Feb, 24, It fails, alas! not infrequently, to the lot of editors to write obituary notices, For these there are certain stereotyped phrases which use and wont de mand shall be adhered to. But occasionally these seem to fal! flat and cne is inclined to ask oneself what is it ina man that makes his passing something be remembered with more th: conventional regret, Men are of different types for it takes all sorts and conditions of men tu make 1 world. Not every man has suilicient force of character to impress his fellows and yet there is an element of greatness in most men, It has been well aid that there are hypocrits of two kinds. Those who are bad Jand assume a virtue though they have it not are common enough.
But there is another class that, through a certain modesty, cloak the virtues they have under 1 certain carelessness and, only by accident, are discovered to be of that number who do good by stealth and would blush were they to find it fame.
Neither poverty nor wealth have anything to do with real worth, The greatest man that ever trod the earth was s0 poor that he had less than the foxes who had holes and the birds of the air that had nests. He was great as a religious teacher but he was no less great intellectually, though this is not so com: monly realized. No man is a hero to his valet and, as has been well said, this is' merely because the valet has the soul, as well as the office, of a val A real man must be appraised by those who have eyes to see. We have all heard of the student who said to Turner, "I cannot see in nature the colours paint in your said the artist, could have seen those things he might have been as great inter as his master,—There are other extraneous things beside poverty and riches which may make " man conspicuous and yet vive him no title to regard. He may be born with a knack for painting bling. like Goldsmith, who "wrote like "an angel and' talked lik poor Poll." and the knack but an excrescence which ture, sang Burns, 0 o'er x0 poor ix king o men that." And honesty hero is not merely refri purloining one's It is honest in the sense of Latin derivation of its honourable; sincerity of intention with no shade of pretence or dissimulation. "He was man," said Hamlet of his father, "take him for all in all I shall not look upon his like agai We get in this the same thought rossed in different words. fake him for all in all." Do not fix your thought on any accidental trait, like dexter lof speech or finesse in the management of altairs. Take the man in the entireness of his personality and if he measures up to standard thus you may say of him as Shakespeare says of Brutus, "The elements were so mixed in him that might st the world "This was a_ man'
Joint, as they have ever been out of joint, men of this type are no tarer now than they were in former days. They pass unnoticed in our midst but the It is ours that it is so, We have to look for them as one looks for violets or _primroses n a wood. They hide themselves from the garish day but shed around them an unobtrusive fragrance that is as refreshing /28 cold water on a thirsty day.
By their fruits ye shall know them and there is one trait common to all those who a >be! numbered with the aatt of the earth; it is that they love and are attractive to little children, John Colet, who was Dean of St. Paul's school, which endures to this day, walked amongst his scholars the most humble and childlike of any of them. And yet he was a great scholar and a great theologian, "Lift up," he said, "your little white hands in'prayer for me" and he drank sweetness from the innocent lives around him, The lives of such men remind us that there are other things to live for than the ceaseless grind of our daily occupations, We are each chained to an oar and time, the taskmaster, holds us bowed to our task. These things we must do, but there are others that. we ought not to leave wa-done. There are opportunities for relaxation lying all around us and it would be wisdom ea our part if we gave rein to out finer impulses and indulged ourselves in the luxury of doing some of the kind things practised by the eccentric characters sketched for us by Dickens, it would be Quixotic, to be sure, and we should appear ridiculous, perhaps, to our friends and we should, certainly, feel abashed ourselves but "a little folly now and then is relished by the wisest men," and folly of this kind would bring us an unespected pleasure., There is place in the world where opp tunities for this kind of dissipation are more numerous than in Shanghai and, we like to think, none where they are taken advantage of more inconspicuously.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.