been on his knees, begging forgiveness and crying it out with his head in her lap very shortly. But all this implies a woman of unusual power—extraordinary patience. And this woman was simply human. She left, and then in order to justify her action she gave reasons. Our actions are usually right, but our reasons for them seldom are.

Mrs. Byron made no concealment of her troubles. Society had occasion for gossip and the occasion was improved. Stories of Byron's cruelty and inhumanity filled the coffeehouses and drawing-rooms; and the hints at crimes so grave they could not even be mentioned gave the gossips their cue.

The press took it up, and the poet was warned by his friends not to appear at the theater or upon the street for fear of the indignation of the mob. The spoilt child of London was paying the penalty of popularity. The pendulum had swung too far and was now coming back.

Byron, hunted by creditors, hooted by enemies, broken in health, crushed in spirit, left the country—left England, never to return alive.

When Byron trod the deck of the good ship bound for Ostend, and saw a strip of tossing, blue water separating him from England, his spirits rose. He was twenty-eight years old, and the thought that he would yet do something and be somebody was strong in his heart. All the old pride came back.

The idea that he would not sell the product of his brain for hire was abandoned, and soon after arriving in Holland he began to write letters home, making sharp bargains with publishers.

Further than this, his attorneys, on his order, made demand for a share of his wife's estate. And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness. He was making money, and had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a conservative and written a book on "Getting on in the World, or Success as I Have Found It."

Byron's pilgrimage down through Germany, along the Rhine to Switzerland, was one of rest and recreation. At Berne, Basle, Lausanne and Geneva he found food for literary thought, and many instances in his writings show the reflected scenes he saw. No visitor at Lausanne fails to visit the Castle of Chillon, and all the guides will recite you these sweeping lines, so surcharged with feeling, beginning:

"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls; A thousand feet in depth below, Its many waters meet and flow."

At Geneva began the most interesting friendship between Byron and that other young man, so like and yet so unlike him.

Only a few years and Byron was to search the shores of the Mediterranean for Shelley's dead body, and finding it, be one of the friends who reduced it to ashes.

Tiring of Geneva and the tourists who pointed him out as a curiosity, we find Byron and his little party making their way across the Simplon, to cross which is an epoch in the life of any man, and then down by the Lago Maggiore to Milan.

"The Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron—the art of painting never did—this was his most marked limitation. From Milan they wandered down through Italy to Verona and Venice.

The third Canto of "Childe Harold," "Manfred," and dozens of shorter poems had been sent to Murray. England read and paid for all that Byron wrote, and accepted it all as autobiography. Possibly Byron's defiant manner lent an excuse for this, but by applying similar rules we could convict Sophocles, Schiller and Shelley of basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who suffered most.

The Countess Guiccioli, it seems, was the only woman who comprehended his nature sufficiently to lead him in the direction of peace and poise. With her, for the first time, he began to systematize his life on a basis of sanity. They lived together for five years, and from the time he met her until his death no other love came to separate them.

Throughout his life Byron was a man in revolt; and it was only a variation of the old passion for freedom that led him to Greece and to his grave. The personal bravery of the man was proven more than once in his life, and on the approach of death he was undismayed. When he passed away, April Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-four, Stanhope wrote, "England has lost her brightest genius—Greece her best friend."

His body was returned to England, denied burial in Westminster, and now rests in the old church at Hucknall, near Newstead.



JOSEPH ADDISON

Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me. This in a moment brings me to an end; But this informs me I shall never die. The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amid the war of elements, The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds! —Cato's Soliloquy



Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

Expression is necessary to life. The spirit grows through exercise of its faculties, just as a muscle grows strong through use. Life is expression and repression is stagnation—death.

Yet there is right expression and wrong expression. If a man allows his life to run riot, and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and therefore those qualities, not used, atrophy and die.

Sensuality, gluttony and the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul. All adown the centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we find individuals forsaking, in horror, the life of the senses and devoting themselves to the life of the spirit.

The question of expression through the spirit or through the senses—through the soul or the body—has been the pivotal point of all philosophies and the inspiration of all religions. Asceticism in our day finds an interesting manifestation in the Trappists, who live on a mountain, nearly inaccessible, and deprive themselves of almost every vestige of bodily comfort; going without food for days, wearing uncomfortable garments, suffering severe cold. So here we find the extreme instance of men repressing the faculties of the body in order that the spirit may find ample time and opportunity for exercise.

Between this extreme repression and the license of the sensualist lies the truth. But just where, is the great question; and the desire of one person, who thinks he has discovered the norm, to compel all other men to stop there, has led to war and strife untold. All law centers around this point—what shall men be allowed to do? And so we find statutes to punish "strolling play-actors," "players on fiddles," "disturbers of the public conscience," "persons who dance wantonly," "blasphemers," etc. In England there were, in the year Eighteen Hundred, sixty-seven offenses punishable with death.

What expression is right and what is not is largely a matter of opinion. Instrumental music has been to some a rock of offense, exciting the spirit, through the sense of hearing, to wrong thoughts—through "the lascivious pleasing of a lute." Others think dancing wicked, while a few allow square dances, but condemn the waltz. Some sects allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while others, still, employ a whole orchestra in their religious service. Some there may be who regard pictures as implements of idolatry, while the Hook-and-Eye Baptists look upon buttons as immoral.

Strange evolutions are often witnessed within the life of one individual, as to what is right and what wrong. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, that great and good man, once a worldling, has now turned ascetic, a not unusual evolution in the lives of the saints. Not caring for harmony as expressed in color, form and sounds, Tolstoy is now quite willing to deprive all others of these things which minister to their well-being. There is in most souls a hunger for beauty, just as there is a physical hunger. Beauty speaks to their spirits through the senses; but Tolstoy would have his house barren to the verge of hardship, and he advocates that all other houses should be likewise. My veneration for Count Tolstoy is profound, but I mention him here simply to show the danger that lies in allowing any man, even one of the best, to dictate to us what is right.

Most of the frightful cruelties inflicted on mankind during the past have arisen out of a difference of opinion arising through a difference in temperament. The question is as live today as it was two thousand years ago—what expression is best? That is, what shall we do to be saved? And concrete absurdity consists in saying we must all do the same thing.

Whether the race will ever grow to a point where men will be willing to leave the matter of life-expression to the individual is a question. Most men are anxious to do what is best for themselves and least harmful for others. The average man now has intelligence enough! Utopia is not far off, if the self-appointed folk who govern us for a consideration would only be willing to do unto others as they would be done by, and cease coveting things that belong to other people. War among nations, and strife among individuals, is a result of the covetous spirit to possess either power or things, or both. A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more devotion, a little more love; with less bowing down to the past, a brave looking forward to the future, with more confidence in ourselves, and more faith in our fellows, and the race will be ripe for a great burst of light and life.

Macaulay has said that the Puritan did not condemn bear-baiting because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. The Puritan regarded beauty as a pitfall and a snare: that which gave pleasure was a sin; he found his gratification in doing without things. Puritanism was a violent oscillation of the pendulum of life to the other side. From the vanity, pretense, affectation and sensualism of a Church and State bitten by corruption, we find the recoil in Puritanism.

Asceticism to the verge of hardship, frankness bordering on rudeness, and a stolidity that was impolite; or soft, luxurious hypocrisy in a moth-eaten society—which shall it be? And Joseph Addison comes upon the scene and by the sincerity, graciousness and gentle excellence of his life and work, says, "Neither!"

* * * * *

The little village of Wiltshire is noted as the birthplace of Addison, who was the son of a clergyman, afterward the Dean of Lichfield. An erstwhile resident of Lichfield, Samuel Johnson by name, once said of Joseph Addison, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."

For elegance, simplicity, insight, and a wit that is sharp but which never wounds, Addison has no rival, although more than two hundred years have come and gone since he ceased to write.

Addison was a gentleman—the best example of a perfect gentleman that the history of English literature affords. And in letters it is much easier to find a genius than a gentleman. The field today is not at all over-worked; and those who wish to cultivate the art of being gentlemen will find no fearsome competition. In fact, the chief reason for not engaging in this line is the discomfort of isolation, and the lack of comradeship one is sure to suffer. To be gentle, generous, kind; to win by few words; and to disarm criticism and prejudice through the potency of a gracious presence, is a fine art. Books on etiquette will not serve the end, nor studious attempts to smile at the proper time, nor zealous efforts to avoid jostling the whims of those we meet; for to attempt to please is often to antagonize.

Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise seem the three ingredients most needed in forming the gentle man. I place these elements according to their value. No man is great who does not possess Sympathy plus, and the greatness of men can safely be gauged by their sympathies. Sympathy and imagination are twin sisters. Your heart must go out to all men, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the learned, the unlearned, the good, the bad, the wise, the foolish—you must be one with them all, else you can never comprehend them. Sympathy! It is the touchstone to every secret, the key to all knowledge, the open sesame of all hearts. Put yourself in the other man's place, and then you will know why he thinks certain thoughts and does certain deeds. Put yourself in his place, and your blame will dissolve itself into pity, and your tears will wipe out the record of his misdeeds. The saviors of the world have simply been men with wondrous Sympathy.

But Knowledge must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child; on a field-mouse instead of a human soul. Knowledge in use is wisdom, and wisdom implies a sense of values—you know a big thing from a little one, a valuable fact from a trivial one. Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value: a little misfit in life makes us laugh, a great one is tragedy and cause for grief.

Poise is the strength of body and strength of mind to control your Sympathy and your Knowledge. Unless you control your emotions they run over and you stand in the slop. Sympathy must not run riot, or it is valueless and tokens weakness instead of strength. In every hospital for nervous disorders are to be found many instances of this loss of control. The individual has Sympathy, but not Poise, and therefore his life is worthless to himself and to the world.

He symbols inefficiency, not helpfulness. Poise reveals itself more in voice than in words; more in thought than in action; more in atmosphere than in conscious life. It is a spiritual quality, and is felt more than it is seen. It is not a matter of size, nor bodily attitude, nor attire, nor personal comeliness: it is a state of inward being, and of knowing your cause is just. And so you see it is a great and profound subject after all, great in its ramifications, limitless in extent, implying the entire science of right living. I once met a man who was deformed in body and little more than a dwarf, but who had such Spiritual Gravity—such Poise—that to enter a room where he was, was to feel his presence and acknowledge his superiority. To allow Sympathy to waste itself on unworthy subjects is to deplete one's life-forces. To conserve is the part of wisdom. No great orator ever exerts himself to his fullest, and reserve is a necessary element in all good literature, as well as in everything else. Poise being the control of your Sympathy and Knowledge implies the possession of these attributes, for without Sympathy and Knowledge you have nothing to control but your physical body. To practise Poise as a mere gymnastic exercise, or a study in etiquette, is to be self-conscious, stiff, preposterous and ridiculous. Those who cut such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make angels weep are men void of Sympathy and Knowledge trying to cultivate Poise. Their science is a mere matter of what to do with arms and legs. Poise is a question of spirit controlling flesh, heart controlling attitude. And so in the cultivation of Poise it is well to begin quite aways back. Let perfect love cast out fear; get rid of all secrets; have nothing in your heart to conceal; be gentle, generous, kind; do not bother to forgive your enemies—it is better to forget them, and cease conjuring them forth from your inner consciousness. The idea that you have enemies is egotism gone to seed. Get Knowledge by coming close to Nature, listening to her heart-beats, studying her ways. And let your heart go out to humanity by a desire to serve.