provided was very bitter in the eating. The story of his struggles, are they not written in the chronicles of the immortals? and his ‘monument,’ is it not standing yet ‘in the new stone premises of his publishers?’[13] His biographers--his niece, the Princessa della Rocca, among the latest--have made every incident of Heine’s life as familiar as his own books have made his genius to English readers, and Mr. Stigand, following Herr Strodtman, has given us an exhaustive record of the poet’s life at home and in exile; in the Germany which was so harsh and in the France which was so tender with him; with the respectable German relatives, who read his books at last and were none the wiser, and with the unlettered French wife, who could not read a single word of them all, and who yet understood her poet by virtue of the love which passeth understanding, and was in this case entirely independent of it. This sketch trenches on no such well-filled ground; it presumes to touch only on the fault which gave to life and genius both that odd pathetic twist, and to glance at the suffering, which, if there be any saving power in anguish, might surely be held by the most self-righteous as some atonement for the ‘blackguardism.’ ‘Oh! not little when pain Is most quelling, and man Easily quelled, and the fine Temper of genius so soon Thrills at each smart, is the praise Not to have yielded to pain.’[14] Seven years on the rack is no small test of the heroic temperament; to lie sick and solitary, stretched on a ‘mattress grave,’ the back bent and twisted, the legs paralysed, the hands powerless, and with the senses of sight and taste fast failing. At any time within that seven years Heine might well have gained the gold medal in capability of suffering for which, in his whimsical way, he talked of competing, should such a prize be offered at the Paris Exhibition.[15] And the long days, with ‘no pleasure in them,’ were so drearily many; the silver cord was so slowly loosed, the golden bowl seemed broken on the wheel. His very friends grew tired. ‘One must love one’s friends with all their failings, but it is a great failing to be ill,’ says Madame Sevigné, and, as the years went by, more and more deserted grew the sick-chamber. He never complained; his sweet, ungrudging nature found excuses for desertion and content in loneliness, in the reflection that he was in truth ‘unconscionably long a-dying.’ ‘Never have I seen,’ says Lady Duff-Gordon, in her _Recollections of Heine_, and she herself was no mean exemplar of bravely-borne pain, ‘never have I seen a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He neither paraded his anguish, nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He was pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once set to work to make me laugh heartily, which pleased him just as much.’