when he dealt with civilization itself, its schools,
and porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched
beneath the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks;
when he showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics,
the Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of
politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the
stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of
Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calin smile,
into the salons of the chattering wits of Paris in the eighteenth
century,--oh! then his irony was that of Lucian, sweetened by the gentle
spirit of Erasmus. For not even here was my father's satire of the
cheerless and Mephistophelian school. From this record of error he drew
forth the grandeurs of truth. He showed how earnest men never think
in vain, though their thoughts may be errors. He proved how, in vast
cycles, age after age, the human mind marches on, like the ocean,
receding here, but there advancing; how from the speculations of the
Greek sprang all true philosophy; how from the institutions of the Roman
rose all durable systems of government; how from the robust follies
of the North came the glory of chivalry, and the modern delicacies of
honor, and the sweet, harmonizing influences of woman. He tracked the
ancestry of our Sidneys and Bayards from the Hengists, Genserics,
and Attilas. Full of all curious and quaint anecdote, of original
illustration, of those niceties of learning which spring from a taste
cultivated to the last exquisite polish, the book amused and allured
and charmed; and erudition lost its pedantry, now in the simplicity of
Montaigne, now in the penetration of La Bruyere. He lived in each time
of which he wrote, and the time lived again in him. Ah! what a writer
of romances he would have been if--if what? If he had had as sad an
experience of men's passions as he had the happy intuition into their
humors. But he who would see the mirror of the shore must look where
it is cast on the river, not the ocean. The narrow stream reflects the
gnarled tree and the pausing herd and the village spire and the romance
of the landscape. But the sea reflects only the vast outline of the
headland and the lights of the eternal heaven.

CHAPTER III.

"It is Lombard Street to a China orange," quoth Uncle Jack.

"Are the odds in favor of fame against failure so great? You