well balanced; no one attribute acting at the expense of others. A disordered or a distempered

mind is totally incompatible with health and long life. It soon destroys the body of its possessor. Tranquillity and repose of mind are indispensable to health and long life. It is an interesting fact, that all the vices contribute to disturb the mind, while all the virtues contribute to its repose and tranquillity. The effect of vice is to destroy health and shorten life. On the other hand, virtue inclines to lengthen life. Allow me to urge you to cultivate symmetry of mind. Repel from your mind all corroding cares-all unnecessary anxiety—and everything in the shape of secret vices. Secret vices are like the destructive vermin that establishes itself in the heart of the choicest and most promising fruits, and eats out all their virtue and substance Never allow revenge, envy, hatred, or malice to take possession of your mind. These conditions of mind deepen all the lines of the face, sharpen all the features, and give to the possessor the appearance of premature old age. But, on the other hand, internal purity and the practice of benevolence, the exercise of generosity, of kindness to all, thinking no evil, cultivating the fullest cheerfulness, will soothe and soften the coarsest brow. Above all, the whole mind requires an anchor that shall stay it in all storms, vicissitudes

and troubles of life. This anchor is obtained in pure and undefiled religion: a constant reliance, in all trials, upon God our Saviour. Practise the precepts of health. For your mind, learn and practise all the teachings of our blessed Saviour, and your person will be full of strength and beauty, your days multiplied, and your life will be long, prosperous and happy.

142

CHAPTER VIII.

BIOGRAPHY AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE.

ANOTHER of the uses of biography is that its pages are the inductions of mental and moral science; they are to the student of humanity what the battery is to the electrician, and the retort is to the chemist. It is from reading the lives of other men that we become best acquainted with our own. Erasmus, when his guardian, at the age of seventeen, desired him to enter a monastery, replied, "No, I will not. I neither know what the world is, what a monastery is, nor what I am myself. I shall continue a few years more in the school, that I may become better acquainted with myself." In like manner, in the study of biography, men become acquainted with the motions and structure of their own minds. A well written life, that presents to us the entire picture of a mind, unclasps to us the sealed volume

of our own inner history. Sometimes the works of a man form his best mental autobiography, as in the case of Montaigne; more frequently we have to wait until the tomb has closed over him, before we are permitted to take an inventory of the interior of his mind-that solemn room where none besides himself and the Deity can enter. One preeminent value of the written life is, that it gives to us glimpses of that solemn chamber, the laboratory of the life; for through that chamber moved all the fantastic shapes and tragic forms of the imagination; what projects and plans; what pieces of mental architecture; what struggles; what hopes; what defeats; the hell where conscience pronounced her verdict, and uttered her fulminations; the camera obscura of the soul;-yet there fell the gleams of the cloud-realm; the phantasms of the understanding danced and played there; rainbows, meteors, lightnings, and auroras

com

mingling or raying out their likeness on the mystic apartment. Now biography does little if it does not admit you there-if you are not permitted to see the psychologic features of the portrait. Very much of biography is only the holding up the dialplate of the watch; and inferior writers possess only the power to do this, unless the subject of the memoir has done much himself. But every man has a main-spring to his character, and we wish to

see this, and how it was set in motion.

We wish to see how all the intricate machinery of wheels was held in harmony and consistency-how all the passions, like tributary wheels, obeyed the ruling master-motion of the soul. Without this insight, how is it possible to know a life? Yet, in this way, much of our biography is written.

In painting we can easily discover the character; the warrior is known by his sash, or his helmet; the apostle by his rags, or his halo; the madonna by the circle; and the angel by his wings. Lauzi, in his "History of Painting," observes that "a large landscape of Poussin or Salvator Rosa is seen in half the time it takes to examine even a small one by Claude, since the small one embraces so many objects, and admits so ample a perspective, that a spectator almost anticipates the fatigues of a long journey." Thus we shall ever find it with the study of human character. Some men seem to be known at a glance; some only after a long survey. Warburton says one great cause why it is so difficult to judge of persons in general, "arises from that obscurity which is thrown over the character, through the contest and the strife between nature and costume, reason and appetite, truth and opinion." And Horace Walpole expresses surprise that in writing men's lives, biographers so frequently become enamoured of their