as a murderer.’  There is a substratum of philosophic truth in Professor Aytoun’s brilliant burlesque of Firmilian.  That gentleman wanted to be a poet.  And being persuaded that the only way to successfully describe tragic and awful feelings was to have actually felt them, he got into all kinds of scrapes of set purpose, that he might know what were the actual sensations of people in like circumstances.  Wishing to know what are the emotions of a murderer, he goes and kills somebody.  He finds, indeed, that feelings sought experimentally prove not to be the genuine article:  still, you see the spirit of the true artist, content to make any sacrifice to attain perfection in his art.  The highest excellence, indeed, in some one department of human exertion is not consistent with decent goodness in all:  you dwarf the remaining faculties when you develop one to abnormal size and strength.  Thus have men been great preachers, but uncommonly neglectful parents.  Thus have men been great statesmen, but omitted to pay their tradesmen’s bills.  Thus men have been great moral and social reformers, whose own lives stood much in need of moral and social reformation.  I should judge from a portrait I have seen of Mr. Thomas Sayers, the champion of England, that this eminent individual has attended to his physical to the neglect of his intellectual development.  His face appeared deficient in intelligence, though his body seemed abundant in muscle.  And possibly it is better to seek to develop the entire nature—­intellectual, moral, and physical-than to push one part of it into a prominence that stunts and kills the rest.  It is better to be a complete man than to be essentially a poet, a statesman, a prize-fighter.  It is better that a tree should be fairly grown all round, than that it should send out one tremendous branch to the south, and have only rotten twigs in every other direction; better, even though that tremendous branch should be the very biggest that ever was seen.  Such an inordinate growth in a single direction is truly morbid.  It reminds one of the geese whose livers go to form that regal dainty, the pate de foie gras.  By subjecting a goose to a certain manner of life, you dwarf its legs, wings, and general muscular development; but you make its liver grow as large as itself.  I have known human beings who practised on their mental powers a precisely analogous discipline.  The power of calculating in figures, of writing poetry, of chess-playing, of preaching sermons, was tremendous; but all their other faculties were like the legs and wings of the fattening goose.

Let us try to be entire human beings, round and complete; and if we wish to be so, it is best not to live too much alone.  The best that is in man’s nature taken as a whole is brought out by the society of his kind.  In one or two respects he may be better in solitude, but not as the complete man.  And more especially a good deal of the society of little children is much to be desired.  You will be the