These persons

but find forgiveness a hard task. remember everything about themselves, and forget everything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw. Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to your pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a sketch of your family-tree. If your daughter has made a runaway marriage-on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious silence he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart again. In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arises simply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in

An imaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow, and speaks to that. To hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of the rudeness we encounter in life cannot be to cruelty or badness of heart. man is callous, and although he cannot be easily hurt in return. man is sensitive and merciful to others out of the merest mercy to himself.

properly set down The unimaginative hurts easily, he The imaginative

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends entirely upon the egotist. If he be

a conceited man, full of self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel. When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge

he calls the writer a coxcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humorous, with a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader as well. A man may write about himself during his whole life without once tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be interesting in himself—be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers, so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. tells me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude to X. for the information. Possibly, if my establishment boasts only of Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to ride, and all the more if I can indulge in that only on occasions of solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor of a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs me that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early snow-drops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he prefers in woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early love passages his reasons for the preference, I do not

get angry; on the contrary, I feel quite pleased; perhaps, if the matter is related with unusual grace and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture and dimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The egotistical X. is barren, and suggests nothing beyond himself, save that he is a good deal better off than I am—a reflection much pleasanter to him than it is to me; whereas the equally egotistical Z., with a single sentence about his snow-drops, or his liking for brown eyes rather than for blue, sends my thoughts wandering away back among my dead spring-times, or wafts me the odours of the roses of those summers when the colour of an eye was of more importance than it now is. X.'s men-servants and coach-and-six do not fit into the life of his reader, because in all probability his reader knows as much about these things as he knows about Pharaoh; Z.'s snow-drops and preferences of colour do, because every one knows what the spring thirst is, and every one in his time has been enslaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his life, but which he knew were the tenderest that ever looked love, the brightest that ever flashed sunlight. Montaigne and Charles Lamb are egotists of the Z. class, and the world never wearies reading them; nor are egotists of the X. school absolutely without entertainment. Several of these the world reads assiduously too, although for another reason. The avid vanity of Mr Pepys would be gratified if made aware of the success of his diary; but curiously to inquire

into the reason of that success, why his diary has been found so amusing, would not conduce to his comfort.

After all, the only thing a man knows is himself. The world outside he can know only by hearsay. His shred of personality is all he has; than that, he is nothing richer, nothing poorer. Everything else is mere accident and appendage. Alexander must not be measured by the shoutings of his armies, nor Lazarus at Dives' gates by his sores. And a man knows himself only in part. In every nature, as in Australia, there is an unexplored territory-green, wellwatered regions or mere sandy deserts; and into that territory experience is making progress day by day. We can remember when we knew only the outer childish rimand from the crescent guessed the sphere; whether, as we advanced, these guesses have been realised, each knows for himself.

A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE.

WHEN a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends, he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. They possess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of Solon, nor the wit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of Napoleon III. If pushed hard he will be constrained to admit that he has known each and all get angry without sufficient occasion, make at times the foolishest remarks, and act as if personal comfort were the highest thing in their estimation. Yet, driven thus to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortable confessions, our supposed man does not like his friends one whit the less; nay, more, he is aware that if they were very superior and faultless persons he would not be conscious of so much kindly feeling towards them. The tide of friendship does not rise high on the bank of perfection. Amiable weaknesses and shortcomings are the food of love. It is from the roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you are able to lay hold of him. If a man be an entire and perfect chrysolite, you slide off him and fall back into