True science and safe prac

does not profess to understand. tice require that he should not only desire knowledge, but should be free from all suspicion of presumptuously overleaping the barrier which divides our knowledge from our ignorance.

It is the misfortune of homoeopathy that its votaries, like those of all exclusive sects, never can occupy the position above defined as that of the true physician. If, indeed, their leading principle had been an axiom, or self-evident truth, its exclusiveness might have been justified. But even in this case it had better have been tacitly assumed or calmly maintained against discussion, than have been made the ground-work of those virulent attacks upon the convictions of others, which, as we have seen, formed the most prominent part of Hahnemann's literary labours. By ungenerous and unfair treatment of his adversaries, by an arrogance and presumption which, if not allied to madness, are indicative of the most insufferable personal vanity, and by a mode of dealing with facts which shows but a very slender regard for the modest limits of truth, Hahnemann from the first placed himself beyond the pale of ordinary scientific discussion, and provoked retaliation, both of a moral and a material kind, which I am not prepared in all cases to justify. That a similar spirit of self-exaltation on the one hand, and a somewhat similar disposition to make reprisals on the other, still continue to characterize this unhappy controversy, is but too true. Indeed it is obviously part of the policy of homoeopathy to encourage this strife; to flaunt in the faces of physicians the banner of its exclusive dogma, and to perpetuate the use of nicknames associated with every kind of bitterness. I have been desirous, in this article, of adding as little as may be to the exasperation of the contending parties. Although in duty bound to state clearly and strongly my own opinions, I have endeavoured to do so, without distorting or calumniating those of the homœopathists, whom it has been my anxious desire to represent accurately according to their own authorized sources of information.

W. T. G.

INFANTI PERDUTI.

Much they reck of your praise and you!
But the wronged great souls can they be quit
Of a world where all their work is to do,

Where you style them, you of the little wit,
Old Master this and Early the other,

Not dreaming that Old and New are fellows?

BROWNING'S Old Pictures in Florence.

WHETHER or not defeat may often be greater than

victory, as involving a higher success than that

at which the struggler aimed, and "to nobly die" may be called the first, rather than "the second, glorious part," it is at least certain, that

The dread strife

Of poor humanity's afflicted will,

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny,

excites a profounder interest in the hearts of men than any which can be aroused by the most complete and conspicuous success. Such is most evidently the case when the struggle finally results in victory, but too late for him who has borne the heat of the battle; for then, defeat is just victory denied victory's reward. The forlorn hope of the assault, the martyrs of the churches, early patriots, pioneers of civilization, discoverers of truth, and the poets in their misery dead, obtain, at last, the truest and most affectionate acknowledgment, even though certain weaklings may at times harp upon the theme so as to render it distasteful to weaklings of another kind. All other interest taken in the past is poor compared with that which attaches itself to a few men of high aims and tragic destiny. Columbus as mere high admiral and successful viceroy could have been little to us, but his story, with

The Forlorn Hope of Humanity; Columbus.

133

its pathos and romance, nerves us to command the present and anticipate the future, for it is a brief striking representation, which all can comprehend, of the struggles, hopes, and conquests of humanity. The thoughtful majesty, delicate beauty (well contrasted with the casque and sword haply laid aside for a time), and blue clear pensive eyes of his portrait in the Museo Reale of Naples, indicate a nature at once so gentle and so powerful, consequently so generous and so brave, that merely to recognize that nature lifts one to nobler moods of mind. And when, recalling his story, we think over his single-handed battle and denied reward-how that immortal, as Homer would have said, was tortured for the sake of mortals, we may be both contented and proud, if to us also, as to him and to Achilles and the Greeks, it be given "to accomplish painful wars, till we, even each of us, shall perish." For the wool-carder's son had long to struggle unsuccessfully with the petty conditions necessary to the realization of his idea; his heart remained undaunted through the bitter years of his "long wandring woe;" his soul was sufficient to itself on that unknown deep, where it must have been as lonely as the Ancient Mariner's, when even God scarce seemed to be; and though he did not meet with the laughing incredulity which rewarded the Phoenician who first sailed to the South of the sun, yet after finding the path to the New World, that, with its Mississippi and Amazon valleys, its ancient forests, broad table-lands, and rolling prairies, was to provide for the unborn generations of Europe,-after twenty years' painful service to the sovereigns of Spain had left, as he said, his body infirm, and every hair grey, he had to complain that his very frock had been taken and sold, that he had not a roof of his own, and lacked wherewithal to pay his tavern bill. Even at his death (though they gave him. a "royal funeral") he was a scarcely tolerated beggar, and it was then that, with failing breath, he uttered the words, sublime in their touching simplicity,-"I, a native of Genoa, discovered, in the distant West, the continent and isles of India." Proud as Scotsmen are of King Robert Bruce, his personal success has diminished his influence; and the national spirit has been more effectually nourished by the story of the faith of Wallace, who desired no personal reward; saw, with

the instinct of genius, the future of his country; and, when betrayed, insulted, and condemned to ignominious death, could remain the hero in spite of the surging crowd eager to see him die, the submission, for a time, of Scotland to the oppressor, and the executioner's ruthless hand. Portuguese history (to take an instance from the poets) can present no spectacle more interesting than that of Camoens, as we may easily conceive him, sitting on the stairs of a convent, floating, as it were, in a cloud of golden light between the blue frith and the blue sky of that "delicious land;" waiting, in his feebleness, for his grey-headed Javan to bring him the melon-rinds, and such other scraps of pig's and poet's food as were to be gathered on the streets of Lisbon; recalling, as he watches the white sails below, red African and Arabian sands, the palmfringed coast of Malabar, intricate China seas, and all the far memories of his troubled wandering life; mourning over his country's degeneracy, as his one eye beholds, in prophetic vision, Goa's wasted state, and the descendant of Vasco de Gama in the nineteenth century glorying in being an English sahib's butler and the son of a sea-cook; but still thinking with love, not bitterness, of the ingrata patria to which he had returned, with his rich prize, A Lusiada, only to conclude it, ere he sunk into a pauper's grave, with the lines Mickle pointedly paraphrased :

Enough, my Muse, thy wearied wing no more
Must to the seat of Jove triumphant soar.
Chill'd by my nation's cold neglect, thy fires
Glow bold no more, and all thy rage expires.

In so far as the forlorn hope of humanity is composed of such men as the two first of those I have just referred to, it commands the veneration of all reasonable beings, whenever judgment is purified by time; it is acknowledged that such men are, as Mohammed said, "sent as a blessing from the Lord." But in that dread strife, never ending and never promising to end, between destiny and human will, there are other shapes to which many eyes are turned with almost a deeper interest than towards those who stand so grandly and so calm. There are those to whom the reason firm and temperate will appear to have been denied, or rather denied

Interest felt in the Forlorn Hope.

135

in that measure which was necessary to sustain them against the roughness of their fate, or enable them to control their own destructive passions, and who, in consequence, have wrathfully performed deeds which made them a terror and a shame, or else

Have sunk, extinct, in their refulgent prime.

Of those who have failed, knocked under in their life-battle, some appear in themselves not less great than any of more happy fortune, but it is chiefly the tragic character of their lives which gives them all their peculiar places in the memory of the world. No fat livings, no soft pillows of serene stupidity, no noble consciousness of an undivided soul were given to them while on earth; and it is as something very different from "gods and heroes that they "people the immeasurable solitudes of time; yet, looking back on their pale disfigured faces, where the wrath of a Titan is so often blended with the weakness of a child, and the fury of a maniac with the light of immortal love, it is no weak unintelligent useless pity which loves to dwell there, and to find there, if possible, instruction and hope. This pity almost ignores the question as to whether the cause of the misfortune may have lain in the individuals or in their environment. Instinctively the ordinary judgment of humanity refuses to judge harshly of those whose very degradation has had a humanizing influence, and without very clearly seeing wherefore, without being able to see, or willing to admit, that the common ground is general gain by individual loss, classes together all the unfortunates, all the lost children, on the ground of their failure when alive, without paying much attention to the character of that failure or the measure of their ultimate apparent success. There is great kindliness in such phrases as Enfans perdu, Infante perduto, Gens perdus, Fille perdue, and the Forlorn Hope of Humanity. Our notion of a forlorn hope is, destruction to the individuals composing it, but a clear gain to the force from which they are selected. Doubtless, an entire army partakes of this character, and we may speak of the whole human race as Gens perdus, life being, as some one has acutely observed, the disease of which we all perish; but