which do not condescend to give what are called personal details,
but confine themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I
have finished reading such books I feel as if I had been reading
The Statesman's Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental
picture of the hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues,
in frockcoat and trousers, that decorate our London squares.

I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The
subject of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the
funeral of one of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had
several technical controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote
a very tender and beautiful account of the funeral in his diary,
which is quoted at length: "How little," he wrote, "the sense of
difference, and how strong my feeling of his power and solid sense;
how little I care that he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how
much that he was so happy with us in the summer; how much that he
was, as all the family told me, so 'devoted' to my Nellie!"

That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of
proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human
relations that matter more than policies and statesmanship.

And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the
fulness of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me
alienum puto. If we grow absorbed in work, in business, in
literature, in art, in policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human
elements, we dock and maim our lives. We cannot solve the mystery
of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this--that it is
not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and
relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of