tranquillity under misfortune, used to be inseparable from the character either of hero or gentleman, and are surely ill superseded by a readiness to meet a voluntary death because you have been unsuccessful. Let the morality be only that of Marcus Aurelius, or even of Lord Chesterfield, and still to be able to endure misfortune, whether caused by one's own acts or no, is part of the character which either of them would have admired. It is true the Stoics held suicide to be permissible, or even, under certain conditions, obliga- | tory; but we never heard that in their

philosophy the right or the obligation was limited to the moment of defeat. Lord Wolseley is really arguing, in expressing the opinion we have quoted, that the men's aqua in arduis is not a constituent part of the character either of the hero or of the great gentleman, and he can hardly intend to teach that. Byron, it is true, agreed with him, and held that Napoleon, in surviving Waterloo, was "most ignobly brave; " but Lara is not the highest ideal, even of the soldier who fights for his own hand.

additional and much-needed exercise to the heart, and the heart grows strong by vigorous exercise exactly as every other muscular organ does, for the heart is a muscle. If a man has no organic disease of the heart, no enlargement, and no functional disorder, plenty of brisk walking, with occasional running, will soon dispel his breathlessness and heart weakness, other things being equal. The muscular inactivity of the modern town man is the parent of more ill health than any other single cause whatever. Hospital.

WEAK HEARTS. —A weak heart seems to | ercise of the legs and back and arms gives be decidedly more practically inconvenient than a weak head. If a man or a woman be a little feeble about the region of the brain it is generally of little moment. Some post or other will be provided if the conduct be respectable; and lack of brains is too common to excite any particular attention either in the person concerned or in those about him. But a weak heart insists upon putting itself in evidence at all sorts of convenient and inconvenient times. If its possessor finds himself rather late for his morning train, and makes a "spurt" to recover lost time, the exertion is usually followed by such a "bad quarter of an hour" that he resolves in future rather to lose a dozen trains than to risk temporary suffocation or permanent syncope again. The PUNISHING WOODEN IDOLS. - A curious practical evils which are associated with a fee- case of punishing the gods is reported from ble heart are innumerable, and will readily Foochow. The idols of a certain temple in suggest themselves to those who possess so that city were those appealed to by persons unsatisfactory a pumping engine. Weak who desired to be revenged on their enemies. hearts are by no means so common as is often They were supposed to cause death to those supposed. Many a man who thinks he has against whom prayers to them were directed. got one is merely dyspeptic; many a woman Recently the Tartar military commander died owes her symptoms to tight-lacing or insuffi- suddenly, and the idea got abroad among cient feeding. If the dyspepsia be cured, the people that he had been slain by the or the tight lacing be dispensed with, the idols in question. The viceroy of the provsymptoms of heart weakness will disappear.ince, hearing this, at once gave orders that Even when the heart is genuinely weak, the they were to be arrested and punished. The weakness is not always due to special disease prefect was instructed to see the decree carof that organ. It may be only part of a gen-ried out, and, armed with the viceroy's wareral weakness of the whole system, which is rant, he went to the temple and had fifteen easily curable. The late Sir Robert Christi-idols arrested. These were of wood, and son, one of the most eminent of British physi- about five feet high. Before being brought cians, used to smile at certain persons who for judgment before the prefect their eyes were always complaining of weak hearts. were all put out, so that they should not see "Gentlemen," he would say to his students who was their judge, and be able to trouble when lecturing on digitalis, gentlemen, the him either here or hereafter. After a full inbest tonic for a weak heart is a good brisk vestigation, a report was sent to the viceroy, walk." Not a doubt of it. The majority of who gave orders that the idols should be beweak, flabby hearts are weak and flabby be-headed, their bodies cast into a pond, and cause every other muscle in the body is weak their temple sealed up forever, to prevent and flabby, and this general weakness and them from troubling the peace of the town in flabbiness is due to want of vigorous use. Ex-future.

Rock.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

WORN watchers by the grave of Summer dead, EDMUND BURKE AND THE FRENCH REVOLUSoul-stricken at the rapturous birth of

to "

From The Quarterly Review.
MR. NORRIS'S NOVELS.*

my boyhood; days that seemed then far more remote than they do now. I am afraid my mind was a good deal more occupied with memories and vain regrets than with the prayers and the Rector's subsequent homily.

A FEW years ago we were turning over the leaves of a kind of literary album, in which were preserved in manuscript strikThis, like all his discourses, was constructed ing scenes or happy descriptive passages on time-honored and unvarying lines. Firstly: chosen from modern fiction. There was What was so-and-so? Was it this? No. a good deal that was clever, and a great Was it that? No. Was it something else deal that was in many ways impressive; altogether improbable? Again, no. What, but we were becoming aware of a feeling then, was it? Which led to the agreeable of monotony, when we came upon an ex-discovery that, after all, it was very much tract in which an almost forgotten note what the untutored mind would have proseemed to be struck. The simplicity, the nounced it to be at first sight. Secondly: quiet humor, and the minuteness of obser- How was this doctrine illustrated by examples vation, shown in the passage, took us back from Holy Writ? Examples from Holy The Vicar of Wakefield," and Wash- Writ, numerous and more or less apposite, followed. Finally, brethren, how did this ington Irving; while the writer's power of great truth come home to all of us? The unstyle was at once apparent in the air of satisfactory conclusion being that it ought to drowsiness and calm which he was able to come home to us all in many ways, but that, breathe into his description of Sunday in by reason of the hardness of our hearts, it an English village. Young Maxwell re- didn't. Then there was a great scuffling of turns after many wanderings to the scene hobnailed boots, a great sigh of relief, and we of his boyhood, and finds the same rou- were dismissed. Sir Digby and Lady Welby tine which, week after week, and year were always waiting for us in the porch, and Sir after year, had enacted itself in that Digby invariably remarked that the weather Sleepy Hollow. The extract is from Mr. was seasonable, while Lady Welby as invariably informed us that she had a headache, Norris's "Thirlby Hall: ". 'but not one of my bad ones to-day." Then they got into their yellow chariot and were driven away, and my uncle and I walked down the churchyard path to our more modest equipage.

The next day being Sunday, my uncle and I of course went to church in the morning. The old square pew in which we sat, with its worm-eaten boards, its green baize curtain above them, and its shabby cushions and hassocks; the faint musty smell, for which partly damp and partly the remains of our decaying ancestors were responsible; the village choir in the gallery bawling out "I will arise the accompaniment of various musical instruments, which had always been dimly associated in my imagination with King Nebuchadnezzar and his image of gold-all these things brought back vividly to me the days of

1877.

to

1. Heaps of Money. By W. E. Norris. London,

2. Mademoiselle de Mersac. By the Same. London, 1880.

3. Matrimony. By the Same. London, 1881. 4. No New Thing. By the Same. London, 1883. 5. Thirlby Hall. By the Same. London, 1884. 6. Adrian Vidal. By the Same. London, 1885. 7. The Man of his Word, and other Short Stories. By the Same. London, 1886.

8. The Bachelor's Blunder. By the Same. London, 1886.

9. My Friend Jim. By the Same. London, 1886. 10. Major and Minor. By the Same. London, 1887.

11. Chris. By the Same. London, 1888.
12. The Rogue. By the Same. London, 1888.

66

It was this passage which introduced to us the work of Mr. Norris, and we have since read "Thirlby Hall" and his other novels with great pleasure and admiration. It is true that most of his novels have won their way into cheaper editions, and three "Mademoiselle de Mersac," of them, "Matrimony," and "No New Thing," have attained that measure of popularity, of which the outward and visible sign is bad print, and the superscription, "Fcap. 8vo, picture-boards, 2s." Yet his works are unknown to scores of thousands who have read or who are declared to have at least purchased — the “ Hansom Cab;" and there may be some use in indicating the tatted calf to those who are fain to fill their bellies with the husks that the swine ate. For surely never was there an age in which the emptiest literary husks were more eagerly devoured than now, nor in which there was less excuse for its depraved appetite. For we heartily recog

awarded to very few. Fully fifty per cent. of the novelists of the present day will write "whom he said was his brother;" and about seventy-five per cent. will offend the taste of their readers with a sentence like this, which we quote from an accepted purveyor of fiction, the prolific Hawley Smart:

A veritable storm in a teacup this, no doubt, but it is precisely such little convulsions that constitute the salt of existence in small country towns.

nize many high qualities and hopeful | have now reached an epoch in literature elements in the English school of fiction at which this praise, humble as it is, can be of to-day. If its style does not flash and burn like the French, we must remember that it is so difficult to write a really classic French sentence, that only the fit writers survive and the unfit perish. A book written as is the " Mystery of a Hansom Cab" could not exist in French; we doubt, indeed, whether a French Hawley Smart would be possible. But after all, it is as much the good luck as good guidance of a Bourget or a Droz which has brought it to pass that a French sentence must either be written correctly, or must obviously be no sentence at all. Though we have but few writers whose pages scintillate like those of George Meredith and R. L. Ste-figured by a vulgarity of style which lies venson, we have many whose style more or less nearly approximates to that of Mr. Norris; that is, to the style of one who always writes like a gentleman, and often like a wit and a scholar. Surely the present generation, when it betakes itself to its husks, can by no means plead in excuse any want of variety in the good grain offered for its acceptance. Among living novelists, Black, Blackmore, Hardy, Meredith, Baring-Gould, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Burnett, the Sisters Gerard, Miss Fother

gill, offer each diverse samples of good wholesome grain. And may it not be procured, chopped to the finest tenuity in the analytical school of America, with its dozen or so of reasons why a girl did not smile? Nay, even theology is held to the lips of the novel-reader of the present day, if he prefers his theology diluted. We, for our part, recommend him to take it

neat.

When we say that we owe Mr. Norris thanks for writing like a scholar, we have no fear of misconstruction; but when we

go so far as to congratulate him on writing

like a man of ordinary education, we feel we owe him an apology. This is a quality which ought to belong to all novelists, and to ascribe it to Mr. Norris is indeed to damn him with faint praise. But we

* M. Scherer, whose recent loss the literary world has to deplore, is far more fastidious. He divides the novels of his own country into two classes - those which are written and those which are not written. With the latter he ranges our English school.

There is a sentence which will pass muster with the careless reader, but it is dis

deeper than grammatical solecisms. The
sentence is the work of a writer who has
not words to say what he means, who takes
refuge in utterly outworn figures which he
does not clearly conceive, and who finally
flounders into a confusion of metaphors
which is just not sufficiently marked to be
amusing like the blunders ascribed to Sir
Boyle Roche, and generally laid to the
account of Irish oratory, where the exu-
berance, not the poverty, of imagination
is as a rule the source of the incongruity.
minion of some form of words which hap-
The vulgar mind is always under the do-
pens for the time to be in the ascendant.
We were once haunted by the “skeleton
in the closet"—indeed we are still. The
popular writer from whom we have just
quoted, in another place, wishing to say
that his hero was not at any time known
to be suffering from any secret sorrow,
writes, "no skeleton in the background
ever transpired." We recollect when one
could not take up a newspaper or a maga-
zine article without meeting "kittle cat-
tle." To it succeeded the "
courage of
blue;" and now
his convictions," and the "bolt from the
we suffer most from
"measurable distance" and "proven up
to the hilt." Most of these were once
good phrases, and we hold with Justice
Swallow that "good phrases are surely
and ever were very commendable." It
has been said that the first man who lik-
ened his mistress to a rose was a poet,
the second an ass. To speak thus is per-
haps to put a truth too strongly. But