joying the paper on "Novalis." That
on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimately
to the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto,
"Tread the lilies under foot." I was for the Bourbons! The French
Revolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (in
Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had lived
through the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probably
the same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whose
connections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk to
Fabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list of
the condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substituting
in their place others that did not happen to belong to Celts!

In spite of the Little Catechism and the uplifting influence of Emerson,
I looked on this probably mythical gentleman as one of the glories of
our family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up and
down Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief,
bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believed
that he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in our
neighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured
every line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. It
seemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out of
my life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescued
Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed
impossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friends
who went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie de
Buxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whose
letters lie before me as I write.

In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul
Richter, of whose writings I remember only one line,

I love God and little children,

I did not get very far into his "French Revolution." It seemed then an
unreal and lurid book.

Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had
from the Mechanics' Institute, of which my father was a committeeman,
delighted me beyond words. I liked Emerson's essay on "Friendship"
better than his, but for wit, quick repartee, general cheerfulness, he
reminded me of my favouri