as refreshing as to our over-excited and exhausted
nerves are the green, quiet, hidden nooks of their Alpine solitudes.
With them there is no need of imaginative expression; the trouble of
thought is useless; their words are the transparent revelation of their
beliefs. The calm brought to the hyper-civilized spirit by this
plainness and directness of Nature is absolutely indescribable; and when
I came to reflect on the profoundness of mental quietude--I might say of
consolation--that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not
help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all
of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by
the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and
where this outward seeming is absent, they are completely at a loss.

Well-bred Frenchmen rarely if ever have or pronounce an opinion, or pass
a judgment--unless with a playful obliquity of judgment, and on things
in general. They assume an air of knowing what they are talking about,
and of having probed the vanity of all human effort before they have
ever attempted or approached it; and even this indifference, this
disdain, this apparent dislike to the responsibility of so much as an
opinion,--even this is not natural, not innate; its formula is not of
its own creation; it is but the repetition of what was originated by
some one else. The truth is, that in our atmosphere all affirmative
action is difficult; it is hard either to be or to do. This habit of
irony has destroyed all healthful activity here. It is a mere instrument
of evil; if you grasp it, it turns to mischief in your hands, and either
slips from and eludes them, or wounds you, as often as not, mortally.

SIR AUBREY DE VERE

(1788-1846)

[Illustration: SIR AUBREY DE VERE]

At Curragh Chase, in the picturesque county of Limerick, Ireland, Aubrey
Hunt was born in 1788. On the death of his father he succeeded to the
baronetcy and took the name of De Vere. Though his deep love of nature
prompted him while very young to write descriptive verses, it was the
drama that first seriously attracted him. This form he chose for his
first painstaking work, 'Julian the Apostate.' The play opens at the
time when Julian, having renounced the faith of his household
oppressors, is allowed as a pagan worshiper to participate in the
Eleusinian mysteries; when, it is said, he consented to the
assassination of his uncle the Emper