turn away in awe and perplexity. Yet there is some method running through the little affairs of man as through the multitude of suns, seemingly to us as confused as routed armies in full flight.

DUNSFORD. Some law of love.

ELLESMERE. I am afraid it is not in the past alone that we should be awe-struck with horrors: we, who have a slave trade still on earth. But, to go back to the essay, I like what you say about the theory of constructing the Christian character without geniality; only you do not go far enough. You are afraid. People are for ever talking, especially you philanthropical people, about making others happy. I do not know any way so sure of making others happy as of being so oneself, to begin with. I do not mean that people are to be self-absorbed ; but they are to drink in nature and life a little. From a genial, wisely developed man, good things radiate: whereas, you must allow, Milverton, that benevolent people are very apt to be one-sided and fussy, and not of the sweetest temper if others will not be good and happy in their way.

MILVERTON. That is really not fair. Of course, acid, small-minded people, carry their narrow notions and their acidity into their benevolence. Benevolence is no abstract perfection. Men will express their benevolence according to their other gifts or want of gifts. If it is strong, it overcomes other things in the character which would be hindrances to it; but it must speak in the language of the soul it is in..

ELLESMERE. Come, let us go and see the pigs. I hear them grunting over their dinners in the farmyard. I like to see creatures who can be happy without a theory.

CHAPTER VI.

THE next time that I came over to Worth Ashton it was raining, and I found my friends in the study.

Well, Dunsford, said Ellesmere, is it not comfortable to have our sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid English wet day.

DUNSFORD. Rather a fluid than a solid. But I agree with you in thinking it is very comfortable here.

ELLESMERE. I like to look upon the backs of books. First I think how much of the owner's inner life and character is shown in his books: then perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so remote from all that I know of him

MILVERTON. I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you come into the study.

ELLESMERE. But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a charming party: "A Treatise on the Steam Engine" between "Locke on Christianity" and

Madame de Stael's "Corinne." I wonder what they talk about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy juxta position, old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he would positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and Horsley next to Priestly; but this sort of thing happens most in the best-regulated libraries. It is a charming reflection for controversial writers that their works will be put together on the same shelves, often between the same covers, and that in the minds of educated men, the name of one writer will be sure to recall the name of the other. So they go down to posterity as a brotherhood.

MILVERTON. To complete Ellesmere's theory, we may say that all those injuries to books which we choose to throw upon some wretched worm, are but the wounds from rival books.

ELLESMERE. Certainly. But now let us proceed to polish up the weapons of another of these spiteful

creatures.

DUNSFORD. Yes. What is to be our essay to-day, Milverton?

MILVERTON. Fiction.

ELLESMERE. Now, that is really unfortunate. Fiction is just the subject to be discussed, no, not discussed, talked over, out of doors, on a hot day, all of us lying about in easy attitudes on the grass, Dunsford with his gaiters forming a most picturesque and prominent figure. But there is nothing complete in this life. "Surgit amari aliquid: " and so

we must listen to Fiction in arm chairs.

90

FICTION.

THE influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are often more stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history, or biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our experience we adopt their feelings, and imitate their acts. And so there comes to be something traditional even in the management of the passions. Shakespeare's historical plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles, or Ulysses, did, in Homer. The poet sings of the deeds that shall be. He imagines the past: he forms the future.

Yet how surpassingly interesting is real life, when we get an insight into it. Occasionally a great genius lifts up the veil of history, and we see men who once really were alive, who did not always live only in history. Or, amidst the dreary page of