rather too easily on their hinges. And thus it happens that, as Mr. Cobden said," the authority of an English statesman increases in exact proportion as his capacity declines."

There are some practical correctives which might perhaps do something to abate the evils which I have been trying to describe. In the first place, sensible people should take pains to dissociate themselves from the open and avowed worship of Heroes. When men lay hold of an eminent person, and make him the object of what the Americans call a boom, we may, with all due courtesy, assert our right to form our own judgment. And in doing so, we may be sure that we shall not offend the Hero, if he is a Hero. No true man likes to have "admiration without limit" roaring, and gushing, and twittering round him all the day long. A great man does not disdain our praise, but he disdains the notion of being dependent on it. When Dr. Keate was headmaster of Eton, he was called in to suppress a rebellion among the boys. He executed justice so promptly and so fearlessly, that when he took his departure even the rebels began to cheer. He turned on them with a grim smile: "None of that, boys. If If you may cheer me, you may hiss me. There was a true heroic dignity in this remark.

Again, we can do much to preserve ourselves and others from error if we bear in mind that genuine Heroes must always be few. There are never enough of them to justify us in counting on their aid; we may, therefore,

treat them as exceptional, and give all the attention and interest we can to the study of the average man. I am quite aware that the average man is not a client to do one credit. He affords no scope for rhetoric; he is limited, apathetic, prosaic. But after all, he is the important person for whose benefit Churches and Parties and Saints and Heroes are created.

If any historian will give us an adequate biography of Mr. Gladstone, we shall all receive it with gratitude. But I for one shall be even more grateful to the man who will give me a true picture of the mind of the average Midlothian elector. Depend on it, that would be a document from which we should learn more than from the biography of any statesman, however distinguished.

In endeavouring to maintain a critical habit of mind we shall, of course, expose ourselves to the violence of fanatics. If you presume to analyse your neighbour's religion, however respectfully the analysis may be conducted, he will probably regard you as an indifferent sceptic and a hardened cynic. There is really all the difference in the world between the critic and the cynic. It would be cynical

to assume that all Heroes are overrated persons or that all popular judgments are wrong. The critic makes no such assumption; he takes as much pleasure in discovering the true Hero as in exposing the sham. But if his faculty is to be kept fit for use, he must beware of mental prostration, even in the presence of the true.

LIKE the dissipated roué in the play of 'Mayfair,' who thus accounts for his not being in bed till five in the morning, I can say that "I always was a bit of a student;" and a special corner of my library is set apart for the reception of my ancient friends, my veneration for which shrine is, I fear, by no means shared by the other members of my family circle. On the contrary, I have reason to believe that my wife views each fresh addition to its contents with extreme disfavour. "What! more of your ancient Greeks!" she is wont to exclaim when she comes upon me in the act of hastily and somewhat surreptitiously undoing a fresh parcel of books, the two last words being uttered much in the same tone that I have heard her use the expression "littering rubbish," in connection with the shortcomings of an untidy housemaid. I have reason also to believe, that my sons fully endorse the opinion so emphatically expressed by Swift's Captain with respect to the value of a classical education.

'Your Noveds, and Blutuchs, and Omurs and stuff,

By G- they don't signify this pinch of

snuff.

To give a young gentleman right education, The army's the only good school in the nation."

not

Whatever volumes may be missing from other parts of my library (and I notice by the way that 'Jorrocks' and 'Soapey Sponge' are rarely in their places), there are never any gaps in these shelves for which I am myself responsible. Not even the disappearance of a Bohn's translation ever shows the faintest desire on the part of any inmate of my house, male or female, to gain that insight into the "sweetness and light" of the original, which it is the fashion now-a-days to say may be acquired

through the medium of a crib. Here at all events, whatever I may be elsewhere, "I am monarch of all I survey," and no one cares to dispute my right. There they stand, a somewhat motley collection, it must be confessed, both in size and binding, ranging from the Greyfriars Latin and Greek Primers of half a century ago to the Master of Balliol's 'Plato' and the Edipus Tyrannus' of Professor Jebb. Often, as I look at them, my mind wanders back over a long vista of years, and recalls some quaint memory of the days when as a schoolboy I hammered out by the aid of Dictionary and Gradus Hexameters, or Longs and Shorts, of doubtful Latinity and scanning, or listened as an undergraduate, too often with dull and drowsy ear, to my College Tutor's learned unravelling of some tortuous passage in a Greek Chorus. One such memory occurred to me only a day or two ago, when, wishing to verify a quotation, I took from its shelf a somewhat bruised and battered 'Corpus Poetarum Latinorum' in which I remember investing on my arrival as a freshman in Oxford. In turning over its pages I came upon half a sheet of paper dotted with certain pencil hieroglyphics that on closer inspection I made out to be the numbers and other particulars necessary for reference to some score of lines of different authors whose poems are to be found in the volume. For a moment, though I recognised my own handwriting, my memory was at fault as to how they got there, but on looking out one of the lines in question there flashed upon my recollection an episode of my Oxford life which I had long since forgotten, but which for years after I had shaken off the dust of "the High from my feet, I had never recalled without a keen sense of amusement.

One of the best and most popular of the members of my college was Henry Pelham, and his wine parties were the most agreeable entertainments of their kind in the University. They were by no means exclusively confined to one set, or to men of his own college. On the contrary, the rapidly maturing first from Balliol sat in amicable contiguity to the hard rider from Christ Church or Trinity, and the promising young orator of the Union hobnobbed with the boating man from Brasenose, or the fast bowler or crack bat of the University Eleven. Pelham was an excellent host, and had the happy knack of fusing into harmony with each other these, ofttimes, under less skilful management, discordant elements; and the result was that, though it could not be said that every man invariably hid his own light under a bushel, there was less individual "shop" talked at these Symposia than at any other that I remember in the course of my University

career.

Pelham had been at Oxford about a year and a half when I went up to keep my first term. His father and mine were country squires in different parts of Clayshire; and Pelham and I had already made each other's acquaintance at a cricket match between the north and south of the county, of which I now remember little but the fact that the division which I represented received a somewhat ignominious beating in a single innings. One of the first cards left upon me was his, speedily followed by an invitation to wine in his rooms. Thither accordingly I adjourned on the appointed evening shortly after dining in hall, and found some fifteen or sixteen men already gathered round the mahogany, and discussing with much apparent gusto some excellent claret which, I need hardly say, our host had not purchased from an Oxford winemerchant. The party was composed of men of various colleges, our own being fairly represented, and with three or four exceptions was to me, a

newly-joined freshman, an entirely strange one. One of these exceptions

was a little fellow of the name of Downey, of Merton, who for several years had been my schoolfellow and sworn friend at Grey Friars. We were in the same house and in the same class together, and had each left the school a year and a half ago, in order, as the fashion then was, that in the interval between school and college we might unlearn, in the dolce far niente of life with a private tutor, the small modicum of Greek and Latin which the bulk of public schoolboys, even to this day, ever succeed in acquiring. Since then I had lost sight of him, but on my entering Pelham's room he greeted me with a joyous cry of recognition. "Glad we meet once more, old fellow!" said he, as I dropped into the vacant chair beside him. "Heard you were up this term, and meant to come and look after you directly. Better place this than that beastly Grey Friars on a cold winter's morning, ain't it? Different stuff this, too, from old Swisher's 'swipes,"" he added, as he refilled his glass from the passing magnum. Downey was, as I have already mentioned, of the light-weight order, and of an extremely youthful appearance. His boyish voice and laugh, his freshcoloured, cherubic face, with its blue eyes and more than slightly "tiptilted" nose, gave him a look of such childish innocence and simplicity, that a physiognomist would scarcely have hesitated to pronounce his patronymic to be a singular misnomer, so far as it might be taken to indicate the possession of sharp wits and absence of youthful verdure on the part of its owner. The physiognomist who drew any such conclusion, and tried to follow it up to his own advantage, would have found that he had wofully mistaken his man, as the sequel of my story will show.

Very different indeed in outward appearance was another of my Grey Friars contemporaries, Parr of Balliol, who sat near our host on the

opposite side of the table. By two years and more my senior at the school, he was now in his third year of residence, and had well sustained at Oxford the high reputation as a scholar he had won at Grey Friars. There he had carried all before him, and his school career had culminated in a Balliol scholarship, to which he had since added the Hertford and Ireland, and mounted the rostrum more than once at Commemoration to recite his prize compositions before an undergraduate audience that bellowed indiscriminately its praise or censure. Parr's undoubted talents commanded universal respect, but on the whole it could not be said that he was popular amongst his fellows. At school he had been looked on as a bit of a bully; and at college, though he could be pleasant enough when he chose, he was noted for a somewhat overbearing manner, and was withal by no means patient of contradiction. This tendency to self-assertion always manifested itself more strongly whenever, as on the occasion of which I am writing, Todhunter, familiarly dubbed "Toady," was one of the company, another Grey Friars man who had there been Parr's satellite, and who worshipped him and hung on his every sentence much after the fashion that Boswell did on those that fell from the lips of the Great Lexicographer.

The claret circulated freely, and for a while the conversation flowed as freely from one topic to another, men talking together in groups without an attempt on anyone's part to monopolise the talk. Gradually, however, the voice of Parr rose high above the rest, as he somewhat authoritatively and dictatorially set his opposite neighbour right on the authorship and exact wording of a Latin quotation, upon which the other had been rash enough to venture. Somewhat nettled by Parr's tone, his adversary obstinately held to his own version, and the result was a reference to a neatly bound 'Corpus Poetarum Latinorum' which occupied a conspicuous position on Pelham's

bookshelves. That Parr proved to be right was a matter of surprise to no one, and the beaten man was the first frankly to own that he had been mistaken, and admit that he had met with the due reward of his rashness in venturing to dispute so paramount an authority. This admission gave the cue to Todhunter to take up his parable and launch out into one of his effusive laudations of Parr and all his works. Pretty plainly hinting that his late opponent was one of that class who rush in where angels fear to tread, he went on to dilate on Parr's prodigious powers of memory, and told as an instance of them how he and a rival Balliol luminary, being on a reading party together during the last long vacation, had amused themselves during their daily constitutionals by capping Greek and Latin verses. Day after day, nay week after week, according to Todhunter's account, had the match continued, and finally been drawn by mutual consent, to be renewed should the pair ever meet again in similar circumstances. Parr listened with considerable self-complacency to his satellite's narrative of his achievements, and flung himself back in his chair with an air of contempt when Todhunter concluded by offering to lay a "pony" that there was no one in the room who would enter the lists that evening with his hero at the same amusement.

Todhunter spake, and, like the gods whom Zeus challenged to a trial of strength on the topmost peak of manyridged Olympus, "we all kept silent and were still, marvelling at his saying, for he spake very masterfully." But suddenly the silence was broken, and the challenge taken up in a most unlooked-for quarter. "Well," said the clear boyish voice of little Downey "my knowledge of Greek is strictly limited, as you Grey Friars fellows are aware, to the verb τúπш as practically conjugated by old Swisher, but if no one else will have a shy, and he will give me the first start, I don't mind having a canter against old Parr

over the Latin course for your 'pony,' Toady, and I'll take my chance of being distanced by your Balliol crack."

Had a bombshell burst in the middle of our party we could not have been more astounded. Parr turned as red as a turkey-cock; his prominent eyes nearly started out of his head; and if hair ever does actually stand on end with either astonishment or fear, his may fairly be said to have done so. "You impudent little beggar," he blurted out at length, "what on earth do you mean by cheeking me like that? Why I remember at Grey Friars-" 66 'Come, come, Parr, don't get in a wax, old fellow," said Downey, in a tone of voice that only added fuel to the fire of Parr's wrath; "I meant what I said, but of course if you funk, I'll let Toady off, without even asking for half-forfeit. And pray spare us your Grey Friars reminiscences, as they can hardly be a subject of general interest to the present company."

At the idea of Parr's funking to encounter Downey there was a general roar of laughter, in the midst of which Parr sat chafing and fuming, and finally began to open the vials of his wrath upon the unfortunate Todhunter, for having made him the subject of a ridiculous challenge, and one moreover totally unauthorised on his part. Here, however, our host interfered, and, pouring oil on the troubled waters, suggested that if Downey was in serious earnest he had better be taken at his word, and given his chance of winning his money, or receiving his quietus. To this Parr, with not the best grace in the world, assented, and with an air of ill-concealed contempt offered to accede to Downey's condition that he should have first start, further ironically inquiring over what limits as to time, and over what range of Latin poets he proposed, that their contest should extend. Well," said Downey, "as to time, I am quite ready to leave that to Pelham and Todhunter to settle together; the whole term if you

please. And as to poets, let us say any line out of that big volume that you were poring over just now." At this there was a fresh roar of laughter. "What, all the poets in the 'Corpus,' Downey!" said Todhunter, "why, how hard you must have been reading since you left Grey Friars ! Poor fellow, no wonder your whiskers have fallen off, I only wonder your hair isn't snow-white into the bargain." "Don't be personal, Toady," answered the imperturbable Cherub; "whiskers or no whiskers, I am ready to swallow the whole Corpus,' but if Parr objects, there's a long-winded fellow near the end of it I don't mind cutting out. One Silly-something or another. I confess I never read a line of him and I've forgotten his name." "I sup pose you mean Silius Italicus," said Parr. "The very party," replied Downey. "Well," said Parr, beginning to recover his temper, "cut him out, by all means if you like, we shall still have a pretty wide field to range over." At length it was settled between Pelham and Todhunter as umpires, firstly, that the match should last for two hours, and that if neither party was brought to a standstill by the end of that time it should be considered as drawn; secondly, that a minute only should be allowed for one antagonist to follow the other, and in the event of either failing to keep time he should be declared the loser; thirdly, that either antagonist on being challenged by his adversary to do so, should give his authority for the line quoted, to be verified in case of doubt by a reference to the Corpus.' During the settlement of these terms opinions as to the result of the contest were freely outspoken, and with one single exception they were unanimous, that Downey would speedily find that he had caught a Tartar. "I am afraid it will be a case of 'Infelix puer, atque impar congressus,'" said Monckton, a noted punster, who prided himself, and not altogether without reason, on the happiness of his classical quotations. Downey, however, nothing daunted,