olor of youth and the flush of devotion with the hectic
of disease! At least, you did not doze and droop in our over-heated
edifices, and die of vitiated air and disregard of the simplest
conditions of organized life. It is fortunate that each generation
does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our
ancestors barbarous. It is something also that each age has its choice
of the death it will die. Our generation is most ingenious. From our
public assembly-rooms and houses we have almost succeeded in excluding
pure air. It took the race ages to build dwellings that would keep out
rain; it has taken longer to build houses air-tight, but we are on the
eve of success. We are only foiled by the ill-fitting, insincere work of
the builders, who build for a day, and charge for all time.

II

When the fire on the hearth has blazed up and then settled into steady
radiance, talk begins. There is no place like the chimney-corner for
confidences; for picking up the clews of an old friendship; for taking
note where one's self has drifted, by comparing ideas and prejudices
with the intimate friend of years ago, whose course in life has lain
apart from yours. No stranger puzzles you so much as the once close
friend, with whose thinking and associates you have for years been
unfamiliar. Life has come to mean this and that to you; you have fallen
into certain habits of thought; for you the world has progressed in
this or that direction; of certain results you feel very sure; you
have fallen into harmony with your surroundings; you meet day after day
people interested in the things that interest you; you are not in the
least opinionated, it is simply your good fortune to look upon the
affairs of the world from the right point of view. When you last saw
your friend,--less than a year after you left college,--he was the most
sensible and agreeable of men; he had no heterodox notions; he agreed
with you; you could even tell what sort of a wife he would select, and
if you could do that, you held the key to his life.

Well, Herbert came to visit me the other day from the antipodes. And
here he sits by the fireplace. I cannot think of any one I would rather
see there, except perhaps Thackery; or, for entertainment, Boswell; or
old, Pepys; or one of the people who was left out of the Ark. They were
talking one foggy London night at Hazlitt's about whom they would most
like to have seen, when Charles Lamb startled th