ment to any idea whatsoever would have power to turn him from his path. He has the same devotion to his own interests that a good man has to virtue: if the object were noble, his persistency would be admirable.

to much greater advantage on horseback than on foot; in all ways it is war, and war only, he is fitted for. His manner in society is constrained without being timid; it is disdainful when he is on his guard, and vulgar when he is at ease; his air of disdain suits him best, and so he is not sparing in the use of it. He took pleasure already in the part of embarrassing people by saying disagreeable things: an art which he has since made a system of, as of all other methods of subjugating men by degrading them. -Madame de Stael

Every time that I heard him talk I was struck by his superiority; it was of a kind, however, that had no relation to that of men instructed and cultivated by study, or by society, such as England and France possess examples of. But his conversation indicated that quick perception of circumstances the hunter has in pursuing his prey. Sometimes he related the political and military events of his life in a very interesting manner; he had even, in narratives that admitted gaiety, a touch of Italian imagination. Nothing however, could conquer my invincible alienation from what I perIceived in him. I saw in his soul a

...

cold and cutting sword, which froze while wounding; I saw in his mind a profound irony, from which nothing fine or noble could escape, not even his own glory: for he despised the nation whose suffrages he desired; and no spark of enthusiasm mingled with his craving to astonish the human race. . . His face, thin and pale at that time, was very agreeable: since then he has gained flesh-which does not become him; for one needs to believe such a man to be tormented by his own character, at all to tolerate the sufferings this character causes others. As his stature is short, and yet his waist very long, he appeared

HE most joyful thing I know is the peace, the silence, that one enjoys in the woods or on the tilled lands. One sees a poor, heavily laden creature with a bundle of fagots advancing from a narrow path in the fields. The manner in which this figure comes suddenly before one is a momentary reminder of the fundamental condition of human life, toil. On the tilled land around, one watches figures hoeing and digging. One sees how this or that one rises and wipes away the sweat with the back of his hand. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." Is that merry, enlivening work? And yet it is here that I find the true humanity, the great poetry.

-Jean Francois Millet.

ND now, having seen a great military march through a friendly country, the pomps and festivities of more than one German court, the severe struggle of a hotly contested battle, and the triumph of victory, Mr. Esmond beheld another part of military duty; our troops entering the enemy's territory and putting all around them to fire and sword; burning farms, wasted fields, shrieking women, slaughtered sons and fathers, and drunken soldiery, cursing and carousing in the midst of tears, terror, and murder. Why does the stately Muse of History, that delights in describing the valor of heroes and the grandeur of conquest, leave out these scenes, so brutal, and degrading, that yet form by far the greater part of the drama of war? You gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease and compliment yourselves in the songs of triumph with which our chieftains are bepraised; you pretty maidens that come tumbling down the stairs when the fife and drum call you, and huzza for the British Grenadiersdo you take account that these items go to make up the amount of triumph you admire, and form part of the duties of the heroes you fondle?

Our chief (the Duke of Marlborough), whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshiped almost, had this of the god-like in him: that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage table where his plans were laid, of an enemy's battery, vomiting flame and death and strewing corpses round about him-he was always cold, calm, resolute, like fate. He performed a treason or a court bow, he told a falsehood as black as Styx, as easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a mistress and left her, he betrayed his benefactor and supported him, or would have murdered him, with the same calmness

always and having no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis when she cuts it. In the hour of battle I have heard the Prince of Savoy's officers say the prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury: his eyes lighted up; he rushed hither and thither, raging; shrieked curses and encouragement, yelling and harking his bloody war-dogs on, and himself always at the first of the hunt. Our duke was as calm at the mouth of a cannon as at the door of a drawing-room. Perhaps he could not have been the great man he was had he had a heart either for love or hatred, or pity or fear, or regret or remorse. He achieved the highest deed of daring, or deepest calculation of thought, as he performed the very meanest action of which a man is capable; told a lie or cheated a fond woman or robbed a poor beggar of a halfpenny, with a like awful serenity, and equal capacity of the highest and lowest acts of our nature. His qualities were pretty well-known in the army, where there were parties of all politics, and of plenty of shrewdness and wit; but there existed such a perfect confidence in him, as the first captain of the world, and such a faith and admiration in his prodigious genius and fortune, that the very men whom he notoriously cheated of their pay, the chiefs whom he used and injured-for he used all men, great and small, that came near him, as his instruments, alike, and took something of theirs, either some quality or some property: the blood of a soldier, it might be, or a jeweled hat or a hundred thousand crowns from the king, or a portion out of a starving sentinel's three farthings; or when he was young, a kiss from a woman, and the gold chain off her neck, taking all he could from woman or man, and having, as I said, this of the godlike in him, that he could see a hero perish or a sparrow fall with the same amount of sympathy for either. Not that he had no tears, he could always order up this reserve at the proper moment to battle; he could draw upon tears or smiles alike, and whenever need was for using this cheap coin. He would cringe to a shoeblack, and he would

flatter a minister or a monarch; be haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp your hand, or stab you whenever he saw occasion-but yet those of the army who knew him best and had suffered most from him, admired him most of all; and as he rode along the lines to battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling from the enemy's charge or shot, the fainting men and officers got new courage as they saw the splendid calm of his face, and felt that his will made them irresistible. After the great victory of Blenheim, the enthusiasm of the army for the duke, even of his bitterest personal enemies in it, amounted to a sort of rage: nay, the very officers who cursed him in their hearts were among the most frantic to cheer him. Who could refuse his meed of admiration to such a victory and such a victor? Not he who writes: a man may profess to be ever so much a philosopher, but he who fought on that day must feel a thrill of pride as he recalls it.

-William M. Thackeray.

doing things, not wholly rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it not our substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from eternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys. We may address it without superstitious terrors; it is not wicked. It follows its own habits abstractedly; it can be trusted to be true to its word. Society is not impossible between it and us, and since it is the source of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not cling to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and so sadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what, doubtless, it never knew that it did?-George Santayana.

Industry, economy, honesty and kindness form a quartette of virtues that will never be improved upon.-James Oliver.

HE main thing about a book is not

in what it says, but in what it asks and suggests. The interrogation-point is the accusing finger of orthodoxy, which would rather be denounced than questioned.-Horace Traubel.

tion in man's dependence upon the natural world and in its service to many sides of the mind. Such justification of cosmic piety is rather obscured than supported by the euphemisms and ambiguities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their attempt to preserve the customary religious unction For the more they personify the universe and give it the name of God the more they turn it into a devil. The universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive. If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals and plants, the cosmos has its own way of

of feelings and desires-supreme; and leaves knowledge merely the post of observer. This system of feelings is a fact in our minds about which there can be no dispute, a fact of which we have intuitive knowledge, a knowledge not inferred by arguments, nor generated by reasonings which can be received or neglected as we choose. Only such faceto-face knowledge has reality. It alone can get life in motion, since it springs from life.-Fichte.

HE sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.

-Thomas Paine.