the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been injured had my name
appeared in the columns of the terrible _National Reformer_, and until
the work commenced and paid for was concluded I did not feel at liberty
to use my own name. Later, I signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and
the tracts written for Mr. Scott appeared anonymously.

The name was suggested by the famous statue of "Ajax crying for light", a
cast of which stands in the centre walk of the Crystal Palace. The cry
through the darkness for light, even if light brought destruction, was
one that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my heart:

"If our fate be death,
Give light, and let us die!"

To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though the
knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest hopes,
such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind of man. Some
regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it exists most
strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the lips of those
who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance from the
overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has gone out most
often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned cry :--

"Give light."



XII.