names which make up ordinary chronicles, we can get, in the lives of great men, all the main incidents of the time strung like pearls upon the golden thread of their own personal career. For example, where can we find a better account of the old Greeks and Romans than in Plutarch's Lives; or a more vivid representation of the struggle for Scottish independence than in the lives of Wallace and Bruce; or a more interesting and complete chronicle of the great war at the beginning of this century, than in the lives of Napoleon, Nelson, and Wellington! We thus, on easy and pleasant terms, master the accumulated wisdom of the past, and become "The heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." 4. The study of biography, if properly prosecuted, should increase our faith in God's providence. When we see how degraded, how selfish, how sensual, nay, how devilish, many of our fellow-creatures are, our faith in God's providence is apt to be shaken. We are inclined to feel that human nature is a wretched thing, only a few degrees above the bestial; we almost despair of the progress and amelioration of the race; and we begin to think that this world may be a God-forsaken planet. Now one remedy for this despair is the contemplation of the great men whose memory lives in biography. These men are ness. likenesses of God. They are, indeed, set in frames of clay, and often blurred and even shattered by the accidents and storms of time, yet still they retain the lineaments of the Great Original His truthfulness, sympathy, and long-suffering goodAnd hence it happens that the contemplation of such men as Socrates, St. Paul, John Howard, David Livingstone, makes us feel that this world is not God-forsaken after all. Such men as these stand in the same relation to God as the planets do to the sun. They came originally from him; from him they draw their lustre ; and in the dark night of time, while he remains unseen, they reflect his light, and shed down comfort and guidance upon the dim and dangerous paths of groping humanity. CHAPTER IV. HISTORY. THE study of history is founded on a great law of our nature. Man is not content with his own narrow experience. He wishes to share in the experience of others, and to add that experience to his own. Now, he has a marvellous faculty which enables his soul (as it were) to go out of his body, to travel abroad, to enter into other people's bodies, to see through their eyes, and to partake of their joys and sorrows. This power is called sympathy, and this sympathy is in proportion to the degree of humanity in the man. If he is of a low type, his sympathy does not carry him further than his parish. It makes him a village gossip, the Paul Pry of the neighborhood, and he is found, with spectacles on nose, and umbrella under his arm, haunting the street and by-lanes of the hamlet, and taking an absorbing interest in what the Joneses are to have for dinner, and in who the strangers can be that are arriving at Colonel Hardy's. But if a man is of a higher type, his sympathy is not bounded by the district in which he lives, but goes abroad over the whole earth. He becomes, in fact, the reader of the newspaper, the village politician; and without stirring from his easy-chair at the club fire, he can, by aid of the paper, sit in Parliament and hear the speeches, travel with Stanley through the thorny brakes and pestilential morasses of Africa, or look on the fierce and protracted struggle which deluged with blood the plains of Bulgaria. But if he is of the highest type of all, his sympathy is not only as broad as the world, but as long as the course of time. He becomes the large-hearted, large-minded student of history. To him no country is foreign, no custom obsolete. The men of the silent past exercise a strange fascination over him. Their very dust is dear to him. He longs to call them to life again, to see their forms, dress, habits, to watch their actions, and to understand their sentiments. He is constantly striving (with reverence be it spoken), toward the omniscience and omnipresence of his Maker, with whom the past is present and the distant near. But the next momentous question arises, What is the best method of prosecuting these studies? To study history, we need scarcely say, is not to learn it as it is generally learned at school. It is not to store away a few names and dates, and allow them to lie about in a confused group in the mind. It is not, in other words, to turn the mind into a lumber-room. It is to do something infinitely more comprehensive and more difficult than this. It is to transport ourselves out of the present into the past, to live in spirit among a people of a by-gone age, to notice their appearance, houses, manners, and general condition, to look at things from their point of view, and thus to form a just estimate of their merits and their failings. is, in fact, to realize the past. It To realize the past! To make it real! To turn that dim, mysterious region of ghosts into a palpable, sunlit land, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people in every-day dress and with every-day manners. "A very difficult task," you will say. Still it can be done, partially if not altogether. Of course the chief method is to study the works of those great historians who have gathered and arranged the facts of the past into a connected narrative. That method we need not dwell upon, for it is well understood by every student. But there are certain important auxiliary methods which are apt to be overlooked, and to which we must call particular attention. The past is not altogether dead. Part of it, at least, is still extant. We have battle-fields on which the men of other days struggled and bled, mouldering castles in which they lived, armor in which they encased themselves, and weapons and |