thing that we cannot understand; like him, we feel that it is an extremely disagreeable necessity, this of death.

clew.

Like ourselves, but yet superior. His mind differing in degree from ours, not in kind; larger, broader, keener. It is impossible that truth should be better studied in a successive series of observations, although he is never able to show the relations of one to another. They have, indeed, no natural relations to him. He feels himself in a labyrinth full of uncertainty, doubt, and perplexity, wanders aimlessly along, turning from path to path, plucking flowers as he goes, and careless about finding any His mottoes, cut upon the rafters of his library, show his mind, in which uncertainty is the leading characteristic. An uncertainty which chimed in with the miserable condition of affairs in the world; when burnings, tortures, civil wars, horrid plagues, were the commonest accidents of life, and man's intellect, man's reason, man's kindly nature, seemed powerless to arrest the dreadful miseries wrought by king and priest. Religion? It is a need. Truth? Who knows what it is? Government? It means protection. Life? It means disappointment, disease, fear of death. Science ? A bundle of contradictions. Love? It means falsehood and infidelity. And then men quarrel as to whether Montaigne was a Christian. It is exasperating to find the question so much as raised. What were these two banners under which men were ranged, of Huguenot and Catholic? Some poor artisans, like Bishop Briconnet's weavers of Meaux, might greatly dare for liberty's sake; to the men of culture the rival parties were but two political sides. Montaigne belonged to that side which represented, in his eyes, order and law; he was, therefore, a Catholic. Like all the men of his own time, he had a creed, a kind of pill, to be taken when it might be wanted. The time had gone by when such men as Rabelais and Dolet hoped to bring the world to Deism; the scholars had accepted the inevitable position of orthodoxy, and, while giving all their activity and interest to heathenism, were zealous supporters of the lifeless creed. Montaigne a Christian? Compare his morality with that of the Gospels; read how the dread of death is breathed in every page of his book; remember how he says that to pretend to know, to understand aught beyond the phenomenal, is to make the handful greater than the hand can hold; the armful larger than the arms can embrace; the stride

wider than the legs can stretch "a man can but see with his eyes and hold with his grasp." Try then to remember that we

are not in the nineteenth century, but in the sixteenth; that Montaigne died in the act of adoration, and cease to ask whether the man was a Christian. Christian? There was no better Christian than Montaigne in all his century.

From "The French Humorists.» Roberts

Brothers, Boston.

:

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL

(1850-)

UGUSTINE BIRRELL'S "Obiter Dicta," published in 1884, decided conclusively in the mind of England and America that, no

matter what he may do at the bar or in parliament, he belongs not to law or to public life, but to literature. The book was the work of a pupil of Charles Lamb who believed with his master that the surest way to serve is to begin by pleasing. The superiority of Carlyle and the intensity of Ruskin had made giving pleasure seem a matter of minor importance or of no importance at all. These great men, each of whom was in his own way as certainly a prophet as Isaiah or Ezekiel, set what, for men of less intellect and no inspiration, was a bad example. As a result of stereotyped imitation of it, the world became weary of the artificial fervor of the mere Mahdis of inspiration. Being so, it was ready to receive Birrell and give him a hearing when, instead of crying aloud in the street of Nineveh, he renounced sackcloth and ashes for himself and his readers by quoting Dr. John Brown's story of the Scotch dog whose master said in explaining his gravity: "Oh, sir, life is full of sairiousness to him- he can just never get eneugh o' fechtin.'»

The world cannot escape its fighters, and though it must needs be that the offense of fechtin comes, the woe pronounced on those by whom it cometh, is sairiousness, — perhaps due to the movement of the soul, but frequently "connoting indigestion, physical and intellectual."

Birrell would have none of such seriousness. He thought it worth while to please, and he has succeeded so well that in the sixteen years since he began writing, he has won a well-assured place among those whose essays are certain to survive and become classics.

He was born January 19th, 1850, at Wavertree, near Liverpool, and educated at Cambridge, graduating with honors in law and history in 1872. He was called to the bar in 1875, and in 1889 returned to Parliament from West Fife. He has done noteworthy work as a writer of biography and on legal subjects, but his special field is essay writing.

DR.

ON DOCTOR BROWN'S DOG-STORY

R. JOHN BROWN's pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied: "Oh, sir! life is full of sairiousness to him- he can just never get eneugh o' fechtin'." Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it-our men of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbandsever ready to resent an affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:

"The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight over Coke upon Lyttleton. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man."

Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the great class for whose sole use and behalf literature exists, the class of readers,-I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an author is happy or not. I want him to make me happy. That is his office. Let him discharge it.

I recognize in this connection the corresponding truth of what Sydney Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the private virtues of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister :

"You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant all that you write-I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country; and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to Master Perceval, I should prefer that he

whipped his boys and saved his country."

We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutshell (a cocoanut shell, if you will Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires!), when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it. "Give us enjoyment!" "Teach us endurance!" Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever-unsatisfied and always-suffering humanity!

How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand?

Self-forgetfulness is of the essence of enjoyment, and the author who would confer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of destroying for the time the reader's own personality. Undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is by the creation of a host of rival personalities - hence the number and popularity of novels. Whenever a novelist fails, his book is said to flag; that is, the reader suddenly (as in skating) comes bump down upon his own personality, and curses the unskillful author. No lack of characters and continual motion is the easiest recipe for a novel, which, like a beggar, should always be kept "moving on." Nobody knows this better than Fielding, whose novels, like most good ones, are full of inns.

When those who are addicted to what is called "improving reading" inquire of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel; nor is there any reason, in the nature of things, why they should not always be so, though experience proves the contrary.

The truth or falsehood of a book is immaterial. George Bor. row's "Bible in Spain" is, I suppose, true; though now that I come to think of it, in what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd things. But was not Borrow the accredited agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society? Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at their charges? Was he not befriended by our minister at Madrid, Mr. Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England? It must be true; and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of the "Bible in Spain" as I would "Gil Blas"; nay, I positively would give the preference to Señor Giorgio,