ed view of an ignorant mind, which sees only the bare result of
unceasing efforts. Envy sees Fame on the peak. Envy therefore hates
Fame, and declares that there are no crags, or rifts, or snows, or
storms on the way up--that, the path is an easy one, over which all who
ever went that way traveled in preference to all other routes!

I lay upon a boarding-house bed day after day, one summer, sick of a
fever. On the one side, a building was going up, and workmen filled the
air with mighty din. On the other side, a young man sang

"DO, HOORAY, ME, FAH, SOLE, LAH, SE, DO!"

I thought: "The one will be a grand house, and the other will be a great
tenor, but oh the way is long. The feet grow weary!"

It has often seemed to me that this was my first true view of life, and
nowadays, when--I am tired, especially,--I do not envy the truly great
in any avenue of distinction. The walker has walked, the builder has
groaned, the fighter has fought, the scribe has scribbled, the statesman
has lied and betrayed. Any one of them will tell you his pay has been
sadly inadequate.

TAKE A MAN LIKE THEIRS.

Born in an age still drunk with the glory of Napoleon, but himself
infused with ideas of popular liberty; chained to the chariot of
circumstances, and made to swell the sawdust-magnificence of unpopular
kings and the ridiculous success of Napoleon III., the greatest impostor
of all history, this Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers went through a
life the bare retrospect of which would actually tire the mind. In his
old age this little lover and critic of greatness--this man who could
show the weaknesses of Napoleon Bonaparte so clearly that one would feel
the critic must be the superior of Napoleon--this squeak-voiced orator,
must have felt that whatever greatness might come to him in history was
well-earned--that the way had indeed been long!

THE SAME OF GLADSTONE.

Who in his sane mind would be Gladstone living any more than Homer
living? Of course, he survives those horrible crises in which public
duty has made him the most pitiable object, and in the most dreadful
complication of great interests shines forth as Venus fresh-lighted.
But I would not have Gladstone's fame for the boon of rest eternal, from
fear that his retrospect of inconsistency and apostacy would be its
accompaniment, its deeper shadow. Yet who shall blame Gladstone? He was
the executor and administrator of the policy of a parvenu Jew, one of
the very ba