a time. This consideration alone, if there were nothing else, forbids us to regard him as a statesman whose deeds were equal to his opportunities and to his genius. To serve the purpose of the hour was his policy. To succeed in serving it was his triumph. It is not thus that a great fame is built up, unless indeed where the genius of the man is like that of some Cæsar or Napoleon, which can convert its very ruins into monumental records. Lord Palmerston is hardly to be called a great man. Perhaps he may be called a great << man of the time."

GEORGE MACDONALD

(1824-)

EORGE MACDONALD has been characterized as a cross between a poet and a spiritual teacher." His powers as a novelist, however, are not taken into account by this description. Added to his genuine poetical feeling, and to his refined moral sense, are the qualities of a good story-teller. He knows how to handle an elaborate plot; he understands the dramatic values of situations; he can put life into his characters. Yet the dominant impression left by his novels is their essential moral nobility. The ideal which Mr. Macdonald sets before himself as a writer

of fiction is summed up in this passage from Sir Gibbie':

"But whatever the demand of the age, I insist that that which ought to be presented to its beholding is the common good, uncommonly developed: and that not because of its rarity, but because it is truer to humanity. It is the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human: and if I must show the failure, let it ever be with an eye to the final possible, yea, imperative success. But in our day a man who will accept any oddity of idiosyncratic development in manners, tastes, and habits, will refuse not only as improbable, but as inconsistent with human nature, the representation of a man trying to be merely as noble as is absolutely essential to his being."

GEORGE MACDONALD

This quaint realism of Mr. Macdonald's in a literary age, when many believe that only the evil in man's nature is real, dominates his novels, from 'David Elginbrod' to 'The Elect Lady.' They are wholesome stories of pure men and women. The author is at his strongest when drawing a character like that of Sir Gibbie, compelled forever to follow the highest law of his nature. With villains and with mean folk, Mr. Macdonald can do nothing. He cannot understand them, neither can he understand complexity of character. He is too dogmatic ever to see the "shadowy third" between the one and one. He is too much of a preacher to be altogether a novelist.

His training has increased his dogmatic faculty. Born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in 1824, he was graduated at King's College, Aberdeen, and then entered upon the study of theology at the Independent College, Highbury, London. He was for a time a preacher in the Scottish Congregational Church, but afterwards became a layman in the Church of England. He then assumed the principalship of a seminary in London. His novels witness to his Scotch origin and training. The scenes of many of them are laid in Scotland, and not a few of the characters speak the North-Scottish dialect. But the spirit which informs them is even more Scotch than their setting. The strong moral convictions of George Macdonald infuse them with the sermonizing element. The novelist is of the spiritual kindred of the Covenanters. Yet they are full of a kindly humanity, and where the moralist is merged in the writer of fiction they attain a high degree of charm.

The pure and tender spirit of Mr. Macdonald makes him peculiarly fitted to understand children and child life. "Gibbie had never been kissed," he writes; "and how is any child to thrive without kisses?" His stories for children, 'At the Back of the North Wind' and 'The Princess and Curdie,' are full of beauty in their fine sympathy for the moods of a child.

Mr. Macdonald has written a great number of novels. They include David Elginbrod,' 'Alec Forbes of How Glen,' 'Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood,' 'The Seaboard Parish' (sequel to the foregoing), 'Robert Falconer,' 'Wilfrid Cumbermede,' 'Malcolm,' 'The Marquis of Lossie,' 'St. George and St. Michael,' 'Sir Gibbie,' 'What's Mine's Mine,' The Elect Lady,' and such fanciful stories as his well-known 'Phantastes.' He has also published 'Miracles of Our Lord' and 'Unspoken Sermons.' Mr. Macdonald's sermons, as might be expected, are vigorous, and exhibit his peculiar sensitiveness to the moral and spiritual elements in man's existence. This same sensitiveness pervades his verse; which, while not of the first order, gives evidence — especially in the lyrics of the true poetic instinct.

THE FLOOD

From Sir Gibbie'

TILL the rain fell and the wind blew; the torrents came tear

Sin

ing down from the hills, and shot madly into the rivers; the rivers ran into the valleys, and deepened the lakes that filled them. On every side of the Mains, from the foot of Glashgar to Gormdhu, all was one yellow and red sea, with roaring currents

and vortices numberless. It burrowed holes, it opened longdeserted channels and water-courses; here it deposited inches of rich mold, there yards of sand and gravel; here it was carrying away fertile ground, leaving behind only bare rock or shingle where the corn had been waving; there it was scooping out the bed of a new lake. Many a thick soft lawn of loveliest grass, dotted with fragrant shrubs and rare trees, vanished, and nothing was there when the waters subsided but a stony waste, or a gravelly precipice. Woods and copses were undermined, and trees and soil together swept into the vast; sometimes the very place was hardly there to say it knew its children no more. Houses were torn to pieces; and their contents, as from broken boxes, sent wandering on the brown waste through the gray air to the discolored sea, whose saltness for a long way out had vanished with its hue. Hay-mows were buried to the very top in sand; others went sailing bodily down the mighty stream some of them followed or surrounded, like big ducks, by a great brood of ricks for their ducklings. Huge trees went past as if shot down an Alpine slide-cottages and bridges of stone giving way before them. Wooden mills, thatched roofs, great mill-wheels, went dipping and swaying and hobbling down. From the upper windows of the Mains, looking towards the chief current, they saw a drift of everything belonging to farms and dwelling-houses that would float. Chairs and tables, chests, carts, saddles, chests of drawers, tubs of linen, beds and blankets, work-benches, harrows, girnels, planes, cheeses, churns, spinning-wheels, cradles, iron pots, wheelbarrows all these and many other things hurried past as they gazed. Everybody was looking, and for a time all had been silent.

Just as Mr. Duff entered the stable from the nearer end, the opposite gable fell out with a great splash, letting in the wide level vision of turbidly raging waters, fading into the obscurity of the wind-driven rain. While he stared aghast, a great tree struck the wall like a battering-ram, so that the stable shook. The horses, which had been for some time moving uneasily, were now quite scared. There was not a moment to be lost. Duff shouted for his men; one or two came running; and in less than a minute more, those in the house heard the iron-shod feet splashing and stamping through the water, as one after another the horses were brought across the yard to the door of the house. Mr. Duff led by the halter his favorite Snowball, who was a good

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deal excited, plunging and rearing so that it was all he could do to hold him. He had ordered the men to take the others first, thinking he would follow more quietly. But the moment Snowball heard the first thundering of hoofs on the stair, he went out of his senses with terror, broke from his master, and went plunging back to the stable. Duff started after him, but was only in time to see him rush from the further end into the swift current, where he was at once out of his depth, and was instantly caught and hurried, rolling over and over, from his master's sight. He ran back into the house, and up to the highest window. From that he caught sight of him a long way down, swimming. Once or twice he saw him turned heels over head— only to get his neck up again presently, and swim as well as before. But alas! it was in the direction of the Daur, which would soon, his master did not doubt, sweep his carcass into the North Sea. With troubled heart he strained his sight after him as long as he could distinguish his lessening head, but it got amongst some wreck; and, unable to tell any more whether he saw it or not, he returned to his men with his eyes full of tears.

Gibbie woke with the first of the dawn. The rain still felldescending in spoonfuls rather than drops; the wind kept shaping itself into long hopeless howls, rising to shrill yells that went drifting away over the land; and then the howling rose again. Nature seemed in despair. There must be more for Gibbie to do! He must go again to the foot of the mountain, and see if there was anybody to help. They might even be in trouble at the Mains: who could tell!

Gibbie sped down the hill through a worse rain than ever. The morning was close, and the vapors that filled it were like smoke burned to the hue of the flames whence it issued. Many a man that morning believed another great deluge begun, and all measures relating to things of this world lost labor. Going down. his own side of the Glashburn, the nearest path to the valley, the gamekeeper's cottage was the first dwelling on his way. It stood a little distance from the bank of the burn, opposite the bridge and gate, while such things were.

It had been with great difficulty- for even Angus did not know the mountain so well as Gibbie so well as Gibbie-that the gamekeeper reached it with the housekeeper the night before. It was within two gun-shots of the house of Glashruach, yet to get to it they