It is only the nearsighted man who can not distinguish things very well at a distance, and who, therefore, gets a strictly impressionist view of life, who really enjoys existence. He can do without his glasses, if necessary, or if he does not think them becoming, and yet experience almost perfect comfort. For him, indeed, the world never loses its illusions, and years, far from robbing him of this boon, only adds to the glamour of enchantment in which he lives. There are those who maintain that the really great men of history have always been short—not in funds, but in stature—and they instance Socrates, Napoleon, Edmund Kean, Victor Hugo and a multitude of others; but, in point of fact it may be still more conclusively shown that the majority of great men have been short-sighted. Much of the romantic view of existence taken by the ancients we may ascribe to the fact that many of them were near-sighted and had not the use of spectacles, which did not come into vogue until the Thirteenth Century, although the Chinese, it is said, had them for some time before that. Nothing but nearsightedness could have so stimulated the imagination of Shakespeare and idealized everything about him, although, indeed, it is true that we have no portraits or busts in which he is shown to have worn glasses. Still, there are so many references in his writings to “thickness of sight” and difficulties of vision, and there are such exquisite descriptions of color effects, that we can not doubt him to have been the victim of what the doctors would call optical infirmity, although it is quite the reverse. The fact that many of our famous modern poets did not wear glasses is no proof that for definite seeking they did not require them. Byron, Shelley or Keates, we may be sure, never would have worn glasses in any circumstances, as such appurtenances would have been out of character. There was not in their time the great variety of the pince-nez that we have at present, rimless and almost invisible; but there was the very fashionable single eyeglass, rather larger than the monocle in use at present, and that Beau Brummel himself, and later Count D’Orsay, did not disdain. The Duke of Wellington used a single eyeglass, tied to a black ribbon, which hung about his neck, habitually, and through it saw the Battle of Waterloo, and, before the engagement was over, Blücher’s columns coming up.