handsome, or tall in church? "A hundred years after death we may weigh the dust of the greatest hero, and it is no more than that of the poorest beggar; and the name that remains is as light and useless as the dust." But if the great hero were very strong and tall and the poor beggar a feeble dwarf, the dust of the one would be appreciably more than that of the other, And what means this Daniel come to judgment by teaching that a hero's name is light and useless? We had supposed it was agreed among all civilized people that a nation's heroic memories are her most priceless possessions. We ask the question simply as a rhetorical one. We are perfectly aware that the author means nothing. He seldom does mean anything. And if he did, he is the last person to whom we should apply for any exact definition of his meaning. He uses words with very little comprehension of their ordinary meaning; of the delicacy or the force of language he has no sort of conception. He grasps at the skirts of any notion that flutters through his disorderly mind, fastens to it the word that comes first to hand, and sets it fluttering again. Juxtaposition is his all-sufficient substitute for connection, and "a moment's time, a point of space," between two statements is fatal to his arguments. "We all differ. _Therefore_," is his extraordinary inference, "every individual should live, not for himself, but to be valuable to others; _for_," and here we turn another of his inexplicable corners, "it would be sheer midsummer madness to preach up that all are equally valuable." Consequently we embark on his sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in entire ignorance of the point where they will land us. He takes Mr. Helps to task for bowing the knee to the Moloch of success in writing Mr. Stephenson's life, accuses Mr. Stephenson of borrowing and purloining ideas, yet himself constantly holds him up to admiration as a hero. The putting down of the Slaveholders' Rebellion is to him a mere "blundering into slaughter"; but the Crimean War "showed that heroism is not yet extinct in high life"; and in the Indian Mutinies, we, the English, "were attacked, undermined, betrayed," and that rebellion was quelled with "courage, skill in arms, anything you will, or all things combined, and God's blessing chief of all, which enabled us to preserve a mighty empire." Of these "high people" he advises us to "adopt the polish, suavity, and politeness, one towards another, which, with few exceptions, they all have," only two pages after he has illustrated "vulgar curiosity in high life" by telling us how, "at an entertainment given by the Prince and Princess of Wales, to which, of course, only the very cream of the cream of society was admitted, there was such a pushing and struggling to see the Princess ... that a bust of the Princess Royal was thrown from its pedestal and damaged, and the pedestal upset; the ladies, in their eagerness to view the Princess, coolly took advantage of the overthrown