leiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.
He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and
his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent,
and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.
His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.
"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"

Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She,
too, had ideas about art--she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists,
embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond
voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw
him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub
at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very
happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him
which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved
him.

* * * * *

A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the
female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct
Xantippe?"--a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And
Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn
horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard
mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that
nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of
Xantippe."

Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have
been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not
call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have
appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would
realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb
his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of
wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his
household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all
pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand
things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can
stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to
Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a
similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and
awfully serious little man of the tribe of Bu