cadence of "The harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed" was throwing off odes with Anacreontic neatness; Leigh Hunt was painting the loveliness of spring mornings at Ravenna, and tenanting the bedchamber of Abou Ben Adhem with recording angels; Tom Hood, at one moment brimming with mirth and laughter, the next with a voice of dolorous pitch, was singing the "Song of the Shirt"; Coleridge was chanting the midnight wails of the lovely Lady Christabel, and intoning his wonderful opiatic but nonsensical music of Kubla Kahn; Thomas Campbell, charmed with his "Pleasures of Hope," was voicing the bold anthem of "Erin Go Bragh"; the muse of Burns, the Ayrshire farmer who "walked in glory and in pride behind his plow upon the mountainside," had not yet ceased those priceless gems which have drawn tears from eyes of stone and softened marble hearts; the daisies had not then begun to grow upon the grave of Keats, done to death by the critic's pen-"Oh, weep for Adonais-he is dead!" and Byron, the grand Napoleon of the realm of rhyme, having squandered more than one fortune in England, had quickly made another by his pen, and with the help of it was fighting for the independence of a country about which the other poets were only singing. Such was the poetical aspect of the age which produced the greatest writer of the nineteenth century.

Walter Scott came of an ancient family, and had in his veins the blue blood of Buccleugh. Every man claims a pedigree, and Scott was proud of his. In that precious fragment of autobiography which he has left us he says: "I am lineally descended from that ancient chieftain, whose name I have made ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame,

the Flower of Yarrow-no bad genealogy for a border minstrel." He was a direct descendant (six generations removed) of the Sir Walter Scott mentioned in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and known in Border story as Auld Wat of Harden. The same year that witnessed the death of one of the first masters of the English novel, Tobias Smollett, saw the birth of the greatest. Walter Scott was born in the old quarter of Edinburgh, on August 15, 1771, and was baptized with the Christian name of his father (a man of magnificent presence, as his son tells us, one who "absolutely loved a funeral"), who was for nearly fifty years a lawyer of the grade then and now known as Writers to the Signet, and of whom the distinguished son has given a faithful reproduction in the elder Fairford of "Redgauntlet," describing him as "a man of business of the old school, moderate in his charges, economical and even niggardly in his expenditures, strictly honest in conducting his own affairs and those of his clients, but taught by long experience to be wary and suspicious in observing those of others." Struck down by paralysis in his seventieth year, the father lived only to see young Walter a member of the Scottish Bar, but not long enough to behold him as the most sought after man of his day, and facile princeps among the authors of the age. His mother, the daughter of a distinguished physician and professor of medicine in the university of his native city, was an educated and intellectual lady, who did much to foster the genius foreshadowed in his early effusions. How often do we find men who have attained eminence attribute their success to their mothers? There is vastly more truth than sentiment in the words which Dick

ens puts into the mouth of Mr. Adolphus Tatterby in his Christmas story of "The Haunted Man": "It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men have had remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after life as their best friends," and Scott, some years after his mother's death, writes thus of her: "If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much. from the studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh." So true it is that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." Surviving her husband over twenty years, and like him dying from paralysis, she beheld her son in the zenith of his fame, and read all his poems and the "Waverley Novels" as far as "The Bride of Lammermoor," which was issued to the world in 1819, the year in which the late Queen Victoria was born.

The childhood of Scott was a frail and sickly one, and gave poor promise of his robust and sturdy manhood. He was barely eighteen months old when, apparently from a dental paralysis (concerning which, by the way, Dr. Charles Creighton has produced a most sapient and elaborate, although somewhat amusing, medical note), he was afflicted with a lameness which, because it unfitted him for the profession of arms to which his father had at one time destined him, his mother in after years spoke of as a "blessing." If it be true that evil is only a lower degree of good, Mrs. Scott's conviction was, perchance, not an unhappy one, for the illness removed him from the place of his birth to that of his

father's, and the years which the future "Aristo of the North" spent amid the beauties of nature at Sandy-Knowe"meet nurse for a poetic child"-within sight of "Tweed's fair flood," the stately ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, Smailholm's fallen tower (afterward mentioned in "The Eve of St. John"), and the tinted brows of "Eildon's triple height," as well as the historical sights and surroundings of Prestonpans, and having, as he declared, "no other fellowship than that of the sheep and lambs," filled his impressionable mind with the imagery which afterward displayed itself in ballad and in song, and acquainted him with many of the traditions and characters that figure conspicuously in his romances. Every one who has read "Marmion" (and "breathes there a man with soul so dead" as never to have done so?)every one who has read "Marmion" remembers the well-drawn picture of his childhood hours at Sandy-Knowe delineated in the introduction to the third canto of that poem :

"Thus while I ape the measure wild
Of tales that charm'd me, yet a child,
Rude though they be, still with the
chime

Return the thoughts of early time;
And feelings, rous'd in life's first day,
Grow in the line, and prompt the lay.

the precipitous black granite of the Castle-rock." He was as fearless a horseman as the hero of Sestos and Abydos was superb as a swimmer. Of course, Scott was a wonderful and original child, but grandam tales are here out of place. At the age of 6 years, with the greatest assurance and the most charming complacency, he dubs himself "a virtuoso, one who wishes to and will know everything."

In the conventional sense of the term, the education of Walter Scott was neither complete nor extensive. After some preliminary tuition at a private school and home instruction by the family tutor, young Scott, in his eighth year, passed into the High School of Edinburgh-not the present High School opposite to the Calton Hill-where he remained until 1783. Here his progress, while spoken of as satisfactory, was most erratic, and if, despite the title of "historian of the class," which the rector, Dr. Alexander Adams, was pleased to confer on him, and his occasional clever translations of Virgil and Horace, he did not at all times please his masters, he was yet a hero in the playground, where his ability as a story-teller made him, as the same gift had made Samuel Richardson, the father of the modern novel, a century before, the center of attraction among his school-fellows. Often amid the dull routine of lessons would he whisper in the ears of young Ballantyne -the same Ballantyne who was afterward to be so disastrously associated with him in the publishing business: "Slink over beside me, Jamie, and I'll tell you a story." Even at this early period Scott was what Horace would term helluo librorum—a devourer of books-and in vacation hours he would retreat to some sequestered spot among

the Blackford Hills or to Salisbury Craigs, there to read his favorite Spenser, Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry, "those beloved volumes," as he calls them, to which was probably due the conception of his "Border Minstrelsy," or the odd volumes of Shake-speare which a "raid" into his mother's dressing-room had given him possession. of. Walter Scott left the High School, therefore, with a mind stored with a wondrous fund of general information, but ill arranged, chaotic and confused. "My appetite for books," he afterward said, "was as ample and undiscriminating as it was indefatigable; and I have since had too frequently reason to repent that few ever read so much, and to so little purpose." It has been too much the fashion of late to refer to schoolboy Scott as a "dunce," and to attempt the consolation of our backward youth by the assertion that in every study young Walter was behind his class. This is an unfair way of putting an unfair statement. While his schoolmates were industriously plodding away at their daily allotted tasks, Scott was roving in fields undreamed of and unknown by master or by pupil. But the fancies of destined. genius are ever peculiar, and his pathways are but seldom the beaten tracks of the methodical student.

If Scott's studies at the High School were irregular, they were still more so at the university, wherein he matriculated as a student of arts in November, 1783. Here he continued only three years, and left without his Master's degree. Indeed, it is not probable he could ever have graduated, for he was as incapable of learning Greek as some youths. are incapable of learning mathematics, his defection in that study gaining for him the unenviable name of the Greek

blockhead. He was, however, by no means idle, for he read almost everything but what was included in the curriculum -romances, histories, memoirs, memoirs, old plays, travels, voyages, et id genus omne; and, while with Latin he was tolerably familiar, his proficiency even enabling him to read in that tongue the elegant histories of the Sottish Virgil, George Buchanan, and of Matthew Paris, besides innumerable monkish chronicles, his self-acquired knowledge of three of the modern languages-French, Spanish and Italian-was quite considerable. The last-named he learned in order to read Ariosto, and to further him in his endeavor to prove to his Greek professor that the author of Orlando Furioso was superior to Homer, and he acquired enough Spanish to understand Cervantes, whose "novelas," he tells us, "first inspired him with the ambition to excel in fiction." In fact, at both the High School and at the university, the education of Walter Scott was precisely that of the young Edward Waverley, which is described in the much criticized introductory chapters of the first novel by the "Great Unknown." The author of the grandest historical work which the world has ever contained, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," entered Magdalen College, Oxford, "with stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed," and this was precisely Scott's case when he was enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, at the age of 12 years and 3 months. Desultory, but yet not altogether aimless, in his reading, it was not strange if, in the multitude of books, he should make an injudicious choice, and no one regretted more than he did his inattention to prescribed studies. At the

a

.

height of his fame he tells us and how many there be who will reiterate the sentiment that "it is with the deepest regret that I recollect in my manhood the opportunities of learning which I neglected in my youth." Scott certainly entered the university too soon, and it might have been well had he continued longer at it. The year 1786, however, saw him doff the bright red cloak and the tasseled trencher of the university undergraduate to stride the three-legged stool of his father's office, and for the period of five years thereafter he was "an apprentice of the law."

(To be continued.)

THE WOMEN AT THE SEPUL-
CHER WITH SWEET SPICES.
BY MARGARET PRESTON.

Three women crept at break of day
Agrope along the shadowy way
Where Joseph's tomb and garden lay.
With blanch of woe each face was white,
As the gray Orient's waxing light
Brought back upon their awe-struck sight
That tragic scene of anguish.
They had with sorrow-riven hearts
Searched all Jerusalem's costliest marts
In quest of nards whose pungent arts
Should the dead sepulcher imbue
With vital odors through and through:
'Twas all their love had leave to do.

The vision of the ideal guards monotony of work from becoming monotony of life.Bishop Westcott.

When keen perception unites with good will and love, it gets at the heart of man and the world. Goethe.

What, then, is that about which we ought to employ our serious pains? This one thingjust thoughts and social acts, and words which never lic, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens.-Marcus Aurelius.

Barre is a thrifty little city of 10,000 people, situated in a beautiful valley in the northern part of Washington County. The scenery for many miles around is very picturesque; on the top of the hills are fine and extensive farms which indicate comfort and prosperity. But Barre depends entirely for support upon the granite business, which, indeed, has made it an independent, busy city without a poor man within its bounds. It is a well-built city, with comfortable homes, good schools, fine churches, excellent stores and substantial public buildings, and two daily newspapers. Every one Every one is hard at work and making money, and the demand for skilled workmen is daily increasing.

Twenty years ago the granite city was only a little village resting in the bosom of the hills, without a Scotchman to handle a chisel, or any granite industry; but now it is full of the clans of the heather, and they have made the town the largest monumental granite-cutting center in the world. Eighteen years ago there were only twenty-eight Scotch granite cutters in Barre, and not one of

them was worth $500, but to-day there are 141 granite firms of all sizes in Barre and vicinity. Some of these firms, of course, are of other nationalities, but the vast majority of them are Scotch.

Nearly all the granite shops are equipped with up-to-date tools and mechanical appliances, which enable them to turn out granite work of the most delicate character at short notice. The proprietors themselves are all competent mechanics and able to produce the finest pieces of art. They can be seen in overalls, moving around the shops and carving granite like any of their skilled cutters, though some of them are worth many thousands of dollars.

He that standeth still proceedeth not; he goeth back that continueth not, he deviateth that revolteth.-St. Augustine.

More than 20,000 persons are killed every year in India by snakes, tigers, and other wild animals.

With a population of about 2,500,000 Paris has fewer than 100 negroes within its limits. It is claimed that the colored population of all France is less than 550.