own natural deficiencies toward the doing of it- resolve by redoubled energy and perseverance to extract from art whatever may supply those deficiencies in nature - this is the surest way to become great-this is the character of the English racethis should be the character of an English genius.

But he who thus feels, thus desires, and thus resolves, will keep free from rust those mainsprings of action - the sensibility to shame, and the yearning toward perfection. It is the elasticity of the watchspring that renders it the essential principle to the mechanism of the watch; but elasticity is only the property of solid bodies to recover, after yielding to pressure, their former shape. The mind which retains to the last youth's quick susceptibility to disgrace and to glory retains to the last the power to resume the shape that it wore in youth. Cynicism is old at twenty. Impudence has no elasticity. If you care no more than the grasshopper for the favor of gods and the reverence of men, your heart has the age of Tithonus, though your cheek have the bloom of Achilles. But if, even alone in your room or a desert, you could still blush or turn pale at the thought of a stain on your honor-if your crest still could rise, your pulse quicken, at the flash of some noble thought or brave deed - then you have the heart of Achilles, though at the age of Tithonus. There is certain august shamefacedness the Romans called it Pudorwhich, under hairs white as snow, preserves the aspect of youth to all personations of honor, of valor, of genius.

From "Caxtoniana.»

R

READERS AND WRITERS

EADING without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly.

Youths who are destined for active careers, or ambitious of distinction in such forms of literature as require freshness of invention or originality of thought, should avoid the habit of intense study for many hours at a stretch. There is a point in all tension of the intellect beyond which effort is only waste of strength. Fresh ideas do not readily spring up within a weary

brain; and whatever exhausts the mind not only enfeebles its power, but narrows its scope. We often see men who have overread at college entering upon life as languidly as if they were about to leave it. They have not the vigor to cope with their own generation; for their own generation is young, and they have wasted the nervous energy which supplies the sinews of war to youth in its contests for fame or fortune.

Study with regularity, at settled hours. Those in the forenoon are the best, if they can be secured. The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.

He is seldom overworked who can contrive to be in advance of his work. If you have three weeks before you to learn something which a man of average quickness could learn in a week, learn it the first week, and not in the third. Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.

In learning what others have thought, it is well to keep in practice the power to think for oneself; when an author has added to your knowledge, pause and consider if you can add nothing to his.

Be not contented to have learned a problem by heart; try and deduce from it a corollary not in the book.

Spare no pains in collecting details before you generalize; but it is only when details are generalized that a truth is grasped. The tendency to generalize is universal with all men who achieve great success, whether in art, literature, or action. The habit of generalizing, though at first gained with care and caution, secures, by practice, a comprehensiveness of judgment and a promptitude of decision which seem to the crowd like the intuitions of genius. And, indeed, nothing more distinguishes the man of genius from the mere man of talent than the facility of generalizing the various details, each of which demands the aptitude of a special talent, but all of which can be only gathered into a single whole by the grasp of a mind which may have no special aptitude for any.

Invention implies the power of generalization, for an invention is but the combining of many details known before into a new whole, and for new results.

Upon any given point, contradictory evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows

little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man. of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.

He who has no sympathy never knows the human heart; but the obtrusive parade of sympathy is incompatible with dignity of character in a man, or with dignity of style in a writer. Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

In science, address the few; in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgment on the few. But the few and the many are not necessarily the few and the many of the passing time; for discoverers in science have not unoften, in their own day, had the few against them, and writers the most permanently popular not unfrequently found, in their own day, a frigid reception from the many. By the few, I mean those who must ever remain the few, from whose dicta, we, the multitude, take fame upon trust; by the many, I mean those who constitute the multitude in the long run. We take the fame of a Harvey or a Newton upon trust, from the verdict of the few in successive generations; but the few could never persuade us to take poets and novelists on trust. We, the many, judge for ourselves of Shakespeare and Cervantes.

He who addresses the abstract reason addresses an audience that must forever be limited to the few; he who addresses the passions, the feelings, the humors, which we all have in common, addresses an audience that must forever compose the many. But either writer, in proportion to his ultimate renown, embodies

new truth, and new truths require new generations for cordial welcome. This much I would say meanwhile: Doubt the permanent fame of any work of science which makes immediate reputation with the ignorant multitude; doubt the permanent fame of any work of imagination which is at once applauded by a conventional clique that styles itself "the critical few."

Complete. From "Caxtoniana, »

M

JUSTIN MCCARTHY

(1830-)

CCARTHY'S "History of Our Own Times," published in 18781880, won him an honorable place among the prose writers of his generation, and he has increased his reputation by his work as an essayist. He has been long a favorite contributor to the leading English reviews, chiefly on subjects which require historical research. He was born at Cork, Ireland, November 22d, 1830, and has been not less prominent in the politics of the Irish Home Rule movement than in literature. On the fall of Parnell in 1890, McCarthy succeeded to the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary party and acquitted himself with credit. Besides the "History of Our Own Times," he has published, among other books, the "History of the Four Georges," 1884; "The Epoch of Reform," 1882; and a number of novels, several in collaboration with Mrs. Campbell-Praed.

NOW

THE LAST OF THE NAPOLEONS

ow that the weapon of a naked savage has struck down in a nameless skirmish the last of the eldest branch of the Bonapartes, and the first of the race who ever fell upon a field of battle, men's eyes are not unnaturally turned again upon one who often commanded their gaze before, but who seemed of late days to have passed from their notice forever,—the man whom strange chance has placed at the head of the Napoleon family. It seems in keeping with the pitiless irony of fate which has always pursued the Bonaparte dynasty—a fate as stern as the fabled destiny of the Pelopids-that the death of Prince Louis Napoleon should place whatever remains of succession at the feet of the man whom neither he nor his mother loved overmuch, at the feet of the Esau or rather the Ishmael of the house, Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (Jérôme), better known as Prince Napoleon, better known still in the argot of history as Plon-Plon. Prince Napoleon is the son of that somewhat featherheaded king of Westphalia who is chiefly conspicuous for his

marriage with Miss Patterson of Baltimore-she who died but the other day - and for his exclamation at the battle of Water100: "Brother, here should perish all who bear the name of Bonaparte!" an heroic exclamation which did not prevent him from escaping from the field and living till 1860. Westphalia Jérôme was the youngest brother of the first Napoleon; but as the great Napoleon did what he liked with the succession, and set aside his other brothers when they displeased him, the year 1852 saw his son the heir presumptive to the imperial crown. The birth of the poor lad who died last June in Zululand took away from him the succession to a great and apparently firmly established empire; his death has given him the headship of a fallen house, and put him nominally in command of a powerless party.

Prince Napoleon is one of the strangest figures of modern history. His career has been one long riddle unexplained as yet. No man in Europe has been more misunderstood, and few have been more disliked; no man had better chances of success than he, and no man ever made less use of his chances. To-day finds him as much a puzzle alike to his friends and his enemies as he was thirty years ago when he first swore allegiance to a French Republic. He has been described by a witty critic as a Cæsar out of place. But the epigram would have been much truer which described him as an unemployed Antony. The marvelous capability for doing the right thing at the right time which characterized Cæsar never was the property of Prince Napoleon. He has rather been conspicuous all his life for doing the right thing at the wrong moment. And now, close to his sixtieth year, he, the strangest evolution of the race Bonaparte, remains just where he was when he started, having succeeded in convincing the world first that he was a fool, then that he was a man of genius, without winning any success either from his folly or his intellect. Among the many witty and bitter things that the Prince Napoleon has said about the members of his own family, one saying deserves especial remembrance - his epigrammatic observation that his cousin the Emperor took in the world twice: first, when he made the world believe that he was an idiot; and secondly, when he made it believe he was a statesman. The epigram

would apply almost as well to its author as to its object.

This is his portrait, drawn by the hand of a bitter enemy:"He is of a tall form, but with his neck sinking between his shoulders; his waist is fast disappearing before the irruption of