nation! We do not want an army of great men to save a nation; we only want one:

"Of the three hundred, grant but three

To make a new Thermopyla."

We only wanted one Howard, and our prisons were purified; we only wanted one Miss Nightingale, and the disgraceful nursing system fell to the ground; we only wanted one Newton, and ignorance and prejudice about God's works vanished; we had but one Clarkson, and the reproach of slavery was taken off us for ever. If we could get one great man to devote his life to making our laws comprehensible and just, we should indeed be happy.

Whether men great in their minds and souls are happy in this world admits of much doubt. They care not much about pleasure, because they are bent upon duty. They are absorbed in high things, and think little of low ones. So also the miseries of great men's lives, exhibited in their histories, touch us very much, but probably do not hurt them. In looking on a tragedy, we know the end and feel for the actors, but the actors themselves go cheerfully to the stake or block, and are merry and at ease, upheld by their own right cause and noble minds. So Sir Thomas More jested as he put down his head, and Sir Walter Raleigh died with a noble sentence on his lips. The executioner told him that his head was somewhat awry on the block. "So the heart be right," said Sir Walter, “no matter which way the head lies." But, to mere readers, and not actors, the deplorable ends of great men, their apparent misery, their non-success, their crushing defeats,

are sad spectacles. melancholy than to behold Milton, blind, old, and poor, sitting in the sun by his cottage door; the great cause for which he had spent his life down-trodden; his poetry unreceived and almost unknown; the wife whom he loved, his "late espoused saint," dead; and the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine," ready to taunt and grin at him?

Can there be anything much more

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Nor does a fallen great man meet with friends in this world. He pays a penalty for being great. His friends were made by his circumstances and his fortunes; his enemies are made by himself, says Colton, in Lacon; "and revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude. Those whom a great man has marred rejoice at his ruin; and those whom he has made look on with indifference, because, with common minds, the distinction of the creditor is considered as equivalent to the payment of the debt." All people are eager enough to turn at him; all, like the mob, will turn after to snarl and yelp at the heels of Aristides; because, to small minds, the exaltation of others seems a personal injury to themselves. Hence every great man is tormented with detractors, and plagued with enemies; and when he gets over the sudden and painful sensation which, if he love his kind, he must feel on being hated, it may afford him some amusement to trace the sudden growth of enemies, and to wonder why people take so much trouble to talk about and malign him. The best way is for him to do like Milton, "to bear up and steer right onwards." I once heard a great author say, "I never look at a newspaper or review now: I shun all criticism written on myself or about my works; for I am sure

to find motives misjudged, principles misinterpreted, slanders and falsehoods promulgated." Now and then the great man may find delicate appreciation and generous praise, but he does not always do so; often he dies without finding one human being to understand him, the victim of sadness and melancholy at what he considers was a wasted life. "Here lies one," said Keats, "whose name was writ in water,”dying young, unhappy, the purpose of his life unachieved; and Byron felt that the flowers of his life had all gone at thirty. The worm, the canker, and the grief," he wrote, "are mine alone."

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But let us console ourselves: if a great man misses human praise—and his love for it is his last weakness—he finds in his own breast that which should uphold and comfort him; and here the noble sentence of Coleridge does apply-a sentence which all should get by heart, as being the most true and noble exposition of the whole subject of greatness in

man:

"Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

Hath he not always treasures, always friends,

The good, great man? Three treasures—Love, and Light,
And calm Thoughts, regular as infant's breath;

And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,

Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death,"

For it is one proof of true greatness, that, to the really great man, Death, come when it may, in the mid-day of his prosperity, or in the evening of his glory, when the skies redden with the setting sun, always comes as a friend.

HIS life has, at any rate, the one merit of being a very complicated piece of action. Many people come into it and go out of it without learning much about it. To them it is "all a muddle,"

and they loudly protest against it. "I was born," said one, "I don't know why; and I shall die, I don't know when." Some persons affect to look at life as a mere farce; others as a very serious tragedy, of which they do not quite understand the plot. "Let down the curtain,” muttered the dying Rabelais" the farce is played out." But others seem to understand its meaning, because they have always taken it upon a given scheme. "I feel," said Cardinal Wiseman, a short time before he died, "like a schoolboy who has learned his lesson, and is now going home for his holidays." Others have not that beatific vision, that certainty of obtaining the prize they have run for. One of Dryden's heroes cries out, with a bitter disappointment :

"When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat :

Yet, fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit,

Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.
To-morrow's falser than the former day;

Lies worse; and while it says we should be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest."

And this view of life is quite true. In fact, as in looking through a prism, just as we behold the pencil of light, be it red, blue, or yellow, all views of life are true from the aspect we take of them. In what light can a lawyer look on life? An amiable and clever student, a solicitor just passed, asked the writer one day what branch of literature he could take up, and what books he could read, to purify his mind and to discharge from it all the black stains it acquired during the day's practice. "I feel,” said he, “as if every man were a rogue ;” and yet the practice of this young friend's office was especially respectable. Rogues, fools, or unfortunate, seemed all his clients. Here was one young idiot, with plenty of money for all good purposes, borrowing other money at sixty per cent. per annum, or five per cent. per month, from a swaggering Westend money-lender, rather than consult his own solictor; the money-lender refusing to release his bond when the original debt was tendered, and impudently appealing to law to protect him whilst robbing the borrower. What is more, Law did—in the person of a learned judge—to a certain extent protect the money-lender, and this while the judge plainly told him that he was a pestilent thief. In the criminal reports we read of a young fellow, with an excellent character, who, having foolishly stolen a bottle of wine out of some dozen he had to deliver, is sent to prison to hard labour for a month; and a newspaper-writer, commenting, to the best of his knowledge, on a somewhat similar case, at least in its