shouting in the trenches; or with Theocritus, in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines-I wander, like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, waiting for waftage,'-I melt into the air, with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content to be alone. The only thing that can affect me personally, for more than one short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry. I seldom have any; and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none. Think of my pleasure in solitude, in comparison with my commerce with the world;— there I am a child,—there, they do not know me, not even my most intimate acquaintance. Some think me middling; others, silly; others, foolish : -every one thinks he sees my weak side. Against my will, I am content to be thought all this, because I have in my own breast so great resource. This is one great reason why they like me so, -because they can all show to advantage, and eclipse, from a certain tact, one that is reckoned to be a good poet. I hope I am not here playing tricks to make the angels weep.' I think not, for I have not the least contempt for my species, and, though it may sound paradoxical, my greatest elevations of soul leave me every time more humbled."

It is probable that these citations have been too long, but they have been cited with a purpose;

we are interested in the mental lives of great men ; whatever their age, their outer life concerns us; not that we care but little for it, except as it illustrates the deeper the inner life; and we are thankful therefore, if one will write that life for us plainly, and communicate it. Hence, Montaigne never tires us with his egotism; his essays perhaps furnish the most perfect mental autobiography ever penned. This book we are compelled to say is honest; here without any fear of reader or reviewer, the whole furniture of the soul is seen, without being displayed; and in reference to authors, if we desire to know any thing of their outer life, it is that we may see how far it reflected itself upon the inner chamber. Nor authors alone, innumerable other men are to us altogether reserved, we cannot see them; we feel that in spite of all that farmer-like bluntness of Cromwell, that it is his breastplate, and we cannot pierce it; spite of all this courtly politeness of Shaftesbury, it is but his veil, and we cannot lift it. And Richelieu, so quiet, so sleek, so cruel, is it, we ask, only for power and for glory? In that silence is his depth, and we cannot fathom; it were foolish to ask such men to wear their heart upon their sleeve; but we must wonder what they saw, or thought they saw: snch minds are interesting to us, for they influenced the conditions of our own mental being:

but to write and read the history of these minds, -this is a work we must do for ourselves. Such men do not usually possess the power of introspection: a glance within them, perhaps, had been more terrible than battles, revolutions, and executions: we gather, therefore, what such men were, by the mind-life of the still souls whose days were passed in the grot and the hermitage; and every such mind-life is a true system of mental science, and is valuable in the degree in which the narrator has honesty, faithfully to relate particulars; sagacity, to look into the very deeps of his conscious ness; and mental being and boldness to venture out into new seas and over new territories of speculation; and caution to discriminate between the varied mental territories. We have had many mental histories wanting in all these qualifications. With the superaddition, however, of the intolerable vanity of dullness, perhaps such biographies were not without their value, if carefully noted; for every little buzzing human insect is worthy to fill some place in the cabinet of life, but let it be understood that it is but an insect.

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CHAPTER IX.

MORAL OF MISTAKEN LIVES.

AGAIN in the classification of Lives, we shall not fail to give an important place to those persons who have staked their lives upon an idea. Such men are important, and worth attentive study, whether they have won or lost in the great game they were playing. This is the best definition, perhaps, that can more fully realise to us that self-centred energy, that calm and vivid glance at things, in their manifold relations to life, whigh we notice in the enthusiastic character; and how much of the most important work in the world, whether good or evil, has resulted from these internal impulses ? from men who viewed every thing in relation to their own idea, and remorselessly swept away every obstacle, to the triumph of their idea. There have been many varieties of these men: some of

them possessed the power of absorbing and making tributary to them every person, and every thought; others, on the contrary, reject every person, every leader, unless squaring with their darling idea. Some hold an idea in their breast, in a kind of reserve; they never reveal it; it burns within them, it inspires them, their passionate determination increases in intensity, in the very degree in which it is unrevealed; it consumes them with its fervid heat. Great revolutions are the platforms upon which to see these varied characters; and they furnish magnificent studies to those who desire to read the history of the human mind. No man is so truly unselfish, as he who lives to publish and perpetuate his thought. The French and the English Revolutions gave birth to many such men, but there are two especially worthy of note in France.

Robespierre has seldom been understood, perhaps has never been regarded from the true point of vision; it is not easy to pronounce immediately upon a life like this. Warriors attain the end of their ambition on the field of indiscriminate slaughter. This man sought to attain the triumph of his political faith, by shearing away all opposition advanced to it in the senate. The annals of biography do not furnish another life, apparently so remarkable in its contradictions. In