soliloquy, for the instruction of the "auditorium" at large, that the cry of Talbot serves him for a sword; for I have loaden me with many spoils, using no other weapon but his name." Such a hero it is highly natural in the Countess of Auvergne to desire to see.

Of course she has formed an idea of his person. A warrior so doughty must needs be of stalwart frame-a man of towering stature and imposing presence. My lady has pictured Talbot to herself as a very Hercules, a Hector at the least, or some equally Muscular Pagan :

Great is the rumour of this dreadful knight,
And his achievements of no less account :

Fain would mine eyes be witness with mine ears,
To give their censure of these rare reports.

The opportunity of doing so occurs soon. Talbot receives a message from "the virtuous lady, Countess of Auvergne," with modesty admiring his renown, in which she entreats him to vouchsafe to visit her poor castle, that she may boast she hath beheld the man whose glory fills the world with high report. At once the Lord Talbot complies.

There is plot and counterplot in the encounter, but with that we are not here concerned. It is with the contrast between the lady's ideal of Talbot, and the physique of the real man himself, that we have to do. Her messenger returns, bringing Talbot with him, and together they enter the court of the castle, where the Countess is already waiting. And

then ensues a shock of more than what Wordsworth

calls mild surprise:

Enter MESSENGER and TALBOT.

• Mess. Madam,

According as your ladyship desired,

My message craved, so is Lord Talbot come.

Countess. And he is welcome.

Mess. Madam, it is.

Countess.

What is THIS the man?

Is this the scourge of France?

Is this the Talbot so much feared abroad,

That with his name the mothers still their babes?

I see report is fabulous and false :

I thought I should have seen some Hercules,

A second Hector, for his grim aspect,

And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.
Alas! this is a child, a silly dwarf:

It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
Should strike such terror to his enemies."

But even her ladyship, before the interview was over, came to think this little shrimp of a fellow very like a whale.

Agesilaus, the great King of Sparta, was small of size; and when Tachos, King of Egypt, on forming an alliance with him, had his first sight of his petty person, the sum total of the Spartan hero's inches was so absurdly inferior to Egypt's expectations, that Tachos had the ill manners to vent his disappointment in a reference to the mountain which brought forth a mouse. Ώδινεν ὄρος, Ζευς δ' ἐφοβεῖτο, τὸ δ ̓ ἔτεκεν μῦν.

The mountain was in

labour, and Zeus himself was all alarm,-but what

Agesilaus, however,
Davýσoμaι σoι TOTE

came to the birth was a mouse. was ready-witted in repartee. kai λewv, One of these days you'll be thinking me a lion, was his reply, we are told, to the dull-eyed giber. We must look to the mind and not to the outward appearance, said Æsop to his master: Αφορᾶν οὖν δεῖ ἐἰς τὸν νοῦν, και μὴ εἰς τὴν ὄψιν : and Æsop spoke feelingly, considering his stunted size and crooked back.

If, says Mr. Emerson, command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease only serve now to please, and to raise esteem and wonder higher. And he quotes a saying of Du Guesclin's, "Since I am so ugly, it behoves me to be bold." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, adds the essayist, were not handsome men. And he urges, that if a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organise victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, it is no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all; whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated. "His deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole." Perhaps, however, it requires the glasses of a transcendental philosopher to see the particular advantage on the whole.

Of one in old time who wrote as seldom man

wrote, it was said by them to whom he wrote, and who were disappointed with his person, that his letters indeed were weighty and powerful, but his bodily presence weak, and his speech contemptible. Plutarch tells us that the Macedonian notion about Flaminius was of a fierce commander, intent on devastation, breathing menace and slaughter, at the head of a host of barbarians, himself the biggest barbarian of all. Great, therefore, was their surprise when they met in him "a young man of a mild aspect, who spoke very good Greek, and was a lover of true honour."-According to Timæus, the Sicilians, at the first appearance of Gylippus, sent from Lacedemon to aid them against the Athenians,

laughed at his cloak and head of hair;" yet scarcely had he shown himself before they "gathered about him, as birds do about an owl, and were ready to follow him wherever he pleased."-Ptolemy is said to have been considerably disgusted at first with Cato's mean dress and appearance, especially when associated with such supercilious manners; but on getting to talk with him, and hearing his free and nervous eloquence, he was easily reconciled to him."

When Julian made his triumphal entry into Constantinople (A.D. 361), an innumerable multitude pressed round him with eager respect, and, says Gibbon, were perhaps disappointed when they beheld the small stature and simple garb of a hero whose inexperienced youth had vanquished the barbarians of Germany, and who had now tra

versed, in a successful career, the whole continent of Europe, from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Bosphorus. It is in the luminous, or voluminous, pages (which was it, Mr. Sheridan ?) of the same historian that we read how that veteran general Sclerus, who had twice been invested with the purple, as well as twice loaded with chains, being desirous of ending in peace the small remainder of his days, approached the throne of Basil (A.D. 976), an aged suppliant, with dim eyes and faltering steps, leaning on his two attendants, and how the emperor exclaimed, in the insolence of youth and power, "And is this the man who has so long been the object of our terror?"

Bacon's saying, that deformed people are good to employ in business, because they have a constant spur to great actions, that by some noble deed they may. rescue their persons from contempt, is an assertion which Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi), in her British Synonymy, approves as in some sort established by experience; many men famous in history having been of this class-"the great warriors, above all, as it should seem in very contradiction to nature— when Agesilaus, King William the Third, and Ladislaus, surnamed Cubitalis, that pigmy King of Poland, reigned, and [the last] fought more victorious battles, as Alexander Gaguinus relates, than all his longer-legged predecessors had done." Corpore parvus eram, I was of small stature, he says-cubito vix altior, scarcely above a cubit high; sed tamen in parvo corpore magnus eram, Nevertheless, small as