attention which facts coldly "set in a note-book" never enlisted.
How many of us unconsciously have adopted the portraits of the early
English kings as Shakspeare drew them! To what a host of living souls is
the history of Scotland what the author of "Waverley" makes it! Charles
I. haunts the fancy, not as drawn by Hume, but as painted by Vandyck.
The institutions of the Middle Ages are realized to every reflective
tourist through the architecture of Florence more than by the municipal
details of Hallam. Pyramids, obelisks, mummies have brought home
Egyptian civilization; the "old masters," that of Europe in the
fifteenth century; the ruins of the Colosseum, Roman art and barbarism,
as they never were by Livy or Gibbon. Lady Russell's letters tell us of
the Civil War in England,--Saint Mark's, at Venice, of Byzantine taste
and Oriental commerce,--the Escurial and the Alhambra, Versailles, a
castle on the Rhine, and a "modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac,"
of their respective eras and their characteristics, social, political,
religious,--more than the most elaborate register, muster-roll, or
judicial calendar. For around and within these memorials lingers the
life of Humanity; they speak to the eye as well as to memory,--to the
heart as well as the intelligence; they draw us by human associations
to the otherwise but technical statement; they lure us to repeople
solitudes and reanimate shadows; and having become intimate with the
scenes, the effigies, the monuments of the Past, we have, as it were, a
vantage-ground of actual experience an impulse from personal observation
and, perhaps, a sympathy born of local inspiration, whereby the phantoms
of departed ages are once more clothed with flesh, and their sorrows and
triumphs are renewed in the soul of enlightened contemplation.

* * * * *

MY NEIGHBOR, THE PROPHET.

The point of commencement for a story is altogether arbitrary. Some
writers stick to Nature and go back to the Creation; others take a few
dozen of the grandfatherly old centuries for granted; others seize Time
by the forelock and bounce into the middle of a narrative; but, as I
said before, the beginning is a mere matter of taste and convenience.
I choose to open my tale with the day on which I took possession of my
newly purchased country-house.

It was a pretty little cottage, wooden, old-fashioned, a story and a
half high, with a long veranda, a shady door-yard