the vision of Charles Lamb in the counting room rises up to decry it.

If the country has really come to feel the need of the literary man's influence in society and state, why not give him the chance to speak the truth that is within him in his own way? If he is to be a support to the government in such work why not allow him the recognition and remuneration of a servant of the government that he may keep his sacred office quite apart from the sordid question of popular taste and market value in the word he utters? The history of all literature is the history of the world's neglect and stupidity in this direction. The effort to restore the Poe cottage at Fordham, N. Y., recalled some of our grand sinning here. Picture our greatest American poet sitting shivering by that bed of straw, where his young wife lay dying, with only the coat he had torn from his back for her covering. And Sidney Lanier, that divine master of song and lute, how did his life go out in suffering and want, to the eternal loss of American literature, while publishers were printing books that would sell, or bringing out war ditties that perished with the occasion.

Dr. Johnson writing "Rasselas" to pay for his mother's funeral, Dante learning in want and exile how bitter it was to climb another's stairs, Carlyle half starving on bread and porridge at Craigenputtock, these are but a few of the authors' woes that point the world's nice care of her best writers. And, although to-day the author with his piling editions can scarcely pose as a mendicant or consumer of the midnight oil, yet it is doubtful if the live connection between bread and glory, truth and the day's living, can be much more happily effected. Truth may be, in a vague way, what the world wants, but the inner observer who writes that

it is truth "toned down, diluted, conventionalized, trimmed," probably knows what he is talking about.

To make the writer totally independent of the world's passing whims and pleasure is the only way, therefore, to enable him to minister to its fundamental and eternal needs. And, as dead men can tell no tales, even to publishers, some author's fund or government pay to enable the author, as well as the state's attorney, to stand by truth and justice and the higher things of life without starving for it, is a clear necessity in the case.

It will be a very different world from what it is now when our Whitmans and our Emersons, our truest "conservators of the vestal fire" anywhere in literature, will stand much show among ward politicians and Tammany chiefs, and even our successful literary statesmen and executives have been more or less obliged to abandon the "higher calling" in entering upon the public and political life. If then it is true that it is through the author, the poet, that "all men see," is not something lost to us when his high office is sacrificed to any other, and should not the note of true progress and enlightenment in modern life reveal itself, not in sinking him in the politician, but in lifting him so effectively into the freedom and greatness of his own work that the politician's glories would have small attraction for him? It meant something for the higher humanity when the son of our beloved poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, stood up at a Western university and declared to teacher and student alike, that the glory of the ideal, "the joy of eternal pursuit" could run like a romantic passion through every branch of their work or study, that neither law nor medicine, nor any known profession need be "commonplace," while the romance of the unachieved, the passion for the ideal, burned within them. But was it not very much the

fine fruition of the New England poet's thought coming down to us as a divine inheritance? And how would it have fared with the whole of that rich inheritance if young Oliver Wendell Holmes had given himself to politics and the antislavery movement in the formative period of his life, as his abolitionist friends so clamorously demanded? Indeed, his interesting letter to James Russell Lowell explaining his principles on the subject is the significant answer to the whole matter, and one which the keepers of the sacred fires would do well to ponder before taking the stump or casting in their lot too effectually with the politicians. However, the gods do sometimes interpose to save their own, and it may be that Booth Tarkington's stage fright was a special evidence of their care. Certainly if it comes again he should

take it for a sign.

OUR DUMB RELATIONS

HAT is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild

WHA

fowl?" asks a Twelfth Night philosopher. “That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird,” replies another. Times have changed since the age of Pythagoras, yet to-day, whatever we may think of our grandams, we have lost no respect for wild fowl. It is not probable that the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis will be revived, but certainly if the glorification of animals goes much farther it will no longer be open to theologians to dismiss the question of the immortality of brutes as "invidious." Indeed, Bishop Butler himself scarcely does that, although Goldwin Smith so interprets him, for he admits, negatively at least, that there may be something in the brute which, along his line of argument, might come in for immortality, but that the question can in no way militate against the immortality of man.

However, the animal lovers of to-day would more and more confound the theologian, for it is not alone the brute instinct or lower order of intelligence they are finding in them, but the higher moral qualities. Maeterlinck has just shown us in the insect world the highest type of that altruism, which is held the basis of all morality, in the unswerving devotion of the bee to the good of the community, and the annual sacrifice it makes of all its years of toils and gains to the next generation. "The act," he submits, "be it conscious or not, undoubtedly passes the limit of human morality." Spiders, which we are told, are properly

classed as animals, are making themselves interesting to science through what one writer calls the "personal bravery" of their courtships, which always includes the probability of being pounced upon by the scornful female and devoured alive. Turtles, in the laboratory at Harvard, are evincing perceptive faculties that are highly wise, if not otherwise moral, and beyond everything else the noble dog has come into the kingdom, and, in the "person" of the beloved "Pluto" of Chicago, been honored, solely for his virtues, with as distinguished a funeral as the prominent citizens of three suburban villages could turn out.

Truly none can hereafter deny immortality to brutes, and it only remains for devout worshipers of their superiority to get out litanies and rituals in their service, as even the best efforts of village clerks and society leaders do not seem quite up to the mark. For really it does seem a little with these gentle creatures of field and forest, as Socrates said of women, that "once made our equals they become our superiors. If they really have souls to know the wrongs and burdens put upon them and the irony of our small human mastery over them, and yet carry themselves with that meek, patient and cheery spirit toward all creation which the domestic animals disclose, they certainly are so much greater than we that we might well set them up in our temples and prepare to do them reverence.

The main trouble seems to be that we have about as mixed ideas concerning the real virtues of birds and beasts as we ever show regarding our own, and if the new teachers of the animal school are right the old ones are altogether wrong. Here is Maeterlinck telling us that an unconscious act of the bee can exceed the limit of human morality, thus sweeping morals quite out of the field of intelligent responsibility. Brave Pluto was honored in his death because he