Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's, like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character of Watteau. "Walden," then, is somewhat too varnished; but "Riverby" and "Pepacton" are "homely" and "homey." To return to memoirs for a moment, that most delightful of all mental dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of "Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is Madame de Boigne on the same shelf with these two lovers of nature? Madame de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She loved the world and the manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is more like an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ to which she would prefer to be compared. There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame de Boigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no real harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and gives the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry VIII. But this is a digression. Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne as displaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr. Mencken cannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in his desire to be academic, Browne's hyperlatinism or his use of Latin words, like "corpage," "confinium," "angustias," or "Vivacious abominations" and "congaevous generations." Mr. Symonds says: He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the most puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to confessions of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the result of tortuous reflections on the enigmas of life and revelation. Perhaps the following paragraph enables us to understand the permanent temper of his mind most truly: