elligent audience in the historic meeting-house by Rev.
Thomas A. Hyde upon Daniel Webster as an orator. Mr. Hyde's special
study of the physical, mental, and expressional qualities which go to
make an orator gave weight to the address. The aims and purposes of the
Webster Historical Society are such as to command the sympathetic help
of all American citizens in whatever direction it may labor.

* * * * *

It is to the credit of American womanhood that the presiding mistress of
the White House is one who, while she is making history, is so
intelligently in sympathy with everything connected with it. Her
sensible ideas of the subject as revealed in the chapter on _History_ in
her recently published book, "George Eliot's Poetry, and other Studies,"
indicate a mind capable of seizing the essential facts and seeing in
them the divine spark. "We must take the event as a starting point, and
travel from it to the man and men behind it." And again, "Let us realize
that history is the shrine of humanity, humanity essential in its
essence in past, present, future, wherein is stored the _ego_--the thou
and the I."

She gives another thought worthy to be quoted and read by itself.

"Nowhere more than in the study of history is it needful to 'put
yourself in his place'--_i. e._, to carry to the making of an image of
the person whose form you seek to confront, those general and common
ingredients which go to make up each man. When you have carried to him
that much of yourself which is common to you both, you will, by this, be
qualified to detect that in him which is himself strictly and not
yourself; and so to a man you will add the individuality of the man and
have what you seek.... Nowhere more than in history does it 'take a
thief to catch a thief.'"

Miss Cleveland illustrates this in some essays which follow, where she
carries herself back to "Old Rome and New France," to Charlemagne, to
Joan of Arc, and other suggestive epochs.

* * * * *

In her essay on "Old Rome and New France," Miss Cleveland calls the
Middle or Dark Ages, the Twilight Age. "It seems to me," she says, "that
this period is not suggestively named when called the Middle Ages, nor
accurately named when called the Dark Ages, but that both suggestion and
accuracy combine in that view which denominates it as a Twilight Age. An
idea which certainly embodies much of truth."

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Joh