like those who have succeeded best in | vent a courser whose spirit is greater other human efforts, are the essentially than his strength, from overstraining healthy, We cannot imagine Homer, his powers and becoming that saddest one or many, to have been other than and sorriest of spectacles, a racehorse healthy, or, again, Shakespeare. We broken down and turned into a hack. know that Michael Angelo was healthy, and so were Milton and Handel, despite their blindness. Sophocles had the good temper which comes of a thoroughly good constitution; so had his modern analogue, Goethe. Scott was a giant in strength, if a lame one. The health and strength of Mr. Darwin's great contemporary, Lord Tennyson, constituted one of the factors in his large and splendid achievement.

From Public Opinion. REMINISCENCES OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

WHEN Oliver Wendell Holmes was in England in 1886 he found himself on one occasion at a "crush" in Loudon amongst a great mass of people, including several royal personages. He sat quietly in a corner, but presently, feelIt is really a question of balance. ing a little faint, and observing refreshHealth and strength are an enormous ments in the distance, he turned to an advantage in themselves, but bring elderly personage standing near, whom with them greater temptations and ex- he supposed to be a butler or something posures and liabilities. Thus, weak of that kind, and asked for a harmhealth may sometimes necessitate the less beverage. The supposed servant spending of a good deal of time on ex-brought this with great alacrity, and ercise and rest, but, as a rule, it is remarked, "I am very glad to meet rather strong health that makes a man you, Dr. Holmes." The Autocrat of a slave to his body in the sense of be- the Breakfast Table was a little taken ing obliged to keep it in employment. aback, and the stranger added, "I am They have their consolation for whom Prince Christian." "Dear me," said some quiet form of exercise limited in Holmes, alive at once to the joke, "I time is sufficient, and who are not have not had much acquaintance with obliged to work off superfluous energy princes, and, do you know, I took you and the results of a too healthy appe-for the waiter!" At this Prince tite in hard or prolonged exertion. Christian went off into a burst of merReally bad health, of course, is often riment. "Where is my wife?" he crushing. The weak who have suc- said. ceeded, have succeeded not by dint of their weakness, but, at best, by its enabling them to manage their strength. Health is like money. He who has none is helpless, but he who has a little may, by economy and concentration, do more than many who have much. no man, then, who has any health at A correspondent of the Christian all, despair. Let him consider how World details an interview he had with much has been done by men weaker the "Autocrat" in 1888. "I asked even than himself. Above all, the him if the 'Little Gentleman' of the moral of Socrates's allusion is that he' Breakfast Table' was drawn from who suffers from chronic weak health life, or was an ideal creation of his will find his best antidote in accepting own, and he said the latter, and he it, in seeing what burdens it removes as always meant him to be a personificawell as what burdens it imposes, in the tion of the true old Boston spirit practice of a genuine and noble econ-proud, impetuous, and a bit shy of omy of his gifts and his strength. The strangers. I then referred to his "bridle of Theages may restrain a poems, and thanked him specially for Pegasus at times, but it may also pre- two that I valued above all others

Let

"I must tell her this. She ad

mires
you immensely.' Off went
Prince Christian to fetch the princess,
and the genial American philosopher
was soon the centre of a circle of roy-
alty, greatly delighted by the incident.
London correspondent, Western Mer-
cury.

though the public, if he might judge by the sale, preferred that of "Elsie Venner.' Dr. Holmes compared Browning to "Ben Jonson come back," but said he did not always "take enough pains to make his meaning clear." Of his personality and of his pleasure in meeting him he spoke with warm appreciation, but he added that "there was a little tinge of resulting disillusion if not disappointment; there was

viz., 'Sun and Shadow,' and his more Angel" was his own chief favorite, famous Chambered Nautilus.' He seemed much pleased and almost touched by my reference to the former, and said: 'Do you know, I find people expose themselves more by what they admire in my writings than in any other way; some idiots express the greatest admiration for the stupidest things I ever wrote, and of which I am ashamed; now, I don't mind telling you that I consider those two poems are the best things I ever wrote or something of the bourgeois in his talk shall write; and now I will do what I - nothing aristocratic; a grand specidon't generally do to strangers.' He men of a middle-class Englishman, then went to a cabinet and produced whose inspiration was loftier than his the actual nautilus shell which had bearing." A correspondent of the originally inspired his exquisite poem, Manchester City News heard Dr. and pointed out to us, as it was in sec- Holmes talk of "the Baconian theory tion, its beautiful convolutions, and of Shakespeare: ""Of course the 'crescendo' of cells. He then gave us very suggestion is enough to make each his photo, with his autograph on most lovers of Shakespeare mad. it, and a copy of his adopted crest, the Still I don't think this Baconian theory nautilus shell itself, with the eloquent is so altogether absurd as many other motto, Per ampliora ad altiora; and I things — homœopathy for example — value these as a unique record of a and the study of it cannot fail to be delightful visit." profitable, for it is the study of the productions of two gigantic intellects, and a comparison which cannot fail to

When on his visit to Edinburgh, Dr. Holmes informed an admirer that amongst his tales "The Guardian be suggestive.

AN AMERICAN POLITICAL Boss: FROM A FRENCH POINT OF VIEW. If it is true that all roads lead to Rome, it is equally true that there are more roads to wealth in the United States than can well be counted. Most of these are not very clean, and there is especially one that is as dirty as it is crowded by a class of men who have neither social rank nor means. These people are called politicians in America; they are the future non-commissioned officers of the election army, who hope to become chiefs themselves. They are already very numerous as a class, and their ranks increase from day to day. They have become a powerful factor whose pernicious influence is evident in broad daylight. How is it possible that a man whose name is almost unknown to the world in general, whose mode of gaining a livelihood is as dark and doubtful as his former life, who has neither an official nor a social position, and has not even been elected to the legislature, yet rules one of

the most thickly populated and richest of
the States as a veritable despot? How is
it possible for such a man to obtain such
weighty influence that he holds the balance
of power between the two parties? Such
questions must naturally arise when one
thinks of Mr. Richard Croker. One does
not like to pronounce his name, and does
so only with a feeling of fear and discom-
fort. Many know nothing about him ex-
cept that he holds no recognized position,
and that he is the "Boss" of Tammany
Hall, and as such the successor of Mr.
John Kelly. If this explanation does not
satisfy questioners, a wise silence is pre-
served, or the people express themselves in
so mystical and cautious a manner that one
feels the chief of Tammany Hall is a
mighty personage, a man to be feared, a
man whose detectives are everywhere.
And, indeed, this is true. No absolute
monarch has ever exercised a more des-
potic power than the Boss in his good city
of New York.

M. C. DE VARIGNY.
Revue des Deux Mondes.

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He's the sense of a Christian, the heart of a hero,

When he sees the red line growing gloriously thin!

When the pulse of the coffee-house bound

er's at zero,

Perfect Cure is his name! Perfect cure is his natur'!

A prince of good manners, and sound as a bell;

He's the pet of the women; each sweet pretty cratur'

Has patted, and kissed him, with dainty farewell.

Farewell! he must go, Dick! but find him a stable,

Where they knows that a 'oss 'as his veelins like we ;

He'll make no mistake, if his rider is able To sit, flung on high, as the foam from the sea.

I've toiled man and boy, like my fathers before me,

Never ground down the poor, called a shovel a spade;

Yet the old farm must go, no laws can restore we,

What the Empire has tossed in the gulf of free-trade.

Let him go, sonny Dick-for young blood will be flying!

To be poor, to be honest, is no man's disgrace!

With the hounds in full cry, I've no fancy

And kissed their locks of gold.

Alas! too soon will all their glory fade;
The sword of death hath leapt from out
its sheath;

Our five year old clipper is bound to And it shall strew their leaflets, torn and begin!

To begin and to finish, o'er pasture and timber,

The brook leaping yellow, the boulderstrewn moor!

frayed,

Upon the earth beneath.

Yet ere their little lease of life be done,
Ere the blasts rend them from their
foster trees,

O'er the clays, where the ploughs are about Their dying hours are cheered with warmth

to unlimber,

In these days of false doctoring, our

Perfect Cure!

and sun,
And rapt in perfect peace.
Chambers' Journal.
R. C. K. E.

ex

From The Edinburgh Review. ding his oldest and deepest love;" THE LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD.1 besides John Mitchell Kemble, the EDWARD FITZGERALD was one of Anglo-Saxon scholar, and William the casuals of literature. He had no Airy, brother of the late astronomer desire — in his own opinion, he had no royal. These boyish ties were capacity — for achievement. His spe- tended and strengthened at Cambridge. cial endowment he considered to be Undergraduate intimacies sprang up taste "the feminine of genius; " with Thackeray, W. H. Thompson, and he felt entitled by this comfortable Whewell's successor in the mastership theory to take his ease as a privileged of Trinity, and John Allen, long afteronlooker with no corresponding duties wards Archbishop of Salop; while the of performance. His power of enjoyment was unlimited, his dislike to exertion intense. Yet, in spite of himself, he was drawn into the game. He did not look for his task; it found him out. Strolling through life, so to speak, with his pipe in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, he unpremeditatedly, and against all reasonable expectation, did just one or two things supremely well.

Although born in Suffolk and bred in France, Fitzgerald was an unalloyed Irishman. His father, indeed, bore the non-Hibernian name of John Purcell; yet he, no less than "the Blakes and O'Donnells,"

resigned

The green hills of his youth, among strangers to find

That repose which at home he had [pre

sumably] sighed for in vain.

66

three Tennysons were added to the group, doubtless through Cambridge connections, although not at Cambridge. Fitzgerald's casual glimpses in hall and quad of the future laureate left, however, an ineffaceable impression. "I remember him well," he wrote in 1882 to Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, a sort of Hyperion." We acknowledge that from early recollections we take a strong personal interest in this remarkable group of men, to which several other names might be added, whom Fitzgerald numbered as his friends at the university. Cambridge has not produced in this century their equals. None of them indeed played that conspicuous part in public life, which distinguished their more ambitious Oxford contemporaries; but they were all men of the highest literary culture, of refined taste, and of originality, not unworthy to be the associates of Alfred Tennyson.

He contracted, however, no alien alliance, but married his cousin, Mary Frances Fitzgerald, the name and arms of whose recently deceased father he These attachments were, every one assumed in 1818. His third son accord- of them, lifelong. Fitzgerald was iningly was known as "Edward Fitzger- comparable in friendship. His fidelity ald" only from his tenth year. He was unconditional, unobtrusive, uncomwas a lively little lad, this youngest plaining; he was willing to give much. scion, and kept the family in fun until and receive little; he consented even sent to school at Bury St. Edmunds. to be forgotten, while he never forgot. There was formed the nucleus of his Describing and excusing his wistful cluster of friends. First of all came longing for a tardy letter, he said to James Spedding, the renowned apolo- Allen: "I am an idle fellow, of a very gist of Bacon, whom he "grappled to ladylike turn of sentiment; and my his soul" veritably with "hooks of friendships are more like loves, I "then W. B. Donne, well known think." in after life as a contributor to this and other journals, who "shared with Sped

steel;

His college career was of typical nonchalance

Unambitious of university distinctions [we quote from Mr. Aldis Wright's few prefatory pages], he was not in the technical sense a reading man, but he passed through his course in a leisurely manner,