Iliad in a nutshell (L. "Ilias in nuce"), a proverbial phrase for anything infinitesimally small. According to the elder Pliny, there existed in his day a copy of Homer's "Iliad" which some indefatigable trifler had copied in such minute characters that the whole manuscript could be enclosed in a nutshell. But history fails to say whether it was a filbert- or a walnut-shell, which, of course, would make some difference. P. D. Huet, the learned Bishop of Avranches, in his "De Rebus ad eum pertinentibus" (1718), p. 297, assures us that he at one time looked upon this as a fiction, but that further examination proved it to be at least a possibility. In the presence of several gentlemen he demonstrated that it was feasible to write seven thousand five hundred verses on a piece of vellum ten inches in length and eight in width. Thus the two sides would contain fifteen thousand verses, the total number in the "Iliad." If the vellum were pliant and firm, it could then easily be folded up and enclosed in the shell of a large walnut. Professor Schrieber, a German inventor of a stereographic process, in order to offset this wonder, transcribed both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into so small a compass that both books complete could be hidden in the shell of an English walnut. Books have been printed the size of a postage-stamp, and only recently a volume was sold measuring eleven-sixteenths of an inch by half an inch, containing six portraits of the Czar and other celebrities. An Oriental scribe once wrote in letters of gold a poem of eight lines, the whole of which he enclosed within a grain of allspice and sent as a present to the Shah of Persia. But the untutored monarch showed small appreciation of the gift. Indeed, it is even said that he threw the penman into prison, where he languished several months until released through the influence of the American consul. In 1883 a Jewish penman at Vienna, Austria, wrote four hundred letters on a common-sized grain of wheat. He sent it to the emperor, who had failed to sign a bill to allow the Jew to become a clerk in some one of the royal departments, giving as a reason that it was absolutely necessary to have an uncommonly good penman in that department. After finishing the cereal wonder and despatching it to his majesty, the Jew picked up a common visiting-card and wrote on the edge a prayer for the imperial family.

In the year 1881 the Chicago Inter-Ocean made mention of a gentleman who had written the entire first chapter of the Gospel of St. John on the back of a postal card. That little notice, innocent as it was, caused the editor several sleepless nights.

Within the next three days postal cards and slips of paper with minute specimens of penmanship began to pour in from all directions. Among the hundreds of samples submitted for inspection, the editor acknowledged that the greatest curiosity was a postal card from John J. Taylor, of Streator, Illinois, upon which were written four thousand one hundred words in legible characters, the whole embracing the first, second, and third chapters of St. John, and nineteen verses of the fourth chapter of the same, and also the sixth and seventh chapters of St. Matthew, besides having nine words, in which mistakes occurred, crossed out.

All of this wonderful production, which would make three columns of the Inter-Ocean set in minion type, could be plainly read with the naked eye. Since that period, however, Mr. Taylor's record has been frequently eclipsed. Harper's Young People records that Joseph English, of Boston, Massachusetts, wrote with a pen an entire speech containing four thousand one hundred and sixty-two words on a postal card. On another postal card William A. Bowers, of Boston, wrote eight chapters of the Bible which contained two hundred and one verses, or five thousand two hundred and thirty-eight words; while W. Frank Hunter, of Topeka, Kansas, succeeded in writing the fifth, sixth,

seventh, eighth, ninth, and part of the tenth chapters of St. John, or six thou. sand two hundred and one words in all, on a space of equal size.

Last and greatest came Walter S. McPhail, of Holyoke, Massachusetts, "who claims to have transferred to the back of a postal card ten thousand two hundred and eighty-three words. These comprise the ninth to the twentieth chapters of St. John, inclusive, and are written with a pen so as to be perfectly legible-through a magnifying-glass."

Addison, in the "Spectator," No. 59, refers to that famous picture of King Charles the First which has the whole book of Psalms written in the lines of the face and the hair of the head. "When I was last at Oxford," he says, "I perused one of the whiskers; and was reading the other, but could not go so far in it as I would have done, by reason of the impatience of my friends and fellow-travellers, who all of them pressed to see such a piece of curiosity. I have since heard that there is now an eminent writing-master in town who has transcribed all the Old Testament in a full-bottomed periwig; and if the fashion should introduce the thick kind of wigs which were in vogue some few years ago, he promises to add two or three supernumerary locks that shall contain all the Apocrypha. He designed this wig originally for King William, having disposed of the two books of Kings in the two forks of the foretop; but that glorious monarch dying before the wig was finished, there is a space left in it for the face of any one that has a mind to purchase it."

This is not a mere piece of humor on Addison's part. The picture of Charles I. is still carefully preserved in the library of St. John's College, Oxford, though now so faded as to be scarcely legible. Besides the Psalms it is said to contain the Creed and the Lord's Prayer. Tradition says that King Charles II. was so anxious to get hold of it that when all his offers of purchase were refused, he told the college they might ask him for anything as a reward if they would but give him the picture. The Fellows complied. Then for a reward they asked to have the picture given back to them."

But a newspaper story credits one Gustave Dahlberg, a student in the Swedish University, with a wonder far exceeding this. He has made a portrait of King Oscar, the whole in microscopic letters, forming short and long extracts from the Bible. The right eye of this wonderful portrait is made up of even verses from the Psalms of David; the left, of verses from the Proverbs of Solomon, the book of Chronicles, and the Song of Solomon, containing in all three hundred and seventeen words and seventeen hundred and nine letters. The king's uniform is composed of the whole of the first fifty Psalms. The exact number of words and letters in the whole portrait is not stated, but, judging from the fact that it took seventeen hundred and nine letters to make one eye, the whole number of letters in this triumph of the penman's art cannot fall much short of fifty thousand. In making the name of the king alone Dahlberg used all of the one-hundred-and-twenty-sixth and one-hundred-and twenty-seventh Psalms. The portrait, which is said to look life-like and natural, is on tinted paper of the kind known as "Haynes's Standard," and is so small that a United States half-dollar laid upon it comparatively hides it from view. But all these feats with the pen have been overshadowed by the achievements of William Webb, of London, England.

In 1886, Mr. Webb invented a machine composed of exquisitely graduated wheels and running a tiny diamond point at the end of an almost equally tiny arm, whereby he was able to write upon glass the whole of the Lord's Prayer within a space measuring the two-hundred-and-ninety-fourth of an inch in length by the four-hundred-and-fortieth of an inch in breadth, or about the size of a dot over the letter i in common print.

With that machine Mr. Webb, or any one else who understood operating it, could write the whole three million five hundred and sixty-six thousand

four hundred and eighty letters of the Old and New Testaments eight times over in the space of one inch square. When this wonderful microscopic writing was enlarged by photography, every letter and point was perfect, and it could be read with ease.

The British Museum, among its many curiosities, has probably the most unique collection of miniature books in the world.

Here is a rather dilapidated book of songs, bound in brown leather, little more than an inch square, called "The Maid's Delight," dated London, 1670. Next is a little brown Bible, known, from its diminutive size, as the Thumb Bible, dated London, 1693. Its gilt edges are excellently preserved. Here is a very small summary of the Bible, in perfect condition, made curious from the fact that it has the tiniest of illustrations. By its side rests a complete copy of Dante, with an engraving of the author. It is only one and a half inches wide, yet it contains four hundred and ninety-nine pages, on which are printed one hundred cantos.

Short-hand writers, too, have a miniature volume containing the New Testament and Psalms, bound in a green cover, once velvet or plush,-with silver clasps and bands. It is a wonderful little book, written in short-hand, by Jeremiah Rich, as far back as two hundred and thirty-one years ago. On the fly-leaf are these words: "The pen's dexterity by these incomparable contractions, by which a sentence is as soon written as a word, allowed by authority and passed the two Universities with great approbation and applause, invented and taught by Jeremiah Rich, 1659. John Lilburne offered to give the author a certificate, under his own hand, that he took down his trial at the Old Bailey with the greatest exactness. The Book of Psalms in Rich's characters is in print. His short-hand was taught in Dr. Doddinge's Academy, at Northampton."

The Chinese and Japanese excel in the art of manufacturing miniatures. Their fingers must indeed be deft if they could carve correct and striking portraits of William III. and George I. on the half of a walnut-shell,-a feat which has been accomplished. Some time ago a British needle-manufacturer sent out to China a number of exceedingly fine needles, saying that he thought nobody in the Celestial Empire could be found to drill a hole as small as that necessary for the eye. He received them back with holes drilled through the very points, truly a wonderful piece of workmanship.

But even this pales before the work now being done by a naturalist.

His hobby consists in collecting the fine dust with which the wings of moths and butterflies are covered, and forming them into the most artistic and picturesque designs. He mounts each single grain of dust separately, so as to make bouquets of flowers, fern-leaves, and butterflies hovering round. This he does in a space occupied by the eighth of an inch. In another design he has a vase of passion-flowers made of upward of five hundred grains of dust; and again he has represented a pot of fuchsias, with butterflies and birds, in three-sixteenths of a square inch. This marvellous mounting in miniature will be more readily understood when it is mentioned that there are so many single grains of dust on a butterfly's wing that no man has ever succeeded in counting them.

This same naturalist mounted a couple of hundred of the tiniest eggs of the smallest insects, so as to make a perfect geometrical design, yet the whole did not cover a space a quarter of an inch in diameter; while another ardent naturalist selected and arranged three thousand six hundred young oysters within a circle a little less than three-eighths of an inch in diameter.

Tiny shells arrive in this country from Barbadoes, a hundred of which could be placed on a space covering the eighth of a square inch. An ingenious individual has made a perfect shot-gun capable of firing a consider.

able distance, yet only measuring two inches in length, and now detectives have managed to find a photographic camera so small as to be contained within the limits of a breast-pin. An enterprising photographer succeeded in taking the portraits of one hundred and five eminent personages on a piece of glass no bigger than a pin's head.

Miniature portraits and pictures necessarily call for some comment. They are painted on ivory. First of all, you make your sketch in pencil, then it is transferred to the ivory. The tiniest take a number of days to work up. In the old days the subjects would give eight to a dozen sittings of from one to two hours, but now photography is often called in in order to obviate the number of sittings. Van Blarenberghe was so clever at painting miniature pictures in water-colors that he could represent a battle-scene, with battalions marching, horses galloping to and fro, colors flying, and fair follow-the-drums, -hundreds of figures, every uniform correct and every face a study,—all on the lid of a snuff-box. Watteau excelled as a painter of the sweetest of little Cupids upon lockets.

Ilk. Of that ilk, an expression of frequent occurrence in newspapers in the sense "of the same sort or stamp." The phrase is Scotch, and is, in Scotland, exclusively applied to a gentleman whose family name is the same as that of his estate. Menzies of Menzies is an example; as is Anstruther of Anstruther. The number of families to whom the title is applicable is extremely limited, and it is regarded as more honorable than those of the newmade nobles. Several of the oldest and highest of the Scotch nobility were earlier of that ilk, as the Dukes of Hamilton, Gordon, etc. The Chisholm, The O'Connor Don, is an analogous and not less distinguished title, indicating that its bearer is chief of the name.

Ill-gotten goods never prosper, a proverb common to all modern languages, and in classic literature found in the "Ill-gotten goods are productive of evil" of Sophocles and the "Ill gotten is ill spent" of Plautus. A common proverb tells us, "Happy is the rich man's son whose father went to hell," meaning that as the father has suffered the retribution which follows avarice and dishonesty, the son may be able to put the money he has hoarded to successful use.

Didst thou never hear

That things ill got had ever bad success?

And happy always was it for that son
Whose father for his hoarding went to hell?

Henry VI., Part III., Act ii., Sc. 2.

Ills we have, And makes us rather bear those. Hamlet's famous soliloquy beginning "To be or not to be" contains the following among many pregnant passages:

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Act iii., Sc. 1.

Livy has a thought similar to the lines we have italicized in the story ne tells of Pacuvius Calavius. He was a man of great influence in Capua.

His fellow-citizens rose in mutiny against their magistrates. Haranguing them in the market-place, he counselled them that they should mention the name of every senator they wished deposed and suggest in his stead a worthy and acceptable person. Then he began the roll-call. The first name mentioned was received with a cry of execration. Out it went. But when it came to the question of a successor a great turmoil arose. One name after another was hooted down. "In the end, growing weary of this bustie, they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and best-known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."

To the same effect was a saying of Socrates, thus recorded by Plutarch: Socrates thought that if all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most persons would be contented to take their own and depart.-Consolation to Apollonius.

Addison enlarges upon this thought in No. 558 of the "Spectator," in an apologue where the human race are invited by Jupiter to a large plain, there to cast off their miseries and exchange them for what they consider the lighter burdens of their neighbors. But when the change is made the man is far unhappier than ever, the new evils seem far greater to unaccustomed shoulders than the old, and there is general joy when Jupiter, having taught a salutary lesson, allows every one to resume his former condition. From this tale Addison draws the moral never to repine at one's own misfortunes, nor to envy the happiness of another, since it is impossible for any man to form a right judgment of his neighbor's sufferings.

As the motto of his paper Addison makes a long quotation from the opening lines of Horace's first satire, "which implies," says Addison, "that the hardships or misfortunes we lie under are more easy to us than those of any other person would be in case we could change conditions with him."

Illuminated Doctor, a title bestowed upon Raymond Lulle or Lully, a distinguished scholastic (1235-1315), and author of the system called "Ars Lulliana," which was taught throughout Europe during several centuries, and whose purpose was to prove that the mysteries of faith are not contrary to

reason.

The same appellation is sometimes given to John Tauler, a celebrated German mystic (1294-1361), who professed to have seen visions and heard spiritual voices.

Impending Crisis. "The Impending Crisis of the South" was the title of a book by H. R. Helper, of North Carolina, published in 1858. As events proved, the political forecasts of the volume were prophetic. It had a pow erful influence in precipitating the conflict, and its title became a watchword with orators on both sides.

Imperium et Libertas. Lord Beaconsfield, in a speech at Guildhall, November 9, 1879, said, “One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what was his politics, replied, 'Imperium et libertas.' That would not make a bad programme for a British minister." Was the reference to Nerva, of whom Tacitus (Agricola, ch. iii.) said, "He joined two things hitherto incompatible, principatem ac libertatem"?

Impossible is not a French word, a famous phrase attributed to Napoleon I. by Colin d'Harlay. Other authorities quote it in the form "Impossible is a word I never use," or "Impossible, a word found only in the dictionary of fools." But before Napoleon something of the same sort had been said by