dren of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox, in April, 1865. Think of him as, ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds, having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tearstained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot the old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey. What does he find- let me ask you, who went to your homes eager to find in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for four years' sacrifice- what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone; without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence the estab lishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves. -GRADY: Speeches.

4. The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere. MACAULAY: Boswell's Life of Johnson.

5. A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities. The reason is obvious. When we speak of a free government, we mean a government in which the sovereign power is divided, in which a single decision is not absolute, where argument has an office. The essence of the "gouvernement des avocats," as the Emperor Nicholas called it, is that you must persuade so many persons. The appeal is not to the solitary decision. of a single statesman; not to Richelieu or Nesselrode alone in his closet; but to the jangled mass of men with a thousand pursuits, a thousand interests, a thousand various habits. Public opinion, as it is said, rules; and public. opinion is the opinion of the average man. Fox used to say of Burke: "Burke is a wise man; but he is wise too soon." The average man will not bear this. He is a cool, common person, with a considerate air, with figures in his mind, with his own business to attend to, with a set of ordinary opinions arising from and suited to ordinary life. He can't bear novelty or originalities. He says: "Sir, I never heard such a thing before in my life"; and he thinks this a reductio ad absurdum. You may see his taste by the reading of which he approves. Is there a more splendid monument of talent and industry than the Times? No wonder that the average man that any one - believes in it. As Carlyle observes: "Let the highest intellect able to write epics try to write such a leader for the morning newspapers, it cannot do it; the highest intellect will fail." But did you ever see anything there you had never seen before? Out of the million articles that everybody has read, can any one person trace a single marked idea to a single article? Where are the deep theories, and the wise axioms, and the everlasting sentiments which the writers of the most influential publication in the world have been the first to communicate to an ignorant species? Such writers

are far too shrewd. The two million, or whatever number of copies it may be, they publish are not purchased because the buyers wish to know new truth. The purchaser desires an article which he can appreciate at sight; which he can lay down and say: "An excellent article, very excellent; exactly my own sentiments." Original theories give trouble; besides, a grave man on the Coal Exchange does not desire to be an apostle of novelties among the contemporaneous dealers in fuel; - he wants to be provided with remarks he can make on the topics of the day which will not be known not to be his; which are not too profound; which he can fancy the paper only reminded him of. And just in the same way, precisely as the most popular political paper is not that which is abstractedly the best or most instructive, but that which most exactly takes up the minds of men where it finds them, catches the floating sentiment of society, puts it in such a form as society can fancy would convince another society which did not believe, so the most influential of constitutional statesmen is the one who most felicitously expresses the creed of the moment, who administers it, who embodies it in laws and institutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable of, who induces the average man to think: "I could not have done it any better, if I had had time myself."

-BAGEHOT: The English Constitution, p. 421.

6. When the example in our Latin Grammar tells us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the person in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, but neither new nor startling. No one would think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in finding something more poignant in the same reflection when Horace tells us that the palace as well as the hovel shudders at the

indiscriminating foot of Death. Here is something more than the dry statement of a truism. The difference between the two is that between a lower and a higher; it is, in short, the difference between prose and poetry. The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, something identical with its shell in substance, but in sentiment and association how unlike! Malherbe takes the same image and makes it a little more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sentinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how long had not that comparison between the rose's life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a commonplace when the same Malherbe made it irreclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase. We do not ask where people got their hints, but what they made out of them. The commonplace is unhappily within reach of us all, and unhappily, too, they are rare who can give it novelty and even invest it with a kind of grandeur as Gray knew how to do. LOWELL: Essay on Gray.

7. The modern type-writing machine has the advantage of making all words equally legible, but the receiver of the printed letter is likely to feel on opening it a slight perceptible shock of the kind always caused by a want of consideration. The letter so printed is undoubtedly easier to read than all but the very clearest manuscript, and so far it may be considered a politeness to use the instrument; but unluckily it is impersonal, so that the performer on the instrument seems far removed from the receiver of the letter and not in that direct communication with him which would be apparent in an autograph. The effect on the mind is almost like that of a printed circular, or at the least of a letter which has been dictated to a shorthand writer.

- HAMERTON: Human Intercourse.

8. Mr. Beecher went on to show how the North could not help fighting when it was attacked, and to give the reasons that made it necessary to fight, reasons which none but a consistent Friend, or avowed non-resistant, can pretend to dispute. His ordinary style in speaking is pointed, staccatoed, as is that of most successful extemporaneous speakers; he is "short-gaited"; the movement of his thoughts is that of the chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricians. But when the lance has pricked him deep enough, when the red flag has flashed in his face often enough, when the fireworks have hissed and sputtered around him long enough, when the cheers have warmed him so that all his life is roused, then his intellectual sparkle becomes a steady glow, and his nimble sentences change their form and become long-drawn, stately periods.

-O. W. HOLMES: Atlantic Monthly, January, 1864.

9. Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; which he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.