Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns:  they both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must struggle towards clear manhood, stormfully enough, for the space of six-and-thirty years; yet only the gifted ploughman can partially prevail therein; the gifted peer must toil, and strive, and shoot out in wild efforts, yet die at last in boyhood, with the promise of his manhood still but announcing itself in the distance.  Truly, as was once written, “it is only the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens:  the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes itself, and rises to be an oak.”  All woodmen, moreover, will tell you that fat manure is the ruin of your oak; likewise that the thinner and wilder your soil, the tougher, more iron-textured is your timber,—­though, unhappily, also the smaller.  So too with the spirits of men:  they become pure from their errors by suffering for them:  he who has battled, were it only with poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger, more expert, than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the provision-wagons, or even not unwatchfully “abiding by the stuff.”  In which sense, an observer, not without experience of our time, has said:—­“Had I a man of clearly developed character (clear, sincere within its limits), of insight, courage, and real applicable force of head and of heart, to search for; and not a man of luxuriously distorted character, with haughtiness for courage, and for insight and applicable force, speculation and plausible show of force,—­it were rather among the lower than among the higher classes that I should look for him.”

A hard saying, indeed, seems this same; that he, whose other wants were all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented except even this, How to cultivate them to best advantage, should attain less real culture than he whose first grand problem and obligation was nowise spiritual culture, but hard labour for his daily bread!  Sad enough must the perversion be, where preparations of such magnitude issue in abortion:  and a so sumptuous heart with all its appliances can accomplish nothing, not so much as necessitous nature would of herself have supplied!  Nevertheless, so pregnant is life with evil as with good; to such height in an age rich, plethorically overgrown with means, can means be accumulated in the wrong place, and immeasurably aggravate wrong tendencies, instead of righting them, this sad and strange result may actually turn out to have been realized.—­Edinburgh Rev. (just published.)

* * * * *

SIR EGERTON BRYDGES.—­THE LATE DUKE OF NORFOLK.

(From Clavering’s Autobiography.)