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NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



my mind was intensely occupied with the matter in hand, the scenes of the 

 channel fight came out of the darkness. I had to do my toastmaster's busi- 

 ness with the preposterous din of that action in the background. This 

 disturbance lasted for about an hour; when the dinner was through the 

 scenes, though well remembered, were no longer present to sight and hear- 

 ing as before. 



It is interesting to note that the persons who appear in the dramatic 

 conception come apparently in a sudden manner before the mind, in my 

 experience, even where they are historic personages about whom I have read 

 and formed opinions as to their appearance and character. When they 

 are visualized in action they are often quite unlike the images previously 

 formed of them. To take a leading example of this, that of Queen Bess 

 herself, what I had read of her led to a notion, not at all dramatic in its 

 intensity, but entirely clear, that she was a hard, calculating, cruel woman, 

 vastly vain, redeemed only by a large measure of political shrewdness. The 

 conception of her appearance was distinctly forbidding. " Old wooden 

 petticoats" I remember often calling her. When she appeared it was rather 

 as a tender lass with a self-sacrificing motive, and the other notion, formed 

 on reading and portraits, never returned to me. So with a dozen other of the 

 characters of the known people, none of them appeared as I had historically 

 conceived them or as I should have delineated them in prose. 



The publication of the five volumes of "Elizabeth of Eng- 

 land" brought Mr. Shaler many appreciative letters from those 

 best qualified to measure his achievement, and the cycle was 

 widely recognized as a work of large significance, showing the 

 essential unity of the poetic with the scientific imagination on 

 its highest level. What Macaulay wrote of Bacon has a sin- 

 gular applicability to this other deep delver in natural lore : 



In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world, amidst 

 things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales, or in those 

 romances on which the curate and barber of Don Quixote's village performed 

 so cruel an auto-da-fe, amidst buildings more sumptuous than the palace of 

 Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, con- 

 veyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more formidable 

 than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of 

 Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild, no- 

 thing but what sober reason sanctioned. He knew that all the secrets feigned 

 by poets to have been written in the books of enchanters are worthless when 



