hey were told to express them.
Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite
different theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it
is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift and
momentous decision. It is from something more immediate, some
determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting
an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most
commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will,
is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so
formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect
that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent. of why Lord
Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of
Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why the
Admirals courted war like a mistress.

VIII

SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN

Through the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in
possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular
merit and interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scottish
Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual spring
exhibition with astonishment and a sense of incongruity. Instead of the
too common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances executed
in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls
of room after room, a whole army of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or
beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of genuine
instinct. It was a complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords
and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges and heretical divines,
a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; and the Scotsman of
to-day walked about among the Scotsman of two generations ago. The
moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too early. The people who
sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still relations.
They are not yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a
middle distance within cry of our affections. The little child who looks
wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the pictu