It is not often that you are told what a man died of. You are put off with some such phrase as "a painful malady," or a "family complaint." Yet, it is often just what we desire to know, because the illness from which a man suffers stands in direct relation to his power of work and his capacity of endurance. Consumption, except in its later stage, is not usually painful. Nor does it necessarily make work difficult. The same may be said of maladies which come on paroxysmally, and leave those blessed intervals of ease of which Paley, himself a sufferer, writes with such unaccustomed tenderness. In the _Gibbon_ of this series, Mr. Morison slurred over the very curious, perhaps unexampled fact, that Gibbon had long concealed a bad hernia and had done nothing for it. It finally killed him, but that with his amazing corpulence he could live a long time with a serious rupture, and keep his general health and his placidity, is very interesting. Professor Huxley tells us point-blank what Hume died of, and it is quite as well for biographers to be specific in such matters. We may just inquire, in passing, where the Professor got his "_solid_ certainty of waking bliss"? It seems pedantic to notice every trifle of this sort, but if small errors in quotation were, so to speak, nipped in the bud, many logomachics would be saved. How much discussion, in pulpits and out of them, has been wasted upon the supposition that Pope wrote that "an honest man's the _noblest_ work of God." Whereas Pope wrote "noble," and it was Burns, in the "Cotter's Saturday Night," who started the error. Now "solid" is as good sense as "sober," but the latter is what suits the verse best, and it is what Milton made Comus say. * * * * * The "run" upon Dante continues. Here is _Dante: Six Sermons_, by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. (C. Kegan Paul & Co.) "In allowing," says Mr. Wicksteed-- "the publication of this little volume, my only thought is to let it take its chance with other fugitive productions of the pulpit that appeal to the press as a means of widening the possible area rather than extending the period over which the preacher's voice may extend; and my only justification is the hope that it may here and there reach hands to which no more adequate treatment of the subject was likely to find its way."