he can with the very "him" of his master and friend.
It is hardly less pathetic than our own human efforts to pierce, by the searching penetration of eyes, to the real personality of each other. We never succeed.
(2360)
Personality, Multiplex—See Multiple Consciousness.
Personality Superior to Misfortune—See
Misfortune, Superiority to.
Perspective—See Point of View.
Perturbation—See Baptism.
Perversion—See Guidance Evilward.
PERVERSION OF GIFTS
Dr. N. D. Hillis, speaking of the perversion of men's talents to low or bad uses, says:
And oh, the pity of the waste and abuse
of these gifts! Oh, the sorrow of Jesus at
these opportunities despised and flung away!
Are roses reddened for the swine to lift
its tusk upon? Are pearls made to be flung
in the mire, in which they are trampled and
lost? Is a hospital fitted up as a room in
which physicians and nurses riot, drinking
up the precious wines, consuming the jellies,
wasting the soft linens, while wounded
soldiers lie in the darkness without, moaning
and dying as their own life-blood ebbs
away in the black night? When Philadelphia,
in the morning after Gettysburg,
rushed a relief train to the battle-field, how
would the whole land have quivered with
indignation at the news that the officers in
charge had forgotten sobriety and honor, and
looted the train of its gifts, counting the
treasure to be personal to themselves, in
utter contempt of heroes wounded and
dying?
(2361)
See Woman's Sphere.
Perversity—See Girls, Little, and
Slamming Doors.
PESSIMISM
Carlyle was never a hopeful prophet. He
called himself a radical of the quiet order,
but he had none of the hopefulness of
radicalism, nor was it in him to be quiet on
any subject that interested him. There is
a good deal of truth in the ironical remark
of Maurice, that Carlyle believed in a God
who left off governing the world at the death
of Oliver Cromwell. He saw nothing in
modern progress that justified its boasts, and
it must be owned that his social forecasts
have been all too amply fulfilled. The hopefulness
of Emerson positively angered him.
He took him round London, showing him
the worst of its many abominations, asking
after each had been duly objurgated, "Do
you believe in the devil now?"—W. J. Dawson,
"Makers of English Prose."
(2362)
PESSIMISM IN LITERATURE
A few days ago Mr. Berth, a young New
Yorker, committed suicide in a hotel at St.
Paul, Minn. The explanation given for his
rash act is that constant study of pessimistic
literature had affected his mind. Among his
books was found a melancholy tale by Edgar
Saltus, in which Berth had marked many
depressing passages. About eighty years ago
fashionable society in London affected great
admiration for Addison's tragedy of "Cato."
After one of the stage renditions of the play
a man named Budgell, imprest by the closing
scene of the play, in which the hero
commits suicide, left the theater and plunging
into the Thames was drowned. On his
body was found this couplet:
What Cato did and Addison approves
Must needs be right.
While such susceptibility to pessimistic writing as was shown by Berth and Budgell is, of course, extremely rare, it is nevertheless, a fact that an author who depicts life in dreary colors is sure to exert a most undesirable influence over many of his readers. The force of this applies to all kinds of writing. Whether a man pens an epic poem or a newspaper editorial, the tone of his philosophy is sure to leave its ultimate effect on those who peruse his words.—New York World.
(2363)
Pessimists, The, and the Optimists—See Loads, Balking Under.
PEST, CONTAGIOUS
The Survey, in commenting on Dr. H. G. Beyer's statement at a recent conference of the New York Academy of Medicine that the fly is "not merely a pest but an epidemic," says:
One fly lays 120 eggs in the season, and
as each of these eggs takes but ten days
to reach maturity, it has been computed that
twelve flies surviving the winter will produce
40,000 the following summer. When to this
