hall celebrity; but we are forced to take leave of her in tears, and to hear with unwilling ears that "these were not the last she was destined to shed." This hurts our best feelings, and hurts them all the more because we have allowed our sympathies to be excited. It reminds us of that ill-natured habit of the Romans, who were ungrateful enough to spoil a conqueror's triumph by hiring somebody to stand in his chariot, and keep whispering in his ear that he was only human, after all; and it speaks volumes for the stern self-restraint of the Roman nature that the officious truth-teller was not promptly kicked out in the dust. In the same grudging spirit, Mr. Thomas Hardy, after conducting one of his heroines safely through a great many trials, and marrying her at last to the husband of her choice, winds up, by way of wedding-bells, with the following consolatory reflections: "Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daydreams rich as hers. … And in being forced
