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of thought are tinged with heart's blood. Even his most charming sports of fancy have been produced under the writhing of such mental agony as only sensitive spirits are capable of experiencing. We all know that Hood, the prince of humorists, convulsed the world with laughter when he was tortured by the deepest melancholy, and that Cowper's mirth-provoking John Gilpin was produced under a state of dejection that bordered on insanity. He, himself, compares the entrance of that poem into his brain, to a harlequin intruding himself into the gloomy chamber occupied by a corpse.

One sensitiveness of great minds has always been inexplicable to us: the sensitiveness to censure. Censure which pierced the heart of the philosophic Newton; which slew Racine and Keats; which drove the Italian Tasso and the English Collins mad. Alas! how could they have forgotten that only insignificance escapes condemnation; that he who outstrips others in ascending the hill of Fame, becomes the most tempting target to be shot at by every puny archer beneath.

And in these days, as in those of Keats and Collins, noble minds groan and writhe under the lash of rebuke, often lifted by unworthy hands, by Malice, by Envy, by Revenge. And the more apparent the sensitiveness of the great, the more frequently and violently they are assailed. Better far to cover Sensibility with the armor of Tact, and conquer Censure as Julius Cæsar did of old.