Cut off Catullus's head? No; he simply invited him to supper. So when a courtier told Constantine that the mob had broken the head off his statue with stones, the emperor simply lifted his hands to his head, saying: "It is very surprising, but I don't feel hurt in the least." Frederick the Great once saw a crowd of men staring at something on a wall. Riding up, he found that the object of curiosity was a scurrilous placard against himself. The placard had been posted up so high that it was not easy to read it. Frederick ordered his attendants to take it down, and put it lower. "My people and I," he said, “have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please." One day the celebrated D'Alembert, who was a friend of the Prussian monarch, and who had some notable weaknesses, was insulted by a gazetteer in the States of Frederick. The philosopher thereupon denounced the libeller to the king, which drew from the latter the following admirable reply: "I know that a Frenchman, a countryman of yours, daubs regularly two sheets of paper a week at Cleves; I know that people buy his sheets, and that a fool always finds a greater fool to read him; but I find it very difficult to persuade myself that a writer of that temper can prejudice your reputation. Ah, my good D'Alembert, if you were king of England, you would encounter many other lampoons, with which your very faithful subjects would furnish you to try your patience. you knew what a number of infamous writings your dear countrymen have published against me during the war, you would laugh at this miserable scribbler. I have not deigned to read all these works which are the offspring of the hate and envy of my enemies, and I have recollected

that beautiful ode of Horace: 'The wise man continues unmoved.'"

When Voltaire complained of his critics to Fontenelle, the latter opened a great box of uncut pamphlets, and said: "Here is all that has been written against me.' He had never read a page of them. In the same spirit Cardinal Mazarin preserved and used to display, in forty-four bound quarto volumes, all the libels ever written against him. It is said that when the elder Kean was playing in New York the same round of characters with the celebrated Cooper, and was daily attacked by a gazette in the interest of his rival, he ordered his man, Miller, to take the paper with a pair of tongs and remove it from his presence, saying that "he never read attacks." This was certainly wiser than embroiling himself in a long-winded and irritating controversy, in which he would have been likely to do many foolish things, and to receive many hard blows, however crushing those he might have dealt against his enemies. When the storm of abuse was raging most fiercely against Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the champion of slave emancipation, he was asked by a friend, "What shall I say when I hear people abusing you?" "Say!" he replied, snapping his fingers, "say that. You good folks think too much of your good name. Do right, and right will be done you." The severest rebuke, oftentimes, to an enemy is silence; the most galling commentary, neglect. Speak!" screamed a termagant to one on whom she had discharged a whole vocabulary of oaths,-" speak, you devil, or I shall burst!"

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THE IDEAL AND THE REAL.

THE

HE great Catholic writer, Count Joseph de Maistre, in a letter to a friend at the Sardinian court, says: "You are kind enough to caution me against the heat of my style. I will only add, it is impossible to have my style without having my defects. Would you have fire which does not burn, or water which does not wet? A word more on a certain Parisian irony for which I have a turn, which I may sometimes abuse. When irony is exercised upon nothings, it is a silly superfluity. It is not the same when it sharpens the reasoning,- when it makes a puncture, so to speak, to let it pass through, as the needle does the thread." In this frank acknowledgment we have one of the thousand illustrations that might be cited of the truth that there is no excellence without some corresponding drawback; that the greatest writer or artist cannot escape from himself,- cannot avoid the inevitable fate of all, which is to have the faults of their qualities. It is a fact well understood by every competent art-critic, that faultless precision of detail is the sure mark of mediocrity; anomaly, the invariable characteristic of the highest order of genius in every branch of imitative art. Great poets and novelists do not hesitate to disregard the strict rules of narrative probability, especially when they are likely to hurt the general effect of a composition. The great Italian painters and sculptors did not scruple,

at times, to violate truth and nature where a rigid adherence to them would have defeated their aims. Sometimes they made a shadow fall on objects which, on strictly optical principles, it would not have reached; at other times, a figure in the background of a picture was drawn larger or smaller, more or less distinct, than the strict rules of perspective enjoin.

Again, not only do we find these anomalies abounding in the works of genius, but we find that the greater the master, the greater are his faults. Just in proportion as his strength of wing enables him to soar away from the beaten track, the groove in which mediocrity is content to plod, is he likely to fall into mistakes and errors. Raphael's animals are all bad, and so are those of Da Vinci. How the disciples in Raphael's "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" contrived to preserve their equilibrium in the boatlets which the artist allows them, has always been a mystery to critics. The figures of most landscape painters are bad, and even in the productions of the greatest masters,-Claude, Poussin, Salvator,there is much carelessness about details and particular truths. One of these painters draws the anatomy of a tree well, but fails in clothing it with leaves; another paints sunshine admirably, but gives us woolen clouds. Claude, so happy in his general effects, drew impossible curves and angles among his tree trunks. Poussin's "Deluge" with boats, and "Saint Jerome" with an eightday clock before him, are well known to amateurs. One of the Dutch artists makes the river of Eden a canal, and builds Babylon upon piles. Again, in painting, as in poetry and even in prose, many an object is used, not for its own sake, but as a foil, to give effect to something

else. Thus the cows and oxen which Hart, instead of drawing with scrupulous fidelity, has blotched with a few. broad strokes into the foreground of the beautiful autumn landscape before us, were put there, not to be looked at, but to be looked over, as the spectator gazes at the gorgeous woods beyond,-woods which look as if a splendid sunset had fallen in fragments upon them, and set them all ablaze. An artist cannot tell all the truth and show everything in a picture; he must concentrate his force, and therefore we do not complain of the omission or even misrepresentation of some of the accessories, if the capital object is portrayed with vividness, beauty and truth. It is true that these omissions or misrepresentations cannot, abstractly, be defended; and so far a Turner who gives us half-finished cows and donkeys, and a Shakspeare that makes Bohemia a seaport and arms the Romans of Pharsalia with the Spanish rapier of the sixteenth century, must yield the palm of superiority to merely mechanical artists, who are "coldly correct and critically dull." we must remember that had Turner and Shakspeare been scrupulous about details and ambitious of microscopic excellence, they would not have been Turner and Shakspeare, and the world would have lacked a "Venice" and a 'Macbeth." Indeed, the great difference between a great artist and a little one lies in their respective powers of generalization,-in the comparative adroitness and skill with which they balance the general and the particular. A great painter has the courage to commit faults; he neglects or casts aside many petty details, that he may give expression to greater truths; while a feeble painter guards every detail, and prides himself on the number of particulars to which he faithfully adheres. So with ora

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