writing three novels, which he afterward burned. That Francois Huber, who wrote the extraordinary Treatise on the Economy of Bees, which for general information on the subject has never been superseded, was from the sixteenth year of his age totally blind,--all the curious remarks and inferences involved in his observations being founded on fifty years of careful researches which he directed others, and particularly a favorite servant, to make. That eighteen years elapsed after the time that Columbus conceived his enterprise before he was enabled to carry it into effect,--most of that time being passed in almost hopeless solicitation, amidst poverty, neglect, and taunting ridicule; when "Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his dishonest name." That Montaigne, who considered cruelty "the extreme of all vices," was a friend of the Guises and of the blood-stained Mont-luc: he was also for many years a member of a parliament which had much innocent blood on its head, and always spoke with reverence and affection of those who carried out the St. Bartholomew. That La Fontaine, who in his Fables "makes animals, trees, and stones talk," was in his conversation proverbially dull and stupid. That Corneille, whom La Bruyere describes as "plain, timorous, and tiresome in his conversation," "taking one word for another, and judging not of the goodness of his own writings but by the money they brought him," in his books is "as great as Augustus, Pompey, Nicomedes, and Heraclius; he talks like a king; is a politician and a philosopher; he undertakes to make heroes speak and act; he describes the Romans, and they are greater and more Romans in his verse than in their history." That John Howard, "the philanthropist" and prison reformer, introduced the system of solitary confinement, and recommended its application to refractory boys. ("For which," said the gentle Charles Lamb, "I could spit on his statue.") That Bruce, the traveler, after all his perils by flood and by field, from wars, from wild beasts, from deserts, from savage natives, broke his neck down his own staircase at home, owing to a slip of the foot, while seeing some visitors out whom he had been entertaining. That Diogenes, who was so fond of expressing his contempt for money, in his younger days was driven out of the kingdom of Pontus for counterfeiting the coin. That the mighty Dr. Johnson was at times so languid as not to be able to distinguish the hour upon the clock. That the ready and voluminous De Quincey, during the four years he was "under the Circean spells of opium," seldom could prevail on himself to write even a letter; an answer of a few words to any that he received was the utmost that he could accomplish; and that,