Author of "Our Little Spanish Cousin," "With a Pessimist in Spain," "God, the King, My Brother," etc.

About sixty years after he had penned the first words of Faust, the disgruntled pessimist at war with life, he took leave of him as a purified soul mounting upward among the saints toward the Ineffable Light, under the mystic guidance of the Eternal-Womanly.

One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremendously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the court of Lilliput.

Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common assumptions of mankind?

However, there are some pessimists for whom indigestion can plead no excuse, but for whose intellectual perversity some other cosmic influence must be sought "behind the veil, behind the veil,"to borrow Mr. Laing's favourite line from his favourite poem.

"The thing is impossible," said the pessimist to Cobden.

Indeed, according to Juvenalwho is, however, a pessimist by professionthe ladies found legal proceedings so interesting that bringing suit became a passion with them as strong as it had once been among the Athenians.

For many years this break-up has been foretold by political pessimists inside and outside the Habsburg dominions, and by many interested agitators both in Central and in Western Europe.

" "You are an even greater pessimist than I myself," Norgate observed.

Not a fraction of a pessimist among them!