It is recorded that when the unfortunate William Collins, the man who wrote, "When Music, heavenly maid, was young," dear to all the declaimers of my boyhood, was taken by his sister to Chichester, "he who had loved music so passionately hated the cathedral organ in his madness, and when he heard it howled in his distress." I do not know what he would have done if he had heard "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung in Tammany Hall on the Fourth of July.

While we are on the subject of music, it is at this day amusing to read what Prosper Mérimée said in his Lettres à une Inconnue about the stupendous. Wagner. "The latest, but a colossal bore, has been 'Tannhäuser.'... The fact is, it is prodigious. I am convinced that I could write something similar if inspired by the scampering of my cat over the piano keys."

When I begin to reflect about the shortness of time and the length of eternity, I wonder what it is about books which makes us so fond of them, which impels us to study them, write about them, and regard them as things of transcendent importance, when after a few years we must leave them behind us. Then I remember the epitaph on the grave of Henry Thomas Buckle, taken from the Arabic:

The written word remains long after the writer. The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure.

Buckle's work endures in only a limited sense. He was a book-lover, and we are told that he had during his rather brief life twentytwo thousand volumes, but he had the courage, which so few of us possess, to part with them when he no longer required them. When he died at forty his library contained only eleven thousand. Justin McCarthy says that the unfinished History of Civilization is a monument of courage, energy, and labor, but that it might not inaptly be described as a ruin. Despite the epitaph, it is the name of Buckle which remains, while his books have passed into comparative oblivion.

It is something to have written a book, even if it is not a very good one. Some day somebody may read it, and that is a consoling thought, although even that consolation may fail us if Mr. William Loring Andrews is right in his melancholy prophecy that because of the perishable paper now in use the books of the present are destined after a while to dissolve in dust. "Every man who has written a book," says Frederic Harrison, "even the diligent Mr. Whitaker, is in one sense an author-'a book's a book, although there's nothing in 't'-and every man who can decipher a penny journal is in one sense a reader."

It is an easy thing, with a little practice, to enunciate opinions which have the appearance of profundity. Carlyle illustrates it when he remarks in his Note-Book: "It is really curious to think how little knowledge there is actually contained in these unaccountable mountains of books that men have written." He seems to forget that his own standard of what knowledge is may not be the true one. His oracular declaration is suggestive of the well-known verse about Jowett, of Balliol, which runs after this fashion, although I plead ignorance of the precise phraseology :

I am the great Professor Jowett.
Whatever there is known, I know it.
I am the head of Balliol College.
What I don't know isn't knowledge.

Carlyle's calm assumption that he, of all men in the world, is solely capable of deciding what true knowledge is, marks the colossal egotism of his character; but he merely set it down in his Note-Book, and a man may, I suppose, be as vain as he pleases in his own private memoranda. Like Buckle, the Sage of Chelsea had "a power of self-will and self-complacency which enabled him to accept as certain and settled every dogma on which he had personally made up his mind." I am not surprised that Margaret Ogilvy (the mother of Barrie), an admirer of Carlyle, said that she would rather have been his mother than his wife. Tennyson remarked, with much good sense, that "it was well that the Carlyles married each other, for, had they married differently, there would have been four unhappy persons instead of two."

Comte went even beyond Carlyle when he selected one hundred books to constitute the library of every Positivist, recommending the destruction of all other books. We do not wonder that it was said of this self-satisfied French gentleman that "his absolute faith in himself passes belief." The trait is not uncommon with his countrymen. Perhaps that is why they have, every now and then, a revolution-the one real luxury of the Frenchman, according to L'Abbé Constantin.

VIII

Of truthful books; and also of humor, American and otherwise.

BOOKS

OOKS which bear upon their face the impress of absolute truth have an indescribable charm. Books are generally truth-tellers, but some are more palpably veracious than others. "It was truly said: optimi consilarii mortui; books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. Therefore it is good to be conversant in them; specially the books of such as themselves have been actors upon the stage.'"" To be sure, Burns said that "some are lies frae end to end," but they are not of the sort which endures. A friend was enthusiastic recently about a pleasant volume called The End of an Era, by the eloquent and accomplished John Sergeant Wise, who is the delight of our dinnertables, and who has not suffered his literary labors to interfere with his notable efficiency as a lawyer. He was certainly an "actor upon

Bacon, Of Counsel.