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ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.

wearied of such themes, had no ambition to outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boyhood. "I knew the battle in 'Marmion' by heart almost before I could read," he writes in his "Reminiscences;" "and I cannot raze out—I do not wish to raze out—of my soul all that filled and colored it in years gone by." Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by the picturesqueness of a sea fight as was Canon Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness that the British privateers who went plundering in the Spanish main were inspired by a pure love for England, and a zeal for the Protestant faith. He can say truly with the little boy of adventurous humor,—

"There is something that suits my mind to a T
In the thought of a reg'lar Pirate King."

Mr. Lang's love of all warlike literature is too well known to need comment. As a child, he confesses he pored over "the fightingest parts of the Bible," when Sunday deprived him of less hallowed reading. As a boy, he devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours which were presumably sacred to the shrine of Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us with glowing words from the consideration of politi-