"How contradictory it seems," remarked Washington Irving, writing of Oliver Goldsmith, "that one of the most delightful pictures of home and homefelt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the married state should be drawn by a bachelor who had been severed from domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made by a man whose deficiencies in all the graces of person and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex." Byron thought it contradictory that the ancients, in their mythology, should have represented Wisdom by a woman, and Love by a boy. "Don't you know," urged Sydney Smith, "as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?" In the old church at Hatfield, in England, amongst the antiquities, there is a recumbent statue, which every one believed was a woman, till Flaxman, the sculptor, examined it, and satisfied himself that it was a priest. Madame De StaËl's Delphine was thought to contain a representation of Talleyrand in the character of an old woman. On her pressing for his opinion of that work, he said, "That is the work—is it not?—in which you and I are exhibited in the disguise of females?" Bulwer seemed to Harriet Martineau "a woman of genius, inclosed by misadventure in a man's form." A lady, speaking of the works of the poet Thomson, observed that she could gather from his writings three parts of his character: that he was an ardent lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent. Savage, to whom the remark was addressed, assured her that, in regard to the first, she was altogether mistaken; for the second, his friend was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and as to the third, he indulged in every luxury that came within his reach. Holmes states, in the preface to Elsie Venner, that while the story was in progress, he received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception. Mrs. Hawthorne said that men who had committed great crimes, or whose memories held tragic secrets, would sometimes write to her husband, or even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as the father confessor for all hidden sins. The Swedenborgians informed Poe that they had discovered all that he said in a magazine article, entitled Mesmeric Revelations, to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt his veracity,—a thing which, in that particular instance, he never dreamed of not doubting himself. Lord Lansdowne and Sydney Smith, with a companion or two, went incognito to Deville, the phrenologist in the Strand, to have their characters read from their skulls, and were most perversely interpreted. Lord Lansdowne was pronounced to be so absorbed in generalization as to fail in all practical matters, and Sydney Smith to be a great naturalist—"never so happy as when arranging his birds and fishes." "Sir," said the divine, with a stare of comical stupidity, "I don't know a fish from a bird;" and the chancellor of the exchequer was conscious that "all the fiddle-faddle of the cabinet" was committed to him on account of his love of what he called practical business. Crabb Robinson, on one of his visits to the British Gallery, where a collection of English portraits was exhibited, was displeased to see the name of the hated Jeffreys put to a "dignified and sweet countenance, that might have conferred new grace on some delightful character." Consistently enough with the delineation of the portrait, Evelyn recorded in his Memoirs that he "saw the Chief Justice Jeffreys in a large company the night before, and that he thought he laughed, drank, and danced too much for a man who had that day condemned Algernon Sidney to the block." An eminent gentleman who inspected the portraits of Luther and Melancthon, as they appear on their monuments in Wittenberg, describes the countenance of the latter as "acute and sarcastic." "Had subtlety and craft been his qualities, I should have thought the portrait expressed them." It is related of one of the philanthropists of France, who at one time held no insignificant place in the government, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband's life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel's tail, he exclaimed, "Good heavens, madame, have you, then, no humanity?" In the palace Doria, said Willis, there is a portrait of "a celebrated widow" (so called in the catalogue) by Vandyck,—a "had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, with hands wonderfully painted." The custodian told the visitor that it was "a portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the widow." Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that Lord Anson, from his countenance, must have been a very wise man. Horace Walpole, who knew Lord Anson well, said he was the most stupid man he ever knew. Until a few years ago, it is stated, a portrait at Holland House was prescriptively reverenced as a speaking likeness of Addison, and a bust was designed after it by a distinguished sculptor. It turns out to be the copy of a portrait of a quite different person from the "great Mr. Addison."

Many a famous name, it has been truly said, has been indebted for its brightest lustre to things which were flung off as a pastime, or composed as an irksome duty, whilst the performances upon which the author most relied or prided himself have fallen still-born or been neglected by posterity. Thus Petrarch, who trusted to his Latin poems for immortality, mainly owes it to the Sonnets, which he regarded as ephemeral displays of feeling or fancy of the hour. Thus Chesterfield, the orator, the statesman, the MÆcenas and Petronius of his age, and (above all) the first viceroy who ventured on justice to Ireland, is floated down to our times by his familiar Letters to his Son. Thus Johnson, the Colossus of Literature, were he to look up or down (to adopt the more polite hypothesis), would hardly believe his eyes or ears, on finding that Bozzy, the snubbed and suppressed, yet ever elastic and rebounding Bozzy, is the prop, the bulwark, the key-stone of his fame; "the salt which keeps it sweet, the vitality which preserves it from putrefaction." We have it upon the authority of old Thomas Fuller, that "when a French printer complained that he was utterly undone by printing a solid, serious book of Rabelais concerning physic, Rabelais, to make him recompense, made that his jesting, scurrilous work, which repaired the printer's loss with advantage." "It was impossible to tell beforehand," said Northcote to Hazlitt, "what would hit the public. You might as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery. It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the subject and the prevailing taste, that you could not possibly be a judge of. I had once painted two pictures—one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with a monkey) and another called The Visit to the Grandmother; and Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of it in Paris; and once, when I went to his house, to get one to complete a set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a proof impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon it." Cervantes, who was fifty-eight when he published the first part of Don Quixote, had, like Fielding, "written a considerable number of indifferent dramas which gave no indication of the immortal work which afterward astonished and delighted the world. He was the author of several tales, for which even his subsequent fame can procure very few readers, and would certainly have been forgotten if the lustre of his masterpiece had not shed its light upon everything which belonged to him. It was not till he was verging upon three-score that he hit upon the happy plan which was to exhibit his genius, and which nothing previously sufficed to display. Fielding was equally ignorant of his province. Writing for a subsistence, trying everything by turns, having the strongest interest in discovering how he could lay out his powers to the best advantage, he mistook his road, and only found it by chance. If Pamela had never existed, it is more than possible that English literature might have wanted Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia." Scott's conversation about his own productions, as recorded by Moore in his Diary, is curious, showing that he rather stumbled upon his talent than cultivated it originally. "Had begun Waverley long before, and then thrown it by, until having occasion for some money (to help his brother, I think), he bethought himself of it, but could not find the MSS." When he did, "made 3,000 pounds by Waverley."

It is set down as a striking commentary upon the taste of his contemporaries that Hogarth's six pictures of Marriage À la Mode were sold for nineteen pounds and six shillings, though fifty years afterward they brought one thousand three hundred and eighty pounds. The manuscript of Robinson Crusoe ran through the whole trade, nor would any one print it, though the writer, De Foe, was in good repute as an author. The bookseller who risked the publication was a speculator, not remarkable for discernment. The Vicar of Wakefield lay unpublished for two years after the publisher, Newberry, was importuned by Dr. Johnson to pay sixty pounds for it to save the author from distress. Paradise Lost made a narrow escape. Sterne found it hard to find a publisher for Tristram Shandy. The sermon in it, he says in the preface to his Sermons, was printed by itself some years before, but could find neither purchasers nor readers. When it was inserted in his eccentric work, with the advantage of Trim's fine reading, it met with a most favorable reception, and occasioned the others to be collected. Cowper's first volume of poems was published by Johnson, and fell dead from the press. Author and publisher were to incur equal loss. Cowper begged Johnson to forgive him his debt, and this was done. In return, Cowper sent Johnson his Task, saying: "You behaved generously to me on a former occasion; if you think it safe to publish this new work, I make you a present of it." Johnson published it. It became popular. The former volume was then sold with it. The profits to the publisher, it is said, were at least fifty thousand dollars. Cooper says that the first volume of The Spy was actually printed several months before he felt a sufficient inducement to write a line of the second. As the second volume, he says, was slowly printing, from manuscript that was barely dry when it went into the compositor's hands, the publisher intimated that the work might grow to a length that would consume the profits. To set his mind at rest, the last chapter was actually written, printed, and paged, several weeks before the chapters which preceded it were even thought of. The Culprit Fay, we are told by the biographer of Drake, was composed hastily among the Highlands of the Hudson, in the summer of 1819. The author was walking with some friends on a warm moonlight evening, when one of the party remarked that it would be difficult to write a fairy poem, purely imaginative, without the aid of human characters. When the party was reassembled two or three days afterward, The Culprit Fay was read to them, nearly as it is now printed. Drake placed a very modest estimate on his own productions, and it is believed that but a small portion of them have been preserved. When on his death-bed, a friend inquired of him what disposition he would have made of his poems. "Oh, burn them," he replied; "they are quite valueless." Written copies of a number of them were, however, in circulation, and some had been incorrectly printed in the periodicals; and for this reason was published the single collection of them which has appeared. A mere rumor that Erasmus' Colloquies had got into the Index Expurgatorius, sold an impression of four-and-twenty thousand copies, and made the fortune of the publisher. FÉnelon's Adventures of Telemachus, which had hitherto remained in manuscript, was given to the world by the dishonesty of a servant who had been employed to have the work copied, but who sold it to a bookseller without disclosing the author's name. The king, having been told that it was from the pen of the Archbishop of Cambrai, and probably sharing an unfounded suspicion then current, that the book was a satire on the court, took measures to suppress it; but a few copies escaped seizure, and an imperfect edition was printed in Holland in 1699. Others followed rapidly, and for a long time the press was unable to keep up with the public demand. Sir Matthew Hale wrote four volumes in folio, "three of which I have read," says Baxter, "against atheism, Sadduceeism, and infidelity, to prove first the Deity, and then the immortality of man's soul, and then the truth of Christianity and the Holy Scripture, answering the infidel's objections against Scripture. It is strong and masculine, only too tedious for impatient readers. He said he wrote it only at vacant hours in his circuits, to regulate his meditations, finding, that while he wrote down what he thought on, his thoughts were the easier kept close to work, and kept in a method. But I could not persuade him to publish them."

One is tempted to speculate upon the books that never were published. As some of the best books have been written in prison or captivity, so some of like quality may have perished with their unfortunate authors. If so many great authors, like Dryden and Cervantes, and Le Sage and Spenser, almost starved, barely procuring a pittance for their published works, how many good works may not, in despair, have been destroyed by their authors. If so many great works were accidentally discovered in manuscript, how many as great may have perished in that form. "The Romans wrote their books either on parchment or on paper made of the Egyptian papyrus. The latter, being the cheapest, was, of course, the most commonly used. But after the communication between Europe and Egypt was broken off, on account of the latter having been seized upon by the Saracens, the papyrus was no longer in use in Italy or in other European countries. They were obliged, on that account, to write all their books upon parchment, and as its price was high, books became extremely rare, and of great value. We may judge of the scarcity of materials for writing them from one circumstance. There still remain several manuscripts of the eighth, ninth, and following centuries, written on parchment, from which some former writing had been erased, in order to substitute a new composition in its place. In this manner, it is probable, several books of the ancients perished. A book of Livy, or of Tacitus, might be erased, to make room for the legendary tale of a saint, or the superstitious prayers of a missal." Truly, a resurrection of the unpublished, to say the least, would expose an interesting mass of intellectual novelties. The book-tasters, wise as they think themselves, are very far from being unerring in their estimates of brain values, and better things than they have approved may have gone into the basket. The weather or bad chirography may have damned many a production of genius. The rejection of an article for a quarterly may have snuffed out the most promising talents. It is possible that some charitable reformer may have discovered a way to fuse sects and harmonize Christians, but was prevented from showing it to the world by the stupidity of printers!

The most wonderful and sublime things in nature and art are rarely appreciated at first view. Every visitor is disappointed at the first sight of Niagara. Mountains are not appreciated till we have dwelt long among them. Goethe was at first disturbed and confused by the impression which Switzerland produced on him. Only after repeated visits, he said, only in later years, when he visited those mountains as a mineralogist merely, could he converse with them at his ease. The sea is but a dead, monotonous waste, till we come to feel its immensity and power. London is but a great town till we have wandered in it, lost ourselves in it, studied it, in fine, till we have found it too great to be comprehended, when its marvelous proportions are expanded into a nation, and it is accepted as one of the great powers of the world. "The longer one stays in London," said a temporary resident, "the more it seems a mockery to say anything about it." "I remember," says an American traveler, "having read a glorious description of Milan cathedral, and a few days later I saw the temple myself. To my first view it was only a large marble church, fronting on an unpleasant square, and adorned with indistinct spires. I was shocked with disappointment. But when I spent a fortnight at Milan, and studied the cathedral in every light and through every part, I then saw that the description was far inadequate to the actuality." "When the visitor," says Hillard, "has passed into the interior of St. Peter's, and so far recovered from the first rush of tumultuous sensations which crowd upon him as to be able to look about him, he will be struck with, and, if not forewarned, disappointed at, the apparent want of magnitude." But he will find that the windows of the church are never opened, it is so immense as well as so complete; that it has its own atmosphere, and needs no supply from the world without; that the most zealous professor of ventilation would admit that there was no work for him to do here. "When we dream of the climate of heaven, we make it warmth without heat, and coolness without cold, like that of St. Peter's." It has been mentioned as a remarkable quality in Coleridge's mind that edifices excited little interest in him. "On his return from Italy, and after having resided for some time in Rome, I remember," says Cottle, "his describing to me the state of society; the characters of the popes and the cardinals; the gorgeous ceremonies, with the superstitions of the people; but not one word did he utter concerning St. Peter's, the Vatican, or the numerous antiquities of the place. I remember to have been with Mr. Coleridge at York on our journey into Durham, to see Mr. Wordsworth. After breakfast at the inn, perceiving Mr. C. engaged, I went out alone, to see the York minster, being in the way detained in a bookseller's shop. In the meantime, Mr. C., having missed me, set off in search of me. Supposing it probable that I was gone to the minster, he went up to the door of that magnificent structure, and inquired of the porter, whether such an individual as myself had gone in there. Being answered in the negative, he had no further curiosity, not even looking into the interior, but turned away to pursue his search! so that Mr. C. left York without beholding, or wishing to behold, the chief attraction of the city, or being at all conscious that he had committed, by his neglect, high treason against all architectural beauty!" Northcote mentioned a conceited painter of the name of Edwards, who went with Romney to Rome, and when they got into the Sistine chapel, turning round to him, said, "Egad, George! we're bit!" "Raphael's Transfiguration," says Willis, "is agreed to be the finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it from every corner of the room, and asked the custodian three times if he was sure this was the original. The color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the drawing—the colors having quite changed with time." Sir Joshua Reynolds says he was informed by the keeper of the Vatican that many of those whom he had conducted through the various apartments of that edifice, when about to be dismissed, had asked for the works of Raphael, and would not believe that they had already passed through the rooms where they are preserved. "I remember very well," he says, "my own disappointment when I first visited the Vatican. All the indigested notions of painting which I had brought with me from England were to be totally done away with and eradicated from my mind. It was necessary, as it is expressed on a very solemn occasion, that I should become as a little child. Nor does painting in this respect differ from other arts. A just and poetical taste, and the acquisition of a nice, discriminative musical ear, are equally the work of time. Even the eye, however perfect in itself, is often unable to distinguish between the brilliancy of two diamonds, though the experienced jeweler will be amazed at its blindness." "The musician by profession," said Goethe, "hears, in an orchestral performance, every instrument, and every single tone, whilst one unacquainted with the art is wrapped up in the massive effect of the whole. A man merely bent upon enjoyment sees in a green or flowery meadow only a pleasant plain, whilst the eye of a botanist discovers an endless detail of the most varied plants and grasses." Gainsborough says that an artist knows an original from a copy, by observing the touch of the pencil; for there will be the same individuality in the strokes of the brush as in the strokes of a pen. "Those who can at once distinguish between different sorts of handwriting are yet often astonished at the possession of the faculty when it is exercised upon pictures. No engraver, in like manner, can counterfeit the style of another. His brethren of the craft would not only immediately detect the forgery, but would recognize the distinctive strokes of the forger."

Hogarth and Reynolds, it is said, could not do each other justice. Hogarth ranked Reynolds very low as a painter. Johnson said "Tristram Shandy did not last;" and Goldsmith noticed the faults of Sterne only. They may each have looked with some feeling of envy to the far greater immediate success than either of themselves had enjoyed; but it does not follow that Hogarth, Johnson, and Goldsmith were so dishonest as to deny the existence of the excellences they saw. Unfortunately, persons engaged in the same departments of literature or art generally dislike one another. It is one of the drawbacks of genius. Voltaire and Rousseau hated each other; Fielding despised Richardson; Petrarch, Dante; Michel Angelo sneered at Raphael; but fortunately their reputations did not depend upon one another. Envy and hatred aside, it was impossible for them to judge one another justly; they were too near. A painter once confessed to Dr. Johnson that no professor of the art ever loved a person who pursued the same craft. The whole class of underlings who fed at the table of Smollett, and existed by his patronage, traduced his character and abused his works; and, as they were no less treacherous to one another than to their benefactor, each was eager to betray the rest to him. At the beginning of the last century, says Southey, books which are now justly regarded as among the treasures of English literature, which are the delight of the old and the young, the learned and the unlearned, the high and the low, were then spoken of with contempt; the Pilgrim's Progress as fit only for the ignorant and the vulgar, Robinson Crusoe for children; if any one but an angler condescended to look into Izaak Walton, it must be for the sake of finding something to laugh at. It will never be forgotten, in the history of English poetry, that, with a generous and just though impatient sense of indignation, Collins, as soon as his means enabled him, repaid the publisher of his poems the price which he had received for their copyright, indemnified him for the loss in the adventure, and committed the remainder, which was by far the greater part of the impression, to the flames. But it should also be remembered that in the course of one generation these poems, without any adventitious aids to bring them into notice, were acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. The very existence of the works of William Dunbar has been mentioned as a signal proof of the immortality of real merit; for we know not at what precise time he was born, nor when he died, and his very name is not, with one solitary exception, to be met with in the whole compass of English literature for two hundred years; nor was it till after the lapse of three centuries that his poems were collected and published—to secure him the reputation, among his own countrymen, of being one of the greatest of Scotland's poets. This neglect or inability to acknowledge contemporary genius was humorously hinted at by Coleridge in one of his lectures. The lecture being extemporaneous, he now and then took up scraps of paper on which he had noted the leading points of his subject, and made use of books that were about him for quotation. On turning to one of these (a work of his own), he said, "As this is a secret which I confided to the public a year or two ago, and which, to do the public justice, has been very faithfully kept, I may be permitted to read you a passage from it."

Tom Taylor's anecdote of Bott, the barrister, illustrates the uncertainty of literary recognition. Bott occupied the rooms opposite to Goldsmith's in Brick Court; he lent the needy author money, drove him in his gig to the Shoemakers' Paradise, eight miles down the Edgeware Road, and occasionally periled both their necks in a ditch. Reynolds painted this good-natured barrister, who runs a better chance of reaching posterity in that gig of his alongside of Goldsmith, than by virtue of the Treatise on the Poor Laws which Goldsmith is said to have written up for him. And as if the uncertainty of literary fame were not great enough, authors themselves sometimes strive to increase it by most extraordinary means. You remember Southey's attempt to hoax Theodore Hook regarding the authorship of The Doctor. At Hook's death a packet of letters was found addressed to him, as the author of The Doctor, and acknowledging presentation copies—one from Southey among the rest. They had been forwarded from the publisher, and were intended, it is presumed, if they were intended for anything, as a trap for Hook's vanity. Sydney Smith positively denied all connection with the Plymley Letters in one edition, and published them in a collection of his acknowledged works some months after. Sir Walter Scott, being taxed at a dinner-table as the author of Old Mortality, not only denied being the author, but said to Murray, the publisher, who was present, "In order to convince you that I am not the author, I will review the book for you in the Quarterly,"—which he actually did, and Murray retained the manuscript after Sir Walter's death.

The novelty of a real work of genius is sufficient to decry it with the incredulous public. All new things, much out of the ordinary way, must make a struggle for existence. It is but the way of the world. The Jesuits of Peru introduced into Protestant England the Peruvian bark; but being a remedy used by Jesuits, the Protestant English at once rejected the drug as the invention of the devil. Paracelsus introduced antimony as a valuable medicine; he was prosecuted for the innovation, and the French Parliament passed an act making it a penal offense to prescribe it. Dr. Groenvelt first employed cantharides internally, and no sooner did his cures begin to make a noise, than he was at once committed to Newgate by warrant of the President of the College of Physicians. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu first introduced into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, by which malady she had lost an only brother and her own fine eye-lashes. She applied the process, after earnest examination, to her only son, five years old; and on her return to England, the experiment was tried, at her suggestion, on five persons under sentence of death. The success of the trial did not prevent the most violent clamors against the innovation. The faculty predicted unknown disastrous consequences, the clergy regarded it as an interference with Divine Providence, and the common people were taught to look upon her as an unnatural mother, who had imperiled the safety of her own child. Although she soon gained influential supporters, the obloquy which she endured was such as to make her sometimes repent her philanthropy. Jenner, who introduced the still greater discovery of vaccination, was treated with ridicule and contempt, and was persecuted, prosecuted, and oppressed by the Royal College of Physicians. After nearly twenty years of patient and sagacious study and experiment, he went to London to communicate the process to the profession, and to endeavor to procure its general adoption. His reception was disheartening in the extreme. Not only did the doctors refuse to make trial of the process, but the discoverer was accused of an attempt to "bestialize" his species by introducing into the system diseased matter from a cow's udder; vaccination was denounced from the pulpit as "diabolical," and the most monstrous statements respecting its effects upon the human system were disseminated and believed. Early in the fourteenth century a law was passed making it a capital offense to burn coal within the precincts of London. In the reign of Edward I. a man was actually executed for the commission of the crime. The prejudice continued to the close of the sixteenth century. Not more than three quarters of a century ago, an ambassador at Paris issued cards for a large party, and found, to his dismay, that only gentlemen attended, the ladies having absented themselves on hearing that his lordship warmed his house by means of English coal. The use of forks was at first much ridiculed in England; in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, "your fork-carving traveler" is spoken of very contemptuously; and Ben Jonson has also ridiculed them in one of his comedies. "On the invention of scissors," says Voltaire, "what was not said of those who pared their nails and cut off some of their hair that was hanging down over their noses? They were undoubtedly considered as prodigals and coxcombs, who bought at an extravagant price an instrument just calculated to spoil the work of the Creator. What an enormous sin to pare the horn which God himself made to grow at our fingers' ends! It was absolutely an insult to the Divine Being himself. When shirts and stockings were invented, it was far worse. It is well known with what warmth and indignation the old counselors, who had never worn socks, exclaimed against the youthful magistrates who encouraged so dreadful and fatal a luxury." The fashion of plaiting shirts began in Rabelais' time; and it was said that the gathers were fit for nothing but to harbor lice and fleas. Robespierre's first important cause was a defense of the introduction of Franklin's lightning-rods against the charge of impiety. When threshing-machines were first introduced into England, there was such an opposition to them, and arson became so common in consequence, that such farmers as had them were obliged to surrender them, or expose them broken on the high-road. The fashion of wearing boots with pointed toes was supposed to have been peculiarly offensive to the Almighty, and was believed by many to have been the cause of the black death, which carried off, it is estimated, in six years, twenty-five millions, or a fourth part of the population of Europe. Another opinion, we are informed, gained ground, that the Jews were responsible for the ravages of the plague. It was claimed that the Rabbi of Toledo had sent out a venomous mixture concocted of consecrated wafers and the blood of Christian hearts to the various congregations, with orders to poison the wells. The Pope himself undertook to plead for their innocency, but even papal bulls were powerless to stay the popular madness. In Dekkendorf a church was built in honor of the massacre of the Jews of that town, and the spot thus consecrated has remained a favorite resort of pilgrims down to the present time.

Amongst the curiosities of literature is "a narrative extracted from Luther's writings, of the dialogue related by Luther himself to have been carried on between him and the devil, who, Luther declares, was the first who pointed out to him the absurdity and evil of private mass. Of course it is strongly pressed upon the pious reader that even Luther himself confesses that the Father of Lies was the author of the Reformation; and a pretty good story is made out for the Catholics." John Galt, in his Life of Wolsey, says, "Those pious Presbyterians, who inveigh against cards as the devil's books, are little aware that they were an instrument in the great work of the Reformation. The vulgar game about that time was the devil and the priest; and the skill of the players consisted in preserving the priest from the devil; but the devil in the end always got hold of him."

Mighty means indeed trifles have sometimes proved. The foolish ballad of Lilli Burlero, treating the Papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very ridiculous manner, slight and insignificant as it now seems, had once a more powerful effect than the Philippics of either Demosthenes or Cicero; it contributed not a little toward the great revolution in 1688; the whole army and the people in country and city caught it up, and "sang a deluded prince out of three kingdoms." Percy has preserved the ballad in his Reliques, but who remembers the air? My Uncle Toby, it seems, was about the last to whistle it.

The most popular song ever written in the British Islands, that of Auld Lang Syne, is anonymous, and we know no more of the author of the music than we do of the author of the words. Much of Burns' great fame rests upon this song, in which his share amounts only to a few emendations. The Last Rose of Summer is said to be made up in great part of an old Sicilian air, originating nobody knows when. Old Hundred, they say, was constructed out of fragments as old as music itself—strains that are as immortal as the instinct of music. Home, Sweet Home was written in a garret in the Palais Royal, Paris, when poor Payne was so utterly destitute and friendless that he knew not where the next day's dinner was to come from. It appeared originally in a diminutive opera called Clari, the Maid of Milan. The opera is seldom seen or heard of now, but the song grows nearer and dearer as the years roll away. More than once the unfortunate author, walking the lonely streets of London or Paris amid the storm and darkness, hungry, houseless, and penniless, saw the cheerful light gleaming through the windows of happy homes, and heard the music of his own song drifting out upon the gloomy night to mock the wanderer's heart with visions of comfort and of joy, whose blessed reality was forever denied to him. Home, Sweet Home was written by a homeless man. Lamartine, in his History of the Girondists, has given an account of the origin of the French national air, the Marseillaise. In the garrison of Strasburg was quartered a young artillery officer, named Rouget de l'Isle. He had a great taste for music and poetry, and often entertained his comrades during their long and tedious hours in the garrison. Sought after for his musical and poetical talent, he was a frequent and familiar guest at the house of one Dietrich, an Alsacian patriot, mayor of Strasburg. The winter of 1792 was a period of great scarcity at Strasburg. The house of Dietrich was poor, his table was frugal, but a seat was always open for Rouget de l'Isle. One day there was nothing but bread and some slices of smoked ham on the table. Dietrich, regarding the young officer, said to him with sad serenity, "Abundance fails at our boards; but what matters that, if enthusiasm fails not at our civic fÊtes, nor courage in the hearts of our soldiers. I have still a last bottle of wine in my cellar. Bring it," said he to one of his daughters, "and let us drink France and Liberty! Strasburg should have its patriotic solemnity. De l'Isle must draw from these last drops one of those hymns which raise the soul of the people." The wine was brought and drank, after which the officer departed. The night was cold. De l'Isle was thoughtful. His heart was moved, his head heated. He returned, staggering, to his solitary room, and slowly sought inspiration, sometimes in the fervor of his citizen soul, and anon on the keys of his instrument, composing now the air before the words, and then the words before the air. He sang all and wrote nothing, and at last, exhausted, fell asleep, with his head resting on his instrument, and woke not till day-break. The music of the night returned to his mind like the impression of a dream. He wrote it, and ran to Dietrich, whom he found in the garden, engaged with his winter lettuces. The wife and daughters of the old man were not up. Dietrich awoke them, and called in some friends, all as passionate as himself for music, and able to execute the composition of De l'Isle. At the first stanza, cheeks grew pale; at the second, tears flowed; and at last, the delirium of enthusiasm burst forth. The wife of Dietrich, his daughters, himself, and the young officer threw themselves, crying, into each other's arms. The hymn of the country was found. Executed some days afterward in Strasburg, the new song flew from city to city, and was played by all the popular orchestras. Marseilles adopted it to be sung at the commencement of the sittings of the clubs, and the Marseillaise spread it through France, singing it along the public roads. From this came the name of Marseillaise. It was the song for excited men under the fiery impulse of liberty. Those melodies for little children, just as immortal, owe their existence to circumstances just as accidental. We mean the melodies of Mother Goose. The story of this Iliad of the nursery is told as follows: The mother-in-law of Thomas Fleet, the editor, in 1731, of the Boston Weekly Rehearsal, was the original Mother Goose—the Mother Goose of the world-famous melodies. Mother Goose belonged to a wealthy family in Boston, where her eldest daughter, Elizabeth Goose, was married by Cotton Mather, in 1715, to Fleet, and in due time gave birth to a son. Like most mothers-in-law in our own day, the importance of Mrs. Goose increased with the appearance of her grandchild, and poor Mr. Fleet, half distracted with her endless nursery ditties, finding all other means fail, tried what ridicule could effect, and actually printed a book, with the title "Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children, printed by T. Fleet, at his printing house, Pudding Lane, Boston. Price, ten coppers." Mother Goose was the mother of nineteen children, and hence we may easily trace the origin of that famous classic, "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe; she had so many children she didn't know what to do."

As to the plays of the stage, we all know how some of them have gradually, in the long years, grown to be there, from additions by actors and managers, so wholly different from what they are in literature, that in important parts they would hardly be recognized as the same. Sheridan's Critic, with the numerous "gags" by Jack Bannister, King, Miss Pope, Richard Jones, Liston, Mrs. Gibbs, Charles Mathews, and other great actors, is a famous instance of the kind. And as to playing, Mathews says it is possible for a man, absurd as it may seem, to obtain favor with the public by merely attending to the mechanical portion of the profession, without any exertion of his intellect beyond committing his words to memory, and speaking to his "cues" at the right moment and with the proper emphasis. He gives a remarkable illustration of this strange possibility. When Douglas Jerrold's play of the Bubbles of the Day was produced at Covent Garden Theatre, there was a long-experienced actor, standing exceedingly well with the public, and an undoubted favorite, who played one of the parts so admirably that he met with unqualified success with the audience, and was a prominent feature in the piece, highly praised by the press, and complimented by the author himself, as having perfectly embodied his conception. After the play had run for some ten or fifteen nights, he one day came to Mathews and asked him as a favor that he would let him have the manuscript of the piece for a short time. Certainly, said Mathews; but what do you want it for? Why, said he, I was unfortunately absent from the reading; and I have not the slightest idea what it is about, or who and what I am in it. He had literally, according to Mathews, played his part admirably for many nights to the gratification of the public, the press, and the author; and he had never even had the curiosity to inquire in what way he was mixed up with the plot. He had seized the instructions given him by Jerrold during the rehearsals, and adopted his suggestions so correctly that he was able to fulfill all the requirements of the character assigned to him without the least idea of what he was doing, or of the person whom he represented. So it would seem that ignorance is not always a hinderance to success; on the contrary, it is sometimes the very foundation of what passes for knowledge. Take the wise doctor's remedies. They are adopted for the number that recover who use them, not for the numbers that die, who used them also. "The sun gives light to their success, and the earth covers their failures." "If your physician," says Montaigne, "does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that shall not be of his opinion." Heine, during the eight years he lay bed-ridden with a kind of paralysis, read all the medical books which treated of his complaint. "But," said he to some one who found him thus engaged, "what good this reading is to do me I don't know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow." What is often accepted as high moral truth is only a small part of what the philosopher has thought—the result less of faith than of skepticism; the two being in about the proportion of Falstaff's bread to his sack.

To get away from the ideal to the physical, what can at first blush be so absurd as the climatic changes believed by some to be produced by railroads? The desert of Western America has been transformed into a fertile plain: the railroad, they say, has brought rain. No element, we are told, was wanting in the earth itself, nor was aught in excess to enforce sterility, but everywhere there was drought. In the hot dust nothing grew but stunted hardy grass and sage brush. All seemed desolation and utter hopelessness. Wherever irrigation was tried, its success exceeded expectation in developing an almost miraculous productiveness in the soil. No enthusiast dared, however, to dream of the possibility of artificial irrigation over all that enormous expanse. Rivers entering there would soon have been drunk up by the thirsty earth and sky. Yet man's work, it would seem, has irrigated that whole desert by unexpected means. The railroad brought rain. Year by year, since the Union Pacific Railroad has been operated through, the rain-fall had steadily increased until the summer of 1873, when it became, to the operators of the road, a positive nuisance. Icicles, paradoxical as it may seem, are formed, science tells us, by the process of freezing in sunshine hot enough to melt snow, blister the human skin, and even, when concentrated, to burn up the human body itself. They result from the fact that air is all but completely transparent to the heat rays emitted by the sun—that is, such rays pass through the air without warming it. Only the scanty fraction of rays to which air is not transparent expend their force in raising its temperature. In the Alps, Tyndall tells us, when the liquefaction is copious and the cold intense, icicles grow to an enormous size. Over the edges (mostly the southern edges) of the chasms hangs a coping of snow, and from this depend, like stalactites, rows of transparent icicles, ten, twenty, thirty feet long, constituting one of the most beautiful features of the higher crevasses. An icicle would be incomprehensible if we did not know that the solar beams may pass through the air, and still leave it at an icy temperature. One of the contradictions of ice is, that, formed at a temperature of twenty-five to thirty degrees Fahrenheit, it is as different from that which is formed when the temperature has ranged for some time between ten degrees and one degree, as chalk is from granite. The ice at the lower temperature is dense and hard as flint. It strikes fire at the prick of a skate. In St. Petersburg, in 1740, when masses of it were turned and bored for cannon, though but four inches thick, they were loaded with iron cannon-balls and a charge of a quarter of a pound of powder, and fired without explosion.

The warm-blooded, fur-covered cat is just as contradictory—in one peculiarity at least. Gilbert White says, "There is a propensity belonging to common house-cats that is very remarkable; that is, their violent fondness for fish, which appears to be their most favorite food: and yet nature in this instance seems to have planted in them an appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to gratify; for of all quadrupeds cats are the least disposed toward water; and will not, when they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much less to plunge into that element." And there is quite as curious a fact pertaining to the rat. Naturalists say that his propensity to gnaw must not be attributed altogether to a reckless determination to overcome impediments. The never-ceasing action of his teeth is not a pastime, but a necessity of his existence. The ceaseless working of his incisors against some hard substance is necessary to keep them down, and if he did not gnaw for his subsistence he would be compelled to gnaw to prevent his jaw being gradually locked by their rapid development. And there is the tortoise. The same delightful naturalist we have quoted had a pet one, of whose habits he made many curious notes. He says no part of its behavior ever struck him more than the extreme timidity it always expressed with regard to rain; for though it had a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet did it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner.

But man, at last, is the creature fullest of contradictions, and his vanity is at the bottom of most of them. "What a sensible and agreeable companion is that gentleman who has just left us," said the famous Charles Townshend to the worthy and sensible Fitzherbert; "I never passed an evening with a more entertaining acquaintance in my life." "What could entertain you? the gentleman never opened his lips." "I grant you, my dear Fitz, but he listened faithfully to what I said, and always laughed in the right place." Darwin, speaking of one of his walks in New Zealand, says, "I should have enjoyed it more, if my companion, the chief, had not possessed extraordinary conversational powers. I knew only three words—'good,' 'bad,' and 'yes;' and with these I answered all his remarks, without, of course, having understood one word he said. This, however, was quite sufficient; I was a good listener, an agreeable person, and he never ceased talking to me." John Chester was a delightful companion to Coleridge, on the same principle. This Chester, says Hazlitt, was one of those who was attracted to Coleridge's discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass pan. He gave Hazlitt his private opinion, though he rarely opened his lips, that Coleridge was a wonderful man! "He followed Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantian philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Blackwood's, when they sat down at the table with the king, was not more so. Once he was astonished," continues Hazlitt, "that I should be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know!" "Demosthenes Taylor, as he was called (that is, the editor of Demosthenes), was the most silent man," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell, "the merest statue of a man, that I have ever seen. I once dined in company with him, and all he said during the whole time was not more than Richard. How a man should say only Richard, it is not easy to imagine. But it was thus: Dr. Douglass was talking of Dr. Zachary Grey, and was ascribing to him something that was written by Dr. Richard Grey. So, to correct him, Taylor said (imitating his affected sententious emphasis and nod) 'Richard.'" "Demosthenes" must have been "a sensible and agreeable companion." That one word was to the point, and was more effective than a dozen would have been to a man like Johnson. Two words, however, if we are to believe the story chronicled by John of Brompton of the mother of Thomas À Becket, performed a still more memorable service. His father, Gilbert À Becket, was taken prisoner during one of the Crusades by a Syrian emir, and held for a considerable period in a kind of honorable captivity. A daughter of the emir saw him at her father's table, heard him converse, fell in love with him, and offered to arrange the means by which both might escape to Europe. The project only partly succeeded; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and after many marvelous adventures by sea and land arrived in England, knowing but two English words, "London" and "Gilbert." By constantly repeating the first, she was directed to the city; and there, followed by a mob, she walked for months from street to street, crying as she went, "Gilbert! Gilbert!" She at last came to the street in which her lover lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the house; Gilbert recognized her; and they were married! But there remains one to be spoken of who gained immortal reputation for his sayings, who may be said to have never said anything at all of his own. Joe Miller, whose name as a wit is now current wherever the English language is spoken, was, when living, himself a jest for dullness. According to report, Miller, who was an excellent comic actor, but taciturn and saturnine, "was in the habit of spending his afternoons at the Black Jack, a well-known public-house in London, which at that time was frequented by the most respectable tradesmen in the neighborhood, who from Joe's imperturbable gravity, whenever any risible saying was recounted, ironically ascribed it to him. After his death, having left his family unprovided for, advantage was taken of this badinage. A Mr. Motley, a well-known dramatist of that day, was employed to collect all the stray jests then current on the town. Joe Miller's name was affixed to them, and from that day to this the man who never uttered a jest has been the reputed author of every jest."