s are especially instructive,
even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and
suggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as
effects of what may be called vocalised orchestration touched off as
skilfully and with as fine a sense of sound and of the sentiment to
correspond as so many passages of instrumentation signed 'Berlioz' might
be.

The Great Earl.

Fruits fail, and love dies, and time ranges; and only the whippersnapper
(that fool of Time) endureth for ever. Moliere knew him well, and he
said that Moliere was a liar and a thief. And Disraeli knew him too, and
he said that in these respects Disraeli and Moliere were brothers. That
he said so matters as little now as ever it did; for though the
whippersnapper is immortal in kind, he is nothing if not futile and
ephemeral in effect, and it was seen long since that in life and death
Disraeli, as became his genius and his race, was the Uncommonplace
incarnate, the antithesis of Grocerdom, the Satan of that revolt against
the yielding habit of Jehovah-Bottles the spirit whereof is fast coming
to be our one defence against socialism and the dominion of the Common
Fool. He was no sentimentalist: as what great artist in government has
ever been? He loved power for power's sake, and recognising to the full
the law of the survival of the fittest he preferred his England to the
world. He knew that it is the function of the man of genius to show that
theory is only theory, and that in the House of Morality there are many
mansions. To that end he lived and died; and it is not until one has
comprehended the complete significance of his life and death that one is
qualified to speak with understanding of such a life and death as his who
passed at Khartoum.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

His Components.

The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is
a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in
sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden,
in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of
every kind. It pleased the great man to consider himself of more
importance than any and all of the crowd of collaborators whose ideas he
developed, whose raw material he wrought up into the achievement we know;
and he was given to take credit to himself not only for the success and
value of a particular work but for the whole thing--the work in