to tears, he must needs fail in his purpose. There are cases of abandoned loyalty, it is true, in which the most trifling, nay, the most ridiculous peculiarities become objects of enthusiasm. If your idol speaks through his nose, you will be tempted to revere all nasal utterances for his sake. But it is nonsense to say that you revere him because he speaks through his nose. The personality of the man includes and dignifies his defects. His very tricks are venerable. But the greatest leader will always be the man whose eccentricity is to be found in his acts, and not in his habits. Garibaldi's liberation of the Two Sicilies was a highly eccentric act; his subsequent withdrawal to Caprera, enriched only by honour, was more eccentric still. But the grandeur here lay in the daring devotedness and unselfishness, which were exhibited on a scale so vast that they seemed to be almost superhuman. If these eccentricities became the fashion, should we be called upon to respect a protest against them? Is not our admiration for the man who did these things increased when we find that he actually suffers from his own incapacity for breaking small rules of politeness, and getting rid of importunate visitors by a little pardonable bluntness? There seems to be confusion of thought on this subject. Standards of action are doubtless generally lower than they ought to be, but it does not follow that whenever you depart from them you rise above them. There is falling short, and there is simple aberration. And we think that there is another point to be considered. There is such a weakness in the world as over-estimate of self. It does sometimes happen (of course not to you, my reader, but to most of your particular friends, as I dare say you will allow) that a man is tempted to think a little too highly of himself. Of course this temptation besets him most easily when he is in the act of preferring his own opinion to the opinion of the world at large. Therefore we think it well that he should try to be a little cautious and modest about his own opinions; and, considering it to be impossible for him accurately to weigh all subjects, that he should make his selection, and having made it, should defer to the collective opinion of his generation on the points which he does not select for his own special study. And if the points which he does select for private trial and legislation are small and indifferent points, such as questions about dress, manners, times, or seasons, we shall be apt to conclude that he has rather a small and indifferent sort of mind. And if, while busy with larger matters, it should be his habit and his pleasure to differ from his generation upon the smaller, we shall be apt to conclude that he thinks himself wiser than his generation. And if he differs merely by oversight, we shall forgive him if we have good reason to love and respect him on higher grounds; but we shall not forgive him if he expects us to approve the oversight, because in that case we shall not believe it to be an oversight at all, but an intentional act, and we shall therefore judge it for its intrinsic merits or demerits. If all this be true of men, much more is it true of women. We are not among those who hold the inherent equality of the sexes in matters intellectual. But not the less do we believe that women have powers to be cultivated and gifts to be used, and that these powers and gifts, when fairly dealt by, may sometimes develop a peculiar charm and merit of their own, out of their very difference from the powers and the gifts of men. But it is one of a woman's difficulties that her gift is often too big for her; she cannot handle it without help, or she falls into grotesque attitudes as she carries it. It is not helping her to bid her lay down her burthen; she wants to have it properly adjusted, so that she may walk steadily under it. We seriously think that every woman who is born with a gift, a taste, or a capacity above the average, should be trained to look upon eccentricity as, in some shape or other, her besetting danger. We think that she should make a study of conformity. In almost any company, if we were called upon to pick out the gifted woman, the woman who "does something," we should expect to detect her by some undesirable peculiarity. She is the woman whose hair is badly dressed, whose costume is in some way or other conspicuously unlike the prevailing fashion, who turns her back upon you when she wants to look at a book, who stares at you in blank defiance when you ask her a civil question, who snubs you or who patronizes you, who is downright rude or offensively deferential, or prodigal of caresses which mean nothing, or elaborate and complacent in her display of politeness. There is no medium for her; either she will wear a pearl brooch on her forehead, and a décolleté dress by daylight, or she will disdain crinoline and corsets, and look like a great boy in disguise. The result of all this shows the mischief of it. Half the people who see her, whether they be men or women, come to the conclusion that it is best for a woman to be commonplace. She ought to be ashamed of helping to bring about this conclusion, because she thereby helps to lower instead of to raise the tone of thought about women; and in reality she is higher in her aims, in her hopes, in her habits, than the generality of those with whom she associates; only it has, unhappily, never occurred to her that it is her special duty to bring no discredit upon her aspirations. Surely you would not ask her to lay such aspirations aside; surely you would not speak of them as her misfortune, if not her fault. It is much simpler to ask her to get rid of the foibles which accompany them. For eccentricity is a foible when it is not a fault, and this is what we wish to establish. Want of taste-want of observation-want of humility-want of sympathy,-in one of these four regions its root will be found, and the resultant blossom can hardly be one which you should wish to wear in your button-hole. Of the eccentricities which come from want of sympathy we have scarcely spoken except by implication. They are sins rather than faults. If the multitude of minute pangs which an untender nature inflicts on its way through life could be added together, they would appal the conscience. The acquisition of tact through sympathy should always be a part of Christian education, and if a glaring deficiency in this respect were looked upon in its true light as a symptom, the cause of which we were bound diligently to explore, we should often be surprised at the diagnosis of moral disease which would result from the examination. The discovery might not be pleasant, but it is a necessary step towards the cure. MR. GLADSTONE AS AN HYMNOLOGIST. WHAT a chapter might be written on the private occupations of public men! Some of them have been trivial enough: monarchs have ere now devoted their leisure to mending locks-even to taming flies! It is one advantage of the classical education given to English gentlemen that they can find in it endless amusement, intellectual, yet not fatiguing. To turn an ode of Horace into tolerable English verse; to write an inscription or an epitaph in tolerable Latin, are harmless and not unpleasant employments for men who have had their share of the toils of life. There are those whose fervid spirit carries them much farther. The Earl of Derby has just completed a translation of the "Iliad;" Mr. Gladstone is said to be similarly occupied, and has already furnished us with an example of what he can do in a rendering of the first book. For, like Richelieu, and with perhaps higher qualifications, the illustrious statesman claims to be also a poet. Sacred poetry gave to the Latin language new forms, greater flexibility. Some of the Latin hymns of the medieval church have wonderful beauty and power. It may not, perhaps, be out of place in this connection to attempt a rendering of one of the most beautiful,— Coelestis O Jerusalem, Mansura semper Civitas! "Jerusalem! the city Abiding evermore, How happy who hereafter Shall crowd thy golden shore! "The glory of the Godhead Doth make thy dwellings light; Comes rest from all affright, For those who wear Christ's diadem And saintly garments white. "A voice of love calls ever Up to those mansions fair; Eternal weight of glory Shall quell our sorrows there. O therefore let our every breath With anthems fill the air To Him who suffer'd shameful death To save us from despair." Mr. Gladstone, in a volume of translations lately published in conjunction with Lord Lyttelton, has most felicitously and completely caught the spirit of those Latin hymns. Before giving an example of this, let us quote a single stanza of his translation of Bishop Heber's verses to his wife, "But when at morn and eve the stars Behold me on my knee, I feel, though thou art distant far, "Rite mî flexis genibus precanti, The sweet singer whom he has thus rendered would, we think, acknowledge that his own thought is improved by the form into which it is thrown. But we pass on to Augustus Toplady's beautiful hymn, "Rock of Ages, rent for me, Let me hide myself in Thee," Mr. Gladstone's rendering of which, besides its intrinsic value, is of extreme interest as showing that the modern English hymn is in essence the same as the old Latin hymn-that the same spirit actuated the unknown or forgotten hymn-writers of the church, which in later times inspired Toplady, Charles Wesley, Newton of Olney, Cowper, Heber. For if we had found Mr. Gladstone's translation of “Rock of Ages" in some ancient hymnal, we should not have imagined it the product of to-day. Thus it runs : "Jesus, pro me perforatus, Tolle culpam, sordes munda. "Nil in manu mecum fero, |