NOTABLE MEN OF WALES.

GEORGE HERBERT.

There are certain writers, not perhaps the greatest, for the immortals of literature are too impersonal, whom we regard almost in the light of friends. We feel that in the widest sense of the word we know them, and can wile away many a pleasant hour in their company. Time cannot separate us from them. The force of imagination is too strong; their personality is stamped with too firm an outline on their work for the impression to fade. We delight to group all sorts of probably irrelevant associations about them, and as we take down from its shelf the familiar volume, some conception of its author, more or less definite, rises in our minds. Every one, for instance, as he turns over the pages of his Spectator, mentally paints his own portrait of Addison. He sees the gentle moralist lecturing poor Steele on his shameful extravagance, and explaining what Boswell calls "the shocking story of Addison sending an execution into Steele's house "- -a little transaction on which

Macaulay built such a delightful romance. Anon the great man is at "Button's," playing the "Atticus" to his admiring senate; or again, if we happen to stumble upon the Campaign, our thoughts fly back to the modest garret in which Boyle and Godolphin discovered the future Secretary of State, while for the life of us we cannot drive out of our heads the familiar "such as of late o'er pale Britannia past." All this is natural enough, and very pleasant. It is fascinating work inventing such graceful fictions. They may be mere details, but none the less they give a certain air of reality to things. They bring an author home to us. The quasi objective portrait enables us to arrange our ideas; we can pigeon-hole our writer, and that is a comfort to everyone, critics included. And in some cases we can go further. It is not merely that our outward impressions of an author are definite; we creep into his mind and explore its inmost recesses. The man has infused himself into

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