s, but all excellent of their
kind. The rules are carefully observed, and the plays are full of
characters shaded with extreme delicacy. Mr. Congreve was infirm and
almost dying when I met him. He had one fault--that of looking down upon
the profession which had brought him fame and fortune. He spoke of his
works to me as trifles beneath his notice, and asked me to regard him
simply as a private gentleman who lived very plainly. I replied that if
he had had the misfortune to be merely a private gentleman like anybody
else, I should never have gone to see him. His ill-placed vanity
disgusted me.

His comedies, however, are the neatest and choicest on the English
stage; Vanbrugh's are the liveliest, and Wycherley's the most vigorous.

Do not ask me to give details of these English comedies that I admire so
keenly; laughter cannot be communicated in a translation. If you wish to
know English comedy, there is nothing for it but to go to London for
three years, learn English thoroughly, and see a comedy every day.

It is otherwise with tragedy; tragedy is concerned with great passions
and heroic follies consecrated by ancient errors in fable and history.
Electra belongs to the Spaniards, to the English, and to ourselves as
much as to the Greeks; but comedy is the living portraiture of a
nation's absurdities, and unless you know the nation through and
through, it is not for you to judge the portraits.

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

Travels on the Amazon

_I.--First View_

Alfred Russel Wallace, eminent as traveller, author, and
naturalist, was born January 8, 1822, at Usk, in Wales.
Till 1845 he followed as an architect and land-surveyor
the profession for which he had been trained, but after
that time he engaged assiduously in natural history
researches. With Mr. Bates, the noted traveller and
explorer and writer, he spent four years in the romantic
regions of the Amazon basin, and next went to the Malay
Islands, where he remained for eight years, making
collections of geological specimens. It is one of the most
remarkable coincidences in human experience that Wallace
and Darwin simultaneously and without mutual understanding
of any kind achieved the discovery of the law of natural
selection and the evolution hypothesis by which biological
science has been completely revolutionized. This
absolutely independent accomplishment by two scientists
amazed them as well as the whole scie