ever disturbs society-yea, even by a causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle-falls first upon the market of labor, and thence affects prejudicially every department of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested, literature is neglected, people are too busy to 5 read anything save appeals to their passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of toil and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now, Lenny, take this piece of advice: You 10 are young, clever, and aspiring: men rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom fails of success if he lets the world alone and resolves to make the best of it. You are in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is the struggle between the new desires knowl-15 edge excites, and that sense of poverty which those desires convert either into a hope and emulation or into envy and despair. I grant that it is an up-hill work that lies before you; but don't you think it is always easier to climb a mountain than it is to level it? These books 20 call on you to level the mountain; and that mountain is the property of other people, subdivided among a great many proprietors, and protected by law. At the first stroke of the pickaxe it is ten to one but what you are taken up for a trespass. But the path up the mountain 25 is a right of way uncontested. You may be safe at the summit, before (even if the owners are fools enough to let you) you could have levelled a yard. It is now more than two thousand years since poor Plato began to level it, and the mountain is as high as ever." Thus saying, Riccabocca came to the end of his pipe, and stalking thoughtfully away, he left Leonard Fairfield trying to extract light from the smoke. 30 Tell fortune of her blindness; And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell arts they have no soundness, Tell schools they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming: If arts and schools reply, Give arts and schools the lie. Tell faith it's fled the city; Tell how the country erreth; So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbingAlthough to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing Stab at thee he that will, No stab the soul can kill. 20 15 10 5 LXXV. LESSONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. BY FREDERICK HARRISON.' WHEN We multiply the appliances of human life, we do not multiply the years of life, nor the days in the year, nor the hours in the day. Nor do we multiply the powers of thought, or of endurance; much less do we multiply self-restraint, unselfishness, and a good heart. 5 What we really multiply are our difficulties and doubts. Millions of new books hardly help us when we can neither read nor remember a tithe of what we have. Billions of new facts rather confuse men who do not know what to do with the old facts. Culture, thought, art, 10 ease and grace of manner, a healthy society, and a high standard of life, have often been found without any of our modern resources in a state of very simple material equipment. Read the delightful picture of Athenian life in the Dialogues of Plato, or in the comedies of Aris-15 tophanes, or of Roman life in the epistles of Horace, or of Medieval life in the tales of Boccaccio, or Chaucer, or of Oriental life in the Arabian Nights, or in the books of Confucius and Mencius, or the tales of old Japan, or go back to the old Greek world in the Odyssey of Ho-20 mer, and the odes of Pindar, Theocritus, and Hesiod. In all of these we get glimpses of societies which are to us ideal in their charm-humane, happy, wise, and bright. No one wishes to return to them. We are better off as we are. These idyllic ages of poetry and story had their 25 own vice, folly, ignorance, narrowness, crime. They |