derful mixture of humor and passion, against modern ways and men; but the moodiness of Tennyson, FitzGerald, and Carlyle was the sublimated soul of good sense compared with the banal eccentricities of conduct and taste of many socalled self-made men, who have fashioned themselves of gold, silver, hay, stubble, and such like material.

In the year 1820 a group of exceptionally promising undergraduates at St. John's College, Cambridge, eager for more nourishment for brain and heart, for a deeper and richer intellectual life than the University offered them, banded themselves together to pursue truth with the free foot of youth rather than the leaden foot of academic routine. They shared the rising tide of emotion and thought of their period, and they were determined to live boldly in the nineteenth century; the University lagging, as has often been the case, a century or two behind. They handicapped themselves at the start by adopting the awkward title of "Cambridge Conversazione Society;" but they were speedily relieved of this burden by the kindly badinage of their fellow-students, who dubbed them the "Apostles" in recognition of their zeal and enthusiasm. They accepted the more familiar title with modest assurance; added to their number the elect from other colleges; held meetings in one another's rooms every Saturday night; "sported the oak;" ate anchovies on toast; drank generous quantities of coffee; read essays and talked without limit on religion, philosophy, literature, art, politics, and all other matters of interest in heaven or on earth.

All this would have meant little if they had been average men; but they were perhaps as notable a group as ever were gathered at one time in a university: among them were Alfred and Charles Tennyson; Arthur Hallam; John Stirling, whose life Carlyle wrote with such tender and compassionate insight; Alford, who became Dean of Canterbury and a profound scholar; Spedding, the editor of Bacon; Merivale, the historian of the Cæsars; Maurice, one of the most influential of modern religious thinkers; Kinglake, the historian of the Crimean War; Thompson, afterwards Master of

Trinity; Trench, the famous Archbishop of Dublin; Brookfield, a master of noble eloquence and delightful wit, and one of the best-beloved men of his time; Milnes, better known to this generation as Lord Houghton, whose breakfasts became famous by reason of the catholicity of the invitations, and of whom Carlyle said that he ought to be president of a society for the amalgamation of heaven and hell; and other men, like Buller and the Lushingtons, whose names are part of the literary history of the time. In later years equally illustrious names were written in the books of these "Apostles of free thought and the joy of untrammeled talk.

These men were full of the gayety and abounding vitality of youth, and were untouched by that blasé spirit, that satiety with a world of which they know nothing, which led one of the great spirits of our time to say of a certain group of men in his own university that they were inaccessible alike to God and man! The "Apostles" were as free on all sides as men of genius must be; they were radiant with hope and enthusiasm, as normal youths always are; the air of greatness hung about them, a fine generosity ran through all their relations, and when they had become old and famous they held together with a manly loyalty which is in striking contrast to the shabby egotism and petty jealousy that are often supposed to blight the companionships of gifted people. Nearly all of them were celebrated in song, for they were all poets on occasion; and a golden rosary of their qualities might be made from the English poetry of their time. Of the many expressions of the love that held these friends together every reader of Tennyson will recall the poet's invitation to Maurice when the latter offended his ecclesiastical superiors by doing a little thinking for himself: "For, being of that honest few

Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty thousand college councils
Thunder Anathema,' friend, at you ;
Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight."

These ardent young explorers of the field of knowledge might have become

oppressive if they had not been so generously endowed with humor. "The world is one great thought, and I am thinking it," said John Kemble, one of their profoundest philosophers. The most tremendous discussions were mitigated by wit, and when seriousness became portentous it was dispelled by an outburst of fun. At a breakfast-table around which sat Rogers, Spedding, Milnes, Thirlwall, Sydney Smith, and Gladstone, W. H. Brookfield reports that Sydney Smith said of a certain bishop: "He is so like Judas Iscariot that I now firmly believe in the Apostolical Succession." Brookfield and Thackeray were always together, and each evoked the humor of the other, peals of laughter invariably betraying their presence to other people. "In irresistible humor none of the Apostles rivaled Brookfield," said Venables; and Kinglake added: "I never heard him say a bitter thing." On one occasion, when Brookfield had failed to keep an appointment, he said: "I covered my shame with the fig-leaf of a humorous note, and am now once more a punctual

man." Like Matthew Arnold, Brookfield was for a time an Inspector of Schools, and gave even that serious business a touch of fun. "A gentleman informed me," he writes, "that in anticipation of my visit to Morden the schoolmaster there had hanged hi.nself;" adding, politely, "This shows the value of inspection." He reports some one saying, at a dinner at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, that Sydney Smith remarked on his death-bed: "Ah, Macaulay will be sorry, when I am gone, that he never heard my voice. He will wish sometimes he had let me edge in a word." When Brookfield went to St. Paul's as a "special preacher," he was told that the warming of the cathedral for special preachers had produced certain injuries to the roof. "Was it not dry rot?" he asked.

The deepest interest in Mrs. Brookheld's book springs from the warmhearted friendship that bound together for life the men who laid the foundations

of their fellowship in the generous aspirations of youth. In all literature there is no finer memorial of the love of man for man than "In Memoriam," which will remain the lasting monument of the companionship of the "Apostles." In 1832 Hallam wrote: "I am now at Somersby-not only as the friend of Alfred Tennyson, but as the lover of his sister;" and with him were Spedding and Brookfield.

"O Bliss, when all in circle drawn

About him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan Poets on the lawn," and morning came upon them unawares after the intoxication of their talk, and they climbed the hills to meet the sunrise. Tennyson's occasional moods were sometimes challenged by his friends. Visiting Aubrey de Vere in Ireland, he began one evening to declaim against dancing. "How would the world get on," briskly answered his hostess, "if others went about growling at its amusements in a voice as deep as a lion's? I request that you will go upstairs, put on an evening coat, and ask my daughter Sophia to dance." When Tennyson caricatured a brilliant fellow-student at Cambridge in an early poem, and the victim was told that he was the study for" A Character," he said, "Oh, really, and which Tenny-' son did you say wrote it? The slovenly one?"

But these touches of acerbity or impatience are only passing shadows that bring

out the massive lines of the Laureate's great nature. "It is a warm and glowing picture," writes Mrs. Brookfield, “the end of Tennyson's life. The splendid old bard, his Bible at his side, with his beautiful surroundings, fading into the sunset; his great achievements like banners around a cathedral, his noble poetry resounding his own Requiem. Did he not sing, when his first child died:

"Hallowed be Thy name-Halleluiah!
Infinite Ideality!

Immeasurable Reality!
Infinite Personality!

Hallowed be Thy name-Halleluiah !'”

M

ANY years of what may be called intimacy with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe do not impair one's power of painting her as she is, and this for two reasons: first, because she does not care to be portrayed in any other way; and, secondly, because her freshness of temperament is so inexhaustible as to fix one's attention always on what she said or did this morning. After knowing her more than forty years, and having been fellow member or officer in half a dozen clubs with her, first and last, during that time, I now see in her, not merely the woman of to-day, but the woman who went through the education of wifehood and motherhood, of reformer and agitator, and in all these was educated by the experience of life. She lived to refute much early criticism or hasty judgment, and this partly from inward growth, partly because the society in which she moved was growing for itself and understood her better. The wife of a reformer is apt to be tested by the obstacles her husband encounters; if she is sympathetic she shares his difficulties, and if not, is perhaps criticised by the very same people for not sharing his zeal. Mrs. Howe, moreover, came to Boston at a time when all New Yorkers were there regarded with a slight distrust; she bore and reared five children, and doubtless, like all good mothers, had methods of her own; she went into company, and was criticised by cliques which did not applaud. Whatever she did, she might be in many eyes the object of prejudice. Beyond all, there was, I suspect, a slight uncertainty in her own mind that was reflected in her early poems.

From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement, however, there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her

calmer, firmer; she found herself among new friends and could disregard old critics. Nothing can be more frank and characteristic than her own narrative of her first almost accidental participation in a woman's suffrage meeting. She had strayed into the hall, still not half convinced, and was rather reluctantly persuaded to take a seat on the platform, although some of her best friends were there-Garrison, Phillips, and James Freeman Clarke, her pastor. But there was also Lucy Stone, who had long been the object of imaginary disapproval; and yet Mrs. Howe, like every one else who heard Lucy Stone's sweet voice for the first time, was charmed and half won by it. I remember the same experience at a New York meeting in the case of Helen Hunt, who went to such a meeting on purpose to write a satirical letter about it for the New York Tribune, but said to me, as we came out together, "Do you suppose I could ever write a word against anything which that woman wishes to have done?" Such was the influence of that first meeting on Mrs. Howe. "When they requested me to speak," she says, "I could only say, I am with you. I have been with them ever since, and have never seen any reason to go back from the pledge then given." She adds that she had everything to learn with respect to public speaking, the rules of debate, and the management of her voice, she having hitherto spoken in parlors only. In the same way she was gradually led into the wider sphere of women's congresses, and at last into the presidency of the woman's department at the great World's Fair at New Orleans in the winter of 1883-4, at which she presided with great ability, organizing a series of short talks on the exhibits, to be given by experts. While in charge of this she held a special meeting in the colored people's department, where the "Battle Hymn " was sung, and she spoke to them of Garrison, Sumner, and Dr. Howe. Her daughter's collection of