Not one of these docs the Constitution touch, nor lift up, nor put in a frame, nor hang lovingly in its sanctum. This should not be. Scant praise at best has Southern literature or Southern writers ever received from any source, but mainly because neither had an audience. Their territory now, however, is widening and becoming more populous. It is not right just at this peculiar juncture to make any invidious distinctions. The Constitution's field is almost too limited to breathe in, much less to do a good day's plowing. Its Pantheon is wofully lacking in gods. It is a temple with only three shrines, while all the outside and abounding space is as desolate as a forest without leaves. Perhaps it will fill it later.

As for the Southern women who have written poetry, we have nothing to say, unless it would be to ask the question: Did a woman ever write poetry? If one ever did it has surely not been Miss Rives in her "Herod and Mariamne.'

AS TO KING DAVID.

[Kansas City Times, September 16, 1888.]

Mr. Ernest Renan, who was once a priest, and who even now professes to live in the odor of sanctity, is again busily engaged in taking venerable and respected tradition to pieces. Having already finished with Christ and His Apostles-having already dealt as he was best able with the New Testament, he has now turned him to the Old-and it is King David who comes first under fire.

Renan has a peculiarintellectual development, even for a Frenchman. No writers of this or any other century ever equaled the French for lucidity of statement; the vivid power of illustration; a satire that is perfectly exquisite; delightful badinage; an irony which never purposely corrodes, but if purposely then only upon occasion; swift movement; the commingling of tragedy and comedy; an inherent dramatic encompassment that is never at a loss for similes or situations-while to marshal all these as is desirable, using either of itself or the whole together as a mass, there is the scaccato or epigrammatic style which to all others is so incomparable. None can write biography like the French. As for memoirs, these in their hands are unapproachable.

Renan has every one of these valuable gifts at his disposalalways valuable to an author-and he has more. He has the education of a Jesuit. This means about fifteen years of hard, uninterrupted study before it is supposed that a man knows anything. He is the fluent master of ten languages, among the ten being Persian, Turkish, the Hebrew, and the Arabic. Probably at least three of these he learned in order all the more readily to get at the Bible and attempt to destroy many of its idols yet dear to the human heart.

Before he began his "Life of Christ" he spent three years in Egypt and Palestine, The Sultan then owned the two countries, and hence his knowledge of the Turkish and Arabic must have stood him in most excellent stead. His sister accompanied him, an enthusiast like himself, as he was then. They went anywhere and everywhere. They appeared to have no idea of fear. When night came they pitched their tents. The Arabs did not seem to understand them; the Bedouins forgot to even ask them for backsheesh.

The sister never returned. She died under a date palm in the desert, tenderly nursed, it is true, having skillful physicans at her side, and plenty of female attendants. But the priest, where was he? Her brother?-no, her God.

Time went on, and Renan got further and further away from the sweet recollections of his college days, from the tender influences of a gentle and benignant life, from the restraints of an intellectual discipline that he so much needed as a safeguard against spiritual shipwreck, from well ordered fields wherein nothing grew that was noxious or told of harm, from old friends and old associations, and the end then came speedily. The ardent young believer was a hardened skeptic. He had grown gray in unbelief in a night. Endowed as he was intellectually, what a spectacle and what a ruin! Using the gifts which Providence had so lavishly bestowed upon him to enlighten and succor mankind, he squandered them in terrible attacks upon the very foundation of society itself.

And they were terrible, these attacks of his. The "Life of Christ" is one of the most insidious, dangerous, yet attractive books in any language. The danger lies in its distillation. Its poison tastes like honey. On the edge of every pitfall there is a fringe of roses. This fringe is also a screen. One reaches out for a rose and instead finds engulfment. The full flow and flood of the tide of the narrative is poetry set to music. As the children followed the flute of the Pied Piper of Hamelin into the heart of the mountain, never to be seen of mortal again, so young men follow the words and the thoughts of this wizard of the pen, and the result in all too many cases is the hardening of the heart and the stiffening of the neck.

His "Lives of the Apostles" is not so sweet to the taste nor so delightful to the palate. It jars often. It is at times harsh, rasping, bitter. Not content with killing his victim he often chooses to skin him. As he gets older of course this spirit will grow upon him. He will not seek to seduce so much from this on as to demolish. Scantier and scantier will become the wine he offers from his own clear champagne country, and plentier and plentier the acrid brew and the brew which burns like acid.

One can easily see this sort of feeling deepening over and about Renan in his recent comments upon David. În three numbers of a leading Paris review he has dealt with this King of Israel. He describes him as a black-hearted hypocrite. A selfish egotist, incapable of a sentiment of sympathy or a disinterested idea. A coward in war, who wept over Absalom and then broke bread with his murderer. He declares that he kept a harem, and that, although he did dabble to some extent in poetry, he never wrote the Psalms. He contrasts him with Saul, making of one a hero and a warrior of great renown-of the other a sneak and a trickster. David's deed of putting Uriah in front of the battle to be killed as he was, in order to take to wife his beautiful widow Bathsheba, is made into a ferocious picture which probably no other hand could paint except the hand of such a monster.

But the question arises, and it is a very natural one. What has brought about this exhumation of David? And what will happen to Solomon when Renan gets to him, who was the son of that very Bathsheba the savage Frenchman has just taken as a text to crucify her imperial ravisher? One can see no earthly good to arise from it all. If Renan writes just to see how powerfully he can write, then it must be admitted that he does it to perfection, although his inspiration now appears to be of the devil.

DR. JOSEPH M. WOOD.

[Kansas City Times, September 20, 1888.]

One of the lights of the medical world-clear, luminous, a great beacon set as it were upon a high hill—has suddenly gone out forever. How death must have rejoiced when it laid him low. No more mortal enemy of the inexorable destroyer ever lived in the land. For more than fifty years man and boy he grappled with it, rescued its victims, drove it from bedsides almost ready for the shroud, fought it hand to hand across a coverlet, routed it from households where every room was an intrenchment, smote it until even its terrors were put to flight, snapped the shaft of its immeinorial spear in sheer derision, taunted it with its impotency, and finally became such an implacable foe that it seemed to avoid him as if he were superhuman.

And now to think that in this last encounter, he who had saved so many could not save himself. But then this splendid defender of his race had grown gray in the war harness. An active battle well on to fifty years long had left him worn, and old, and less able to withstand the final onset. He had the frame of a giant—yes, but he had also done the work of a giant. He had the strength of any four ordinary men-yes, but he put it forth so lavishly in supplying the demands of his profession that when he needed a reserve for himself that reserve had been exhausted. He had the buoyant life and vitality of some great conquerer-yes, even as Cortez, but he poured them all out for others, never caring seemingly to know if a day would not come when a little, at least, of this vast wealth should have been laid away for the final grapple.

He was one of the
A tale of want, or

And yet how could he see or know or care about any of these things-how could he take note to day what might happen or be required for to-morrow? He lived for others. most generous, unselfish and lovable of men. sorrow, or suffering made him as a little child, he, this giant of a surgeon, whose very operating knife had about it something almost of inspiration. The record of his good deeds could only have been written by the recording angel. And they have been so written, never fear. And many a page they took, shining all over and through as though the pinions of the heavenly dove had been folded there to make them blessed and resplendent.

Why, this man would often wait for the darkness to cover him before he departed on his missions of mercy. He wrought out the miracles both of his heart and his intellect by stealth.

No

To surprise him in any act of charity was to put him to flight. If any one ever spoke of it in his presence he would go away pained. That hand which was all iron, when the steel was in it, was always open when it became necessary to succor as well as to save. matter what the nature of the succor was—whether money, medicines, food, raiment, care, watchfulness, professional attendance, hired nurses—he never hesitated a single moment to open his purse or bestow his precious attainments upon the needy and the afflicted. Even if his own life had ever depended upon an accurate summing up of all these abounding charities, to save it he could not have made a report of even a fractional part. Verily, with him the hand that did not give never knew in a single instance what the hand which did give was doing.

Once, when cholera was sweeping from the east to the west, and over the plains, and across the Rocky Mountains, ravaging remorse

lessly where it touched, Dr. Wood was coming from St. Louis to Liberty Landing on a crowded emigrant steamer. The steerage swarmed with poor folks, men, women and children. Piercing as the neigh of a frightened horse the cry arose that the White Specter -which leaves the faces of all those whom it has undone so pinched and pallid and wan-was aboard the boat, doing the same old inevitable work that it had been doing from its home on the Ganges to the Pacific Ocean.

Dr. Wood was just then in the very strength and flower of his young manhood. Life was so fair, so fair before him. Perfect physical health and perfect physical_manhood made all nature delicious, and all the world adorable. Every road which ran to the future had upon it growing grasses and blooming flowers, and singing birds in all the branches of the trees. Death was below him in its most appalling character.

He went below. For nearly a week so far from going to bed he never even took off his clothes. He did the work of a dozen men. His frame, which up to that time had been colossal, now suddenly came to be iron. His nature took upon itself attributes even unknown to their possessor. He was physician, nurse, undertaker, consoler, confessor, musician-but, whatever he was, he staid.

We said musician-yes, musician. Well knowing the power of imagination over the human mind in all epidemics, even in those not so virulent as a cholera epidemic, Dr. Wood took his medicine case in one hand and his fiddle in the other. He was an excellent performer then. After seeing and prescribing for all of his patients he would play them a lively tune-something that would make self quit preying upon self, something that would make the heart beat faster, and the icy circulation strive just one more time to get at all the extremities.

What a spectacle! Here was death, intrenched in the reeking atmosphere of a steerageway, defied with the rollicking tunes of a master fiddler. It was Mirabeau's death song materialized on a western river: "Crown me with flowers, intoxicate me with perfumes and let me die to the sounds of delicious music."

But they did not die, many of them. Considering the unfavorable nature of the surroundings and the malignant type of the disease, many were saved. And what was Dr. Wood's reward? The prayers and the blessings of these poor survivors which followed him for years after in the shape of letters and little tokens in the way of remembrance and affection. Through rigid quarantine and perpetual fumigation the cholera was kept from the cabin passengers. And it was well. Dr. Wood's mission was in the steerage and there he meant to stay even though he were stricken down in mid-battle. God, however, spared him to finish his life, and to build some priceless monuments of science and skill to adorn his noble profession.

Dr. Wood, in its very essence and purity, was a medical philosopher. He went up from cause to effect with the rapid stride of the born commander. Said Bichat, that wonderful Frenchman, who died too young for the sake of humanity: "The discovery of the cause is the discovery of the remedy.' To this end Dr. Wood marched with a set will that never relaxed or yielded. His glance was instantaneous. He seemed to fathom disease through the application of a sixth sense which might well be named intuition. His diagnosis was as unerring as the tide's ebb and flow. His resources in any desperate crisis were as manifold as they were instantly evoked. No extremity, however desperate, ever confused his

searching glance or ruffled the calm serenity of the great physician. Hence, when many of his brother practitioners, had patients supposed to be nearing the inevitable hour, Dr. Wood was most generally called in for consultation. So frequently was this done that the practice passed into a proverb. A lady one day made it vivid by an epigram. Awakening from a deep sleep she saw Dr. Wood standing by her bedside, and exclaimed: What, then, is it so bad as this? I see that Dr. Wood is here."

So remarkable had his fame become for snatching people from the very jaws of death, and so widely known had this reputation been made, both in medicine and surgery, that he was sent for at various times to New York, Baltimore, Washington City, upon several occasions to Philadelphia, often to St. Louis, and to as many as two hundred places in the State of Missouri. These demands were constantly made upon him until he gradually withdrew from his more arduous labors to devote more time to his own personal and devoted friends.

Dr. Wood had a face like the face of that famous English surgeon, Sir Astley Cooper. Genius beamed from every line of it-from every form, fashion, contour and feature. In repose it was sometimes sad, yet always august. But when that peculiar smile of his broke over it, then it shone as the east shines when low down on its uttermost verge the shadows begin to lift a little and the dawn to stir therein, peering over the edge and waiting to bless the world. It had often and often been remarked for its fascination and from the

way it made his face transfigured. Seen in the sick chamber, it brought hope, faith, help, consolation. Seen in social life it attracted all who wanted solace, confidence and unrestrained communion.

And now it will never more be seen again anywhere this side of the Wonderful River. He had lived his life as some huge old oak which the wind for years could not prevail against, the lightnings shiver, nor the storms uproot. But, stricken at last by time, which strikes all earthly things to dust, it falls a forest monarch, never to be upreared again in all the ages.

So fell our giant, who was yet full of all gentleness, and tenderness, and charity, and good deeds, and a stainless manhood, and a fame that will endure while intellect does homage to intellect, and genius has a shrine where all its devotees can kneel and worship. A life so grandly and so unselfishly lived sinks from the sight of those who yet remain with the halo of noble deeds about it, and leaves behind the example of its own magnanimous dedication to duty and to humanity.

But beyond? What of that? Ah

"Who shall murmur or misdoubt

When God's great sunshine finds us out?"

WAR QUAKER FASHION.

[Kansas City Times, September 21, 1888.]

The telegraph tells us that the Third German Army Corps, led by the Emperor, was repulsed after a hot battle in an attack upon Berlin, which was defended by the guards.

How many were killed? None. How many were wounded? None. Then it was a Quaker battle? Not absolutely necessary-it was only a part of the autumn manœuvrers.

By the way, does this mimic sort of warfare amount to anything?