expend his fortune in dress, and starve his body and mind. While other men have had the whole energy of their nature to throw into action, his has been already drained when he leaves his study and enters the world. The force which they have expended in deeds he has expended in originating and uttering the moral ideas which have been their trumpet-call to duty, and enough has not remained to work these ideas into his own life.

The remarks we have made about literary men of genius apply with equal force to great reformers. How often do we hear it lamented that a Luther, a Knox, or a Garrison, when attacking the wicked institutions or well-fortified abuses of his time, is not more temperate and charitable in his language! Would he be equally strenuous and energetic, without indulging in such vehemence and coarseness of denunciation, he would be a pattern reformer. The critic does not perceive that without that fierceness of spirit which leads to such excesses, the reformer would be incapable of performing the tremendous tasks he undertakes. Broad-axes cannot have the delicate edge of razors. A man may possibly be, as Heine says of Luther, at the same time a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action,- a scholastic word-thresher and an inspired, God-intoxicated prophet; but he cannot be, at the same moment, as wild as the storm that uproots the oak, and gentle as the zephyr that dallies with the violet." It often happens in this world that, as De Maistre says, "a sufficiency does not suffice" (ce qui suffit ne suffit pas); and, as he adds, we are never sure of our moral qualities, till we have learned to give them a little exaltation. If a person attempts to throw you down, it is not enough. to stiffen up against him; you must strike him and make

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him recoil. To clear a ditch, you must look beyond the farther edge, if you would not tumble in. In like manner, he who would batter down any mighty evil, any strong fortress of superstition or error, must not nicely calculate the amount of force to be used; he must deal the heaviest blows in his power. The men by whom the world has been most benefited have usually been men of strong passions and broad social sympathies. These passions and sympathies lead them into many errors and excesses; but we must take the evil with the good, nor quarrel with the winds that give life and freshness to the intellect, though they sometimes swell into a storm or even a hurricane. Gentleness, moderation and courtesy are excellent qualities in themselves; but to suppose them in a sturdy, thorough-going reformer, is to suppose an intellectual paradox,-a moral monster,- a being born under the contending influences of Mercury and Saturn. As an able writer has said: "There is but one alternative in the matter. Either the rudeness of reformers must be tolerated for the sake of the necessary boldness, or the boldness must be wanted also, and the work remain unperformed. It is here as in the ordinary walks of life: we must not expect butchers to be men of exquisitely sensitive and refined feelings, nor scavengers to have the squeamishness or delicacy of gentlemen. Those who bewail the want of soft and courteous qualities in a Luther, might as reasonably expect to see the hurricane pause in its tremendous but perhaps necessary mission, in order to waft a pleasure bark across some fairy lake, or fan the cheek of beauty in her rosy bower."

AMO

FAT vs. LEAN.

MONG the witty passages in the writings of the late Henry Giles is a panegyric upon fat men, of whom he may be considered the laureate. There is something cordial, he asserts, in a fat man. Everybody likes him, and he likes everybody. He is a living, walking minister of gratitude to the bounty of the earth and the fullness thereof; an incarnate testimony against the vanities of care; a radiant manifestation of the wisdom of good humor. A fat man, almost in virtue of being fat, is, per se, a popular man; he has an abundance of rich juices, and, the hinges of his system being well oiled and his springs noiseless, he goes on his way rejoicing, full of contentment and placidity. A fat man, it is argued again, feels his position solid; "he knows that his being is cognizable; he knows that he has a marked place in the universe, and that he need take no extraordinary pains to advertise to mankind that he is among them. He knows that he is in no danger of being overlooked. A fat man has also the decided advantage of being the nearest to that most perfect of figures, a mathematical sphere, while a thin man approximates to a simple line. Moreover, a fat man is a being of harmonious volume, and holds relations to the material universe in every direction, while the thin man has nothing but length,- is, in fact, but the continuation of a point."

All this is well put, and the logic, so far as it goes, is

without a flaw; but the argument is like a jug-handle, all on one side. Obesity, as well as leanness, has its disadvantages. Who pays the largest bills to his tailor, and requires the most time to dress and undress, to go to sleep or to wake up all over? Which, when in a hurry, has the advantage, the man who lugs about a load of flesh, like Atlas carrying the globe on his shoulders, or he who, composed of skin and bones only, darts from place to place with the agility of a grasshopper? Who, in a crowded church or lecturé-room, is squeezed the hardest, and who suffers most from hydrostatic pressure in a horsecar? Whose sides are grazed by narrow doorways, and who in war presents the biggest mark to the bullets of the enemy? Who tumbles from stage-coaches or rolls down staircases or precipices with the greatest momentum; and who is refused admission into light or loaded vehicles? True, the fat man is warmest in winter; but though he may crow over his thin neighbor in January, see him under the sweltering heats of dog-days, when "the whirligig of time has brought around its revenges,"— how he puffs, and blows, and "lards the lean earth as he walks along"! You no longer hear the merry chuckle with which in winter he cried out to his thin neighbor, "Away, you starveling; you eel-skin; you dried neat's tongue; you stock-fish!" Gladly would he now exchange the mountain of flesh which he trundles along for the ghostlike anatomy of his neighbor. No doubt the fat man is more visible than the lean man. It is hard, sometimes, for the fleshless man to convince the world that he is somebody; that he is an actual entity, a positive substance, as well as his corpulent fellow-creature. There is a full abstract admission of his equality; he counts as a

soul in population returns and paragraphs about accidents, the same as the fat man; he is the same in the eye of the law, pays the same taxes, has alike his epitaph and his elegy. But the fat man has only to appear, and the poor fellow is absolutely lost in the obscurity of the fat man's shadow. "The fat man has only to speak, and he drowns the treble squeal of his fleshless brother in the depths of his bass, as the full swell of an organ overpowers the whistle of a penny trumpet."

But how is it in times of danger? Who is it that, if shy or sensitive, finds it impossible to escape observation? Who, when hunted by a detective, tries in vain to crawl through small holes, or to stow himself in a cranny or snug hiding-place? Who, serving on juries, shrinks and shrivels till he can hardly recognize his own identity,— beginning the term with two hundred avoirdupois, and ending it with a lightness that can hardly turn a moneyscale? It is another great disadvantage of the fat man that he lacks spirituality. The man who is fat bodily is apt to be lean intellectually. A corpulent intellectualist. is, in fact, a contradiction in terms, a palpable catachresis. You might as well talk of a brick balloon, a sedentary will-o'-the wisp, a pot-bellied spirit, or a lazy lightning. In gross, carneous bodies, the thinking principle is buried under a mountain of flesh, like Enceladus under Ætna. The spirit is apt to be like a little fish in a large frying pan of fat, which is either totally absorbed or tastes of nothing but the lard. No great deeds are ever done by fat men. They are too sluggish to set the world on fire. It is your spare, spiritualized beings,men who can distinctly feel and reckon their own ribs,— men in whom the fiery soul has o'erinformed its integu