by rescuing the civilized world from the bloody grasp of the Corsican monster, he, an occidental Sardanapalus, was the leader of Fashion in his capital, the competitor of dandies, the rival of Brummels. While his great country was reeling under the weight of her immense outlay, feeding the leagued armies of Europe, he was wasting millions on frippery and perishable nothings, on gaudy ostentations and senile sensualities, - his annual tailor's bill amounting to a sum that were a generous portion for a baronet's daughter.

And yet, so servile to rank and power, so dimmed in moral and æsthetic vision, was the titled crowd whereof he was the centre and summit, and so strong the glare that this crowd threw on its subordinate thousands, the liveried lieges of Fashion, that by his generation of Anglo-Saxons the Prince Regent was admired as a model gentleman. The dynasty of Chesterfield had not yet been supplanted. The Prince Regent was indeed a regal realization of the Chesterfieldian ideal, according to which, hypocrisy was the law of manners, and worldliness a duty, and the shallow flatteries of courtly speech, factitious conventionalities, fraudulent phrases, were cultivated, not as the permissible and profitable externals of a man of fashion, but were offered and accepted as the credentials of a gentleman.

But while thus unsparing towards the false gentleman, let us be charitable towards the man. Kingship is not favorable to manly virtues. King's sons are so sequestered, that the airs most needful to mental health visit them but faintly. The high walls of prerogative shut off the north winds of bracing oppugnancy, the east winds of enkindling derision. Oaks cannot be raised under glass. Their gnarled grandeur they can only gain by tussling with wintry tempests. The qualities, whose activity moulds the character into strength and beauty, prefer a fair field and no favor. They prosper even on buffets. The sons of a king are denied the youthful superlative privilege of being buffeted.

A Prince, especially a Crown-Prince, lacks fulcrums whereon to adjust the lever of his abilities, from which adjustment comes the enlivening power wherewith men, not artificially exalted, swing themselves aloft. Instead of the solid indispensable fulcrum, the Prince meets yielding cushions; so that his movements are more like falls than self-achieved ascensions; until, - unless he be stiffened by rare rugged energy, or winged by genius, he ceases to make efforts; and forces, that were designed to be toughened by conflict, grow flaccid from the obsequious capitulation of those who to others offer a determined, but at the same time auxiliary, because stimulating, opposition. Self-help is the law of all successful life. Soul and body must earn health, or else not have it. From this law men covet exemption, which is, to covet so much death. There is a town in England, Bedford I think it is, - where, owing to the number and wealth of charitable foundations, so many mouths are gratuitously fed, that, it is stated, the mass of the laboring population has sunk into apathetic sloth. The pressure of an irregular or extreme prosperity is as unpropitious as that of an extreme poverty. In either case nothing but exceptional individual fire bursts through the incumbent accumulation.

IV.

LEICESTER - HAMPDEN - WASHINGTON - NAPOLEON - ST. PAUL.

ON

N the other hand, men who do not inherit, but by active ability earn, prominent positions, are apt to be coarse and greedy; and so, the highest gentleman is by no means always found in the highest place. Eminences, civil and ecclesiastical, and even military, are too often the prizes of much more self-seeking and stirring worldliness than are consistent with the best type of gentlemanhood. Bayard was to the end of his long career a subordinate, he who ought to have been a generalissimo at thirty, and would, had he been more selfish (but then he had not been Bayard), and less modest; for a great power in the world, but one incompatible with the purest gentlemanliness, is impudence, which is a compound of equal parts of self-confidence and unscrupulousness. - Sidney, although young when he