It has often seemed to me that this was my first true view of life, and nowadays, when—­I am tired, especially,—­I do not envy the truly great in any avenue of distinction.  The walker has walked, the builder has groaned, the fighter has fought, the scribe has scribbled, the statesman has lied and betrayed.  Any one of them will tell you his pay has been sadly inadequate.

TAKE A MAN LIKE THEIRS.

Born in an age still drunk with the glory of Napoleon, but himself infused with ideas of popular liberty; chained to the chariot of circumstances, and made to swell the sawdust-magnificence of unpopular kings and the ridiculous success of Napoleon III., the greatest impostor of all history, this Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers went through a life the bare retrospect of which would actually tire the mind.  In his old age this little lover and critic of greatness—­this man who could show the weaknesses of Napoleon Bonaparte so clearly that one would feel the critic must be the superior of Napoleon—­this squeak-voiced orator, must have felt that whatever greatness might come to him in history was well-earned—­that the way had indeed been long!

THE SAME OF GLADSTONE.

Who in his sane mind would be Gladstone living any more than Homer living?  Of course, he survives those horrible crises in which public duty has made him the most pitiable object, and in the most dreadful complication of great interests shines forth as Venus fresh-lighted.  But I would not have Gladstone’s fame for the boon of rest eternal, from fear that his retrospect of inconsistency and apostacy would be its accompaniment, its deeper shadow.  Yet who shall blame Gladstone?  He was the executor and administrator of the policy of a parvenu Jew, one of the very bad men of the earth.  He

REAPED ANOTHER MAN’S WHIRLWINDS.

Forced into geographical relations with the Irish, an unwarlike people with indomitable tongues, England has in the middle ages, naturally done to this unwarlike people just what a warlike people would do in the middle ages—­taken everything.  With painful volubility the unwarlike people has for centuries sounded its fate over the world, touching the heart of Gladstone and other good Englishmen, and tempting him and them to many struggles.  Behold him at the next step, then, in the role of warring upon the unwarlike, of oppressing the oppressed, of answering an Irish clack with a British click!  Is it not pitiful?  Gladstone fell ill from it.  He paid there and then for his illustrious name.  And, next, of those brave Boers!  God nerved their quick muscles and darted straight their wonderful eye; and when the single hand rose against the hundred hands of British Briarius they were not forsaken.  Oh! how clearly that question seemed to an American!  No geographical necessity was there—­no race hatred, no hotbed to foment conspiracy against the sister country England.  The independence of those Boers, if they desired it, ought to have been fought for by England, by Gladstone, willingly, irresistibly—­in the very name of England’s own love of liberty for herself.  And finally Gladstone so saw it.