THE CAVALIER.
"An evil reputation is light to raise, but heavy to bear, and very difficult to put aside. No Rumor which many people chatter of altogether dieth away; she too is, after her kind, an immortal." So moralizes Hesiod over an exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had forced itself upon man's unwilling convictions; and while many later philosophers have given caustic expression to the same thought, few have clothed it with more delicate and agreeable irony. Rumor is, after her kind, an immortal. Antæus-like, she gains new strength each time she is driven to the ground, and it is a wholesome humiliation for our very enlightened minds to see how little she has suffered from centuries of analysis and research. Rumor still writes our histories, directs our diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we have grown to think that this is probably what is meant by the vox populi, and that any
