No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an
honest portrait of himself in an autobiography,
however sedulously he may have set to work
about it. In spite of his candid purpose he
omits necessary touches and adds superfluous
ones. At times he cannot help draping his
thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes
a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom-
plishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, with-
out any such end in view, does it unconsciously.
A man cannot keep a daily record of his com-
ings and goings and the little items that make
up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently
betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his
heart with a candor not possible to the self-
consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated
revelation. While Pepys was filling those small
octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he
never once suspected that he was adding a pho-
tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal-
lery of immortals. We are more intimately
acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner
man--his little meannesses and his large gener-
osities--then we are with half the persons we
call our dear friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive
to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any-
body praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other
morning, the maid replaced an engraving of
Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man-
tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that
undignified posture ever since. I have no dis-
position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of
the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been
dead and--otherwise provided for these last
three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England
was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and
uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was
occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew
massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it
for the time being, when it seemed politic to do
so. Queen Mary was a maniac; but the suc-
cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of
cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to
let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on
its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor-
dially dislike several persons, but I hate no-
body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of
Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble
as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick.
AMONG the delightful men and women whom
you are certain to meet at an English country
house there is generally one guest who is sup-
posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing
--"so very droll, don't you know." He recites
things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and
mimics public characters. He is a type of a
class, and I take him to be one of the elemen-
tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae.
His presence is capable of adding a gloom to
an undertaker's establishment. The last time I
fell in with him was on a coaching trip through
Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must
confess to receiving an instant of entertainment
at his hands. He was delivering a little dis-
sertation on "the English and American lan-
guages." As there were two Americans on the
back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amur-
ricans"--his choice of subject was full of tact.
It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia-
tion from a gentleman who said boult for bolt,
called St. John Sin' Jun, and did not know
how to pronounce the beautiful name of his
own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober
man saying Maudlin for Magdalen! Perhaps
the purest English spoken is that of the English
folk who have resided abroad ever since the
Elizabethan period, or thereabouts.
EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the
collectors are after it. The fool and his book-
plate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex-
libris is inanely to destroy the only significance
it has, that of indicating the past or present
ownership of the volume in which it is placed.
WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative
he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals.
He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert
sense of humor. Yet England has produced
the finest of humorists and the greatest of
poets. The humor and imagination which
are diffused through other peoples concentrate
themselves from time to time in individual
Englishmen.
THIS is a page of autobiography, though not
written in the first person: Many years ago a
noted Boston publisher used to keep a large
memorandum-book on a table in his personal
office. The volume always lay open, and was in
no manner a private affair, being the receptacle
of nothing more important than hastily scrawled
reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It
chanced one day that a very young, unfledged
author, passing through the city, looked in upon
the publisher, who was also the editor of a
famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy
of verses secreted about his person. The pub-
lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling
that "they also serve who only stand and wait,"
sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell
upon the memorandum-book, lying there spread
out like a morning newspaper, and almost in
spite of himself he read: "Don't forget to see
the binder," "Don't forget to mail E----- his
contract," "Don't forget H-----'s proofs," etc.
An inspiration seized upon the youth; he took
a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of
"don't forgets " he wrote: "Don't forget to
accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript
on the table and disappeared. That afternoon
when the publisher glanced over his memo-
randa, he was not a little astonished at the last
item; but his sense of humor was so strong that
he did accept the poem (it required a strong
sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a
check for it, though the verses remain to this
day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise
as well as kind.
FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psycholo-
gical prefaces are always certain to be particu-
larly indecent.
I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry
Sandford of England, the priggish little boy
in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a
worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore,
who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end-
less succession of girls' books. I came across
a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This
impossible female is carried from infancy up to
grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei-
surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an
ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There
are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand-
daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her
grandmother's own child, with the same preco-
cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to
her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary
talent!
H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender,
graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and
narrow, and looks as if he might have been
the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put
together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and
affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical.
AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as
the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen-
eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were
to break into blossom at the present moment,
would probably be left to fade upon the stem.
Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing
hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety
is especially subject to very early frosts, as is
also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor
is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it
has a serious root striking deep down into
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering
indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal,
whose plan should involve the discharge of the
chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh
censor on the completion of each issue. To
place a man in permanent absolute control of a
certain number of pages, in which to express his
opinions, is to place him in a position of great
personal danger, It is almost inevitable that he
should come to overrate the importance of those
opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of
his own infallibility. The liberty to summon
this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap-
pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi-
ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not
his, and says in effect, if not in so many words: