both dead and alive. But even this was considered a weakness. His wife said that the only fault people could charge him with, was his love for the "basties," and she did consider this a fault. Yet, when we studied his life, we felt that this was a great man. He had the God-like quality of sympathy with the meanest of living things. He was like the great common Father, who loves and tenderly provides for the most insignificant and for what are usually considered the most loathsome of his creatures.

In this way great men are constituted. What a noble band they are! With all their shortcomings, they are the noblest works of God on the face of the earth. His other works, the plants, the animals, the celestial luminaries, show his power, but these show his own likeness. They are like him in wisdom, but above all in that warm, far-reaching sympathy which embraces every living thing. They are, indeed, the highest, the very flower of all the Almighty's works. They illumine,

as it were, both space and time. They have shed a lustre on

the earth upon which they have lived; they have made it far more beautiful to us; and we cannot visit the hallowed spots of Stratford, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount, without feeling that such men as Shakespeare, Scott, and Wordsworth have made the place of their feet glorious. lighted up the dark vista of history. abyss of the past, like the fixed stars, that have drawn into themselves, as into centres, all the light and heat scattered through space, and burn there forever to cheer and guide us.

Great men have also There they shine in the

We have now discovered a test by which we can ascertain whether any particular biography should be studied.

Is the subject of the biography a man of large sympathy, who feels and labors for his fellow-creatures? If he is so, he is really great, and we shall be benefited by a study of his life.

The great question now is, How should we study these great men in their biographies? What is the best method by which we can thoroughly understand them? This is no casy question. It is difficult enough to understand an ordinary man.

He is a sealed book, and unless some severe accident happens to force open the leaves of his character, we see only the outside of him. We imagine him thoroughly respectable. He is, let us suppose, temperate and virtuous, a church officebearer, and even a Sunday-school teacher. But let a commercial crisis come, and very likely we find we have been mistaken. The man whom we fondly thought a saint, turns out to be a selfish, heartless swindler.

him. We would

But if it is difficult to understand an ordinary man, even when he is before our very eyes, it is far more difficult to understand an extraordinary man, especially when he is remote in the past, and imperfectly recorded in a book. Yet still it can be done, and in doing so we follow the method that would be used in ordinary life. In ordinary life, what would we do if we wished to know a man thoroughly? We would, if possible, live beside him, and associate with notice his appearance, his dress, his house, his every-day habits. We would study his demeanor in all the varying scenes of life, in joy and in sorrow, beside his friends and in the presence of his enemies; and we would listen to all his sayings, his careless conversation by the fireside, and his deliberate utterances before the public. And last of all, we would place ourselves, in imagination, in his circumstances, and look at things from his point of view. It is quite true, that all this inquisitiveness might be stigmatized as impertinence; but still, if we wished to understand the character in question, it would be perfectly necessary. Very much in the same way should we study the biography of a great man. First of all, we should visit, if possible, the places where he lived, for this will give us a far more vivid idea of his career. Then we should master all the details of his life. We cannot be too particular in our inquiries. We should learn about his house, his furniture, his dress, his habits, and his style of conversation. We should peruse his diaries and his letters. If he is an author, we should read his books; if he is an inventor, we should study the plan of his inventions. Then, last of all, we should trans

port ourselves in fancy to his time and place, and look at things from his point of view; and by taking into account the influences which surrounded him, we should estimate his character correctly. This is the only satisfactory method in which a great man's life can be studied. But some might object to this method by saying: "It is impossible to get such full and particular information regarding the lives of all the great men." Very true. But the fact that we cannot study fully the lives of all the great men, is no reason why we should not study fully the lives of the few. Nay, rather, is it not a reason why we should study the lives of the few all the more? In the English language, we have enough of full and complete biographies to occupy our attention for many years. Have we not long and detailed lives of Johnson, of Scott, of Chalmers, of Byron, of John Sterling, of Dickens, of Kingsley, of Norman Macleod, of Macaulay? Have we not the autobiographies of Gibbon, Burns, Franklin, Haydon, Crabb Robinson, and Carlyle? Have we not also such light biographical gossip as Aubrey's "Lives," Spence's "Anecdotes," and the "Table Talks" of Selden, Coleridge, and Rogers? He who studies all these great men, grasping their characters, and appropriating their ideas and their wisdom, will not require to study much He need not fear to meet his enemies in the gate. Let us, in conclusion, refer to the special advantages to be got from the study of biography.

more.

1. The study of biography will cure us of affectation and conceit. Affectation is most debasing and deforming. A creature who spends the most of his time before the mirror, admiring his own imaginary perfections, cannot fail to shrivel up into something puny and unnatural. Everything that he does is marked by littleness. The steps he takes are little, because he fears to soil his exquisite feet. His mouth becomes little, for he thinks it genteel to pucker it up.

His words are

little, because he deems it mighty fine to clip them. His ideas are little, because they are about a very little subject,

namely himself.

Truly affectation is the most unnatural and odious thing under God's heaven; and Shakespeare makes Hamlet read Ophelia a scathing lesson on the subject: "God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll none on't; it hath made me mad."

Now there is no better cure for this affectation than the contemplation of the great. The small, when placed beside the great, will have their smallness made apparent. The strutting, would-be-dignified mannikin, when set side by side with Goliath, will collapse. The dux of the village school, when he comes to understand the complicated and far-reaching calculations of Newton, will value little his own deftness at ciphering. The local poet, when he has entered thoroughly into the grand conceptions and divine harmonies of Shakespeare and Milton, will take the hoarded newspapers, containing his once-cherished verses, and make a bonfire of them. And so we, when we contemplate great men, will cease to think much about ourselves; and accordingly our conduct, words, and ideas will become free, unaffected, and natural.

2. The study of biography leads us to imitate the grandest models of the human race. We are imitative animals. Everything about us-our manners, our ideas, our language, our accent has been acquired by imitating those around us. We begin this imitation unconsciously in our very infancy. The little girl in the nursery imitates her mother: keeps house, takes all the household cares upon her little shoulders, cooks dinners, scolds servants, places her doll in the corner, and even whips it for being naughty. The little boy too, simulating his father, throws himself into an easy-chair, puts on his spectacles, reads the newspaper upside down, grumbles, growls, and even swears after the paternal fashion. We cannot refrain from imitating. It is as natural and unconscious as breathing; and when, in the study of biography, we are, as it were, in the

presence of the great and good, we must imitate even unwittingly their noble characteristics. We are in the best company in the world, and we cannot fail to acquire their modes of feeling, thought, and action.

3. In studying the lives of great men, we get the accumulated wisdom of the past. In plainer language, we get a knowledge of history. There was once an old Grecian king named Danaus. He had fifty daughters, and forty-nine of these in one night murdered their husbands. For this, after death, they were condemned in the infernal regions to fill buckets of water. But the buckets were full of holes, the water ran out as fast as it was poured in, and they are still engaged in their hopeless task. This old legend seems to us to be an emblem of the teaching of history. The buckets are the minds of the pupils. The liquid poured in is the milk-and-watery information that goes by the name of historical knowledge. And the daughters of Danaus are the teachers of history. What crime they have committed to be condemned to such a thankless task, we know not. But there they are, incessantly pouring into the youthful minds facts and dates, and then finding, when they look into the minds, nothing but emptiness. It is difficult to detect among the mass of people any knowledge of history whatever. To most the past is utterly dark and dead ; and they cannot be said, in the words of Shakespeare, to be "endowed with large discourse of reason, looking before and after." Now, Providence has provided a remedy for this great general shortcoming. He has supplied a short, easy, and simple method of learning history. The great men of each age have been endowed with such wide sympathy and such strong capacity that they absorb all the information of that age. There is not an important fact or sentiment which is not to be found in them. There is not an important action in which they do not play a part. They are the embodiment of all that They are history incarnate. And instead of losing ourselves in the labyrinths of small facts and

is valuable in that age.