for it," when the scourge of his college debt
and college vices fell on him a little more
heavily than usual? My uncle had been what
in his day passed for manly; what in ours we
would call "fast." He drank, gamed, raced,
betted, and rioted with the best of them;
he could not pour out money like water, because
he had no money to pour; but he incurred debts
in heroic masses, and went to the Jews more
steadily than he went to chapel, coming back
with cent per cent, as his litany: in a word, always
hewing and hacking at the Sisyphusian stone he
would have to spend his future life in trying to
roll off his glebe. His father, a stern man of
puritan principles and limited income, left him
to his hewing and hacking undisturbed;
objecting, not unreasonably, to being made the
scapegoat for the boy's sins, the liquidator of
his liabilities. Besides, he had other sons and
daughters whose pathway from the paternal
homestead he had to mark out with golden
borderings; and would he be justified in sending
them out into the world unaided, that he might
give all his strength to one? would it be fair to
diminish the patrimony of his own tor the benefit
of half a dozen university bloodsuckers who could
better afford to lose their money than he to
pay it?

A poor living, however pleasant the parsonage
and sweet the roses and honeysuckle
adorning it, a large family, a sickly wife, and
boys who went the same way as himself, have
kept him grinding at stone-rolling from the
first years of his manhood to the last. When
he dies his executors will not be able to lodge
the boulder more than halfway up to the top of
the hill, amid the sneers, if not the wrath, of the
creditors.

Another roller up-hill of stones for which
there is no resting-place, is the man of high
aspiration and low executive power—the
inglorious Milton, not wise enough to be mute,
but summoning all the world to listen to his
halting feet and cracked measures—assembling
the universe to witness his prowess in rolling
the poetic stone up to the top of Parnassus. To
witness, instead, the swift descent of a mass of
rubbish sent flying down the steep incline amid
the laughter of the gods, and the contemptuous
jests of men. What can we do for the poor
inglorious Milton shivering in the ruin of his
poetic monolith? It may be cruel to laugh
and jeer, but it would be far more cruel to pick
up the pieces and try to patch them into a usable
boulder again, bidding him take courage and a
better aim, and he would be sure to lodge his
stone right in the Temple of the Muses, with
no laughter of gods or men to follow. His
aspirations may be very high, his thoughts and
aims undoubtedly pure and good; but if he
wants the executive power, of what earthly use
his rolling up poetic monoliths for the mere
amusement of unruly folk, glad to see them
tumble back into the dead level of failure again,
making a prodigious splash of dust and mud as
they fall? Far better that he should carry his
shoulders to some useful mechanical wheel, such
as grinds corn, or brings up water, or stitches
together Ihe children's garments— far better
that he should sit in a shady corner on the highway
and break stones for the great ones' chariots
to pass over, than lose time and strength and
the substance of his hands in enacting the part
of old Sisyphus in Hades. Whatever our sorrow
and sympathy for him individually, the eternal
laws of failure remain the same; and the fact
that wasted strength is so much loss to the
world of man, and misdirected effort so much
discouragement to the generations to follow,
will not be modified even for the bitter heart-
pain of an inglorious Milton mistaking his
vocation, and rolling stones up Parnassus to
end in failure and a shower of dust and mud.

This may stand good for all men assuming
the art-life for which nature did not design
them; for musicians torturing the crying soul
of untuned catgut, yet getting no harmony, and
making no melody; for painters to whom is
denied the true perception of colour, and the right
reproduction of form; for architects building
from the rubble of another man's ideas and
losing the cement by the way; for authors with
brains like that Australian lake, not six inches
deep even in the rainy season, and as salt as brine
at all times. For all men wasting in needless
stone-rolling the time and faculty that might go
to useful sowing and reaping, does the fate of
Sisyphus stand as a warning and example; and
the shower of mud following the descent of the
poetic monolith follows equally the descent of
all others rolled upward with insufficient motive
power.

A very frequent manner of rolling Sisyphusian
stones is to be seen in the frantic efforts of
certain folk to force the barriers of what is
called Good Society. It may be in London, or
it may be in the country, that this up-hill fight
goes on. In both places it may be seen any
day in full vigour; and if sometimes crowned
with success, and the tranquil resting of the
stone on the hill-top, yet sometimes also, and
perhaps more frequently, uncrowned with such
success, and the stone falling back again into the
plain, prostrate and repulsed. Men and women
with more money than manners, and better
luck in speculation than they ever had in
schooling, often spend their lives in trying to get to
the top of the hill, where they would be vastly
uncomfortable if they did get, and quite out of
place with the high-bred ants and emmets
inhabiting. Which elevation, a kind fortune in
the guise of a crabbed, uniformly forbids. They
are people who will learn no lessons set them
by circumstance; who will take no hints gently
whispered by fate; but who go boring on with
their stone-rolling, and try and try again as if
their very lives, or what is more, their salvation,
consisted in being adopted by certain line, ladies
and gentlemen as their " social equals." Heaven
help them! The grave will make them all
social equals before another fifty years are out,
and when they are laid side by side in Kensal-
green it will not be of much value whether the
one was successfully exclusive, or the other