suicide in Minnesota, yesterday, by choking himself with a twisted sheet. These are all the items involving the moral relations of man to man contained in the history of the world for Tuesday, March 22d, 1881, as given by a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of its daily collection. Now suppose a picture were drawn of the moral condition of the United States from these data: how nearly would it represent the facts? This so-called "history of the world for one day," if you closely examine it, turns out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's crimes for one day. The world's virtues do not appear. It is true that Patrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday; but then how many Kellys who came home, tired from work, and found the wife drunk and the children crying for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, with a rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one corner, fumbled about the poor, dirty cupboard in another for crusts of bread, fed the crying youngsters after some rude fashion, and finally lay down with dumb heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true that Jones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series of defalcations; but how many thousands of bank clerks on that same day resisted the strongest temptations to false entries and the allurements of private stock speculations. It is true that yesterday Mrs. Lighthead eloped with the music-teacher, leaving six children and a desolate husband; but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts spent the same day in nursing some drunken husband, who had long ago forfeited all love; how many Milly Bartons were darning six children's stockings at five o'clock of that morning; nay, what untold millions of faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise for husband and children. And finally, you have but to consider a moment that if it lay within the power of the diligent collector of items for the Associated Press despatches to gather together the virtuous, rather than the criminal actions of mankind, the virtuous would so far exceed the criminal as that no journal would find columns enough to put them in, so as to put a wholly different complexion upon matters. Now the use of this newspaper illustration in my present argument is this: I complain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in professing to paint men as they _are_, really paint men only as they _appear_ in some such necessarily one-sided representations as the newspaper history just described. And it is perfectly characteristic of the inherent weakness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to see the true significance underlying society's repudiation of his proposed natural picture. The least that such a repudiation _could_ mean, would be that even if the picture were good in Fielding's time, it is bad now. It is beautiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's great influence at the time when _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were written,