for the country, and that he was succeeded by a Republican; but the fact of a disputed Presidency had a far-reaching evil influence, and prevented showing fair play in New York in 1884. Blaine lost in his illness coincident with the Cincinnati convention the confidence of the country in his firm health and strength, and that handicapped him to his grave. Perhaps it is even more important that he lost faith in himself as a strong man, and had almost a superstition that if he became President it would be for him personally a fatality. And yet he was intellectually a growing man for fifteen years after his Cincinnati defeat. His greater works, his most influential ideas, the full fruition of his gifts, were after that catastrophe. Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious, that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed. Those very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening; about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater. One who studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a phenomenon. He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on earth or in the air that did not tell him something. He was like an instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and wore like steel. He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the ordinary man.