night in particular Savage and Johnson walked round and about St. James's Square for want of a lodging, and were not at all depressed at their situation, but, in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours? Only a few years after this homeless night, and Johnson stood, a literary Colossus, on the enduring pedestal of fame, and Savage, a murderer and a profligate, ended his miserable career in Bristol gaol.

But Boswell, as leader of all writers on Johnson, has done his work so

bell. "If I agitate the communicator,” she asked, "will the domestic appear?"

The following is certainly an excellent imitation of the style of the worthy doctor:

"What is a window ?" asked an earnest seeker after knowledge.

"A window, sir,” replied Johnson, “is an orifice cut out of an edifice for the introduction of illumination."

“Thank you; will you be good enough to snuff the candle?"

"Sir, you ought rather to say, deprive that luminary of its superfluous eminence."

thoroughly that it were folly for us to repeat here any of the well-known stories of the great man which have become embedded in our literature. And, besides, an oak-tree is out of place in the tiny beds of a close-cut lawn. Dwarf plants should be there, with an occasional rose-bush, making bright bits of colour, and filling the air with sweet scents. Let the big tree flourish in some neighbouring field, where it has room to throw out its mighty roots and branches!

Shelley certainly is not one of our oak-trees of literature; but, thanks to the present revival of interest in him, both as a man and a poet, his personality has become so pronounced that we all know himsome will perhaps have it, even better than he knew himself-and so we linger here but for a moment to bestow on him a passing look of sad farewell. In spirit we bend

our heads with Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny* over the body of the dead poet, lying on the Tuscan coast, about to be reduced to ashes. "A furnace was provided, of iron bars and strong sheet-iron, with fuel, and frankincense, wine, salt and oil, the accompaniments of a Grecian cremation: the volume of Keats was burned along with the body. It was a glorious day, and a splendid prospect-the cruel and calm sea before, the Apennines behind. A curlew wheeled close to the pyre, screaming, and would not be driven away; the flame arose golden and towering." And so we pass on, with chastened soul and sad heart, leaving Hunt and Byron behind. The world has been robbed of a dreamer!

* "To hear Trelawny speak of Shelley," said Swinburne, "is beautiful and touching; at that name his voice (usually that of an old sea-king, as he is) always changes and softens unconsciously. 'There,' he said to me, was the very best of men, and he was treated as the very worst.'

XI.

A GIANT IN THE PATH.

"In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend."-WALT WHITMAN.

THE grim persistency of Carlylethe dogged determination which enabled him to overcome obstacles which would have taken the life out of most men, appears to have been in a measure characteristic of the Carlyle family. In his Reminiscences of Carlyle, Mr. A. J. Symington tells the following story, which will speak for itself:

"While walking in Rotten Row, he (Carlyle) told me how his brother

John, who had been twenty years in Italy, as physician to the Duke of Buccleuch, had amassed an enormous amount of Dante material towards executing a prose translation. For long he had unsuccessfully urged his brother to set about it; but, urge and progue as he would, he could not get him to begin. So he resolved on trying quite another plan, and bethought him of the man who was driving pigs to Killarney, and who told his friend to hush and speak low, for the pigs thought he wanted them to go the other way. This story he told with great animation, standing still the while, and acting it inimitably, saying, after he had finished: 'That is how I got John to begin his translation, and thus it came about. One day said I: "John, man, if I were in your shoes, I would get quit of that Dante business, which hangs about your neck like a dead albatross.