A man cannot keep a daily record of his com-ings and goings and the little items that make up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his heart with a candor not possible to the self-consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated revelation. While Pepys was filling those small octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once suspected that he was adding a pho-tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal-lery of immortals. We are more intimately acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner man--his little meannesses and his large gener-osities--then we are with half the persons we call our dear friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any-body praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other morning, the maid replaced an engraving of Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man-tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that undignified posture ever since. I have no dis-position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been dead and--otherwise provided for these last three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it for the time being, when it seemed politic to do so. Queen Mary was a maniac; but the suc-cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of cruelty pure and ******, and I have a mind to let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor-dially dislike several persons, but I hate no-body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. ****.
AMONG the delightful men and women whom you are certain to meet at an English country house there is generally one guest who is sup-posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing --"so very droll, don't you know." He recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the elemen-tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae.
His presence is capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last time I
fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dis-sertation on "the English and American lan-guages." As there were two Americans on the back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amur-ricans"--his choice of subject was full of tact.
It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia-tion from a gentleman who said <i>boult</i> for bolt, called St. John <i>Sin' Jun</i>, and did not know how to pronounce the beautiful name of his own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober man saying <i>Maudlin</i> for Magdalen! Perhaps the purest English spoken is that of the English folk who have resided abroad ever since the Elizabethan period, or thereabouts.
EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his book-plate are soon parted. To distribute one's <i>ex-libris</i> is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.
WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals.
He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert sense of humor. Yet England has produced the finest of humorists and the greatest of poets. The humor and imagination which are diffused through other peoples concentrate themselves from time to time in individual Englishmen.
THIS is a page of autobiography, though not written in the first person: Many years ago a noted Boston publisher used to keep a large memorandum-book on a table in his personal office. The volume always lay open, and was in no manner a private affair, being the receptacle of nothing more important than hastily scrawled reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It chanced one day that a very young, unfledged author, passing through the city, looked in upon the publisher, who was also the editor of a famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy of verses secreted about his person. The pub-lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling that "they also serve who only stand and wait,"
sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell upon the memorandum-book, lying there spread out like a morning newspaper, and almost in spite of himself he read: "Don't forget to see the binder," "Don't forget to mail E----- his contract," "Don't forget H-----'s proofs," etc.
An inspiration seized upon the youth; he took a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of "don't forgets " he wrote: "Don't forget to accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript on the table and disappeared. That afternoon when the publisher glanced over his memo-randa, he was not a little astonished at the last item; but his sense of humor was so strong that he did accept the poem (it required a strong sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a check for it, though the verses remain to this day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise as well as kind.
FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psycholo-gical prefaces are always certain to be particu-larly indecent.
