lue."

"Pish!" cried Wolfe; "let no man who forgets his public duties prate of
his private merits. I tell you, man, that he who can advance by a single
hair's-breadth the happiness or the freedom of mankind has done more to
save his own soul than if he had paced every step of the narrow circle
of his domestic life with the regularity of clockwork."

"You may be right," quoth the stranger, carelessly; "but I look on
things in the mass, and perhaps see only the superficies, while you,
I perceive already, are a lover of the abstract. For my part, Harry
Fielding's two definitions seem to me excellent. 'Patriot,--a candidate
for a place!' 'Politics,--the art of getting such a place!' Perhaps,
sir, as you seem a man of education, you remember the words of our great
novelist."

"No!" answered Wolfe, a little contemptuously; "I cannot say that I
burden my memory with the deleterious witticisms and shallow remarks of
writers of fancy. It has been a mighty and spreading evil to the world
that the vain fictions of the poets or the exaggerations of novelists
have been hitherto so welcomed and extolled. Better had it been for us
if the destruction of the lettered wealth at Alexandria had included all
the lighter works which have floated, from their very levity, down the
stream of time, an example and a corruption to the degraded geniuses of
later days."

The eyes of the stranger sparkled. "Why, you outgoth the Goth!"
exclaimed he, sharply. "But you surely preach against what you have not
studied. Confess that you are but slightly acquainted with Shakspeare,
and Spenser, and noble Dan Chaucer. Ay, if you knew them as well as I
do, you would, like me, give--

'To hem faith and full credence,
And in your heart have hem in reverence.'"

"Pish!" again muttered Wolfe; and then rejoined aloud, "It grieves me to
see time so wasted, and judgment so perverted, as yours appears to have
been; but it fills me with pity and surprise, as well as grief, to find
that, so far from shame at the effeminacy of your studies, you appear to
glory and exult in them."

"May the Lord help me, and lighten thee," said Cole; for it was he.
"You are at least not a novelty in human wisdom, whatever you may be in
character; for you are far from the only one proud of being ignorant,
and pitying those who are not so."

Wolfe darted one of his looks of fire at the speaker, who, nothing
abashed, met the glance with an eye, if not as fiery, at least as bo