grave. What was the secret of Alexander's magnificent audacity?

his mind, and that thenceforward till he died, he expressed it so strongly as to rouse the angry scorn of his greatest captains, and to draw from Olympias the haughtily satirical remonstrance that

We believe it to have been mental courage springing from a quality in Alexander which in its degree was almost without a parallel. No man in history of whose" Alexander was always embroiling her mind we know anything, unless, indeed, it were Benvenuto Cellini, ever had a similar self-consciousness. Every story, every myth, every act recorded about Alexander, indicates this quality as the one which dominated his character. He felt in himself from the first, powers which in their degree, if not in their nature, separated him from all children of men, and gradually grew what shall we say - intoxicated with the sense of his own genius. So brave, that the officers of the phalanx seemed like cowards by his side; so learned in the knowledge of his day, that scholars were to him but ignorant men; such a strategist, that he had nothing to learn from experience; such a statesman by instinct, that his very victims were ready to die for him against his own followers, and all the while a lad, his veins full to bursting with life, capable of all enjoyment, even of the mad drinking-bouts of his highland chieftains, he stood in his own sight so separate from the ruck of mankind, that he half doubted if he belonged to the same breed. His thoughts which produced such results, which, for example, crushed armies twenty-fold his own in number, seemed to him like inspirations. He began to ask-sincerely ask, and not as modern men would fancy whether there must not be in himself something of the divine, some trace of actual godhead, some unknown relationship with the beings above man, from one of whom he, probably in all earnestness, believed himself descended. We of this century do not know the full difference between our thoughts and the thoughts of the men of old, and assume that Julius Cæsar, in his ostentatious cult of Venus, his divine ancestress, was "playing to the gallery;" but what if he believed it, or half believed it, himself, and derived from it much of the audacity to master Rome? There is no evidence whatever that Alex ander was a sceptic, and to the pagan of old, as to the Hindoo of to-day, direct descent from the gods seemed neither monstrous nor unlikely, was, in fact, a concrete equivalent for what moderns call inspiration. It is certain that Alexander made a long and painful march into the desert only to ask of a great oracle if he were indeed a son of Jupiter, that the response confirmed an inner conviction in

with Juno." That sense of supernatural power once in his mind, separated him from all the remainder of humanity, made Persians and Greeks equal before his eyes, so that in one supreme hour of his life, he dared break his own enchanted sword of sharpness, and disband by decree his own Macedonian army, and gave him the cour age which, when he refused the offer of Darius to partition the world, and when he turned south to conquer India, made him seem to his companions half-delirious, half-divine. The single reason he gave Parmenio for rejecting the offer of the great king, then awaiting him with half a million of soldiers, was, “I am Alexander;" and his whole scheme for reaching the Ganges and founding an empire there - a scheme which must have succeeded had his soldiers consented to go onmust have been conceived and worked out and perfected within his own brain. In a man penetrated with an idea of that kind, pitifulness could hardly exist except for the submissive, for to him, as afterwards to Mahommed, resistance and blasphemy were identical. He was not, perhaps, cruel by nature, for though he looked coolly on torture, so did the Christian judges of Europe down almost to our own time; and though he slew Parmenio and his son, he probably knew that his friend and counsellor, the most powerful of the Macedodonian clan-chiefs, and the keeper of his treasure-house — in which was stored gold enough to buy all Greece and every mercenary in Europe - had plotted to supersede him. An absolute king hears much. Alexander knew well the bitter hatred of some of the clan-chiefs for his ascendency, and may have known, as well as suspected, the plan of dividing his marvellous empire which they, aided, there can be no doubt, by their hereditary rank for most of them were not only soldiers, but ancient nobles of Macedonia- ultimately carried out. The biting insolence of Clitus, avenged by his death from the monarch's own hand, revealed the fiery spite lurking under Macedonian deference, as much as the strange scene that followed, the voluntary plébiscite taken by the common soldiery that Alexander was right in killing him and ought not to die of remorse, manifested his perfect hold upon the hearts of Macedonians at large. It is at least pos

SIR JAMES PAGET'S CONFESSION ON BEHALF OF SCIENCE.

61

our destination, where we soon pulled up, | tunnel. Our tallow candles shed a dim and descended, wishing our “coachmen light around us, and we began to realize good-day. that we were at the end of a narrow pasBetween the railway and the sea we sage deep down in the solid, or, to be corobserved a great quantity of chalky rub-rect, rather soft, lower chalk, but not ble, various machinery, and a hut or two. quite beneath the sea. Having picked up This was evidently an external view of a piece of chalk from the face of the headthe Channel Tunnel. As we walked to- ing and a nodule of iron pyrites, which wards what seemed to be the headquar-glistened like gold in the rays of our dips, ters, a man came forward, to whom we we retraced our sloppy steps, and once gave our other order. This he evidently more emerged into the light of day, after had heard about beforehand, for, after half an hour's walk in the heart of the hastily looking at our letter, he said: chalk. "You ain't a-goin' down like that, are you?" "Why not?" we replied. We had our usual tweed suits on, and did not imagine what we were in for. “Well, if | you do, you'll never be able to wear them clothes again," said our new friend. "What can we do, then?" we asked. "Follow me," was all the answer we got; so we obeyed, and went into one of the huts, where our guide who was to be, opened a a large box, from which he took some miners' clothes, some broad-brimmed hats, and some very big india-rubber jack-boots.

We then appreciated the value of the miners' costumes, for we were wet through with icy-cold water, and our boots were filled with chalky mud; so we had a swim in the now tepid sea, and once more resumed our normal clothing. A delightful though terribly hot walk along that wild and land-slipped coast soon brought us to Folkestone, whence we returned to Dover by train, having enjoyed the privilege of a walk to the bottom of the Channel Tunnel.

From The Spectator. SIR JAMES PAGET'S CONFESSION ON BEHALF OF SCIENCE.

In these formidable but useful garments we arrayed ourselves; and when our toilet was complete, I do not think even our parents would have known us. Having fixed a candle into each of our hats, we began our exploration by entering a comparatively insignificant-looking hole, which SIR JAMES PAGET was truly eloquent sloped gently downwards for a little way, this day week in the praise of science and when we, by turning a bend, lost sight of of the happiness which knowledge gives; daylight and began to look around us. but he made one confession which he eviWe found that we were tramping in Indian dently felt to be humiliating, when he said file along an exceedingly dirty sort of pas- that though science is full of wonders, scisage, upon the bottom of which was laid entific men completely lose their sense of a rough railway, on which the little trucks wonder in their every-day occupation with ran which brought the excavated chalk those wonders. They looked," he said, from the head of the boring. Presently "at a machine so perfect in construction, we stopped for a moment, and our guide so exact for the purpose for which it was told us we were coming to a wet spot; built, made with such foresight and such and sure enough we were. It was one of precision that the mind of the inventor those fissures in the chalk which act as a really seemed to be in it; it seemed to be sort of underground watercourse, and working by mind; and there stood the through this the water was streaming; workman by the side of that machine, but not the sea-water, but the natural water his sense of wonder had long since passed which is always held by the chalk as a away. He knew what was going on, he sort of natural reservoir and which forms knew how all was to come to pass, and to the sources of our south-country water him, that which they thought to be a wonsupply. This water mixing with the finely der was a common experience of every-day ground chalk from the boring-machine, life." Is that the reason why literary formed an oozy mud, through which we culture is generally thought to have the waded till we came to the end of our jour-advantage of scientific culture in quickenney, where the drill stood against the heading, although, unfortunately, it was not then at work. As we stood there, neither of us uttered a word, and the intense stillness was only broken by the dripping of the water from the roof of the

ing the mental life? Bacon, we know, who of all men best appreciated the eager craving of the scientific temperament for the satisfaction of the higher kinds of curiosity, did not scruple to say that "a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure."

62 SIR JAMES PAGET'S CONFESSION ON BEHALF OF SCIENCE.

cient for man. The possession of truth means something much more than the possession of knowledge; it means the possession of knowledge of a kind high enough to satisfy the human affections,

anything and everything which can be contemplated with actual delight. For example, to take what is by no means the highest type of such knowledge, - the knowledge of what is intrinsically beautiful satisfies, for a time at least, the craving of man's heart, and therefore fills him with an emotion which pure scientific knowledge is incapable of exciting. So the knowledge of the wonderful and subtle ways of the human heart, which is the main subject of literature, is a kind of knowledge which it satisfies the heart to contemplate without even pressing further to its issues. But you cannot contemplate the law of reflection or refraction, or the laws which govern the structure of the human body, or the laws which govern the association of ideas, or any other of the skeleton methods upon which the physics and metaphysics of nature are built up, with any sense of final satisfaction; you are always spurred on to discover what the method leads to, what use can be made of it, what locks it will open, what knots it will untie.

"Doth any man doubt," he adds, in the same essay, the essay on truth, "that if there was taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number in other words, of the knowledge of of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?" Sir James Paget seems in some measure to agree with this theory when he boasts that "science would supply the life of men with wonders uncounted," only that the man of science stands by with steady eye enumerating all these wonders without a single thrill of awe or even astonishment, though he uses the marvels he has discovered for his own purpose, whether that be to determine the constitution of a sun separated from us by billions of miles, or to count the rate at which one such sun is approaching or separating from another. The men of science lose the sense of wonder almost in the very act of achieving the feats by which it ought to be excited, because their main object is not the kindling of feeling, but the mastery of a new instrument, by the help of which they may serve some useful purpose. Directly they invent their instruments, they set to work to use them, and you can no more be constantly engaged in using an instrument, however wonderful, and yet continue to overflow with wonder at its delicacy and strength, than you can emulate Dickens's inimitable hypocrite in eating and drinking chiefly in order that you may realize how great "a benefactor to his race" is he who winds up and sets going the very beautiful and wonderful digestive apparatus contained in his own body. The sense of wonder collapses before the practical habit of use, and reserves itself for those attitudes of the mind in which, as in all great literary effects, we are contemplating final results on which the mind loves to rest, and not merely instruments by which it hopes to attain to some ulterior end. And this is the great difference, surely, between scientific and literary culture, that the one is a culture in the apt choice of means to ends beyond themselves, the other a culture in the appreciation of what is intrinsically interesting, interesting for its own sake. When Bacon spoke of minds shrinking in an atmosphere of mere truth, for want of the vain opinions, flattering hopes, and false valuations without which man is hardly able to live, he was certainly unjust to the human intellect. It is not mere truth but mere knowledge which is insuffi

This is the real difference, as it seems, between scientific and literary culture. The former is full of discipline in the various directions to which Sir James Paget referred. It teaches vigilance in observing. It teaches accuracy in recording and measuring. It teaches immeasurable patience in disentangling difficulties. It teaches fertility of resource, as well as still greater patience in conceiving what may be the secret of the whole process and in comparing the guess with the facts till all the erroneous guesses are excluded. And it teaches above all the limitless self-control which is needed for all these processes alike. Literary culture teaches some of these habits of mind as well as science, and some of them much less well. It teaches a very different kind of vigilance in observation, vigilance in noticing the significance of expression rather than vigilance in noticing the traces of agency or cause. It teaches accuracy, again, in rendering the shade of meaning expressed in one language into the nearest equivalent in a different language. It teaches patience in tracking out the various traces of association which words and gestures convey. And it stimulates to the effort

From The Standard.

of imagination necessary to form a full conception of the purpose with which a AVALANCHES ON MOUNT ST. BERNARD. great poet or thinker was possessed, in the construction of any of his great works. Two avalanches have fallen on the But the two cultures differ in this. The famous Hospice of St. Bernard. The scientific culture never inclines one to church has been almost entirely buried in rest in any of its achievements; it reveals snow. No loss of life is reported. Beat best a method which is always urging tween landslips and avalanches the chronon the mind that grasps it to apply it, and icle of disaster is already full. There is finds hardly any satisfaction in it except no distinction of place' the plains of so far as the application yields a further Lombardy are no better off than the high mastery over nature. The literary culture valleys of the Oberland, and the bad tidleads to real satisfactions that do not, like ings that reach us to-day from the Pass the treadmill, compel the inquirer to push of the Great St. Bernard may be paralleled further, and deaden him to the wonder of by the news of tearible avalanches in sunny what he has achieved. The literary cul- Spain. The undiscriminating remorseture which exhibits Isaiah or Homer, or lessness of nature was never, however, Eschylus or Virgil, or Goethe or Shake- more strikingly shown than in the blind speare, in his full grandeur, gives the mind fate which marked the Alpine hospice for a resting-place as well as a discipline. doom. If anything could appeal for pity The scientific culture which exhibits a to the elements, it would turely be the physical, or geological, or biological, or gentle labors of those monks who, from psychological method of investigation, gives a discipline but not a resting-place, - rather, indeed, a spur to the elaboration of new methods. For scientific culture is the piercing of a path through a neverending wilderness, which, however useful, always insists on being pursued further. Literary culture is the piercing of a path through a wilderness which leads to view after view in which you would willingly rest and even live. The one deals with means that only suggest new means; the other, with ends that too often satisfy without urging on to further ends.

And this is why science so often benumbs the imaginations of her devotees. The curiosity to which she ministers is an insatiable hunger which is only whetted by what it feeds on. There is hardly any food for love in the wonders which she reveals, only food for a triumph which immediately goads the mind to seek a further triumph. The domain which has been once annexed by science never seems to yield any further harvest or gratification after the first conquest, or after the first full appreciation of the conquest achieved by others. The domain which has been annexed by literature never ceases to afford fresh delight; it is one in which the mind is only too disposed to rest, for it is one in which there is some satisfaction for the higher affections of man as well as for his higher reason. Here it is, and here alone, that, in our opinion, Sir James Paget under-estimates the culture of the literary school, when he regards, as we understand him to regard, scientific culture as its equal, if not its superior.

century to century, have spent their little span of life in succoring the victims of the storm. The destruction of the Eddystone lighthouse in a gale would not be more dramatically touching than the engulfment in a huge snow-slope of this Alpine haven of refuge and centre of relief. If the practice of heroic beneficence and of self-denial, directed to the most useful as well as the most noble ends, could render any spot of earth holy ground, the hospice of St. Bernard ought to stand first among the sacred places. There, for nearly a thousand years, the lamp of civilization and of active piety has been aglow in the sternest and bleakest spot that any society of human beings has ever chosen for a retreat. Happily, there is no reason to believe that the accident involves any break in the continuity of these far-reaching traditions. The church has, indeed, been almost entirely buried in the snow; but the snow can be a kind protector when it pleases. The summer's sun, however, will restore to light and air the walls which for two centuries have been hallowed by prayers as true as were ever breathed by the devout. The work to which the Fraternity of St. Bernard dedicate themselves is a perfect illustration of the old maxim Laborare est orare. Whether when St. Bernard came, nine hundred and sixteen years ago, from the quiet hamlet of Menthon to the icy solitude of the pass, he contemplated in all its fulness the future of the community he established there, it is vain to speculate. But the brotherhood in its worst times was true to the mission of humanity, and still, in the al