'What! Won't kiss Mr. Fitzhugh! O Patricia! Oh, poor Mr. Fitzhugh!'

I looked at Mr. Fitzhugh. He made me think of our dough-men before they were put into the oven. I did n't wonder that she would n't kiss him. His mouth was - well, not the kind one wants to kiss. But he was lame, and were not lame people good? In the storybooks, where they abounded plentifully, they were all, all good, and only the wicked were unkind to them.

I looked at Patricia. Was n't it wicked to be unkind to lame people? But already she had lost interest in Mr. Fitzhugh her choice had been made. She had shaken hands with him; she had wiped the impression unobtrusively off upon her skirt; now her eyes were turned to the piano, where the young lady in magenta was beginning to play 'La Cracovienne' with the soft pedal down. Her eyes rested upon the left hand of the player, and from a certain hint of brooding in their expression, I knew that the bass was all wrong.

'Never mind. Here comes Janie. She will give me a kiss, I know. A nice sweet kiss; maybe two, three, four.' He made the sound of four kisses. 'Janie and I are good friends. Are n't we, Janie?'

'Ye-es.' (To myself, 'He's lame.') 'But if you don't mind, I think I'd rather just shake hands.' ('I can't kiss him.')

Another chorus of 'What! Not kiss Mr. Fitzhugh! Oh, poor Mr. Fitzhugh!' Always, please remember, in the soft voices of eighteen-sixty-one.

("Can I kiss him? No, I can't. But he's lame.')

'You too, Janie! Who would have believed you could be so cruel! Look at poor Mr. Fitzhugh! Only see how sad he looks!'

Yes, there was no doubt about it. He was looking sad. And he was lame. To be cruel to the lame!

("Now, if you shut your eyes and hurry up, perhaps you can do it. Now, now.")

It was done.

It was hard to do. Had n't a little girl some reason to expect approval? But that beautiful, rainbow-colored group had led her on to her undoing, only to turn upon her now with looks and exclamations more shocked than before.

'Janie! Janie! You little coquette! Coming down from the nursery with your kisses all made up, and then pretending to be too coy to give them! Pretending you would n't, when all the time you meant to!'

I turned to Mr. Fitzhugh. He was grinning—an odious grin.

Down dropped my head upon the sofa; hot, shut eyes pressed close against the slippery coolness of its horsehair.

I could feel a fluttering of the air like a flock of butterflies closing in upon me; there was a soft humming, half pity, half mocking laughter. Then the iambic of a lame footstep. At that I straightened up and stood at bay.

I must have breathed Patricia's name, for she stopped trying to reconcile the bass and treble of 'La Cracovienne' and came to me. I wish I could describe how she did it. Straight as the dart of a sailboat — and the circle closing me in parted as naturally as the water at the bow. It was an instinctive movement, altogether free from aggressiveness, but nobody touched me. 'We can't stay any longer, Janie. Mother's beckoning to us.'

For once the signal was welcome. As our parents kissed us good-night, their cheerfulness impressed me as a strange thing. If they knew how their child had been disgraced!

I crept up the dimly lighted stairs beside Patricia, crushed and silent. Her hold of my hand was the only comfort she tried to give. Pity would have

come amiss just then. I wanted nothing more to do with pity, my own or another's. It was a mistake. If I had refused to listen to its appeal, like Patricia, I might now have been walking with my head held up like hers. Only once she spoke.

'If I were you, I would n't pay any attention to what young ladies say,

They're like that-in society. Society's silly.'

And then we were back in the dear, safe nursery, where treachery was unknown. And Robin had just finished shortening.his second stirrup, so I knew that hours and days could not have passed since we left him busy with the first.

It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person than

to give way to perfect raptures of moral indigna

tion against his abstract vices. — ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

It is not only more instructive-it is more enlivening. The conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass from mouth to mouth and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the press are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries. And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their labored impartiality, their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition, produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free hold, like Mr. Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to originality. Therefore he grumbled at the

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paradoxes which were somewhat of a novelty in his day, but which are outworn in ours, at the making over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting than virtue. 'We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the first Napoleon.'

That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of favor as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the English people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed place) of the survival of representative government. The twentieth century does not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to disparagement, to searchlights, to that lavish candor which no man's reputation can survive.

When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson's suggestion, and chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the world had heard little but good, who had been praised and reverenced beyond their deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret and cold hostility, he experimented successfully with the latent uncharitableness of men's minds. The brilliancy with which the four essays were written, the keenness of each assault, the charm and persuasiveness of the style, delighted even the uncensorious. The business of a biographer, said the author in a very engaging preface, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit, and lay bare the facts as he understands them, 'dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.'

It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon, and no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered also that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of stubborn character and compelling will, as far removed from irreproachable excellence as from criminality. Of such, much criticism may be offered; but the only way to keep an open outlook is to ask, 'What was their life's job?' 'How well did they do it?' Men and women who have a pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale was all job) cannot afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move with an irresistible impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr. Strachey is never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon these forceful and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their more amenable contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we should be glad to forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington we hope to remember while we live.

The popularity of Eminent Victorians

inspired a host of followers. Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr. J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and that every side of his character was open to assault. The result of this perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his contemporaries liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have been content to take the word of those who knew him. He may have been, as Mr. Strahan asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a bad official, and a worse friend; but he managed to give a different impression. The just man falls seven times a day. Take sufficient account of all these falls, and he eclipses Lucifer. Addison's friends and neighbors found him a modest, honorable, sweet-tempered gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous words: 'You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried.'

This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were I coveting praise, this is the form I'd like the praise to take.

The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms, thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. "The editor of the Morning Post,' observes Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily, 'begins his day by wondering whom he shall denounce'; and opposing

editors, as nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry, and malice against malignity.

I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written The Mirrors of Downing Street, and I am sure that, were an American able to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur to him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. We grumble at our high officials, and expect our full share of impossibilities; but as task-masters we are not in it with the British. The difficulties surmounted by Mr. Lloyd George make the labors of Hercules look like a picnic; and to begrudge him an hour in his arm-chair, with his young daughter and a friend, seems to us like begrudging an engine-driver his sleep. There was a time when it was thought that an engine-driver could sleep less, and lamentable results ensued.

The public actions of public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour's personal selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener 'greatness of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,' is harsh speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him,' is a personality which Town Topics would scorn. The Mirrors of Downing Street aspires to a moral purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the expense of our neighbor's character.

The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to come by than the 'raptures of moral indignation,' of which he heard more than he wanted, and which are rever

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berating through the world to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and there, as we step apprehensively into historic by-paths, we are cheered by patches of sunshine, straight glimpses into truths which put a more credible, because a more merciful, construction upon men's actions, and lighten our burden of dispraise.

I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an avenue of approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis the Eleventh as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist. He has a natural desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews every side of Louis's character with dispassionate sincerity.

First, as a Catholic: "The king was very liberal to the Church, and, in some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the poor to give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at perfection.'

Next, as a husband: 'As for ladies, he never meddled with them in my time; for when I came to his court, he lost a son, at whose death he was greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence never to have intercourse with any other woman than the queen. And though this was no more than he was bound to do by the canons of the Church, yet it was much that he should have such self-command as to persevere firmly in his resolution, considering that the queen (though an excellent lady in other respects) was not a princess in whom a man could take any great delight.'

Finally, as a ruler: "The king was naturally kind and indulgent to persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no need of him. . . . But this I say boldly in his commendation,

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history in an ejaculation, 'Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!' it rests our souls to say, 'Amen!'

We cannot easily love Swift. The great 'professional hater' frightens us out of the timid regard which we should like

in honor of English literature

to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble sentence of Thackeray's which, if it does not soften our hearts, cannot fail to clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging misapprehension which we confuse with moral distaste. "Through the storms and tempests of his [Swift's] furious mind the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and maddening hurricane of his life.' One clear and penetrating note ('Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came') is worth much careful auditing of accounts.

The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his Early History of Charles James Fox, and the picture of Aaron Burr drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his Life of John Marshall are happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the terms are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a man whose history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are swayed by their political passions. An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all Conservatives were in fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition to George the Third is the acid test he applies, to separate

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the Federalists as the strength and the Republicans as the weakness of the young nation. Thomas Jefferson is his test, and a man hated and hounded by Jefferson necessarily wins his support.

Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their sympathizers in a cold north light, which softens and conceals nothing. Men of positive quality, they look best when clearly seen. 'Research and fact are ever in collision with fancy and legend,' observes Mr. Beveridge soberly; and it is to research and fact that he trusts, to rescue his accomplished filibuster from those unproved charges which live by virtue of their vagueness. American school histories, remembering the duty of moral indignation, have played havoc with the reputation of Aaron Burr; and American school-children, if they know him at all, know him as a duelist and a traitor. They are sure about the duel (it was one of the few facts firmly established in my own mind after a severe struggle with American history, concerning the treason, they are at st as ill informed as their elders.

British children do better, pe with John Wilkes. Little Long s can gaze at the obelisk which memorates his mayoralty, and th f him as a catless Whittington. The gan 'Wilkes and Liberty' has an a tive ring to all who are not of Ma Roland's way of thinking. No ma gave his partisans more to deferi, his opponents better chances to at.. and friends and foes rose repea and fervently to their opportuniti. A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend well worth the having, reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted confidence, a careful art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a niceness of touch which wins half-way all readers who love the English language. Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt