many have lived thus, and made no sign; and their names, without commanding any ostentation, have passed away as quietly after death as they lived in life. Ah! but does genius never sink into oblivion? Who knows but in name Occam, Acquinas, or Erasmus, who swayed the whole world of letters in their time? What has become of Salmanasius, for whom Queen Christina of Sweden prepared the fire with her own hands? How much are Cowley and Waller, in their days in the height of popularity and fame, now read and remembered? Is splendidness always in something perceptible, something great executed? Who sees the roots thrown out or the flowers growing in full verdure? No; the deepest work is always out of sight-the flower is developed, but the process is hidden: and the real man often lives unseen, without crying in the world-" See: I am here!"

Now Harris was of the latter class. So far as we can claim for him the epithet great, we are quite content that his greatness should not be anything of ostentation and noise. He did not enter life, as Coleridge says of Chatterton,

"Sublime of hope and confident of fame!"

CHARLES LAMB ON AUTHORSHIP.

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And even if he had the stuff, he calculated wisely in his choice. When Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet, held the situation of a clerk in the Bank of Woodbridge, in Suffolk, he contemplated abandoning his profession for the chances of a literary life. He communicated his design to Charles Lamb, asking him for advice, and he was replied to in awful but stern truth-"Throw yourself on the world, without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you! Throw yourself rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash, headlong upon iron spokes. If you have five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm'slength from them-come not within their grip. I have known many authors want for breadsome repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a country-house; all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers-what not,—rather than the things they were. I have known some starve, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. Oh!

you know not-may you never know-the miseries of subsisting by authorship!"

Perhaps there may be some exaggeration here; but though the state of affairs have materially changed since Sir E. B. Lytton taught his countrymen that the world must know "it is not charity but tribute which they owe to genius," so as to give the direct lie to the bickerings of Charles Lamb, it is true to the very word in this country, where the mass wallows in ignorance, and the rich in utter apathy and luxury. Harris, in attempting at all to enter the line of authorship, should, like the majority of his young countrymen, have miscalculated his position, and wrecked himself utterly. He had no other ambition, the jealousy of the British Government having denied him; and the only one left to him was that of the common journalist, any higher aspiration than which was but coveting frustration, and drawing ridicule, contempt, and ruin. The thought moved in his mind at the early age of twenty,t

*"Not so bad as we seem". -a play by Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, Bart.

In the beginning of 1860, the writer of these pages had some correspondence with Baboo Harrischander on a subject of some moment, when, inquiring of each other his past career, he wrote this fact.

ASPIRATIONS OF HARRIS.

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.when, communicating it to his kind superiors, he received it as their earnest advice to make the cause of his suffering countrymen the first, last, and only theme of his writings. He came out, impressed with an awful sense of the dignity of his self-imposed task; opposed every fraud, every injustice and wrong, with the firmness of principle and the force of enthusiasm, and commenced war against the grasping policy of the Dalhousie Government. He was opposed, ridiculed, and scorned, as a "nigger" and a "pandy," and his writings denounced as “ungrammatical howlings"; but as his resolution was fixed, nothing daunted him in his career, and he revealed dark forebodings. But writers and statesmen at times villify even themselves— "Each lolls his tongue out at the other,

And shakes his empty noddle at his brother";

and they could not refrain from hitting hard at the "perverse patriot." But Harris remained calm. All wish, certainly, they could lay claim to that celebrated motto of Justice Whisted, which Swift made those pungent verses upon—

"Libertas et natale solum."

People are very willing to draw contrasts between the characters and deeds of differ

ent patriots: but though these be ever so different from the wily assassination of a sovereign to the glorious success on the battlefield, they (the patriots) have one family likeness, of the most apparent kind. The assassin who was excited to slay the French General, Kleber, was of the same stuff mentally as Mutius Scævolla or William Tell. He believed, no matter if wrongly, yet he believed earnestly, that he should free his country from the strain of a tyrant, and make sure work by striking him down, receiving gladly the horrible tortures which the Government of the country prescribed for him. So Scævolla thrusts his right hand into the blazing fire, and sternly assures the king that there are four hundred youths in his country as brave as he. And so did Harris rise against an overwhelming force, and struggle hopelessly, yet manfully, to assure his Government, that in their fatal policy they were nearing the brink of a precipice. He fought not with common weapons, nor suffered any physical tortures; yet he was not the less a patriot. He had no faith in the bayonet or the sword: his gun was his pen, his gunpowder his ink; yet he acted not the less patriotically in enforcing the recognition of the rights of his