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made wash for swine and motley for fools. Name them not, for their meaning has become folly, their sanctity scorn. Those who will know me must rid themselves of names and listen to their own hearts."

"I know you, I know you," said Johannes.

"It was I who made you weep for men, though you understood not your own tears. It was I who gifted you with love, the love that you comprehended not; I have been with you and you have not seen me, I have touched your heart and you have not known me."

"Why can I see you now?"

"Many tears must purify the eyes that are to behold me. And you must not weep for yourself alone, but for me, then you will see me and know me for a familiar friend."

"I do know you, I recognize you, let me be with you."

The Nineteenth Century.

The figure pointed to the crystal boat sailing into the light, and again he stretched his hands towards the earneast. "That is my way," he said, “where men and misery dwell; yonder is light and happiness and everything you have ever desired. Choose."

Then Johannes turned his gaze slowly from Windekind's glittering form and stretched his hands towards the earnest-eyed figure, and, with his companion, he faced the chill night wind and chose the hard path to the gloomy city where dwell men and misery.

A new lesson had begun, the lesson that

Knowledge by suffering entereth, And life is perfected by death. Margaret Robinson.

THE DECLINE OF THE MEMOIR.

On every hand there are signs that an age of memoirs is upon us. There have been such periods before, when the memoirs of some "person of quality" and the "remains" and "additional remains" of some divine were the most common outputs of the Press. Then biography was a decent mark of respect, less necessary than a tombstone, but of a rank with the mutes and weepers. My lord was scarcely gone from his earthly tenement when his confidential secretary or his domestic chaplain had begun the work, which, in time, came into print with a frontispiece wherein Muses wept over their patron's bier. It was all an innocent convention, and the products, save in some few cases where the subject had made history, have departed into limbo. After all, the chaplain did his work with care and leisure, and the books

had dignity if they lacked interest. Today we are in a different case. No sooner does a notable man die than his memoir is forthcoming, and the same newspaper which prints an account of his funeral advertises his Life in two volumes with photographs. Any one with the smallest pretensions to fame may count on a hastily written biography; and the fashion goes further, for the majority make it their business to forestall the biographer and publish their annals in their lifetime. It is ungenerous to find fault with the good people who keep diaries and long memories, for we owe them many pleasant hours; but the fashion is a dangerous one, and there are sad examples of its degradation. To have known eminent men and women is well, and to remember their sayings better; but more than this is required for the making of a

good book. The truth is that a man's life is now regarded as a commercial asset. While he lives publishers pester him for his memoirs, and after his death there is always some willing scribe for the work. And the great public likes it, and money is made, and every one is satisfied. Soon it will be a sacred duty to one's family to have' memoirs ready for publication, and some day an enlightened Chancellor of the Exchequer will exact Estate-duty on this as on other personal assets.

We confess to a catholic liking for memoirs of every sort, provided they be done well. From the small craft of anecdote-books and table-talk, and the elegant brigantines of diaries and collections of letters, to the great threedeckers of a Horace Walpole and a Boswell, we find the class one of the most entertaining in literature. We would sharply distinguish the memoir from the biography. The latter is a stiff and comprehensive work, conducted in a scientific spirit, with excursions in psychology and dissertations on ethics, and, speaking generally, a rounded philosophy. The true biographer must not make an idol of his subject; he must discriminate and criticise; and he must make a laborious search after truth. Hence biography-in this severe sense is rarely abused, for only the great are its objects, and the man who essays it is, as a rule, a serious and competent person. But the memoir is a lesser work, though not necessarily in avoirdupois weight, for it may run to a dozen volumes. It is biography in undress, the private, domestic, temperamental side of life, depicted from a near point of view, and not with the scientific aloofness of biography. It may take the shape of reminiscences, when, from a record of preferences and impressions, a man's character stands revealed, or its form may be the impersonal memoir published after death. It is a chronicle of little things, since

three parts of life are made up of them, but the little things must have the meaning which Dr. Johnson claimed for them. "There is nothing, Sir, so little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible."

Let all this be granted, and let a man have the best disposition in the world towards the class; yet the odds are that the modern memoir will prove too much for him. For one thing, there are too many. The smallest notable in any walk of life must have this tribute to his merits, and the garrulity of the memoirist is rarely proportionate to the man's fame. But such books are for the friends, it will be said; the stranger need not read them. True, but the practice corrupts the whole art, and where one good book might be written there will be twenty bad ones. With the great names the case is even worse. All daily newspapers, we understand, keep certain biographies in type for years, to be prepared against a "sudden call;" and it would almost appear as if the publishers accepted a memoir and delayed it till its subject's death, when it might issue with exquisite fitness a wreath for the great man's tomb and a sop to public curiosity. Greatness must be a dreary business for a man nowadays, with the consciousness that a crowd of dull, incompetent biographers will bespatter him with their epithets before the breath is well out of his body. And so come the pithless memoirs which drive better work from the field. The public are in a hurry and must be waited on. While Mr. X's name is still in the papers it wants to know all about his education and his family, his recreations, his taste in wine, his opinions on his contemporaries. The habit is part of the vulgar curiosity which gives personal journalism its vogue; and, indeed, this type of

memoir is simply a systematized and padded journalism. When we read to-day that Lady S. gave a dinnerparty, at which Mr. M. was a guest, or that Mr. A. has gone with the Duke of B. to the Hindu Koosh, we are morally certain that some day we will read all about the conversation at the dinner and the sport of the expedition in some gossipy memoir. Here again we could distinguish. All this may be interesting; possibly even of first-class historical worth; our complaint is that the atmosphere of journalism is apt to blur the vital and the trivial in one undistinguished chaos.

The memoir has become too common and too careless, and all grievances culminate in the great complaint that it is rarely literature. For literature involves distinction, conscience and a nice discrimination. Its bounds are very wide, but for that reason its limits, when they appear, are impassable. There is all the difference in the world between the gossip of a Pepys and a Boswell and the chatter of the hack journalist. In the case of men who have filled a great place, there may be an historical interest apart from the artistic. It may be valuable for the future student to know where Metternich or Bismarck dined on some particular night, though the dinner itself was dull. But such cases must be the exceptions; with the common celebrity we want a direct human interest. We would not for the world miss one of Johnson's comments or Pepy's confessions. When the little Secretary to the Admiralty chronicles his repentances and his peccadilloes, the humors of Lady Castlemaine, the excellence of his wife's pasties and the glories of his "new summer black bombazine;" when Swift talks of Sir Patrick and Lady Masham's children, and the dinners at Mrs. Vanhomrigh's; when Horace Walpole draws his acrid, unforgettable portraits of the men and women he

knew; when Boswell builds up from scattered anecdotes and broken conversations the most complete figure of a man in English letters,-then we know the value of the "little things" which are the foundation of a memoir. But the detail must be illustrative of character, that illuminating commonplace which cannot be over-valued, or it must be in itself a contribution to the gaiety or edification of the world. Greville gives us the stock-pot of history; Mr. Froude's memoir of Carlyle, with all its faults, has a profound psychological interest; while Sir Algernon West-to descend to lesser instances-has a keen eye for humor and the proper manner. These are instances of detail which is justified; but how often is all justification absent? The shoals of biographies of dull, pompous, priggish people, which have no possible historical interest, and none of the savor of wit, books without form or true matter, sandy deserts of infinite triviality,what is to be said of them? Even when the subject is all that can be desired and the author capable, the modern custom of haste leaves the work crude and incomplete. Now and then the perfect memoir, such as Sir Henry Cunningham's sketch of Lord Bowen, arises to point the contrast; but for the rest we have our Church dignitaries, our minor travellers, our heroes of the turf and our inconsiderable litterateurs -each in two volumes with portraits.

Some day, as we have ventured to predict, there will be an Estate-duty upon this form of wealth; but till that enlightened hour let us insist upon the fact that memoir-writing is an art and not a catalogue. The memoir is an essay in the science of selection, as difficult a form as any in literature. In our own country it has been done supremely well; all the more reason, therefore, why we should protest against its decline. In the first place let it be restricted in subject. In the

second place, let it be regarded as literature, and not as the casual skimmings of daily journalism. And, above all things, let its matter be compressed and assorted. The touchstone of selection may be as varied as possible, but let the selection be there. A man The Spectator.

(or his biographer) must be, indeed, possessed of extraordinary self-conceit if he thinks that every petty detail of his daily life is of interest to posterity when crudely and boldly set forth. If life "demands an art" so does the memoir.

A NEW "AULD LANG SYNE."

BY RUDYARD KIPLING.

(Sung at a Concert given by War Correspondents at Bloemfon-
tein, April 18.)

We welcome to our hearts to-night, oh, kinsmen from afar,
Brothers in an empire's fight and comrades of our war;
For Auld Lang Syne, my lads, and the fights of Auld Lang
Syne,

We drink our cup of fellowship to the fights of Auld Lang
Syne.

The Shamrock, Thistle, Leek, and Rose, with Heath and
Wattle twine,

And Maple from Canadian snows, for the sake of Auld Lang

Syne;

For Auld Lang Syne take hands from London to the Line;
Good luck to those that toil with us since the days of Auld
Lang Syne.

Again to all we hold most dear in the life we left behind,
The wives we wooed, the bairns we kissed, and the loves of
Auld Lang Syne.

For surely you'll have your sweetheart and surely I'll have
mine,

We toast her name in silence here and the girls of Auld Lang
Syne.

And last to him, the little man who led our fighting line
From Kabul on to Kandahar, in the days of Auld Lang Syne,
For Old Lang Syne and Bobs our Chief of Auld Lang Syne,
We're here to do his work again as we did in Auld Lang Syne.

AN INDEX EXPURGATORIUS OF WORDS.

In a very interesting article on "English, Good and Bad," in last week's Literature, Mr. James R. Thursfield referred to a list of words and phrases which William Cullen Bryant forbade his contributors to use when he was editing the New York Evening Post. The list is quoted by Mr. Fraser Rae in his book, "Columbia and Canada," with no comment save a mention of Bryant's zeal for purity of speech. As it seems probable that many readers of the Academy may like to have such a list by them, it is given below almost in full-a few needless Americanisms being omitted.

WORDS PROHIBITED BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

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