girls in which there should be frequent discussion on such topics, literary and social, as come under their experience. Papers might also be read by themselves on subjects settled beforehand, and these would furnish a starting-point for conversation. To make this succeed it would probably be necessary, for some time at least, that the teachers should take an active share in the working and organisation. That such an institution would not only afford an excellent training for the conversational power and a means of extended reading and enlargement of ideas, thus heightening the future pleasures of social life, but that it would also become in itself a source of pleasurable interest, may fairly be anticipated when we look at the fascination which penny readings and debating societies have for those who take part in them. Finally, here is an opening for the moral guidance which wise teachers may exert. Here, too, under their leading, may be kindled the love of poetry, which by revealing the poetry in life helps more than any other taste to exalt and refine. Under such an influence we shall have no cause to fear lest, while women "gain in mental breadth," they fail in sweetness, or "lose the childlike in the larger mind."

CHAPTER XI.

SCHOOL LECTURES.

BEFORE Ellen left England she had formed the idea, as already mentioned, of giving at some time a course of school lectures on great men, in the hope of inspiring others by their noble characteristics, and of calling out the best feelings of her pupils.

For this purpose she had already collected information respecting the life and times of Savonarola; but the lecture does not appear to have been written till within the last months of her life, as the tone of writing corresponds rather with the feeling of her own mind at that time. Probably it was written with the view of using it at Bloemfontein. It is unfinished, and is given as a specimen of that eloquence of feeling which scarcely appears in her other papers, but which all felt so much in conversation with her on earnest subjects.

SAVONAROLA.

If you will try to read with understanding and reverence the lives of great men you will find that there is always one of two spirits breathing through them; either a spirit of inborn harmony and beauty, which leads them to dwell on the calm end of all things as they work together for good, or, on the other hand, a spirit of earnest longing to help forward that end which carries them into the thick of the painful, yet victorious, warfare. Through all the exalted ones of the earth-its prophets, warriors, artists, and searchers for wisdom-one of these two spirits runs.

There are those who pass through the earthly life with hearts hardly ruffled by its turmoil, hardly soiled by its sin. They are borne onward almost without touching the ground, as by an unseen angel, who also wraps them round as with a veil of thin air, so that while to all other men they are enveloped in a halo of mystery and beauty, they in their turn cannot approach the struggles of the crowd. They are like the pure vestal virgins set apart in the old Greek time for the glory of the gods and the adoring reverence of men.

In the sad eyes

The other army is the larger one. of those who stand in the foremost ranks we read the height of pain, the height of unconquerable resolve. They have fallen often on a stony path, passed, too, through gray, chill mists, which seemed endless; for them the guardian angel weaves no garment of light,

only instead he keeps ever burning in their hearts a fire whose ardours will sometimes consume even their pain. I do not say that these are always struggling painfully, or that the others fulfil at every moment of their lives a calm ethereal destiny; nor would it be safe to affirm that all great men fall into these distinctly-marked divisions. We must not draw the line too narrowly. The calmest do not shrink from the conflict; the most earnest warrior has his seasons of rest. But of the most it is easy to see on which side they stand, and it is in the greatest of them that either spirit is most clearly shown.

We shall see this more distinctly if we contrast the lives of Mendelssohn and of Beethoven, of Schiller and Goethe; and still more of Shakespeare and Milton, or Chaucer and Spenser. And now to come to our subject itself, a few sentences will show you which destiny was appointed for Savonarola.

Many of you have probably heard that he was a reformer of morals in Florence in the fifteenth century, and that he was put to death in the midst of his struggle to attain this end. A few simple words in which are hidden tragedies, the deepest of all in that human heart around which they arose.

Of Savonarola's history in the most stirring years of his life we are happily well informed in the writings of his contemporaries, about one of whom, Pico della Mirandola, I shall tell you a few words later on. As is natural, we know little of his early years, but our knowledge of the character of the age into which he was born may give some clue to the way in which his youth passed.

It is with this very state of the age, indeed, that Savonarola's greatness is bound up, and I must ask you first of all to look back, as through a telescope, on this corner of history, and try to make clear to yourselves the features and the spirit of that little, living world in which he moved.

He was born at Ferrara in the year 1452, of a noble family, the most distinguished member of which, his grandfather, had been a man of letters and a physician; and it was for this latter profession that Girolamo Savonarola was destined.

As a boy he was serious and sorrowful, not, as far as we know, from any outward causes, but rather from the burden of great thoughts living in him yet unborn, and from the dim appalling visions which haunt the beginning of a life to be filled in the swiftly-coming years with Titanic labours and conflicts. And so he moved among his fellows as one who listens to a voice silent for other men. Growing up thus for the most part in silence and solitude, he followed the study of philosophy as a part of his medical course, and to this pursuit he turned with unceasing delight in the later years of his manhood.

In his home, protecting care and affection surrounded the boy, and he was blessed with that tenderest of guardians, a mother, whose rare strength of character and keen intellect descended in gathered intensity upon her son.

Three influences there were which, falling upon his youth, determined the whole course of his life. And first and strongest of these was the sight of the misery

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