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No one's character can be subjected to this bald and cruel mapping-out by bits, and retain any sweetness, any harmony. It is not even anatomy; it is mutilation and distortion. But it is the fashion of the present day; and everyone who has a damaging fact, a dwarfing view, an inharmonious rendering to present of a great man lost to us, holds it as a duty he owes to truth and posterity to put it forward with as little delay and scant delicacy as possible-more especially if in putting it forward he drives himself to the front along with it-if, in adding a stone to the cairn, he engraves his own name in bold and showy letters on the one side, scrawling his friend's in wretched pin-pricks on the other. It is the fashion of the present day to extol Boswell without understanding him, and to justify a bad copy by the worth of the original.

As bad in its own way is that fulsome adulation which makes of the dead saints and heroes they never were in life-which praises a wry neck as a grace, and calls a fault by the name of a virtue because he possessed it and his name must be kept pure. The morbid sensibility which never rose to healthy self-respect, and was always ashamed of because dominated by circumstance -as if circumstance was greater than character, and the worth of a man's nature consists in what he has about him, and not in what he is-this morbid sensibility is to be praised as an excellent proof of surpassing delicacy. He who would blame it as the sign of that fatal want of moral robustness, that desperate need of masculine self-esteem and self-support by which men are ruined and their manhood betrayed, is scouted as a slanderer, or at best one of those coarse-minded hodmen of the race who know nothing of the lines and tracery of finer architecture. The faithlessness to obligations which galled, and to ties which wearied, was only an allowable exercise of free will in the man of genius who had to care first of all to keep that genius in good working condition, and who was not to be hampered by the petty moralities binding on meaner men. Where a grocer is a scoundrel if he neglects his children or does not pay his bills, a man who makes pretty rhymes and is called a poet, or who paints pretty pictures and is called an artist, may throw his on the chance charity of friends, and forget time and trade in dreams that are more rapturous than profitable. His adulatory biographer will show that his dreams were more to the purpose than another man's work; and that it was better for the world at large that he should give himself to his fancies than to honest methods of earning means whereby to live and pay his way. The grocer and the genius move in different planes of righteousness, and are to be judged by different standards of merit. There is no such thing as a moral absolute, according to the Boswells who pride themselves on the manner in which they carry figs to their patrons; and genius is as an alchemist who can turn base metal into gold and evolve living beauty out of calcined ashes. The common sense of mankind is against them; and virtue, and truth, and loyalty to one's word, and faithfulness to one's engagementsthe truth of a man's heart and nature, in fact-are things more precious in

human history than the subtile brain apt at weaving delicate fancies if coupled with the selfish temper which acknowledged no God but self, and overrid every obligation so soon as it became embarrassing.

Thus, between the babblers and the flatterers, the biographers who mark with a broad arrow every secret fault and every private foible, and the adulators who present vices dressed up as virtues and require us to respect what is despicable and love what is abhorrent, the poor dumb dead come to bad passes in these days, and the art of the memoir writer is one which, for the most part, is a curse to the memory of the departed. Sometimes, indeed, we fall upon a delicately touched and subtilely suggestive bit of writing, wherein the author's own personality is suppressed, so that no literary or social capital is sought to be made out of the association, where nothing is told that ought to be concealed, nothing glossed over that ought to be condemned, and nothing kept back that the world has the right to know of one of its leaders and foremost citizens.

There are certain facts of a man's life which show his character, and reconcile much that else seems discordant; and others which have nothing of the quality of circumstance about them-which are mere facts selfcontained, beginning and ending in themselves, and valuable only on the lowest grounds of gossip and scandal. The true biographer can judge between these two kinds, and the faithful friend knows by intuition which to reject and which to relate. The morality of the man who leaves his wife in favour of a newer love, and condemns because he injures her, is very different from the morality of him who leaves her for incompatibility of temper acknowledged on both sides, and who, though he finds solace in the future, forbears ever to speak bitterly of the past. And the action has to be spoken of differently. In the broad outlines both are the same; in essential qualities they are utterly unlike, and not to be ruled by the same measure. And this may stand as an illustration of more than itself, and of the tact as well as judgment required when dealing with the histories of men-the revelations that must needs be made, and the verdict, from passing which there is no way of escape for him who would be honest and at the same time reverent.

These green spots of love and tact and reverence and truth, all united in the biographical desert, are rare; and few hold the reputation of the dead to be as sacred as that of the living, or regard themselves as trustees of the delicacy they would not have ventured to offend face to face; few, again, standing on the other side of the way, think it needful to make of their hero a fallible man, and to show where the joints in his armour proved him vulnerable and mortal. It is all either the flushing of the sewers and the scraping of the roadway, so that not a fragment should be lost, or else it is running an artificial face of wax over the real features to conceal this homely trait and that unfavourable blemish-the presentation of a colourless ideal as devoid of life-likeness as of beauty. In any case there is vastly too much memoir writing as a rule, and too outrageous an amount of revelation and chatter about the dead. Mors

ultima linea rerum est. This was one of the old-time axioms, believed and accepted for the comfort of the wretched. With death came the end of all disaster, and no pursuing Fury could pass the dread portals of the tomb. Had they had the interviewer and memorialist, the man who received his friend at his own board and made private jottings of his sayings-who stored up in his memory what gifts he carried to him. when the poor wretch lay sick, and how many journeys he and his made across the square to visit him—who noted his agonies, and gave the public a diagram of his sufferings-who made himself the one gigantic capital I in all that passed between them, and placed his "illustrious friend" as a pismire crawling humbly in the shadow thrown by that noble column across their joint track; had they known of flatterers and detractors, flinging, the one his sickly sweets, the other his bitter venom, and both their miserable personalities, into the sacred place of departed souls-they would not have applauded Horace when he wrote that line, and crystallised their simple faith in death as the end of all things. And had he, the poet himself, lived in the nineteenth century, and here, he too would have known that this death does not end all things for man, but that the day after is the one to be most feared; and that even a brave man may shudder when he contemplates the well-known sequela of his decease-a minute pathological description of his case in a medical journal, for one who was as modest as a maiden; a gossiping memoir in a magazine, when facts are scarce and length remunerative, for one who was reticent and not egotistical; a funeral sermon by a popular preacher, burking both facts and vices under one huge pitchplaster of praise, for him whose God had been himself and whose own will was his own law; maybe a statue in Leicester Square for one well versed in art and sensitive to beauty; or a "national memorial," whereof the committee come to loggerheads at first starting, and no one agrees to anything the other proposes, for the honour and glory of a man as meek as Moses and as shy

as a nun.

E. L. L.

A Rose in June.

CHAPTER XIII.

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HERE is no such picturesque incident in life as the sudden changes of fortune which make a complete revolution in the fate of families or individuals without either action or merit of their own. That which we are most familiar with is the change from comfort to poverty, which so often takes place, as it

had done with

the Damerels, when the head of a house, either incautious or unfortunate, goes out of this world leaving not only sorrow, but misery, behind him, and the bereavement is intensified by social downfall and all the trials that accompany loss of means. But for the prospect of Mr. Incledon's backing up, this would have implied a total change in the prospects and condition of the entire household, for all hope of higher education must have been given up for the boys; they must have dropped into any poor occupation which happened to be within their reach, with gratitude that they were able to maintain themselves; and as for the girls, what could they do, poor children, unless by some lucky chance of marriage? This poor hope would have given them one remaining chance not possible to their brothers; but, except that, what had they all to look forward to? This was Mrs. Damerel's excuse for urging Rose's unwilling consent to Mr. Incledon's proposal. But lo! all this was changed as by a magician's wand. The clouds rolled off the sky, the sunshine came out again, the family recovered its prospects, its hopes, its position, its freedom, and all this in a moment. Mrs. Damerel's old uncle Edward had been an original who had quarrelled with all his family. She had not seen him since she

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SHE TOOK HER BAG IN HER HAND AND NOISELESSLY STOLE OUT.

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