In this one may be disposed to say Bunyan judged rightly. The wisest man, it is said, is he who realises most clearly the narrow limits of human knowledge; the greatest should be penetrated with the strongest conviction of his own insignificance. The higher we rise above the average mass of mankind, the more clearly we should see our own incapacity for acting the part of Providence. The village squire who does not really believe in anything invisible from his own steeple, may fancy that he is of real importance to the world, for the world for him means his village. 'P. P. clerk of this parish' thought that all future generations would be interested in the fact that he had smoothed the dog's-ears in the great Bible. A genuine statesman who knows something of the forces by which the world is governed should have seen through the humbug of history. He should have learnt the fable of the fly and the chariot wheel, and be aware that what are called his achievements are really the events upon which, through some accident of position, he has been allowed to inscribe his name. One stage in a nation's life gets itself labelled Cromwell, and another William Pitt; but perhaps Pitt and Cromwell were really of little more importance than some contemporary P. P. This doctrine, however, is considered, I know not why, to be immoral, and to smack of fatalism, cynicism, jealousy of great men, and other objectionable tendencies. We are in a tacit conspiracy to flatter conspicuous men at the expense of their fellow-workers, and he is the most generous and appreciative who can heap the greatest number of superlatives upon growing reputations, and add a stone to the gigantic pile of eulogy under which the historical proportions of some great figures are pretty well buried. We must not complain, therefore, if we flatter the vanity which seems to be the most essential ingredient in the composition of a model biographer. A man who expects that future generations will be profoundly interested in the state of his interior seems to be drawing a heavy bill upon posterity. And yet it is generally honoured. We are flattered perhaps by this exhibition of confidence. We are touched by the demand for sympathy. There is something pathetic in this belief that we shall be moved by the record of past sufferings and aspirations as there is in a child's confidence that you will enter into its little fears and hopes. And perhaps vanity is so universal a weakness, and, in spite of good moralising, it so strongly resembles a virtue in some of its embodiments, that we cannot find it in our hearts to be angry with it. We can understand it too thoroughly. And then we make an ingenious compromise with our consciences. Our interest in Pepys's avowals of his own foibles, for example, is partly due to the fact that whilst we are secretly conscious of at least the germs of similar failings, the consciousness does not bring any sense of shame, because we set down the confession to the account