candidate every groat he is worth; so, before one can commence a true critic, it will cost a man all the good qualities of his mind; which perhaps, for a less purchase, would be thought but an indifferent bargain".

I have thus, as I modestly trust, proved by clear instances from our Holy Bible, that no man should become an author, since the Author of Creation himself has failed miserably; that no man should become an editor, since the meekest of men, and greatest of prophets, was transformed into a wholesale murderer through editing a very short treatise of God's; and, finally, that no man who is well and happy should become a critic, since Job only took to criticism when ruined and diseased, and renounced it immediately he recovered health and wealth. And as these conclusions are exactly those at which I had arrived independently of the Scriptures, I am of course persuaded that they are sound.

But should any one ask, Why then do you write, who write against writing? I would answer with that saying of some philosopher, to me unknown: Suicide would be much more common, were it not that by the time one has learnt the vanity of life he has acquired the bad habit of living. So by the time one has learnt the vanity, and worse than vanity, of authorship, he

But

has fallen into the bad habit of writing. though himself a cureless victim of the plague, he may warn others to keep far from its infection.

ON SUICIDE.

I AM now convinced of what I long ago began to suspect, that the common first accusation against suicide, the accusation of cowardice, springs from an uneasy consciousness in the accusers of their own cowardly unconditional cleaving to life. Suicide is sometimes an act of cowardice; often it is an act of valour and wisdom. In like manner, the common verdict, "Suicide while of unsound mind," expresses the irrational, monomaniacal clinging of the jurors to mere life as life, whether good or bad, happy or wretched, noble or base, beneficent or noxious. If a man feels that his life is useless or worse than useless to himself and others, or that it does more harm than good; and especially if he has reason to expect that it will grow more miserable, more dependent, more ignoble, more vicious, with advancing years, the best use he can make of his life is to end it. But if this truth were laid to heart countless multitudes would be committed to suicide; and the multitude being cowardly, they accuse of cowardice

those who have the courage to deal with themselves justly. But further, if a man is simply weary of life, if it brings him less pleasure than pain, if old age with all its infirmities is stealing on him, then, if none who have just claims on him will suffer by his death, he has undoubtedly the right, as he has the power, to put an end to himself. We get such a life as befalls us from Nature, to use absolutely as we will or can in our circumstances. If my hair is too long for my comfort, I get it cut short; if my life, I can cut it short myself. I recognise no duty to prolong my life to the uttermost; nor in fact does any healthy person; if we did we should refrain from the greater part of our thought, passion, pleasure and activity, concentrate an inordinate affection on self-care, and approximate as nearly as we could to the calm slow life of the tortoise. My life is as a sum of money with which I am endowed, and which I claim the right to spend as I will for my pleasure and profit, not feeling bound to refuse myself nearly all things expensive in order to make it last as long as possible. The main object should be not so to spend it as to suffer one's self to be reduced to dependence on others. [Note the pleasant farce of punishing people by imprisonment for trying (and failing) to make away with themselves.] Are we civilised races really decrepit and wearing out?

When a man is so, he clings to life more anxiously than when young and vigorous, when life was a thousandfold more really life. Leopardi profoundly remarks ("Storia del Genere Umano"): "Moreover, he knew that it would come to pass that men, being oppressed with diseases and calamities, would be less ready than before to turn their hands against themselves, because they would be discouraged and prostrated in heart, as results from the habitude of suffering." We are getting already absurdly reluctant to extinguish a nuisance when the nuisance is a man or woman; and some of us conscientiously object to the slaughter of cattle and sheep. We preserve hardened criminals alive, though their lives are noxious to themselves and others; the convict's warder being only less pitiable than the convict.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, who lived generally a far more vital life than we, and who had but dim notions of an after life, such after life vaguely imagined being moreover a thin and melancholy one-these men threw away their single rich life with the most careless disdain, extinguished it honourably with their own hands, when their country demanded the sacrifice, or when they thought their self-respect and personal dignity seriously wounded or endangered. But modern Christians, who try to believe that they believe in