that it had become the last extremity of his ill fortune to receive benefits and not be able to return them. “But Alexander,” said he, “whose kindness to my mother, my wife and my children I hope the gods will recompense, will doubtless thank you for your humanity to me. Tell him, therefore, in token of my acknowledgment, I give him this right hand,” with these words he took hold of Polystratus’ hand and died. The man who could inspire such sentiments of grateful admiration into the heart of his dying enemy was more than mortal. Plutarch tells us that Alexander, coming up at that moment, gazed with painful emotion upon the dead form of Darius. And taking the cloak from off his own shoulders he covered with it the prostrate form of his late foe, and gazing down upon the fierce dead comely face--he wept. PHILOSOPHIES. All the philosophies of the sleepy East and their antitheses of the aggressive West seem to have receptively influenced the myriad-minded Alexander. Pride, not vanity, but pride essentially one with the chords of being, expressed itself in the words “And were I not Alexander I would be Diogenes.” Either highest or lowest, all or nothing. Earth as kingdom or--a tub; no compromise, no half way, absolutely and unconditionally either one extreme or the other: this seeming perversity in the makeup of many men of genius has not been sufficiently considered; it is not psychologically understood; there is something humanly attractive about it; something young-world young and something old, old as the heart of man. And this perverse pride was the common link between Alexander and Diogenes, and by it each understood the other: to the former, indeed, fate awarded the earth-kingdom and to the latter--the tub; but these extremes were, by the common link, essentially one. The Gymnosophists, or wise men of India, whom Alexander consulted, could not have deeply impressed the mind of the pupil of Aristotle, for, as Plutarch tells us, he laughed at them and sent them away with many presents. Yet the sacrificial death of Calanus, one of these seers, could not fail to affect forcibly the susceptible mind of Alexander. Jests, dreams, auspices, oracles, theories, sophisms, philosophies, metaphysical speculations in general--well, these are agreeably adjustable; maybe so maybe not so; and when looked at too logically they can all scamper away and hide themselves elusively in Symbolism: but death, death in flames, self-sought, self-devised, self-suffered--that is real, that is awful.