carried it off, and he shall never hear more of it. Ay, these things come of reading at the stalls— looking over what one can't buy, and ought not even to glance at.

I wonder if he who carries off the prize ever bestows a thought on the poor creature whose reading he has so ruthlessly cut short. Is he sorry for him? Perhaps not-perhaps he never heard of him. Perhaps he merely saw him as he stood at the stall, and noticed him as he stole meekly, modestly away.

Now and then, I take it, some of these poor scholars rise to greatness, and become men of mark and note; the small spark of genius glowing out till it becomes like a sun, to cover the earth with its light, so that they who read by it see what their unaided sight had never shown them. I wonder— oh, how I wonder if then, in the day of triumph and success, they ever enjoyed, with all the appliances of luxury, what they once felt as they stood at the stall, unable to buy, unable to relinquish.

ANONYMOUS AUTHORSHIP.

WHEN a certain distinguished contemporary of ours experimented on the world of his friends and admirers by the announcement of his death, and thereby provoked a very candid examination into his claims to greatness, he was not, it is said, as much flattered by the experiment as he had hoped to be. Some gifts were altogether denied him, others were conceded with certain little accompanying detractions. Ingenious explanations were given to show why he had not done scores of things he had never dreamed of; and finally, curious speculations were thrown out as to how far certain æsthetical deficiencies in his nature may not have impaired the exercise of his purely intellectual faculties. In fact, the critics presumed to be able, by a post mortem, to pronounce upon the man's defects pretty much as the surgeon might on his physical derangements;

and as the doctors, on discovering a lesion here, an adhesion there, an ossification of this, or a hypertrophy of that, could unerringly declare why life was shortened, so would these skilful anatomists be able to say how it was that he failed in this or broke down in that what were those qualities that were wanting to have made him as eminent as certain other gifts indicated he might have been.

In a word, the restraint of all concealment would appear to do for these wonderful critics just as much as the "autopsy" does for the doctor. All is laid open to them. There lies "the subject," and we can trace every fibre of him now. All the little devices by which he deceived, all the subtleties by which he cajoled us, avail him no longer. We see him as he was in life; and as the surgeon is often obliged to own his astonishment by what a frail thread vitality hung so long, so will the biographer be forced to confess that there was wonderfully little strength in all that vigour that once impressed us-only a mere pretence of passion in the pathos that once had all but convulsed us. I am ready to own that I am sorry for this. Mistaking our geese for swans may be an ornithological error, but is not bad philosophy. I am certain that we are disposed to over-cultivate the difficulty of being pleased, and

that, on the whole, we would infinitely rather be content than discontented.

At all events, I am determined I will never put my friends to the severe test of animadverting on my character during my life, by any announcement of my death. “Les absents ont toujours tort," says a wise adage of that language which is so seldom mistaken in worldly matters; and as Curran tells us, "Death and absence differ but in name."

Indeed, I know I couldn't do it if I would. I could no more submit to the knife of any critic than I could endure the scalpel of the dissecter without crying out, "Stop-I am alive!" I admit this is a great weakness on my part, in some measure the result of temperament, and partly, too, the consequence of a certain self-indulgent mode of dealing with any difficulty by going out to meet it in preference to averting or waiting to see if it would not pass by. My combativeness enables me to bear the open stand-up fight; what I really fear is, what may take place when I am not forthcoming to defend myself.

For this reason I have never been able to understand how people have courage to go in mask to a ball, and endure all the impertinences to which the disguise exposes them. Surely there is no throwing off one's identity by the mere assumption of a

domino; and what terrible stabs to one's self-esteem may be given under the cope of a monk or the cowl of a Capuchin! The next thing to this is to publish anonymously to give to the world a poem or a novel, and lie perdu while your friends read, ridicule, or revile it—to sit calmly, smilingly by, when some one reads you aloud to a laughing audience, overwhelmed with your absurdity-to be warned against your own book-to be confidentially told, "It's the very worst thing of the season"-to hear little fragments of yourself bandied about as domestic drolleries, and to listen to curious speculations as to how or why the publisher had ever adventured on such a production, and grave questions put if there be really a public for such trash.

It is an awful thing to assist at even this much of one's own autopsy, and to hear all the impertinent things that the very stupidest of your acquaintances can say of you. But there is still worse than this; there is a depth lower than abuse; there is a pang infinitely more painful than all that sarcasm. or malevolence can inflict; and this is, the being obliged to listen, patiently, while some addle-headed imbecile relates the argument or the story of your book; mistaking the characters, misplacing the events, totally inverting your moral, and exhibiting you, in the very moment of his commendation, as a