sort of expectation of reaching the clouds; | We have to put forth all our will to adand, if what we do looms larger in other vance not only forwards, but upwards. people's eyes, we often know quite well that we are not really putting half as much labor into it as we spent upon the scrambling attempts of earlier years. On a smaller scale, every one who has produced any kind of work of art knows what different kinds of effort are required for beginning, carrying on, and finishing any design. Most people probably feel that in the first sketch there is a nameless charm which is almost inevitably obscured as the work advances, to reappear, if all goes well, in a different form as it draws towards its completion. Here the uphill part of the work comes in the middle, while the beginning and the end seem almost to do themselves. Probably few experienced artists would attach much importance to their own judgment of the value of their work during the familiar uphill stage. Not only in painting, but in all sustained effort, there is sure to be a time when the general plan or effect, clear enough at the outset, is lost sight of in the labor of working out details before it can be restored in its fulness. But in painting this is actually visible to the eye, because, as long as any one part is less complete than the rest, there is a real discord of color which the painter must disregard while he steadily pursues the processes required for bringing out the ultimate harmony, until, as the long labor draws to its close, every separate touch acquires an almost magical power and value as it falls into the place prepared for it by previous toil and sacrifice. Something of the same kind happens in most lives. Youth is full of interest and picturesqueness, like a sketch freshly dashed off by the hand of a master, and age may have all the stately harmony of a finished picture; but the intermediate stage is apt to be blurred and confused with a multitude of details. Happily the pressure of business generally distracts the attention of the artist in life from the inevitable flatness (if we may be permitted suddenly to reverse our metaphor) which attends its middle period. The most romantic of us have scarcely time to miss from their own lives at their fullest that picturesque effect which is often so marked in youth and in old age, and which is to the flatness of middle age what the hills are to the plains. The slowness with which time passes in youth is another point which almost forces us to think of it as of an uphill road. Rejoice as we may to run the race, we can. not climb as fast as we shall descend. Every step on an uphill road not only brings us nearer to the goal, but also requires a victory over the force of gravitation; so that it is no wonder if our steps are slow. But when we have passed the watershed, and begin to tend downwards, we have only to yield ourselves passively to the same force, and we are carried forward with but little effort of our own quickly and more quickly as the path grows steeper. The involuntariness of much of our action as life advances is a startling change to those who care to notice it. Once perhaps it was a daily act of self-denial to set to work at all. Later in life not to work would be the severest of penances. The act of engaging in labor may be uphill work only at the outset of life; but the work itself which we do may become ever more and more arduous, if we are not content with quantity of effect, but aspire to perfection in quality. Those who are possessed by this ambition will find the whole of their life's journey lying uphill. There are for them no level plains on which to settle down to reap the reward of former toil. For them the shades of even. ing bring no relaxation of effort. Their expectations may be less unlimited as time goes on, and less of their strength will be wasted in vain endeavors to grasp at what is beyond their reach; but the upward strain will not be relaxed; it will only be economized, as experience takes the guidance of their steps. And with the lifelong toil of ascent comes the lifelong expansion of horizon; the journey which is all uphill must needs conduct the wayfarer to fresher air and serener solitudes; away from the crowd and the smoke, up to the heights from which what is mean and trivial falls out of sight, and the sounds of strife are hushed. A freshness more exquisite than the freshness of youth is reserved for some of the aged; but it can be attained only by a path which lies from first to last uphill. Uphill work, both literally and figuratively, means work in two directions at once; literally, it is going forwards while we raise our own weight; figuratively, it is doing things and learning how to do them at the same time; thus lifting ourselves on to a higher platform of moral or intellectual being. There is always in some senses an ascending slope before us, which we may scale if we will. But happily it does not rest with ourselves to decide whether the general tenor of our lives shall be that of laborious ascent or of gentle downward | at eighty-one years of age, is recorded this gliding. The force of gravitation need not week. England has always been the home be always regarded as a type of the de- of political refugees, and some of them praved tendencies of the human heart. have prospered here as they might never There is a time for all things, says the wise have done if left in their own land. The man, and if there is a time for learning, so French immigrants who fled before the is there, happily, a time for forgetting; Edict of Nantes merged themselves almost and also a time for idly applying and at once in the population, and prospered enjoying what we have learned. There so exceedingly that some of their names is a time for scrambling upwards, and are among the best known in the land, and a time for lying on the grass in the valley; peers, millionaires, great bankers, prospera time for climbing fruit-trees, and a time ous men in all ranks of life are proud to for letting the ripe fruit drop into our the last degree that their ancestors ran mouths. Even Christian, who was not the away from France, homeless, moneyless, man to flinch from his share of climbing, and almost friendless, as proud almost, found rest and refreshment in the Valley of indeed, as if they had come over as merHumiliation, and it would be a poor view of cenaries, to carve out estates by their courlife which valued nothing that was not age and their cruelty. There are no walks gained by the sweat of our brow. Let life of life in which the observer does not tend ever so steadily upwards in its moral stumble upon Germans who have adopted and spiritual aspects, and intellectual England as their home, and become so labor be ever so strenuously directed prosperous and so satisfied that they do towards higher and higher levels of attain- not teach their children German, and rement, still there will be in the outward member Germany chiefly because they life pauses from all activity, and welcome have still living relations there. But for and gentle relaxations of effort, when our an Italian Carbonaro under sentence of wisdom is to sit still and receive the riches death to break prison, to land in England which flow into our souls from above. a penniless refugee, to obtain office in a Hard work is no doubt a cure for many great government institution, to become so evils, and the taste for it a most excellent trusted by English aristocrats and statesone to acquire if we can; but not to be men that they were always doing jobs for able to abstain from it for a time, not to him- jobs are jobs, whether beneficial or have any idea of enjoyment without it, is a not- and finally to obtain for thirty years miserable slavery and blindness. the control of the great English reservoir of the materials of learning, and die at a great age universally honored and regretted, this is, so far as our memory serves us, an unique career. It is at variance with much that one thinks of Italians, and all that one believes of Englishmen. That an Italian should prove himself the most practical of the practical and hardestheaded of the hard-headed, that he should fight English officials every day of the week on their own roped-in ground and in their own way, with minute and report and evidence before committees, and invariably beat them, is hardly less surprising than that English officials, trained to regard an Italian as an effeminate visionary, a foreigner as an interloper, and a Carbonaro as a dangerous fanatic with a possibility of an assassin in him, should recognize the man's capacities, and enter into his dreams, and support him, even hotly, against dislike and obloquy and national prejudice. It was not only Mæcenas, but Agrippa who fought for Panizzi, an English Agrippa, Protestant, insular, and single-tongued. Such a career in a prosaic age is at least an interesting one, as interesting as the fact that this foreigner, who was asked, The most exquisite pleasure which we ever take in the work of our own hands or brains is probably derived from some rapid achievement wrought without conscious effort in some direction in which we have lately been working hard. After making a series of laborious studies, with perhaps little apparent result, we suddenly find ourselves rendering an impression, either in words or in color, with an unstudied felicity which has gone far beyond the result of all our former labor, and perhaps by means of which we can give no complete account. Such moments are like those in which, after a long, steep climb in the shadow up the jutting shoulder of a mountain, we suddenly turn a corner, and find ourselves face to face with the whole expanse of the western heavens. From The Spectator. THERE is something, to our minds, curiously picturesque and separate in the career of Sir Anthony Panizzi, whose death, when in prosperity, by the Italian execu- possibly ever will exist, and they fight its tioner of Modena to compensate him for battle from decade to decade successfully, the loss he had sustained by pulling down only dreading the men who will believe his scaffold without any fee for its erection, that learning and democracy can go toand who dated his reply from "the King-gether, and that the treasure-house of dom of the Dead," and promised to pay in learning ought not to be a sort of crypt the next world, became a thorough En- where learning accumulates and moulders, glishman, and deserved fully from England but a source whence learning is diffused. the patronage he received. Nor is it the Whenever the Museum is attacked, these less interesting because his success is not people just describe it, just let the nation very difficult to explain. Panizzi owed, of see what sort of treasure-house it is, and course, his first step out of his troubles to the national feeling always awakes, just as the personal regard of Mr. Roscoe, and to it awakes to pride in the Bank, or English his friend's influence with Sir Henry Ellis, commerce, or the East London dockyards. and owed his hold over many statesmen, The Museum is immensely great then, adeven Brougham, who cordially liked so few equately great, then it shall go on, whether men, to his own character; but his suc- one quite understands its greatness or not. cess was mainly due to the fact, which he Mr. Panizzi had, from first to last, the full had either discovered or accidentally hit advantage of that feeling. Everybody who upon, that the English, so little of a dreamy understood felt that his ideas were very people, possess in a quite exceptional de- large. The conflict about him never took gree business imagination, that they like the form of saying that he was too limited. big plans better than little plans, if only Whenever it became loud enough to attract they are practical plans, and big organiza- attention, it was always found that he tions better than little organizations, if only was wanting something or other that took they will get along without too much rum- men's breath away, the whole literature ble. That is one of the secrets of Lord of England, every book in the world, the Beaconsfield's success, and it is not till it greatest reading-room on earth, something is discovered that his "big things" are as big, and yet as conceivably attainable, never practical things, that he will be thor- as if he had been a Stephenson or a Bruoughly discredited, and it was the secret of nel, or a man of the type which it suits Mr. Panizzi. He planned as Englishmen Englishmen to think is specially national. like to plan, on a scale of twelve inches to It was quite shocking for Mr. Panizzi to the mile. There is no idea in the world want so much, but then the people rather more dreamlike than that of the old Alex-liked that kind of shock, and they let him, andrian Museum, the collection in one spot of all the materials of human learning, with men qualified to use them, but the dreamy idea has been in no slight measure realized in the great building which most Englishmen regard mainly as a gigantic box of curiosities. There is hardly a subject of human knowledge which cannot be better studied in the British Museum than anywhere else, or about which some quiet, little-known man, connected in some way with the building, is not, if you can get fairly at him, the deepest mine of information. If you want to dive into any depart ment of thought demanding concrete materials for its working out, no matter what, whether rare feathers, or Chinese treatises, or anything between, the British Museum is the place, if only you understand it, and can hit upon the invisible man who, nine times out of ten, be you never so much an expert, can tell you what you did not know before. The people do not know this, but the men who guide Parliament on this kind of subject, and who are, therefore, trusted, do; they know that nothing like the British Museum ever existed, or in moderation, have his way. We never remember Mr. Panizzi thoroughly beaten. It is curious that in the only dispute in which he displeased the public, it was because he seemed to them, for once, too small for the work they wanted. He never would let them have that printed catalogue on the scale they wanted it, though he did give them the catalogue he thought better, and they were quite angry. Nonsense about a book too big to make! Put an army of men to it, and let it fill a cathedral. It was an annual quarrel once, that about the catalogue, though it has dropped now; and the best-remembered sentence in the discussion is Joseph Hume's solitary indulgence in the gigantesque; his mag nificent threat, that if the curators and the librarian gave him so much trouble, he would move for the name, date, and author. ship of every book in the British Museum, as an emergent return to the House of Commons. The public laughed with enjoyment at that sally, but if the old economist had kept his word, and obtained his order, as he would have done, for he was dreaded by departments as the fish-insect is by bibliopoles, the public would have would, we fancy, have done as much. He forgiven both his whim and its cost, in ad- would not have been so acceptable to formiration of the scale of the huge concep- eign_librarians, or have received quite so tion. It was this liking for big and com- much foreign correspondence, but he would plete work which sustained Panizzi in his probably have been quite as successful eternal fight with the publishers, who once and quite as cosmopolitan. We take it or twice were seriously oppressed, but the real difference between the foreigner were always beaten. The public under- and the Englishman in this matter is this: stood so grand a conception as a demand The Englishman tends to be too much for one copy of every book published in absorbed in England, while the foreigner the United Kingdom, and thought Mr. thinks of the Continent, which is larger and Panizzi, even when demanding a copy, the contains more literatures, than England; surrender of which made the difference but the Englishman, once escaped from between profit and loss, or spending fifty insularity, is the more cosmopolitan of the times its value in costs over some trumpery two. He does not think the world is pamphlet, quite within his duty. The bounded on the north by the Baltic, on the library should be complete, and not com- south by the Mediterranean, on the west plete with an exception, and the publishers, by the Irish channel, and on the east by though they often received sympathy, the Vistula. We would trust the Continever got either help or compensation. nental to collect everything in every EuroEven the instinctive pity of a British jury pean tongue upon any given subject, but for a British tradesman refused permission should prefer the Englishman to insist on to make out a bill, invariably gave way be-a ransacking of Chinese records, or to colfore the feeling that the tradesman was standing in the way of a very big and complete idea. It was not Mr. Panizzi's idea, of course; but he made the law a reality, and the public, though only half comprehending some of his suits, was always steadily on his side. It used to be said - was, indeed, constantly said-in Parliament, that Mr. Panizzi made a better librarian than any Englishman could have done, because he was a foreigner, because he thought of countries and subjects which no Englishman would or could have thought of; and we wonder if that was true. We rather incline to doubt it. Mr. Panizzi knew many languages, and latterly, at all events, took the true librarian's interest in filling up chinks in his collections; but an Englishman with his knowledge of language, and energy, and interest in the subject, lect Indian manuscripts ante 1200 A.D., or to make a perfect collection of literature from the Western States of the Union. He would not think he was spending himself on barbarisms, as the Continental very often would, or be so attracted by subjects merely because they were bizarre. He would miss fewer of the works of the world, though none of the works of the Continent, and would overlook Biscay and Malta sooner than Lhassa, and the smaller troubadours sooner than the hymn-reciters of Ceylon. It was a good thing for the Museum Library that Mr. Panizzi was not English, but that is no reason for entertaining a definite preference for a foreigner. Fewer Englishmen than Continentals know many languages, but more Englishmen than Continentals are interested in many literatures, and curious about all. FROM a private letter we learn that the In- through the great Unsnur Bandh or embankdus Valley State Railway, recently opened for ment, and flooded the whole country as far as traffic, is in good working order. This line Jacobabad, sweeping away seven miles of the runs up the river from Kotri to Multan, thus railway. At the present time trains are runconnecting the two remote links of the Scinde, ning over a temporary loop-line. The State Delhi and Punjaub Railway, which is the Railway is now being worked by government property of a guaranteed company. The In- officials, but we believe that it is ultimately dus is crossed by a steam ferry between the intended to place it under the management of towns of Sakhar and Rori, and the Satlaj by a the guaranteed company, whose steam flotilla magnificent iron-girder bridge near Bahawal-it has superseded. The importance of this pur. From Kotri upwards to Sehwan the line of rail runs along the foot of the Laki Hills, and is thus protected from inundation though it closely follows the course of the river. But the section from Sehwan to Sakhar must always be exposed to danger. Only last autumn the Indus in one of its wayward moods burst new line, which has been completed about twelve months before the contract time, may be estimated from the fact that Sakhar forms the base of operations for the military force now engaged beyond the Bolan Pass. Academy. e 0 d I. 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