little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.

He who has no sympathy never knows the human heart; but the obtrusive parade of sympathy is incompatible with dignity of character in a man, or with dignity of style in a writer. Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

In science, address the few; in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgment on the few. But the few and the many are not necessarily the few and the many of the passing time; for discoverers in science have not unoften, in their own day, had the few against them, and writers the most permanently popular not unfrequently found, in their own day, a frigid reception from the many. By the few, I mean those who must ever remain the few, from whose dicta, we, the multitude, take fame upon trust; by the many, I mean those who constitute the multitude in the long run. We take the fame of a Harvey or a Newton upon trust, from the verdict of the few in successive generations; but the few could never persuade us to take poets and novelists on trust. We, the many, judge for ourselves of Shakespeare and Cervantes.

He who addresses the abstract reason addresses an audience that must forever be limited to the few; he who addresses the passions, the feelings, the humors, which we all have in common, addresses an audience that must forever compose the many. But either writer, in proportion to his ultimate renown, embodies some new truth, and new truths require new generations for cordial welcome. This much I would say meanwhile: Doubt the permanent fame of any work of science which makes immediate reputation with the ignorant multitude; doubt the permanent fame of any work of imagination which is at once applauded by a conventional clique that styles itself "the critical few.”

Complete. From "Caxtoniana.»

M

JUSTIN MCCARTHY

(1830-)

CCARTHY'S "History of Our Own Times," published in 18781880, won him an honorable place among the prose writers of his generation, and he has increased his reputation by his work as an essayist. He has been long a favorite contributor to the leading English reviews, chiefly on subjects which require historical research. He was born at Cork, Ireland, November 22d, 1830, and has been not less prominent in the politics of the Irish Home Rule movement than in literature. On the fall of Parnell in 1890, McCarthy succeeded to the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary party and acquitted himself with credit. Besides the "History of Our Own Times," he has published, among other books, the "History of the Four Georges," 1884; "The Epoch of Reform," 1882; and a number of novels, several in collaboration with Mrs. Campbell-Praed.

THE LAST OF THE NAPOLEONS

that the weapon of a naked savage has struck down in a nameless skirmish the last of the eldest branch of the Bonapartes, and the first of the race who ever fell upon a field of battle, men's eyes are not unnaturally turned again upon one who often commanded their gaze before, but who seemed of late days to have passed from their notice forever, the man whom strange chance has placed at the head of the Napoleon family. It seems in keeping with the pitiless irony of fate which has always pursued the Bonaparte dynasty—a fate as stern as the fabled destiny of the Pelopids-that the death of Prince Louis Napoleon should place whatever remains of succession at the feet

the man whom neither he nor his mother loved overmuch, at the feet of the Esau or rather the Ishmael of the house, Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (Jérôme), better known as Prince Napoleon, better known still in the argot of history as Plon-Plon. Prince Napoleon is the son of that somewhat featherheaded king of Westphalia who is chiefly conspicuous for his

marriage with Miss Patterson of Baltimore-she who died but the other day and for his exclamation at the battle of Waterloo: "Brother, here should perish all who bear the name of Bonaparte!" an heroic exclamation which did not prevent him from escaping from the field and living till 1860. Westphalia Jérôme was the youngest brother of the first Napoleon; but as the great Napoleon did what he liked with the succession, and set aside his other brothers when they displeased him, the year 1852 saw his son the heir presumptive to the imperial crown. The birth

of the poor lad who died last June in Zululand took away from him the succession to a great and apparently firmly established empire; his death has given him the headship of a fallen house, and put him nominally in command of a powerless party.

Prince Napoleon is one of the strangest figures of modern history. His career has been one long riddle unexplained as yet. No man in Europe has been more misunderstood, and few have been more disliked; no man had better chances of success than he, and no man ever made less use of his chances. To-day finds him as much a puzzle alike to his friends and his enemies as he was thirty years ago when he first swore allegiance to a French Republic. He has been described by a witty critic as a Cæsar out of place. But the epigram would have been much truer which described him as an unemployed Antony. The marvelous capability for doing the right thing at the right time which characterized Cæsar never was the property of Prince Napoleon. He has rather been conspicuous all his life for doing the right thing at the wrong moment. And now, close to his sixtieth year, he, the strangest evolution of the race Bonaparte, remains just where he was when he started, having succeeded in convincing the world first that he was a fool, then that he was a man of genius, without winning any success either from his folly or his intellect. Among the many witty and bitter things that the Prince Napoleon has said about the members of his own family, one saying deserves especial remembrance- his epigrammatic observation that his cousin the Emperor took in the world twice: first, when he made the world believe that he was an idiot; and secondly, when he made it believe he was a statesman. The epigram

would apply almost as well to its author as to its object.

This is his portrait, drawn by the hand of a bitter enemy:"He is of a tall form, but with his neck sinking between his shoulders; his waist is fast disappearing before the irruption of

corpulency; his gait is heavy and undignified; he is short-sighted, and his glance is an oblique one. His general appearance reminds you of the elder Bonaparte, the one whom MM. Thiers and Marco Saint-Hilaire, Troplong and Havin, and likewise M. Prudhomme style le Grand Homme,' but it reminds you still more of Otho or Vitellius, and somewhat also of the common mask of 'Punch. Such a description as this gives no real idea of the appearance of the man or of the quality of character to be inferred from a study of his face. Flandrin's famous portrait gave another and a truer view of his nature. Strangely like the first Napoleon was it, so like that it would have passed in the eyes of most spectators as a picture of the Little Corporal. A more attentive observer would have assumed it to be a study of the Great Emperor after Leipsic or Waterloo, for there was stamped on the sensuous face a look of sullen discontent, of a disappointment that did not often belong to the features of the first of the Bonapartes. It was the face of a Napoleon without success, of a Napoleon who had not found his chance, who had waited too long for his Marengo. It was the face of a Napoleon compelled by strange fate to inaction; it was the face of Prince Napoleon.

There can be little doubt that his genius, his far-sighted political intelligence, and his power of appreciating the relative values of nations, might have made his assistance of great service to Napoleon III., if Napoleon III. had seen fit to profit by it more often. It is true that Prince Napoleon's political judgment generally led him to different conclusions from those evolved from the Tuileries, and it must be admitted that his opinions generally ran counter to those of the majority upon most great questions; but events have almost invariably justified Prince Napoleon, and showed that his Imperial cousin would have done wiser in listening to his single voice than to any clamor of public opinion. When Prince Napoleon went over to America during the Civil War, to judge the question on its native ground, hearing the cause discussed in New York salons, in reunions of Boston Abolitionists, and in the not altogether impartial atmosphere of General Beauregard's tent, he had the sense to see that the North was sure to win in the end; and he saw this at a time when the Emperor was moving heaven and earth to induce England to aid him in supporting by arms the cause of the South and slavery. Prince Napoleon was also strongly opposed

to the Mexican intervention. He knew the temper of the American people too well to fancy that they would suffer Napoleon to carry out his dearly cherished infringement of what has come to be called the Monroe Doctrine, but which is really the doctrine suggested to and impressed upon President Monroe by George Canning. The sequel of that most disastrous undertaking thoroughly justified his views. Upon all the great European questions, too, he showed a shrewd and foreseeing mind. He believed in Italy, he supported the cause of Poland, he foresaw the downfall of Austria, and we have it on his own authority that he strongly objected to the action of the French government with regard to Rome, and attributed to that action the result of the war with Prussia. Moreover, he was a free-trader long before the Emperor could be induced to believe that the doctrine was an essential law of political economy. It may be asked why a man who showed such capacity for statesmanship as to foresee the result of all the great political crises during his time should yet have received such little honor for his prophecies, not only in his own country, but everywhere else. The truth doubtless is that Prince Napoleon's character is marred not only by his bad temper and his proverbially bitter tongue, which make it impossible, or next to impossible, for him to get on with any one or for any one to get on with him-faults which caused him to fling up the Algerian administration, and brought him. back to France from so many important missions- but by a worse defect than either of these, a fatal want of energy. He lacks the proud patience which is so essential to true success, and he is disposed, when people decline to see things as he sees them, to give up in disgust, and let them learn by experience the wisdom of councils he had not himself the energy to do battle for. There is in him a great deal of the nature of Byron's Sardanapalus who, while having no small share of the stuff that heroes are made of, fritters away his life in purposeless inaction and aimless pleasures. In aimless pleasures, indeed, a good deal of Prince Napoleon's life has been passed. Witness his purposeless wanderings in his yacht all over the world, wanderings which made wits inquire if the prince was qualifying to be a teacher of geography in case of any unexpected reverse to the Napoleon family. Witness, too, his endeavor to live the life of a Roman in modern Paris. Hence the villa, Diomede, which most visitors to Paris have seen, and where, according to rumor, the