but half true. A "fiery soul" his, indeed, was; but it is doubtful if the body's decay was not due to inherited disease rather than to his intense mental activity. The truth is that the author of the Habeas Corpus Act was born a cripple; he could not move without his man and his crutch, and he suffered daily from epileptic fits. "I was never," he once said, "without a dull aching pain of that side." Instead of shortening his life, it is probable that his extraordinary mental activity prolonged it by dispelling the morbid brooding over his physical infirmities and pains, in which he might have indulged had he kept out of the whirl of politics, and lived like "the dull weed that rots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf."

So, doubtless, with scores of other men who have been supposed to have killed themselves by overwork. They have borne that within them which would have more ignobly killed them if they had not thrown themselves impetuously into the intellectual struggle, and thus withdrawn their thoughts from "the Bluebeard chambers of the heart." The slenderness of Chamfort's frame, the delicacy of his features, and the mingled sadness, sweetness, and resignation of his looks when he was calm, led his friends to suppose that he was doomed to wear out early. But in spite of these physiognomic appearances, his friend Mirabeau declared that it was so far from being true that the blade was wearing out the scabbard, that it was the very vis ignea which preserved the machine. "Give him another soul," said Mirabeau, "and his frail existence would straightway dissolve."

Autobiography THE world moves in a circle. Autobiog Revived. raphy, so common in some bygone ages, is

in vogue again. One of the latest is that of Mr. Ball, the American sculptor, at Rome. The interest of such selfportraiture, when well done, is unquestionable; but what is its value? Augustine's is, no doubt, trustworthy; but how many other men have the courage to pluck out the heart of their mystery, to turn themselves inside out, and lay bare all their innate selfishness and deceitfulness, as he did?

Only too truly did Voltaire say that there is no man who has not something hateful in him, some of the wild beast in him; but there are few who will quite honestly tell us how they manage their wild beast. Rousseau professed to unbosom himself in his "Confessions; " but he kept back as much as, if not more than, he revealed. The deception of which he accuses Montaigne is one which he himself, to a considerable extent, practised, and to which all autobiography is liable. "I put Montaigne," he says, "at the head of those falsely-sincere persons who wish to deceive in telling the truth. He shows himself with his faults, but he gives himself none but amiable ones; there is no man who has not odious ones. Montaigne paints his likeness, but it is a profile. Who knows whether some scar on the cheek, or an eye put out, on the side which he conceals from us, would not have totally changed the physiognomy?"

Ancient Music WHEN We tire of the praises of Greek art and Modern. and the proclamations of the inferiority of modern which are ceaselessly dinned in our ears, and of which we are sometimes as weary as were the Athenians of hearing of "Aristides the Just," it is consoling to reflect that in one art the ancient Greeks fell immeasurably

below the men of our day. Surpassing as was their excellence in painting, sculpture, and architecture, they were far below the moderns in music. Though Cicero deemed it a mark of their unrivalled acuteness that they considered no man accomplished unless he was a musician, it is doubtful if they knew anything about this art in the modern sense of the term. Of simple melodies, executed on a pipe, or on a lyre with three strings, they had an abundance; but could they have had any conception, or even dreamed, of the grand orchestral and choral harmonies, the prodigal coloring, and heaven-scaling wails of passionate aspiration in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Had they a Handel, a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Wagner, or even a Gounod or a Spohr?

It has been pretended at times that the music of to-day is based and perfected upon that of the Greeks; but the simple truth is that in Greece and the isles of Greece, "where burning Sappho loved and sung," time and harmony all that we now call music were unknown. Were old Timotheus, who, according to Dryden, by his breathing flute and sounding lyre —

"Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire "

to rise from the dead, and listen to the complex harmonies and unearthly strains of Handel's "Messiah," to the bursts of choral gladness in Haydn's "Creation," or to the "Hailstone Chorus" in Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony," - that "grandest and most fearful of all storms which ever thundered in the bassos, whistled in the flutes, bellowed and blustered in the trumpets, and lightened and hailed in the violins," no other change or development in modern civilization, not even its steam-engine, electric

telegraph or telephone, would astonish him more than the revolution in his own art.

Some Uses

APROPOS of the old Greeks, I am reminded of Greek. of an original and unique reason for acquiring a mastery of that language given some forty years ago by "Vivian," the brilliant literary, musical, and theatrical critic of the London "Leader" (George H. Lewes, author of the "Biographical History of Philosophy," and various other works). Referring to a dwarf poet living in Cos or in Athens, who was so small and light that his friends fastened lead to his sandals to prevent the wind from toppling him over, the critic says: "There you see the virtue of lead. I take the hint. Conscious of my own specific levity, I leaden my remarks with imposing Greek or formidable philosophy; for you will have noticed in the British mind an incurable suspicion of all vivacious talkers and writers. As it is not in my nature to be grave, I borrow my gravity from the Greeks. Greek covereth a vast array of ignorance; Greek endoweth stupidity with an air of very supreme wisdom. That which in English would be commonplace, an adroit writer puts in Greek; and then

"How the wit brightens! how the style refines ! '

"It has been my lot (I may say misfortune) to have read a considerable amount of Greek in my time, and, honestly, the best use I have found for it has been for lead for my sandals. I harass Jones with Greek; he would despise me if it were not for that; but as he does not know what depths of wisdom may not lie concealed in the mind of a man who calls himself a poludakrutos aner (a really

fine phrase, by the way, the many-sorrowed man!'), and who tells him that emathen eph'oon epathe (he has learned through the things he has suffered'), Jones keeps contempt in abeyance, though, to be sure, he replaces it with dislike. I harass him, and he hates me. I crush his arguments by a quotation which he does n't understand, and so he is silent, because he is ashamed to ask the meaning!"

The First Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte, Step. "The first step is the only difficulty," says a French proverb. In attempting any great enterprise it is all-important to begin vigorously at the onset. Did you ever, in the days of brass door-knockers, give a feeble rap at first, without finding it impossible to knock loudly afterward? Did not brass in your hands seem to have lost all its brazen properties? So in moral enterprises, the first blow often determines all the rest. In moving a heavy load, in undertaking a dry and forbidding study, in forming a habit of abstinence or economy, the beginning is the hardest task. In the religious life, as every pastor knows, crossing the Rubicon is the main difficulty. In writing a book, a review, or a newspaper article, even after forty or fifty years of practice, it is in the composition of the first paragraph that "the rub" lies; the very idea of it often hangs like a millstone about the neck for a week. A writer often plunges into the middle of his subject at once, to get rid of the trouble of a proper beginning, and perhaps never gets any farther. Clergymen who put off the writing of their sermons till Saturday night or Sunday morning, do so from an acute sense of the misery of beginning. Even Milton, with all his genius, seems to have shrunk