We may not be able to agree with Middleton, who says in his life of Cicero, " Human nature has ever been the same in all ages and nations ;" but it is probably true that nothing has changed less in primal qualities than the bases of life. Empires have perished, civilizations vanished, governments have rotted, languages, territorial lines, seeming sit-fast institutions, have passed into nothingness ; but the human element has stood the sihock of ages. " The one remains ; the many change and pass," said Shelley. Man-character, man-life, is the one element, the colors of which seem fast. It is, like all other things, subject to evolutionary changes ; it may be differentiated into a thousand forms ; but the bases of life have never shifted. Human history is a great tragedy indeed. But, like all tragedies, it has its spiritualizing, sanctifying, ennobling side. When the drama of the ages is unrolled we see much to make us weep ; but we also see immeasurably more to make us glory that we are a part of the race. While its history reeks with blood, carnage, oppression, injustice, cruelty, in which sad facts the pessimist hears '' the eternal note of sadness,''' and unwisely rushes into a denial of the moral order -- it has its sun-bright triumphs of rectitude, and the illuminating picture of the steady and glorious advance of mankind from brutishness into an orderly, moralized life. Readers of Matthew Arnold -- an author whose intellectual vision was great, and whose style is one of the literary ornaments of the last century -- will recall how he was taken with what he called " Mr. Darwin's famous proposition " that " our ancestor was a hairy quadruped, furnisihed with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." Mr.