pared, and he thought it would take him eighty or ninety years more to prepare, so that when he was ushered into another world he wouldn't be ashamed of himself.

I

One hundred and ten years ago, Patrick Henry said, "Sir, our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is inevitable, and let it come. repeat it, sir, let it come!"

In the spring of 1860 I used almost the same language. So did Horace Greeley. There were four or five of us who got our heads together and decided that the war was inevitable, and consented to let it come.

Then it came. Whenever there is a large, inevitable conflict loafing around waiting for permission to come, it devolves on the great statesmen and bald-headed literati of the nation to avoid all delay. It was so with Patrick Henry. He permitted the land to be deluged in gore, and then he retired. It is the duty of the great orator to howl for war, and then hold some other man's coat while he fights.-BILL NYE: Remarks.

Liberty Party, an outgrowth of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It numbered among its adherents such men as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, and was less remarkable for numbers than for persistent agitation. In 1840 its candidate for the Presidency, James G. Birney, received a total of only seven thousand and fifty-nine votes in the entire country, and in 1848, when again its nominee, he had sixty-two thousand three hundred. It was merged into the Free-Soil Party in 1848.

Licked into shape. This expression arises out of the popular superstition that a bear's cub is born an amorphous mass and is licked into shape by its dam. The idea is a very old one, and is reported seriously by Aristotle (History of Animals, vi. 27) and other ancient and mediæval writers. Here is Pliny's circumstantial account of the phenomenon :

Bears when first born are shapeless masses of white flesh a little larger than mice, their claws alone being prominent. The mother then licks them gradually into proper shape.Natural History, Book viii., Sect. 126.

The myth has furnished numerous illustrations to the poets :

To disproportion me in every part,

Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear-whelp,

That carries no impression like the dam.

SHAKESPEARE: Henry VI., Part III., Act iii., Sc. 2.

Not unlike the bear which bringeth forth
In the end of thirty dayes a shapeless birth;
But after licking, it in shape she drawes,
And by degrees she fashions out the pawes,
The head, and neck, and finally doth bring
To a perfect beast that first deformed thing.

DU BARTAS: Divine Weekes and Workes:
First Week, First Day.

So watchful Bruin forms, with plastic care,
Each growing lump, and brings it to a bear.
POPE: Dunciad, i. 101.

In French "ours mal léché" is commonly used figuratively of an ill-bred man, just as we say an unlicked cub or whelp. Sir Thomas Browne mentions the belief only to ridicule it in his "Vulgar Errors." It is therefore all the more surprising to find Burke accepting it as a fact. Pouring out his indignation against Rousseau for deserting his children, Burke says, "The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers" (Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791). In the course of a rather lively controversy on this subject in Notes and Queries (sixth series, iv. 395, etc.), F. Chance seeks to show that the error is one of interpretation rather than of observation: "I never was, and never am likely to be, present at the birth of a bear's cub, but I have often witnessed the birth of puppies, and I can affirm that a pup at birth does appear to be a shapeless mass, and that after the mother has licked away at it, its shape comes very clearly into view." But to this J. Dixon very properly replies, “From the earliest times men must have been

accustomed to witness births among their flocks and herds, to say nothing of puppies; and yet it very early became a belief that the cub of a bear differed in a remarkable way from other new-born animals. Few persons could have been present at the accouchement of a bear, and so the story of the cub being born shapeless, having been once told, was not likely to be contradicted."

Lie-under a mistake. A very common jest among school-boys is to say, "You lie" (pause) "under a mistake," which turns an insult into a joke. It is sad to chronicle that this same jest has reappeared in literature in three at least of our classical authors, as per the following extracts:

You lie under a mistake,

For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face.

Say what I think.

I now

SHELLEY: Translation of the Magico Prodigioso, Sc. 1.

If, after all, there should be some so blind

To their own good this warning to despise,

Led by some tortuosity of mind

Not to believe my verse and their own eyes
And cry that they the moral cannot find,
I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies;

Should captains the remark, or critics, make,
They also lie too-under a mistake.

BYRON: Don Juan, Canto 1.

You are tempted, after walking round a line [of Milton] threescore times, to exclaim at last, Well, if the Fiend himself should rise up before me at this very moment, in this very study of mine, and say that no screw was loose in that line, then would I reply, "Sir, with due submission, you are- "What!" suppose the Fiend suddenly to demand in thunder, "What am I?" .. Horribly wrong," you wish exceedingly to say; but, recollecting that some people are choleric in argument, you confine yourself to the polite answer, "That, with deference to his better education, you conceive him to lie"-that's a bad word to drop your voice upon in talking with a friend, and you hasten to add-" under a slight, a very slight mistake." -DE QUINCEY: Milton versus Southey and Landor.

The phrase was a popular one so far back as the time of Swift, for he puts it in the mouth of one of his characters in "Polite Conversation." But Swift's brochure was a satire on the inanity of fashionable society.

Lies, Half-. Lord Bacon, in his essay "Of Truth," has the following praise of half-lies:

A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?-BACON: Essays: Of Truth.

Per contra, Tennyson says,

That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

The Grandmother, Stanza 8.

Life. Of all Mrs. Barbauld's voluminous poetry one stanza alone survives. If the praise of the best minds is a guarantee of immortality, these lines are immortal:

Life! we've been long together

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;

'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not "Good-night," but in some brighter clime

Bid me "Good-morning."

Wordsworth used to repeat them, and even wish they were his,-the highest

praise that Wordsworth knew how to give. Madame d'Arblay in her old age told Crabb Robinson that every night she said the verses over to herself as she went to her rest. Tennyson has called them sweet verses, according to Miss Thackeray, who adds that to her "they are almost sacred." They were written about 1813, but published posthumously.

Had Mrs. Barbauld, one cannot help wondering, ever read the story of one Lamb and his wife, Scotch martyrs of the sixteenth century? Both were condemned by the authorities,-he to be hanged, she to be tied in a sack and drowned in a pool. The woman on parting said to her husband, "Husband, be glad; we have lived together many joyful days, and this day, on which we must die, we ought to esteem the most joyful of all, because now we shall have joy forever. Therefore I will not bid you good-night, for we shall meet in the kingdom of heaven." (Notes and Queries, fifth series, iv. 64.)

It is an interesting task to compare what the poets and philosophers have said about life. On the one hand is the magnificent optimism of Browning,How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again,

Saul, ix.;

At the Mermaid, Stanza 10,

and on the other a long line of wailings over the shortness of life, its transitoriness, its incompleteness, its vanity, its sorrows. Job's cry, "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble" (xiv. 1), is echoed by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, "For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief" (ii. 23), and finds its analogue everywhere in literature, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian :

For fate has wove the thread of life with pain,

And twins ev'n from the birth are misery and man.

Odyssey, Book vii., 1. 263 (Pope's translation).

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion. MARCUS AURELIUS: Meditations, ii. 17.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man

Less than a span.

LORD BACON: The World.

Whose life's a bubble, and in length a span.

WILLIAM BROWNE: Britannia's Pastorals, Book i., Song 2

Our days begin with trouble here,

Our life is but a span,

And cruel death is always near,

So frail a thing is man.

New England Primer.

Better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie

in restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:

Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

SHAKESPEARE: Macbeth, Act iii., Sc. 2.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,

The Issues of Life and Death,

and so take heart of grace from Longfellow's admonition :

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"

For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real life is earnest !

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

A Psalm of Life.

Doddridge seeks to show how the Epicurean and the ascetic doctrine may be reconciled:

Live while you live, the epicure would say,
And seize the pleasures of the present day;
Live while you live, the sacred preacher cries,
And give to God each moment as it flies.
Lord, in my views let both united be:
I live in pleasure when I live to thee.

Epigram on his Family Arms.

And the same truth is taught by Ellen Sturgis Hooper :

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;

I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream, then, a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.
Life a Duty.

But, whatever life may be, few care to leave it :

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing, anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?

GRAY: Elegy, Stanza 22.

Nay, it is the oldest that are least resigned. "Nobody loves life like an old man," says Sophocles (Acrisius, Frag. 63), and Euripides tells us,

Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them,-Alcestis, 669;

sayings which are thus summed up by Mrs. Thrale in her poern of 'The Three Warnings:"

The tree of deepest root is found

Least willing still to quit the ground:
'Twas therefore said by ancient sages

That love of life increased with years

So much, that in our latter stages,

When pain grows sharp and sickness rages,
The greatest love of life appears.

Lifting, or Heaving, an old custom formerly prevalent in many parts of England, mostly performed in the open street. People formed into parties of twelve or more, and from every one "lifted" they extorted a contribution. There is said to be a record in the Tower of London of certain payments made to ladies and maids of honor for taking King Edward I. in his bed at Easter, whence it has been presumed that he was lifted according to the custom which then prevailed among all ranks throughout the kingdom. The custom survives locally in England as part of the Easter privileges of the fair sex.

Light and leading, Men of. In "Sibyl" (Book v. ch. i.) Disraeli had the phrase, "Not a public man of light and leading in the country withheld the expression of his opinion." Again, February 28, 1859, moving for leave to bring in the Representation of the People Bill in the House of Commons, Disraeli said, "I believe there is a general wish among all men of light and leading in this country that the solution of this long-controverted question should be arrived at." A third repetition of this alliterative phrase occurred March 10, 1880, in an electioneering address to the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. But long before Disraeli, Burke had said, in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (vol. iii. p. 331), "The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England." Cowper has a faintly analogous line:

Lights of the world, and stars of human race,

The Progress of Error, 1. 97:

and a curious verbal likeness is found in an old ballad which describes the vengeance exacted by Crichton, the Lord of Sanquhar, on a noted freebooter, Johnstone of Annandale :

And when they came to the Well path head,
The Crichtons bade them "Light and lead."

But this only means that the followers of the chief were to "dismount and give battle."

Light, Blasted with excess of. In the "Progress of Poetry," Part III., Sec. 2, Gray has this fine allusion to Milton's blindness:

He passed the flaming bounds of space and time:

The living throne, the sapphire blaze,

Where angels tremble while they gaze,

He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.