spouted eternally of republican liberty. He too went forever in fear of the shadow of the prating Brutus -particularly fashionable as exemplar to the classicdrunk Renaissance.

Savonarola, Lorenzo's enemy, was an eminent lover of tumid words and of rotund professions of virtue, yet he too in his turn found the temptations and difficulties of power as great as every other popular idol has done. It is a curious light on Lorenzo's character that he accorded Savonarola complete liberty, though the Medici influence with the Papacy would have made exile or silencing a mere matter of a word. Indeed, not until Lorenzo's death removed the protection he accorded to Savonarola, did the Curia undertake to crush the strenuous Prior.

We have always been told to execrate the BankerPrince, to reverence the Reformer, yet the facts make one doubt and pause. Was not perhaps Lorenzo the wiser and truer patriot of the two?

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is true,” warns St. Paul, but how is anything to be proved? "What is truth?" asks Pontius Pilate gravely of the Hebrews who come before his judgement seat; and no one of them can answer his terrible enquiry, though no doubt each was sure he had the root of the matter in him.

"Words, words, words!" cries Hamlet, despair

ingly. "Wingéd words," the poet calls them, that fly like thistledown, each silver web of pinions carrying a seed of thought in the centre of its fairy feathers, to be sown as chance and the wind wills, and to spring up again in rank and bristling growths. vulgar, selfish senti

Jean Jacques Rousseau mentalist, who lived upon the purse of silly women, abandoned the helpless fruits of his passing amours to public charity, and gravely chronicled his petty egregiousnesses for posterity-blew this seeded thistledown through Europe, and with it overthrew laws and thrones.

William Jennings Bryan, an ex-strolling player and briefless attorney, poured forth in a golden voice a majestic borrowed phrase, and millions of his countrymen followed him like sheep for years, though never was one great deed put to his credit.

In spite of all which, men of action speak scornfully of "word-braiders"; think indifferently and contemptuously of literature; yet books outlive rulers and races. Carthage was so great a city that for fifteen hundred years after its fall it was not necessary to quarry stone in Syria. From its ruins a hundred cities have been built, a thousand roads paved. Throughout the Middle Ages, and also prior to them, Carthage was a building quarry for all Islam, and much of Christendom. The Arabian geographer,

Edrisi, says that in his time no vessel left Tunis without some marble plunder from Carthage. The whole city of Tunis is built from it, and every town on the African coast of the Mediterranean has stolen stone from "Kart-Hadast." Southern Italy, Sicily, and Corsica looted building-stuff from its site for centuries, and the Cathedral at Pisa was fashioned of material taken from the Punic temples. Even yet the smaller fragments of its masonry form a layer from twelve to fifteen feet deep above the spot once occupied by half a million merchants.

Of this enormous civilization only its wide-flung stones remain. Of it we know almost nothing. Its life counts for nothing in our lives, yet the literature of a little semi-nomad Semitic tribe is as living to-day as when it was written. That literature has moulded the arts, the polity, the thoughts, the very structure of the brains of all Europe. Half the deeds of the Occident for the last two thousand years have had their germ and impulse from the words of Hebrew word-braiders.

Troy town is as the dream of a dream, but Homer's book keeps its folk forever immortal through the sheer potency of words.

Whatever is done by man is soon forgotten, if no bard makes a story of it; fitting, filing, shifting, matching words. And in making his story, his verbal

picture, he may, and generally does, feel considerably greater concern as to its being a good story, a fine picture, than an accurate record; yet once made, it is through his eyes that we see the deed forever.

These obscure, ignored, usually indigent little word-smiths sit in dingy corners hammering out their phrases, while destruction and reconstruction roar about them unheeded. If, however, one stopped to contemplate those unimportant-seeming labours with observant eyes, it would be obvious that they were really engaged in fashioning mankind. It would be seen that out of these small booths had come the impressions and impulses that were pushing and pulling the loud mob making history outside. It would be seen that here were being laid the eggs from which were to be hatched future heroisms and murders, future wars and migrations; that this was the soil in which was germinating the seed of the convictions and aspirations of generations still inconceivably remote in the future. The philosophical student of these shabby artisans would perceive that, though they as often wrote false as true, their pens were indubitably mightier than all the blades ever forged by the armourers of Toledo or Damascus.

XI

MR. SLUDGE, THE MEDIUM

S was nearing

OME ten years since, as the nineteenth century its close, I took occasion to put forth some speculations as to the nature of the TimeSpirit of the coming era. These could by no chance be more than speculations, for at that moment the manifestations of the Zeitgeist were still too vague and inchoate to lend themselves to prophecy. One generation, or one century, melts so imperceptibly into another, that it is difficult to draw a line clearly between them, since, before the passing one has wholly passed, the new one is itself tending toward its close. Yet each generation feels a new impulse; differs as does the child from the parent, and each century essays a new solution of the problem of

life.

The pendulum of the ages swings across a fixed parabola, but so great is the arc that it requires a period of twice fifty years to cross the spaces dividing one extreme of human tendency from the other. No sooner has this pendulum reached the limit of its rise than all the forces of reaction combine to