THE ROMANCE OF BIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER I. ROMANCE AND REALITY. A CHARMING Writer tells, in one of the sweetest and most shadowy of all modern parables, the story of a marvellous magic mirror. When it came into the hands of the student it seemed a very ordinary thing; but as he gazed upon it, it appeared soon to suggest the wonderful affinity existing between a mirror and the imagination. For, somehow, objects regarded in a mirror always acquire a strange and weird unreality. As we look, there is something that seems to fascinate us. We should like to live in that room-the room in the mirror-if we could only get into it. Suddenly, one day, while the student gazed, the enchanting form of a lady entered the room in the mirror; the student turned and looked in his own room-there was no such form there; then from day to day her visits were constant to the room in the mirror, never to the real room. He was a poor student (students are usually poor), but now he laboured constantly to furnish his own poor room, that he might make it look more pleasant and |