under a pallid bust of Pallas in a commodious library, learnedly annotating in fine small hand an interleaved edition of Plato, or poring with a reading glass over the Greek folio of Origen, or perhaps quite lost to the world in the wide wilderness of Leo XIII's Aquinas.
Men with such companions are less solitary than they seem. Upon a scholarly leisure so austerely industrious, you and I would not lightly venture to intrude, even though we had heard that after a week with St. Augustine Mr. More enjoys a Saturday evening with a tale of Anna Katherine Green; or will good-humoredly meet the Princeton pundits and Bluestockings at a rubber of bridge, bringing to the solution of its problems the logical rigor of Duns Scotus and the transcendental insight of Plotinus. On another night, at tea-time or after, Samuel Johnson would not hesitate to stumble in, and, stretching his great legs towards the fire, challenge Mr. Henry Holt's views of Patience Worth and the ouija board, or summon Mr. More to a defence of the thesis, somewhat wearily stoical, which he has carved in tall Greek letters across the wide face of his mantel shelf—a thesis of which this is the gist: "Man's affairs are really of small consequence, but one must act as if they were, and this is a burden." Later in the evening one can imagine that saturated student of Queen Anne's time, Professor Trent, completing the semi-circle; and then the three of them, confirmed Tories all three, joining in an ami-
