I will defend myself." The very words of Antigonus are found in their Arabic equivalent in a volume of maxims of Honan-ben-Isaak, who died A.D. 873. Canning's lines are well known Give me th' avowed, erect, and manly foe; Firm I can meet, perhaps can turn a blow; Above all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send, Save me, oh, save me from a candid friend! "Peace with honor" is one of Beaconsfield's most famous rockets of speech. It is only the form of the expression, however, that can be called original; the thought, of course, is the baldest commonplace. Lord John Russell, for example, in 1853 said, "If peace cannot be maintained with honor, it is no longer peace;" and a still more pronounced similarity, not only in the words but also in the situation in which they were uttered, occurs in Fletcher's "Queen of Corinth": Eraton." The general is returned, then ?" Meanthes." With much honor." Sosicles." And peace concluded with the place of Argos?" When the Duke of Orleans succeeded to the throne of France as Louis XII., he made the noble remark, "The King of France does not revenge the injuries of the Duke of Orleans;" but he was anticipated by Philip, Count of Bresse, who on becoming Duke of Savoy said, "It would be shameful for the duke to revenge the injuries done to the count." And is not the spirit of both these sayings contained in that story of the Emperor Hadrian, who met a personal enemy, the day after his accession to the throne, with the remark, “Evasisti” ("You have escaped")? The description of a fishing-rod as a worm at one end and a fool at the other, which has been ascribed to Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, existed before their time in a less striking form. A French writer of the seventeenth century, named Guyet, has these lines: La ligne avec sa canne est un long instrument, Sometimes, but not often, we have given us the opportunity of seeing how a famous phrase has grown and blossomed in the writer's own mind. Sheridan, whose impromptus all smelt of the lamp, had set down in a note-book for future use the words, "He employs his fancy in his narrative and keeps his recollections for his wit," which is clever, but has not that final and clinching wit that catches hold of the popular mind. Nor was it much better in the second form: "When he makes his jokes you applaud the accuracy of his memory, and it is only when he states his facts that you admire the flights of his imagination." When finally the opportunity occurred, in speaking of Mr. Dundas in the House of Commons, he gave it this brilliant turn: "He generally resorts to his memory for his jokes and to his imagination for his facts." In the year 1819 Chief-Justice Marshall (McCullough vs. Maryland, 4 Wheaton, 316) spoke as follows from the bench: "The government of the Union is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them, its powers are granted by them, and ought to be exercised directly on them and for their benefit." Eleven years later, Daniel Webster, consciously or unconsciously, plagiarized the idea and clothed it in these words: "The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people;" but even he did not succeed in making his words a familiar quotation. In 1854, in an address to the Anti-Slavery Society, Theodore Parker tried his hand at embalming the wisdom of many in the wit of one, and spoke of democracy as "a government of all the people by all the people and for all the people." A lady who was a member of his household for many years says that this phrase, though the result of long and careful hammering at a favorite thought, even yet failed to satisfy him. "It was not," she says, "quite pointed enough for the weapon he needed to use so often in criticising the national government, to penetrate the mind of hearer and reader with a just idea of democracy, securing it there by much polishing, and I can distinctly recollect his joyful look when he afterwards read it to me in his library, condensed into this gem: 'of the people, by the people, for the people."" But, unfortunately, the gem re-cut into these brilliant facets does not appear in his printed works. In "Additional Speeches," vol. ii. p. 25, the rough diamond is given in the form in which it originally presented itself to the great Abolitionist. That, of course, is the reason why the gem did not become public property until Abraham Lincoln set it in that extraordinary cluster of brilliants, his Gettysburg address (November 19, 1863), where, as everybody knows, it took the slightly modified form, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." When Antigonus I., King of Sparta, was told by the poet Hermodotus that he was a god and a son of the sun, he replied, "My body-servant sings me no such song." Centuries afterwards, La Bruyère put the substance of Antigonus's rebuke into epigrammatic form, as follows: "The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men; rarely do they appear great before their valets." His contemporary Marshal Catinat polished the same thought into this jewel of speech: "A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet;" but even yet the brilliant needed the final brilliancy lent to it by Madame Cornuel in the now familiar commonplace, “No man is a hero to his valet." Brissot, in his "Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property," wrote, "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature." The phrase itself died with him, when Prudhomme resuscitated it by endowing it with the soul of wit in the catching phrase, "La propriété, c'est le vol." William Shepard. AN APOSTLE OF "FRANKNESS." IBSEN's plays are now exciting an interest which is out of all proportion to their merits as social studies or literary works. Mr. Andrew Lang, who treats Ibsen as the elder Dumas might have treated any unromantic barbarian, says that "the times are hostile to literature," and that the secret of Ibsen's success is his unliterary lack of serenity, his outcry against law and order, and his constant preoccupation with the cares of the day. The truth is that Ibsen has a new flavor, and the inventor of a new flavor is sure to be hailed with joy by those jaded gourmets in literature whose indulgences in exotic foods have brought them to the condition of Philippe Égalité, to whom a new sensation was a new world. Ibsen, too, is "frank." The people in his plays say anything that can be put into words, decent or indecent, with perfect coolness. The English reviewers who still set our fashions in literature acclaim this "frankness" in a foreigner, although they would not endure it in an Englishman. In "Ghosts," for instance, Mrs. Alving expresses her favorable opinion of those unions of grisettes and students which Henry Murger and Béranger have tried to illuminate, and she is not averse to her son's living with his illegitimate sister as his wife or otherwise: some of Dr. Ibsen's females are truly emancipated. Dr. Ibsen is as bourgeois as the late lamented Frederika Bremer when he is not "frank." And yet he has attained, by his fidelity to life in Norway and by the simplicity with which he takes his impressions for inspirations, that kind of interestingness found in the more modern novels of Trollope. "Ghosts" is perhaps the "frankest" of Ibsen's plays, though it may have lost something in translation. If Daudet should ever elaborate the hint of the unspeakable he leaves at the end of "Les Rois en Exil," we should get something of the nature of "Ghosts." People fond of scrofulous diagnoses will delight in "Ghosts," for, while they could not consider it a social duty to read Zola's minute clinical bits of description, they may virtuously use that excuse for reading Ibsen, whose ideas about maternity and other things are so stimulating! Ibsen is now over sixty years of age; his finest work dates from the age of thirty-six. He passed from the vocation of a chemist's clerk to that of a violinist, under Ole Bull, at the Bergen Theatre. He married in 1857. He thus states the philosophy of his work: "Everything I have written is most intimately connected with what I have experienced or have not experienced. Each new poem has helped to purify and enlighten my mind; for one must share in the responsibility towards the society of which one is a member." "Life," he adds, in metre, "is a war with the unseen, and to write poetry is to hold the last judgment over one's self." "A Doll's House," "A Pillar of Society," and "Ghosts" may not be representative of Dr. Ibsen. If they be, it is plain that he has keenly observed the most disagreeable characteristic of Scandinavian mankind, that he studies what is called "animalism" with less taste for it than his French realistic brethren, and that he holds-in his professional aspect, at least that the brute in humanity is only hidden by a thin social veneer, which is thinner in Norway than anywhere else. Ibsen is a satirist and a destroyer. The character most talked about is Nora in "A Doll's House." Mr. Andrew Lang rightly puts her with Frou-Frou. And indeed, if the female creatures of the younger Dumas and Belot could be made less Parisian, fed on sauer-kraut, and dressed in dowdy clothes, they would scarcely be known from the ladies that have sprung out of the brain of this new apostle. Maurice F. Egan. BOOK-TALK. "Edwin Forrest the Actor and the Man." By Gabriel Harrison. Brooklyn Eagle Press. Rare are Shakespeare's true interpreters. The poet through his plays, thank heaven, is always with us, but the great players come and go and leave but a memory behind. It is a pity that the actor's art is so perishable, that when he dies he is buried with his mantle wrapped around him, that he cannot leave it as a rich heritage to successors. In the person of Edwin Booth we have still an actor with the genius to interpret genius, but no actor is great enough or manysided enough to play all of Shakespeare's leading roles successfully. Booth is great as Hamlet, as Shylock, as Iago, but Forrest was great as Othello and as Lear. In these rôles perhaps we shall not look upon his like again," unless when the great Italian star flashes his wonderful conception of the Moor upon us. Between the covers of a very beautiful book Mr. Harrison has fitly embalmed the memory of Forrest. Indeed, by his vivid description of the great actor in his favorite rôles he so fans the memory that Forrest seems almost to stand out before us once again. The author calls him out before the curtain, as it were, the sable curtain that rises not, and with the mind's eye we behold the great actor bowing his recognition to merited applause. It is Forrest "the actor" whom Mr. Harrison keeps continually before us; he follows him behind the scenes but rarely, and so gives us but few glimpses of Forrest "the man." The book should be read in connection with such a work as Alger's "Life of Edwin Forrest," to which it forms a most valuable supplement. Max O'Rell is at his best when he dips his pen in gall. Not that he says really ill-natured things, for his cynicism is only skin-deep; but he is cleverest when he is laughing at foibles, and, as John Bull is the target at which he most delights to fling his keen darts, he has never written anything else so clever as John Bull and his Island." He has so keen an eye for John Bull's pet follies, and turns them into such delicious ridicule, that John Bull himself could not help joining in the universal shout that greeted the clever Frenchman's book. He found, at least by his own showing, but little to laugh at in us, and he evidently loves his countrymen too well to laugh at them; consequently his "John Bull, Junior," and his latest book, "Jacques Bonhomme" (Cassell & Co.), are not so amusing as "John Bull and his Island." The foibles and eccentricities of those whom we love never appear particularly funny to us, and do not provoke in us much hilarity. Max O'Rell dearly loves Jacques Bonhomme, and so Jacques excites his admiration and respect, but rarely even a smile. Readers who miss the witty Frenchman's epigrams will, however, be occasionally consoled by such sallies as this: "The Frenchman has his characteristic feature in common with men of all countries: each time that he loves, it is forever. When crossed in love, he seldom goes to the length of committing suicide. He does not go in for such extreme measures: he generally prefers resorting to homœopathy: he loves 'another.' Like cures like. Similia similibus curantur." We are treated to a picture of Jacques at home, but Jacques is taken very seriously, and we are told that he is not the man at all that he appears to be, that on the stage he may seem very naughty, but behind the scenes he is a model of virtue. We are warned, however, that Jacques will not allow strangers or mere acquaintances to go behind the scenes with him, and so we must take Max O'Rell's word for his domestic virtues. We are willing to take it, however; for what foreigner can set up his outside view against that of a Frenchman? And O'Rell reminds us that only Frenchmen really know the French. "John Bull on the Continent," a sketch of the English resident in France, and "From my Letter-Box," an amusing collection of letters from unknown correspondents, which was first published in Lippincott's Magazine, are bound up in this volume. "The Winning of the West." By Theodore Roosevelt. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is a young man who has done a remarkable amount of work in various lines, and has already distinguished himself as a lawyer, a politician, and an author. One's chief regret in reading "The Winning of the West" is that there is not more of it, and that it does not cover more ground. The two volumes embrace the times from 1769 to 1783. Mr. Roosevelt possesses the judicial trait of impartiality so necessary to an historian, and, what many historians lack, an entertaining style. The work of the early pioneers in the West, of such men as Boone, Clark, Robertson, and Sevier, has never been properly appreciated, and Mr. Roosevelt does well in pointing out how much we owe to them. He has done them ample justice, and has taken care to exclude those wild exaggerations and fairy-tales which always cling like barnacles about the name and fame of dead heroes. It is to be hoped that, having broken the ground in these two volumes, Mr. Roosevelt will continue the work so ably begun. "Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short Stories told after Dark." By "Uncle Remus" (Joel Chandler Harris). The Century Co. This is a book that both big and little people can read with pleasure, and every reader will be glad that the little boy to whom the quaint "Uncle Remus" is supposed to relate his tales does not really enjoy a monopoly of them. Some of the stories included in this collection are published for the first time, and the book is profusely illustrated. Some old friends appear in the "Literary Gems" series issued by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Certainly the gems are very charmingly set. The dainty little volumes so far published include "The Gold-Bug," by Edgar A. Poe, “Rab and his Friends" and "Marjorie Fleming," by John Brown, M.D., "The GoodNatured Man," by Oliver Goldsmith, "The Culprit Fay," by Joseph Rodman Drake, "Our Best Society," by George William Curtis, and "Sweetness and Light," by Matthew Arnold. The Putnams have also published "The Geography of Marriage, or Legal Perplexities of Wedlock in the United States," by William L. Synder, which gives a compendium of the various marriage laws in vogue in the different States, and the best methods of tying the knot, as well as how to slip the noose, in various sections of the country; and "The Story of the Bacteria and their Relation to Health and Disease," by T. Mitchell Prudden, M.D. Charles Scribner's Sons publish "A Collection of Letters of Dickens, 1883-1870;" the collection has been made from the three volumes of Dickens's letters edited by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter, which appeared nearly a decade ago. A new edition of Tolstoï's "War and Peace," in two volumes, |