In the "Echoes of the Weel which a few years ago formed one of the most agreeable features of the Illustrated London Netes, you may have noticed and forgotten remark, the recollection of which never fails to bring a smile to my lips. men have been more roundly abused in their time than George Augustus Sala, and it been cold douche of extra chieh led him to observe plaintively in his own defence that he was sure some good must lurk within the bosom of the man who ate daily a large slice of plum cake with his cup of afternoon tea. Tt would not have been Sala had he not nude haste to add that to him personally no repast yielded more real and regular enjoy ment. How far the observation may. be considered worthy of general application, and whether it is altogether fair to constitute the practice a sort of moral re-agent to indicate the latent virtues, as surely as the first faint blush on a sheet of litmus test paper betrays the presence of an acid, will probably be decided by the reader's ion and taste for sweets.
T have sometimes thought, no doubt from individual predilections of a similar nature, that a fair index to a man's capacity for for the afflatus which refuses to descend. The light is excellent, the quiet unbroken, the fire burns brightly, the room is full of the only kind of furniture of which " super-Suity is tolerable—bookshelves, I am surrounded by all manner of incentives to thought, and still the pen rests idly in my hand, and I begin to realise, that like Canning's needy knife-grinder, "Story God bless you! I have nonetotell, sir".
I like that word "idea". It is so nimble, so flexible, so entirely fitted to all the gradations of thought it is meant to express, debased though its use has become since the days when Milton rolled it in his sonorous verse, "This new created world, The addition of his empire, how it showed In prospect from his throne, how good, how fair, Answering his great idea, Tt was the symbol Crashaw used to express the charms of the supposed mistress, whose advent he warbled so sweetly, "Till that divine Idea take a shrine Of crystal flesh, through which to shine.'
It meant then the idol, as well as the idea, the thing invisible indeed to mortal eyes, but seen of the soul as things only truly can be perceived. By the force of that word were races controlled and nations dominate ed more effectively than by all the legions of Rome; hy its power werethrones establish-edend tyrannies cast down. It was the day, cre their sun had waned, and lesser lights had appeared above our horizon of ideas with a capital "1, A serious matter when you come to re-fleet on it, this rise and fall of ideas, One of the finest oratorical efforts to which it was ever my good fortune to listen was an address, which Professor Thwing, of Brooklyn, delivered at the Shanghai Missionary Conference on the "Growth of an Idea." There was, however. one underlying fal-Mey, which, in my opinion, robbed the speech of much ofts effectiveness. Ideas are not eternal, as Professor Thwing implied, or racher their eternity is of the Kantian, Newelian, extra-temporal kind, In the common-sense world of time, history and development, not only individuals, nations, races, but ideas also, have their periods ut youth, of maturity, of senility, of death, The immortality of Ideas is as true and untrue as the immortality of man. The scheme of salvation by a legal fiction"; "the universal Church, the mother responsible for the life and behaviour of her children"; the Imperial principle with law and order, truncheons and Uayonets, sciot eternnmgne se debit"; the scientific principle, spread of education, free trade, enlightenment through knowledge"; the British Constitution, with its checks and balances, its spirit of compromise,—the union of invincibility with speculative dulness"; Holy Russia and the ultimate triumph of the Slav"; the "Mission of Art", and all the numberless minor missions and fads, many rising and falling within the compass of one man's life; westheticism, Salvation - Armyixm, spiritualist, Conversion of Heather a, Ballot Boxism, Local Government, Teetota ideas may be found in his liking for solit- lism, Antivivisectionisn, Antivaccinatioary rambles. I say this the more readily ism, Home for lost dog [matism] etc., that I am constantly being humiliated on etc., ete.,—all bursting up, daming away returning from walks by myself to find and dying down. how vain and jejune my cogitations have At Ottawa, at the top of a large public been. To be quite honest, that is my building, isa spacious room where specimens present, condition. - T know the printer's of all stticles for which patents have been will be round in the morning for issued are deposited.
Huge cases with "copy", but for the life of me I can think lass doors.
Inventions of all sorts and at the moment of nothing which will bear Sizes piled one on the top of the other, committing to paper. some in front and some behind. A melan-'A week or two ago I recounted in these choly intellectual cemetery. Plate has, I notes my advice to a young man, who, with- believe, described the souls of men being in the four walls of a library, complained Whirled up to judgment by some intricate that he was" hard up" fora book. Imarvel Psychico-mechanical contrivance.
Here now at my own temerity. I am in a far You can see the earthly tenements of lost, worse plight than he. It was only a book useless, mad, individual Ideas. In anth-he required. Iam "'hard up" for an idea! Topology you have people's caps, clothes, For an hour and more I have been waiting Weapons, implements, etc., exhibited, but
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.