story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, perhaps the most foreign of all sentiments to their naturally liberal and generous hearts."

Big Houses.

WHEN one reads of the big houses which the Crœsuses of our day are building in town and country, he cannot help recalling the words of Plutarch concerning the Rhodians. "They built their houses," he says, "as if they were to be immortal; " and then adds the words that seem irresistibly to follow, "and furnished their souls as if they were but for a day." When fabulous sums are spent for the outer, sensuous life, the inner,

Of course, the fact that

spiritual life is apt to be starved. a man expends millions on his house, furniture, horses and carriages, dress and display, is not conclusive proof that he gives little time to the culture of his mind and heart; but we fear that to many such persons the retort of Ben Jonson to the vain king who jested upon the humbleness of his dwelling the ornaments of which were the " rare "old dramatist himself, the best minds of the age, and "plain living and high thinking" is but too evidently applicable: "Tell his majesty that his soul lives in an alley.”

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Strange, that in this age of "advanced ideas" and wide-spread culture," when we plume ourselves so much upon our superiority to the men of bygone ages, we should need to listen to the admonition of a pagan philosopher of nearly nineteen hundred years ago. "You will confer the greatest benefit on your city," said the Phrygian Stoic, Epictetus, "not by raising its roofs, but by exalting its souls; for it is better that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses."

Newspaper THE passion in the soul of an editor for Rivalry. special, exclusive news is, as all the world knows, intense and all-absorbing. Life to him is a drama or a farce with little interest, except for the "paragraphs it may furnish. Disasters the more appalling the betterare godsends; shipwrecks are runs of luck; cyclones (paradoxical as it may seem) are windfalls; thefts, embezzlements, and bankruptcies are "grist to his mill;" a murder is like rain in the drought season; revolutions are fortunes. Especially is this true to-day, when the rivalry of daily newspapers is so fierce, unmatched in intensity by the competition in any other calling. Watch the necrological news-hunter of a great daily, when the life of an eminent invalid, whose "impromptu" biography he has had pigeon-holed for many weeks, is prolonged beyond all reasonable expectation. How unhappy the poor scribbler looks! What disappointment elongates his lugubrious visage! He feels aggrieved, almost insulted. But let him hear of the great man's decease, and how his eyes sparkle, how elastic his step, how jubilant his voice, attitude, and demeanor! Signor Penseroso is transformed into Signor Allegro in a twinkling.

There is a story of a provincial editor in England, who, discovering that one of his neighbors had hanged himself, would not cut him down, or mention the discovery to any one, but kept the body under lock and key for two entire days. Does this seem to you heartless, reader? To him the reason was simple and sufficient. His paper appeared on Thursday, his rival's on Wednesday; and "do you think," he triumphantly asked, "that I was going to say anything about the suicide, and let that scoundrel have the paragraph?"

The foregoing example of newspaper enterprise may startle the reader; but, unique as it is, it has been surpassed, as might be expected, in this fast country. The following story of American reportorial shrewdness and activity which, like love," laugh at locksmiths," and which, as Horace says of gold, "delight to penetrate through the midst of guards, and to break through stone walls, more potent than the thunderbolt" was told some years ago in the Correspondents' Club at Washington :

At the funeral of General Baker, which was held at the White House, the correspondent of a New York journal, unable to get a ticket of admission, got down through a coal-hole, and, after groping about for some time, reached the East Room at last, directly in the rear of the officiating clergyman. While the latter was engaged in prayer, the reporter observed a roll of paper in his hat. To seize it and fly was the work of a moment. When the unfortunate preacher turned to find his sermon, he found it not. He attempted to deliver it from memory, but made a mortifying failure, much to the astonishment of the dignitaries addressed. The next morning he had the satisfaction of reading his oraison funèbre in the New York "Herald."

"Smart' WHAT is more offensive than an excessively Boys. "smart" boy? Even downright dulness, which, if it never startles you by its wit, never pesters you with its impertinence, is preferable to the excessive precocity of these pert, saucy, prematurely wise youths, who know more at twelve or fifteen than their fathers or grandfathers did at sixty. Miss Florence Marryatt, who visited this country in 1884, met with a youngster of this stampa boy of eight or nine years on board of the steamship

"Germanic." He was one day on deck handling the quoits, when the skipper, in passing, observed kindly: "That's not the way to handle a quoit, my boy." The little wretch looked up and said: "Look here, old man, are you bossing this game, or am I?"

Contradic- Ir is a truism to say that it requires the tions in highest acuteness and the largest acquaintance Character. with men to read character correctly. Gall and Spurzheim, indeed, profess to make, comparatively speaking, child's play of it; but, in spite of their carefully mapped "organs" and their "temperaments," they have failed to provide us with an anthropometer: man continues to be a puzzle and a mystery to his fellow-man, as baffling as any riddle of the Egyptian Sphinx. One cause of the difficulty is the inexplicable contradictions that are so often found in the same individual. Even when we have discovered the ruling passion, we have not always obtained a key to all the chambers and secret closets of the soul. In nothing is Shakespeare's profound insight more strikingly shown than in his knowledge of the infinite complexity of human nature. While all his leading characters have some primary, overmastering passion, a close study of them discloses a thousand other qualities, the mutual play and varying intensity of which go to make up the complex being that the poet has portrayed in Shylock, Falstaff, Timon, or Macbeth.

The moral incongruities of men are, indeed, endless. Who, for instance, would suppose that a musical composer, and that, too, of sacred music, of the very highest order of intellect, could be a profane man, miserly, and in one respect grossly sensual? Yet such, we are

told, was the author of that sublimest of oratorios, "The Messiah," whom an English admirer describes as a large, tall, heavy man, with clumsy hands and feet, sauntering about (in London) with an awkward "rocking motion," talking English in the most grotesquely uncouth of German. accents and with the sublimest contempt for grammar and construction, and swearing heartily a good mouth-filling oath" at any one or anything that did not please him. At his meals he appears to have been a perfect Justice Greedy,

a second caliph Soliman, or what Horace calls a pernicies et tempestas barathrumque macelli, who gorged himself like an anaconda. No stranger who looked at him as he was cramming his skin with creature comforts would have believed that he was the author of the heavenly strains of which he was so prodigal. It is said that he used to order his dinner at an inn for two persons; and when it was ready, and the waiter asked when the company would arrive, he was answered by Handel in a voice of thunder, "I am de company! Pring de dinner, prestissimo!" For fear of not getting enough when he was invited to dine out, he took care to make an enormous repast before he went; and in the course of one of these antepasts he devoured a couple of chickens, half-a-dozen mackerel, and a good part of a duck, yet two hours afterward went to complete his dinner at a nobleman's! In apology for this it was urged (and we hope with truth) that probably, as in Goethe's case, who had also an abnormal appetite, Handel's large physique and generally rude health made it natural to him to eat more largely than average men.

Of his miserly disposition, an illustration is the peculiarity that he would wear a shirt a month without change to save the cost of washing, and that at a time when he was receiving £50 a night for his musical compositions!