for this despair is the contemplation of the great men whose memory lives in biography. These men are 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 goodness. And 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 Godforsaken 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.

HE study of history is founded on a great law

THE

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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 neighbourhood, 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

From a Picture by Siv. Soshva Roqaodslate
in the possession of Mrs. Prezzi,

The Highways of Literature p. 96.

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,) towards the omniscience and omnipresence of his

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